“Hear this, all you peoples. Pay attention, all you inhabitants of the world.” (Psalm 49:1)

Okay. It better be good.

“Both small and great, Rich and poor alike. My own mouth will speak wisdom, And the meditation of my heart will show understanding.” (vs 2-3).

More of the same. You could even take it for immodesty, if you hadn’t already decided it’s not going to be that way.

“I will pay attention to a proverb; I will expound my riddle with the harp.” (vs 4)

There will be music.

“Why should I fear during times of trouble, When I am surrounded by the evil of those trying to overthrow me?” (vs 5)

Okay, now we’re getting down to it. And it looks like it is going to be a good, fine way to counter anxiety.

“Those who are trusting in their wealth And who boast about their great riches,” (vs 6)

People do tend to be like this. What makes the world go round? What trail should do they say you should always follow to see how things are happening? The ‘money trail?’ Not that it’s bad stuff. ‘A protection’ is what Ecclesiastes 7:12 calls it, even as it says ‘wisdom’ is a better protection, since it “preserves the life of its owner.” What can money do and what can’t it do?

“None of them can ever redeem a brother Or give to God a ransom for him, (The ransom price for their life is so precious That it is always beyond their reach); That he should live forever and not see the pit.” (7-9)

Here are verses that are such a slam-dunk for explaining the ransom of Christ—how the death of one man can redeem a brother by giving a ransom for him, in fact not just one, but countless ones: “For God loved the world so much that he gave his only-begotten Son, so that everyone exercising faith in him might not be destroyed but have everlasting life,” (John 3:16)—that we usually go straight there, such as here in the Enjoy Life Forever guide.

Let’s stay more on the lines of what the psalmist would have thought. He wouldn’t have known of that future application. He would have confined his observations to the ‘here and now’ limitations of money. Here’s an article that goes that way.

On a street of massively imposing homes, one householder assured me that, “You have no idea what goes on behind these doors.” Money may hide woes, but it by no means alleviates them. ‘They’re lives are a mess,’ one hairdresser told me—to whom they unhesitatingly spill. Expand the list of how the wealthy cannot ‘redeem even a brother’ to destruction from drugs, alcohol, or depravity. Often wealth better enables those paths.

Alas, the wealthy one, who has bought university wisdom with his wealth, “sees that even wise people die; The stupid and the unreasoning perish together, And they must leave their wealth to others. Their inner wish is that their houses will last forever, Their tents to generation after generation. They have named their estates after themselves.” (vs 10-11)

Even park benches they name after themselves, I reflect, as I set my rear end on one. Maybe not the ‘wealthy’ do this as much as the ‘wannabe wealthiest.’ Nothing wrong with that, I suppose, for otherwise I would be standing, but—talk about a meager consolation prize!

“But man, although honored, will not remain; He is no better than the beasts that perish. This is the way of the stupid ones And of those who follow them, who take pleasure in their empty words. (vs 12-13)

Whoa! Why not say what you think? For the first time, the wisdom of the wise, who ‘boast of their great riches,’ is likened to ‘the way of the stupid ones’ spewing ‘empty words!’—words to the effect that this life is all there is.

They overlook that “They are assigned like sheep to the Grave. Death will shepherd them; The upright will rule over them in the morning. Every trace of them will fade away; The Grave rather than a palace will be their home.” (vs 14)

Whereas, for the one who puts his trust in God? “God will redeem me from the power of the Grave, For he will take hold of me.” (15)

“Do not be afraid because a man becomes rich, Because the splendor of his house increases,” (vs 16)

The words would not be here if they didn’t reflect a truth—that people do become afraid. I am in awe of the publishers of the city congregation I once attended who would screw up every ounce of their courage to chase out to the suburbs and witness to ones of staggering  wealth compared to theirs. They could have sat it out. Everyone would have understood. But they didn’t.

Sometimes there was even a racial component to it. Larry King interviewed someone who recalled his liberal background as one who would ‘call a charity if he saw Blacks on TV but call a cop if he saw one on his street.’ I think too of Bobby, a white man as uneducated as could be—even by our standards—who regularly placed magazines with a lofty fellow out in the burbs. Send a more educated brother out there and the fellow wouldn’t give him the time of day. ‘Yeah, some of them like to show off their superiority,’ Ruth muttered.

