The most astounding fact about the universe

The most astounding fact about the universe, according to astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, is that the atoms that make our bodies, whose complexity makes life possible, were forged in the crucibles of stars.  Nuclear fusion in stars is  responsible for the creation of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, calcium, iron and all the other substances that make up our bodies.  Everything is connected.  Or, as we Unitarian Universalists like to put it, we must respect the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.

The video below tells how the elements of life are forged.

Hat tip to notes to ponder.

A homeless man conducts a survey

Click on Homeless man’s A/B test of generosity based on faith for the result.

Not that this proves anything.

Hat tip to Marginal Revolution.

Why save a world that’s going to end soon?

My friend Bill Elwell called my attention to this article on The Raw Story web site.

The United States has failed to take action to mitigate climate change thanks in part to the large number of religious Americans who believe the world has a set expiration date.

Research by David C. Barker of the University of Pittsburgh and David H. Bearce of the University of Colorado uncovered that belief in the biblical end-times was a motivating factor behind resistance to curbing climate change.

“[T]he fact that such an overwhelming percentage of Republican citizens profess a belief in the Second Coming (76 percent in 2006, according to our sample) suggests that governmental attempts to curb greenhouse emissions would encounter stiff resistance even if every Democrat in the country wanted to curb them,” Barker and Bearce wrote in their study, which will be published in the June issue of Political Science Quarterly.

The study, based on data from the 2007 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, uncovered that belief in the “Second Coming” of Jesus reduced the probability of strongly supporting government action on climate change by 12 percent when controlling for a number of demographic and cultural factors.  When the effects of party affiliation, political ideology, and media distrust were removed from the analysis, the belief in the “Second Coming” increased this effect by almost 20 percent.

“[I]t stands to reason that most nonbelievers would support preserving the Earth for future generations, but that end-times believers would rationally perceive such efforts to be ultimately futile, and hence ill-advised,” Barker and Bearce explained.

That very sentiment has been expressed by federal legislators.  Rep. John Shimkus (R-IL) said in 2010 that he opposed action on climate change because “the Earth will end only when God declares it to be over.” He is the chairman of the Subcommittee on Environment and the Economy.

Though the two researchers cautioned their study was not intended to predict future policy outcomes, they said their study suggested it was unlikely the United States would take action on climate change while so many Americans, particularly Republicans, believed in the coming end-times.

“That is, because of institutions such as the Electoral College, the winner-take-all representation mechanism, and the Senate filibuster, as well as the geographic distribution of partisanship to modern partisan polarization, minority interests often successfully block majority preferences,” Barker and Bearce wrote. “Thus, even if the median voter supports policies designed to slow global warming, legislation to effect such change could find itself dead on arrival if the median Republican voter strongly resists public policy environmentalism at least in part because of end-times beliefs.”

via The Raw Story.

An atheist draws moral lessons from Bible stories

Herb Silverman, a retired professor of mathematics who lives in Charleston, S.C., is founder and past president of the Secular Coalition for America, which defends and promotes atheism.  He once ran for governor of South Carolina to challenge that state’s constitutional provision barring atheists from holding public office.

Openly being an atheist in the United States still takes moral courage, unless you’re in an academic or intellectual enclave shielded from society at large.  Atheists are subject to religious discrimination and even, in some places, physical violence.

Silverman was here in Rochester, N.Y., last week to address the Rochester Russell Set and promote his new book, Candidate Without a Prayer: An Autobiography of a Jewish Atheist in the Bible Belt.  One part of the book I liked was Chapter 12, in which he tells the moral lessons that he as an atheist draws from well-known Bible stories.

The Creation of Eve

Herb Silverman

Humans and other species are social animals.  Solitude has its rewards, but do does the company of others.  It’s good to associate with people whose values you share.  Learn about other kinds, but recognize those with whom you can communicate well and trust.

Adam, Eve and the Snake

God makes blind obedience the supreme virtue, assuming ignorance is bliss.  God either lied or was mistaken when he said humans would die on the day they received knowledge.  So don’t blindly believe, even if you pay a price for independent thought.  Better to have freedom without a guarantee of security than to have security without freedom.

Cain and Abel

The first worship ceremony is followed immediately by the first murder, which shows we must not put our love and worship of a God above our love for human beings, especially when God’s favoritism can be so arbitrary.  Cain belatedly learns that humans should look out for one another, making each of us our brother and sister’s keeper.  God recognizes his culpability in the first murder, and puts a mark on Cain as a sign to those he meets that they must now do to Cain what Cain did to Abel.

Noah and the Flood

God learns that his expectations for humans were unrealistic and genocide solves nothing.  Never indiscriminately destroy the innocent along with the guilty.  God should have been concerned about a compliant Noah who showed no empathy for the lives of others.  Older doesn’t necessarily mean wiser, even with 600 years of experience.