“For when he dies he can take nothing with him; His splendor will not go down with him. For during his lifetime he congratulates himself. (People praise you when you prosper.)” (vs 17-18)

Why do I think of the Billie Holiday song, ‘God Bless the Child?’

And when you got money,

You got a lots of friends

Crowdin' 'round your door

When the money's gone

And all you're spendin' ends

They won't be 'round any more.

I first heard Chicago sing this song. That is the version that sticks with me. In these touchy times, however, the group might be declared guilty of ‘cultural approbation.’ Holiday considered it a uniquely Black song—or has it been assigned that role retroactively? Leave it to someone else to track this down. It was 80 years ago. Either way, it’s a good song.

“But he finally joins the generation of his forefathers. They will never again see the light.” Even when you do succeed in holding onto the big dough, which is more often than not, the end is the same.” (19)

The psalmist concludes by, once again, throw sensibilities to the wind.

“A man who does not understand this, although honored, Is no better than the beasts that perish.”

Why do I think of those who were once believers and exchanged it for today’s trendy atheism? Why do I liken them to the fellow who loses millions in the stock market? ‘They were only paper gains, anyway,’ he tells himself, and whoops it up with the hundreds he still has left.

(photo: Pixabay)

******  The bookstore

See prior post here and here

So here I was on the edge of the universe, measuring up the stars so I could see they were just as good as the ones back home (they were), when the ghost of Carl Sagan cut himself with the razor Dr. Occam had loaned him and swore. Unbeknownst to both he and Dr. Occam, Dr. Occam’s wife had been using that razor to shave her legs.

Now, irreligious as Carl Sagan was, he wouldn’t just swear, ‘G*******t!’ upon cutting himself. He doesn’t do God. Instead, he swore about religious belief, that it was “an extremely dangerous doctrine, because the more we are to assume that the solution comes from the outside, the less likely we are to solve our problems ourselves.”

I heard his ghost. All the way from the edge of the universe I heard his ghost, and I should have minded my own business, but it was like a red flag before a bull. It wasn’t even on his own blog anyway, he being dead, but on the feed of one of his Twitter admirers. Time for me to put in my two cents:

“On the other hand, the more we insist than any answers will come from man, the more we expose ourselves to potential disaster in case they do not. Best to let ones believe as they will rather than declare your opponent ‘dangerous’ and thereby feel justified to run him off the road,” said I, as though he had meant to do that. He may be dead, but he will get some unhinged follower in this age of unhinge to act on his word. (His champion’s words are in italics from this point on.)

I don't care what people believe, but beliefs don't live in a vacuum. People vote their beliefs into laws that affect others. [I had expressed just that concern, only going the other way.] We should all want to believe as many true things and stop believing in as many false or unsubstantiated things as possible. It makes the world better. All the answers should come from reality. I see zero proof of any answers coming from supernatural things. If we don't have an answer, then we say "we don't know". We don't make something up because it might give someone comfort. We don't invent magical woobies. (bolding mine)

Believe me, you don’t want to try to prove God to these ones. If they are locked and loaded, they will have comebacks to anything you will say. In the end, you can’t prove God. That’s why they call it faith. All you can do is show belief is reasonable. That will not work in this instance because ‘reason’ is defined in different terms. Better to focus on the words I bolded above: what is it that makes the world better?

At the end of a lengthy door discussion forty years ago over creation vs evolution, the man asked what difference it made. Who cares how we got here? he said. I replied that if it was God, he might not stand idly by to see all his worked ruined, but if it was evolution, then whatever hope there was for humankind lay in their hands. “And they’re not doing too well,” I added. The man’s wife, who up till that time had not said a word, for the first time did. “That’s a good point,” she said.

They’re still not doing too well. There is no sign whatsoever of people ‘coming together,’ but rather, the reverse. It cannot be blamed on religion. That force has clearly waned over the years.

What sort of answer would that bring?

I don't care if humankind comes to anything. The purpose of life is to live it, and by communal existence, make things better for us because all share space on this planet. There is no ultimate goal beyond this. No heaven to get to.

He doesn’t see that his first statement contradicts his second? He’ll keep on ‘making things better’ at the same time saying he doesn’t care if it all blows up? I mean, forgive the rest of us if we aspire to something more.

Moreover, understand that they are people who do care if humankind comes to nothing, and since their distrust in human efforts is well merited, they go beyond what his brand of science is able to detect and finds something greater.

Produce proof of God, or go away. … Evolution is a fact. I can't, nor would I control what others believe. You seem to need a woobie for your life to have meaning. I don't. Good luck with your delusional beliefs.

How can persons who will be senile and in diapers in not so many years say they need no crutch (“woobie”)? Of course they do. Plenty of scientists believe in God. No need for the insult.

I don't mean to be insulting, but it is what it is. Without proof, it doesn't matter who believes (scientists), how long they believe, or how many believe (quantity). Old people only need this crutch because religion has poisoned people's minds into believing there is a magical.. ...place with no strife, no disease, no pain, and everything you desire, while this reality is just a place to wipe your feet till you get there. If people told you they believed in Santa, would that be any more ridiculous? Yet me comparing your imaginary friend to a woobie is... ...somehow insulting? The problem with this world is this unsubstantiated belief when people use those beliefs to hurt people because an ancient book written by bronze age sheep herders tells them so. I don't care what people believe, as long as those beliefs don't affect me...

Yes, you don’t mean to be insulting, but—and then proceed to insult with ‘woobie.’ Why not use the n-word and explain how you don’t mean to insult? [the very origin of woo is ‘Woooo—what superstitious people say when confronted by some phenomenon they can’t figure out, and so ascribe to the supernatural. ‘Wooooo’ not insulting, my foot! People howl at the straw in their neighbor’s eye, but never consider the one in their own.

It’s why humans will never succeed in living with other humans. They don’t mean to insult, but—then on a hundred different pretexts having nothing to do with religion, they do. All the same, did I not start this? Why did I do that? Mind your own business, Tommy. A person ought to be allowed the last word on his own feed. That’s why I unfollowed (not blocked) the person. Those call-to-action words of Sagan will be quoted and it’s like waving a red flag before a bull—which I should ignore but don’t. My bad.

The exchange had a surprisingly happy ending, though. The Saganaphile repleated with how he doesn’t care what people believe as long as they don’t go passing laws to impinge on his freedom. Bingo. Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t do that, though most groups do whenever they can garner the strength. Indeed, the trigger words beginning this thread suggested just the opposite concern: not that faith would seek to outlaw non-faith, but that non-faith would seek to rule out faith. Sagan considered faith ‘dangerous.’ You know some of his followers will seek to do something about this ‘danger.’

Not Jehovah’s Witnesses. Their weapons are words alone. Their standards they apply only to themselves. They tell no one else what to do. The person actually ‘liked’ my closing tweet, which he took (correctly) as an extending of the olive branch:

“The trick is to coexist on a polarized world. It is not going to unpolarize anytime soon. You said it well. As long as neither side passes laws to impose their viewpoint on the other, we’re all good.”

******  The bookstore

Willie Whitepebble, Wayne’s boy, graduated from university with a degree—not one of those ‘so what?’ degrees to which you say, ‘Sorry for not having a PhD in the hogwash your PhD is in’—No, he graduated with a real degree in a bona fide discipline: philosophy. Thereupon, he started dissing faith.

‘Since science shows humans are but the tiniest speck on a planet of the most insignificant star, and not the very center of the universe, so much for man-centric-religion,’ he said.

Straw man argument, anyone? There may be churchy types that carry on as though the central theme of the universe is our personal salvation, but that’s on them. It is nothing the Bible advances.

The Bible has man at the center of the universe, does it? How did this one escape his attention:

“When I see your heavens, the works of your fingers, The moon and the stars that you have prepared, What is mortal man that you keep him in mind, And a son of man that you take care of him?”

No boasting about human importance there. ‘Dust on the scales,’ the psalmist calls them: “The sons of men are a mere breath, The sons of mankind are a delusion.  When laid together on the scales, they are lighter than a mere breath.” (Psalm 62:9)

So if science disproves faith, it certainly does not do so on the basis that it gave people of faith a rude awakening, as though they imagined themself the center of everything and now they can no longer do so.

Willie came up with another straw man: Science shows how chaotic are the subatomic building blocks of life, therefore belief in God is nonsense—as though men of faith have always figured Lego blocks were the starting point.

Why doesn’t he just go with Job 26:14?

“Look! These are just the fringes of his ways; Only a faint whisper has been heard of him!”