The Tower of Babel

Leaders must not become as insecure as God, who prevented others from cooperating and moving upward together.  Also, there is value in diversity.  Each of us must decide when to go along with the crowd and when to set out on a road not taken.

Sodom and Gomorrah

Abraham is morally superior to Noah, since he tried to talk God out of mass destruction.  It takes courage to stand up to authority, especially one bent on genocide.  God teaches the value of looking forward to a fresh start without dwelling on the past, but what he did to Lot’s wife for a brief look backward was, shall we say, overkill.  People in new and frightening environments are likely to act in ways formerly unthinkable.  Lot’s motherless daughters, believing all other men dead, chose what they thought was the most practical path for the survival of the species—make love, not war.

The Binding of Isaac

God tests Abraham, who fails the test.  Nobody should commit an atrocity, no matter who makes the request.  Abraham’s willingness to kill his son creates a dysfunctional family.  Neither Abraham’s son Isaac nor his wife Sarah ever speak to Abraham again in the Bible.  It is better to do good than have faith.

Jacob and Esau

We shouldn’t prey on the weaknesses of family members, as Jacob and Rebekah did.  On the other hand, a future leader should be a thinker and planner like Jacob, rather than prone to foolish choices, as Esau was.  Esau makes the wise decision to forgive his brother, rather than seek revenge.  Violence breeds violence.

Joseph and the Coat of Many Colors

As often occurs in families, Jacob picks up some of the bad habits of his father, and suffers for opening preferring one child over another.  We learn about degrees of horrendous behavior, with Judas appearing the most reasonable brother because he favors selling Joseph into slavery instead of killing him.  Joseph, similarly, feels the need to torment his brothers before eventually disclosing his identity and dropping trumped-up charges.  We learn in this fable not to flaunt a favored status, as Joseph does, and not to overreact with envy, as Joseph’s brothers do.

Judah, Onan and Tamar

Marriages arranged by authority figures for the sole purpose of increasing property can lead to death and destruction.  Couples should be honest with each other about their sexual relationships, which Onan was not.  Judah, at least, is willing to admit his error when confronted with proof.  Tamar is the most admirable character because she is not a hypocrite and attains her goal the only way possible in a culture ruled by men.

Click on Secular Coaltion for America for that organization’s web page.

Interactive picture of the Sistine Chapel

You don’t have to be a Catholic to appreciate the beauty of the Sistine Chapel, although I imagine Catholics and people raised in the Catholic tradition see more in it than I do.

Click on the name, then use the plus and minus icons on the picture to enlarge or reduce it, the up and down arrow keys on your computer to view the ceiling or floor and the right and left arrow keys to rotate the image.

Hat tip to Making Light.

Canticle of the Creatures

Hat tip to The Dish.

A religious pilgrimage of upstate New York

The newest addition to my Blogroll page is Chris and Luke Explore the Burned Over District.  It is by a couple of young men who go around visiting places of worship and other religious sites in and around Rochester, N.Y., and reporting on what they see and hear.  Their blog is well worth following if you’re interested in the diversity of religion.  They visited my church, First Universalist Church of Rochester, some weeks ago.  

The Burned Over District

Western and central New York came to be called the Burned Over District after a series of powerful religious revivals in the early 19th century.  Revival preachers said the area was burned over because there was no more fuel (unsaved souls) to feed the fire of religious fervor.  But that was just the beginning of religious movements in this part of New York state.   At least two religions, Mormonism and Spiritualism, have roots here.

Joseph Smith Jr. lived in Palmyra, N.Y., just to the east of Rochester, and stated he was led by the Angel Moroni to the golden plates, whose inscriptions he translated into the Book of Mormon.  Each year the events of the Book of Mormon are enacted in the annual Hill Cumorah Pageant on the original site.  It is as if the events of the Book of Exodus were annually reenacted in a pageant at the real Mount Sinai.

The Fox sisters of Hydesville, N.Y., conducted their first table-rapping seánces in the area to communicate with the dead, leading to the Spiritualist movement, whose centers include the Lily Dale retreat center in Chautauqua County, NY, and Plymouth Spiritualist Church here in Rochester.

The Oneida Society was a successful communal utopian society in central New York, led by the prophet John Humphrey Noyes who said it is possible to live without sin in this world.  His most striking teaching was “complex marriage,” which included no unique partners, adolescent boys and girls being initiated into sex by older women and men and distinctive practices on birth control and eugenics.  After Noyes abdicated leadership in old age, the society reorganized as the Oneida silverware company.  The <Shakers were also an important part of upstate New York’s 19th century religious ferment.

First Universalist Church of Rochester, NY

People of diverse religions are good neighbors here.  In 1874, Unitarians, Universalists and Jews began a Union Thanksgiving Service which has been held annually since then, and now includes Catholics, Protestants and Muslims.

Roshi Philip Kapleau started his Zen Center, one of the first American Buddhist communities, in Rochester in 1966.  He had never before visited the city, but his reading led him to believe the area had spiritual significance.  Chris and Luke haven’t visited the Zen Center as yet, but they have visited three other Buddhist places of worship as well as the local Hindu temple and the Islamic Center

As for myself, I do not believe in the doctrines of any one religion, and I think some religions at some periods of history have fostered hatred and oppression, but I think the teachings of most religions contain valuable wisdom, and I think all religions express the yearnings and creativity of the human spirit.

The experience of seeing Earth from space

Hat tip for this to Hank Stone.

The new Pope and the Argentine military junta

Many Latin American prelates, most famously Dom Helder Camaro of Brazil and the martyred Archbishop Oscar Romaro of El Salvador, spoke out in the 1970s and 1980s against military dictatorships, death squads and torture.  The new Pope Francis was not one of them.

Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio

[Jorge Mario] Bergoglio was the head of the Jesuits in Argentina during the military dictatorship of 1976-1983, during which the military murdered upwards of 30,000 people (as well as kidnapping hundreds of children whose parents the regime had tortured and murdered). Unlike Catholic officials in neighboring Chile and Brazil, where priests, bishops, and even cardinals spoke out against human rights abuses and defended victims of abuses, in Argentina, the Catholic Church was openly complicit in the military regime’s repression.

Bergoglio was not exempt from this involvement: military officers have testified that Bergoglio helped the Argentine military regime hide political prisoners when human rights activists visited the country.  And Bergoglio himself had to testify regarding the kidnapping of two priests who he stripped of their religious licenses shortly before they were kidnapped and tortured.

This isn’t just a case of Bergoglio being a member of an institution that supported a brutal regime; it’s a case of Bergoglio himself having ties, direct and indirect, to that very regime.  For those who hoped for a Pope who might represent a more welcoming and open path for the Catholic Church, the selection of Bergoglio has to be a let-down.

via Americas South and North.

In November 2005, Cardinal Bergoglio was elected head of the Argentine Conference of Bishops for a three-year term, which was renewed in 2008.  At the time he was chosen, the Argentine church was dealing with a notorious political scandal, that of the Rev. Christian von Wernich, a former chaplain of the Buenos Aires police who had been accused of aiding in the questioning, torture and death of political prisoners.

The church authorities had spirited Father von Wernich out of the country and placed him in a parish in Chile under a false name, but he was eventually brought back to Argentina and put on trial. In 2007, he was found guilty on seven counts of complicity in homicide, more than 40 counts of kidnapping and more than 30 of torture, and was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Father von Wernich was allowed to continue to celebrate Mass in prison, and in 2010 a church official said that “at the appropriate time, von Wernich’s situation will have to be resolved in accordance with canonical law.” But Cardinal Bergoglio never issued a formal apology on behalf of the church, or commented directly on the case, and during his tenure the bishops’ conference was similarly silent.

via NYTimes.com.

I never was bothered by the fact Pope Benedict XVI was a member of the Hitler Youth as a teenager.  He was a boy and too young to know better, he never personally participated in Nazi atrocities and he never supported or showed sympathy for Naziism as an adult.  Cardinal Bergoglio was an adult when he supported the fascist Argentine military junta, and, so far as I know, he never expressed regrets.  (If I am wrong on this point, I would be grateful for better information).

[Note added 3/16/13.  Argentina's bishops in October 2012 issued a collective apology for failing to protect their flock during the dictatorship.]

The Papacy is important to everyone and not just Catholics.  The Roman Catholic Church is not only the world’s largest religious communion, it is the world’s largest membership organization—period.  There are more than a billion Catholics in the world.   A majority of the world’s Christians are Catholics.  What the Pope does, and what the Catholic Church does, are hugely important to the world, for good and bad.

Now it may be that as Pope, Pope Francis will be able to put his past history behind him.  Maybe he will support Catholic social teaching at its best, rather than Catholic authoritarianism at its worst.  I hope so.  It’s possible.  Such a change of heart wouldn’t be unprecedented.  But I wouldn’t bet on it.

Money laundering at the Vatican bank

Al Jazeera English recently rebroadcast this 2011 piece about money laundering at the Institute for Religious Works (IOR), otherwise known as the Vatican bank.   The purpose of the IOR is to administer the Roman Catholic Church’s vast wealth, and to disperse it for religious and charitable purposes.  But it operates outside the laws of Italy or any other nation, and investigative reporters in this video show evidence that it has been used to launder money from illicit sources for bribery and other corrupt purposes.

At the time this program was originally broadcast, Pope Benedict XVI had appointed outside auditors and announced new transparency rules for the bank.   It would be interesting to know how successful the Pope’s housecleaning efforts were, and to what degree his successor will continue them.