No expectation of simplicity there, is there?

If Willie disses faith, as appears his Mission now, he must do it with arguments that apply, not with straw man arguments that don’t.

He must not confuse church with Bible. Often they are different. And he must not confuse church with Jehovah’s Witnesses. Often they too are different. Does church put humans at the very center? Often they do. Witnesses don’t.

And if the early ‘science’ of Aristotle that came to be favored by the early Church—drawn to it because it was knowledge by decree, rather that observation, that doesn’t mean the Bible favored that ‘science.’ There is Aristotle, pasting on the heavenly bodies on the canopy surrounding central earth. He may do it. The Bible does not do so.

“He stretches out the northern sky over empty space, suspending the earth upon nothing,” says Job 26:7

I used to attempt to hang my pen upon nothing, to illustrate how unlikely it was for ‘primitive’ man to envision Job’s words on his own. Very carefully I would hang it there, before letting go. Always it would fall. But that was when I carried a pen. Nowadays all is digital and so I am stymied.

All this is not to say that Willie’s college may not serve him well. It well might, at least in the short term. His stint at the optician’s office was cut abruptly short when he proved himself not too observant about sign placement.

(Photo: anonymous on social media. If it’s yours, claim it)

******  The bookstore

No longer do I try to prove the faith to those determined not to share it. They have an answer to everything—just as any faction today has an answer to anyone who have chosen something different.. 

The idea of living forever, minus the woes of this present life, appeals to me. The idea of gratitude to a Creator, who has superior wisdom, appeals to me. All I need is to clear up misgivings about the existence of evil, and that can be done in a reasonable manner. It’s not something you can prove, but it makes sense.

Conversely, the idea that humans will have the answers does not appeal to me. All I know and have experienced argues that following that course will just incur `one disappointment after another.

These qualities could be described as those of heart. Head has nothing to do with it. The heart chooses what it wants, then charges the head to devise a convincing rationale. This may lend the appearance that the head is running the show, but it is the heart all along.

There is a downside to being as cocoon-like as many are toward in-depth following of news events. We miss that people everywhere select the facts they like, that support their belief/value/political system, then use them to castigate those of different persuasion. People are like sports fans today. They cheer and boast when their side scores a point, wince and do damage control when their side suffers loss, but on no account do they examine the merits of the other side. There are no end of combative  ‘other sides.’ But we miss much of this due to lumping them all together as ‘the world.’

Critical thinking as a tool in the toolbox is fine. Critical thinking as an overarching philosophy is a joke. We’re not capable of it. Heart trumps head every time. We think the ‘activism’ against the Witness organization is something unique. Instead, it just demonstrates that we stand for something. Everyone that stands for something triggers activism from those of conflicting persuasion. The one way not to trigger ‘activism’ is to be bland and toothless. Then, since your faith doesn’t really matter, since it doesn’t meaningfully stand in the way of predominant secular values, no one has anything to object to.

There is little sense in trying to prove the faith to anyone other than yourself. ‘Prove to yourselves,’ Romans 12:2 says. ‘Taste and see Jehovah is good,’ says the psalm. Taste is subjective. If someone can’t stand the taste of beets, how are you going to prove to them that beets taste good? These days I just present the Bible hope. It appeals to some and does not appeal to others.

When people squawk about Adam and Eve being fairy tale, as many do in the modern world, I say treat them, and all that derives from them, as they would a jigsaw puzzle. When you put together a jigsaw puzzle you do not concern yourself at all with whether the picture on the box cover is real or not. Upon assembling the puzzle and replicating that picture, sometimes that in itself triggers a reassessment of the picture’s validity. 

But if you know the box cover picture is of Josh Grobin, and you do not like Josh Grobin because after you picked up your wife and her girlfriend from his concert, you learned in a sudden storm that bridge surfaces really do freeze before road pavement (and Josh thereafter didn’t even come to visit you—unlike Mozart, who would have done so), then you will not attempt to put that puzzle together. So it is with the ‘God, prayer, everlasting life, man dominates man to his injury’ puzzle. Some are intrigued to put that puzzle together. To others, the box cover is a turn-off. 

Similarly, prayer is not a topic that you seek to prove to someone else. Does the Bible ever suggest that course? It is personal back and forth with God, without regard for how someone else might view it. If one person thinks such-and-such is an answer to prayer, what business is that of anyone else? Besides, even believers have grown comfortable with saying that, while God answers all prayers, sometimes the answer is no.

******  The bookstore

See Part 1 here.

You can always trust Albert Einstein to come up with good questions. You can trust him to dive into the scientific but not abandon the spiritual. You can’t trust everyone to do that but you can trust him. For example, he says:

“Here arise a puzzle that has disturbed scientists of all periods. How is it possible that mathematics, a product of human thought that is independent of experience, fits so excellently the objects of physical reality? Can human reason without experience discover by pre thinking properties of real things?”

Morris Kline answers. He is not dumb, but forgive me if I suggest that his huge oversimplification is: “What we have achieved by way of mathematical description and prediction amounts to the good luck of the man who finds a hundred-dollar bill while casually taking a walk.”

Replace the hundred dollar bill with a hundred trillion dollar bill and then maybe we can talk. My opening remark will be, “When was the last time you found a hundred trillion dollar bill?”

It’s like Douglas Adams (the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), who also isn’t dumb. In fact, he’s smart, just like Kline is. But, like Kline, he hugely oversimplifies it. Try oversimplifying a paragraph of his book, and he’d howl like a rhesus.

Adams addresses people who believe that God must exist because the world so fits our needs. He compares them to an intelligent puddle of water that fills a hole in the ground. The puddle is certain that the hole must have been designed specifically for it because it fits so well. The puddle exists under the sun until it has entirely evaporated.

Whoa! What a great illustration! All you need do for it to be perfect is find an intelligent puddle of water. It is as though these pillars of thought leadership just dissolve into mush when they try to explain away what any 5-year-old knows can’t be explained away.

Take this tweet from Richard Dawkins—no one sneers at God more than he: He quotes Einstein again, just like I did in opening this post: “The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is at all comprehensible,” the great one says. Dawkins adds: “But what is the alternative to comprehensible? What kind of a world would it be if it were incomprehensible? What would it look like?” He even invites his audience to “discuss” his moronic question.

My contribution was that it would look like this:

Careful, Tommy, careful. Remember, Dawkins (and Kline, and Adams) is a Great Man, and you are not. You really going to call him moronic? You really going to go the route of the one who doesn’t suffer fools gladly—and a fool is anyone who disagrees? Really?

Sigh...of course I am not. I am chastened. Dawkins has more Twitter followers than I do—and THAT probably is not only what the world would look like if it were incomprehensible, but the greatest proof that it is! Even so, sometimes a child with fewer followers than he must say: “The emperor has no clothes!”

Now, if I say that Hannah Fry’s doing a math show to make me mad, it must be conceded that math can make a person mad. It is not so directly transferable to reality as may at first glance appear—and in accounting for this, the renegades are emboldened to take shots at God.

Everyone knows that parallel lines never meet. They know that by looking down the railroad tracks. The rails may seem to converge, but it is just an illusion. So do you think that simple math (geometry) will come down on the side of illusion or sense? It comes down on the side of illusion! In real life, if you walk down a few hundred yards, you see they are still apart—they don’t touch. In geometry, they do!

Do a thought experiment Start in your head with two perpendicular lines; one is horizontal, and one is vertical. They cross. Call the point where they cross ‘P’. Grab hold of the vertical line just above the horizontal line and start to pivot it. What happens to ‘P’—that point of intersection? Doesn’t it move farther and farther down the horizontal line. At what point does it “jump off” to make the two lines parallel?

When I played this trick on guys in the workplace, some saw right away that the lines would never separate—designate a place of separation, and why can you not draw a straight line from the pivot point to a point just a bit further down from your separation point? Some guys walked away scratching their heads. Some got mad, as though I was messing with reality.

It’s like that other scenario of how in a race someone gaining can never pass the one in the lead, since he would first have to close half the distance, and he couldn’t do that until he had closed half that distance. And he couldn’t do that until he had closed half that distance, and so forth. It doesn’t end. The runner catching up can never pass. But go to the races and you will see that he does all the time.. So math can mess with your mind. It does screwy things.

So can you seize upon such things to throw out God? “Mathematics is the alphabet with which God has written the universe,” says Galileo, but since there are some strange letters in that alphabet, that means he didn’t write it. Can you go there? Why not do a Job instead?  “Look! These are the fringes of his ways, And what a whisper of a matter has been heard of him! But of his mighty thunder who can show an understanding?”  (Job 26:14)

The woman following Jesus thought it enough to touch his outer garment, and it did wonders for her when she did. She didn’t have to try the garment on herself. Why doesn’t that satisfy the scientists? Why can’t they just acquiesce to “My ways are higher than your ways?” (Isa 55:8-9)

Return to Einstein, and even my observation of him that he will delve into the scientific without junking the spiritual, ofthe developing field on quantum mechanics, he observed:

“Quantum mechanics is very worthy of respect. But an inner voice tells me that it is not the genuine article after all. The theory delivers much, but does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the Old One. I . . . am convinced that He does not play dice,”

Alas, Einstein caught Him playing dice!—the weirdness of quantum mechanics has proven true. But it didn’t stumble him. He didn’t say, “Well, I guess there isn’t any Old One.” He said (not literally) “Well, I guess Old One is older than I thought, and a cagier too.” I mean, who says he has to spell it all out for humans to understand readily. He’s God. He can do what he wants. “If I were hungry,” he says at Psalm 50:12, “I would not tell it to you.”

Exactly. Are humans going to help him out?

See Part 3.

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I see one of those mathematics shows trying to make me mad is coming up on PBS. Subject: Is math discovered? Or is it invented? The show is hosted by Hannah Fry. It is entitled: Magic Numbers. “Look hard enough at anything, mathematics is lying beneath,” she says. “Is math all in our heads, invented? Or is it an eternal physical reality, something existing out there, waiting to be discovered.”

Now, can a guy be forgiven for thinking that a dumb question? E=mc², for example. Why should it be that way? Why should it be writable in such a simple way? Why shouldn’t it be a hopeless hodgepodge? I mean, just try writing the formula for this:

“Mathematics is the alphabet with which God has written the universe,” said Galileo. Duh. It all reduces to usually very compact math.

But along come others to say that mathematics is not discovered at all. It is invented. The learned one fuss and fret, tossing away one measure that doesn’t work after another, till they finally find something that does work to describe something. You mean that there were a few thousand wanna-be Galileos describing gravity in all sorts of harebrained ways, until the master himself came along and found a way to reduce it all to a few letters and numbers?

Something about this “dissident” (which is now the mainstream) view reminds me of Larry King telling how it was with 7-Up. The soft drink was wildly successful—but only after the inventor flopped with 1-Up, 2-Up, 3-Up, 4-Up, 5-Up, and 6-Up..

So I’m in the mood to be surly. All I can say is that Paul Halpern had better stay on the right side of this. He may. He is a scientist, which is fine. He doesn’t extend it (so far as I know) to scientist-philosopher-cheerleader-atheist, which is not so fine. I am embarrassed to say I have not yet read his Synchronicity (which title implies he is not in the latter category), but I mean to. It’s on the list.

I did start to review his 2019 book, The Universe Speaks in Numbers, only it turned out to be not his book. It was from Graham Farmelo! Paul let me tweet on for quite some time before he said, “Um, you know, you’ve got the wrong guy. Graham’s a good writer, but he’s not me.” I was following them both on Twitter and I got them mixed up!

I had also almost reviewed Morris Kline’s 1985 book Mathematics and the Search for Knowledge. Alas, both reviews are still on the drawing board, and may never get off it (unless they do so right now. Alas, I can no longer find my Farmelo notes—it drives me nuts!) Kline offers gems like: “The work of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and most eighteenth-century mathematicians was...a religious quest. The search for the mathematical laws of nature was an act of devolution that would reveal the glory and grandeur of His handiwork.”

It works for me. But it wasn’t until the second, or maybe even third, reading, that I realized Kline himself doesn’t buy that view. He sides with the inventors, not the discoverers! Is that what is called “confirmation bias” that I had not noticed it before?

“Each discovery of a law of nature was hailed as evidence of God’s brilliance rather that that of the investigator,” he writes, and I should have noticed in the phrasing that Kline seems to think it wrong that it should be that way. Newton, Galileo, Kepler, and others took for granted that it was right to credit God’s brilliance rather than their own. Is it a mark of moderns that they want the credit?

Regarding a contribution of Faraday, Kline writes, “It may be too much to expect that . . . the function sine x should serve. Yet nature never ceases to accommodate itself to man’s mathematics.” Is it only me who draws the parallel of the would-be tourist who envisions paradisiac scenes of Tahiti, then goes and finds such a place, and says, “nature never ceases to accommodate itself to man’s daydreaming!” I mean, what is wrong with people? He saw Tahiti on the brochures—then he went and discovered it.

Kline elaborates: “If math is discovered, not invented, then it must exist somewhere. Where? Would not the plain answer be in the mind of God a la Galileo—god wrote the universe in the language of mathematics. But what if one does not believe in God?”

Well, I would say in that event that nature has provided a fine reason to reconsider, but if you don’t want to believe in God, you don’t want to believe in God. Kline is not so easily dissuaded.

Kline says: “Whereas until around 1850, mathematical order and harmony were believed to be inherent in the design of the universe and mathematicians strove to uncover that design, the newer view, forced on mathematicians by their own creations, is that they are the legislators who decide what the laws of the universe should be. They impose whatever plan or order succeeds in describing restricted classes of phenomena that for inexplicable reasons continue to obey the laws.”

Nah, I don’t buy it. But you might buy it if you think the “inexplicable reasons” is just “one of those things” and it doesn’t otherwise get under your skin.

“Does this last fact mean that there is an ultimate law and order that mathematicians approximate more and more successfully? There is no answer to this, but at the very least, faith in mathematical design had to be replaced by doubt,” Kline says. Is it, “There is no answer to that?” Or is it, “There is no answer that I accept to that?”

Ultimately, is it not other factors, not mathematical at all, that determine whether that “doubt” becomes “conviction?”

“Yet what of the calamities of nature-earthquakes, meteorites striking the Earth, volcanoes, plagues-the unanswered questions of cosmogony, and our ignorance of what lies beyond our ken in our own galaxy, to say nothing of other problems facing humanity, do these not deny any likelihood of ultimate order?” Note that having or not having an answer to the problem of suffering and evil influences one’s assessment of the power of mathematics. The “other problems facing humanity”—problems that he has no answer for—bother Kline. And the only reason earthquakes, meteorites striking earth, and volcanoes registers on his scale is that they cause additional “problems facing humanity.” So it all boils down to: Why is there suffering and evil?

Hannah’s Fry’s kin, fellow Brit Stephen Fry, comedian, is also obsessed with this question. Only they are not kin, but upon doing an online search, I found I was not the only person to speculate they were. Nah, there’s no relation, the fact-check site told me—they don’t even follow each other on social media. But they both in a roundabout way (Fry, through her fellow mathematician Kline) settle into the same question: Why would a supposed God of love permit evil and suffering?

Stephen Fry does more than “settle into” it. He rams it headlong, like one of those horned animals ramming his fellow on Nature just to prove ‘Who’s the man?’ He rams it so forcefully that he triggers violation of the since-repealed Irish Blasphemy law. He figures (not unreasonably) that if an answer exists to evil and suffering, the self-proclaimed experts of the clergy will have it. Since they merely issue such pablum as “God works in mysterious ways,” he erupts into fury.

“Why should I respect a mean-spirited, capricious, stupid God who creates a world that is so full of injustice and pain?....Bone cancer in children, what’s that about? How dare you create a world in which there is such misery that is not our fault. It’s not right. It’s utterly, utterly evil. . . . Because the god who created this universe, if it was created by God, is quite clearly a maniac, an utter maniac, totally selfish.”

I develop this topic at some length in the “Fake News” chapter of I Don’t Know Why We Persecute Jehovah’s Witnesses —Searching for the Why. After all, “Why so Much Suffering?” is a chapter title of their basic Bible teaching book, and has been dealt with in more or less identical words throughout the Witnesses’ history. But the Witnesses stand for the “wisdom that cries out in the street” of Proverbs 1:20. “Hogwash!” the world thinkers are inclined to say. “It cries out from the quadrangles. Only ignoramuses are to be found in the street,”

See Part 2

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Bart comes from an evangelical background. In his blog, he speaks poignantly of the tragedy of losing his faith, something that happened once he began to examine the Bible through “critical thinking.” 

He never had a firm foundation to stand on. I would lose my faith, too, if I had to uphold all the nonsense that is part and parcel of church teaching. One can almost feel sorry for him—but one does not, because he does not feel sorry for himself. He has a good gig going—top selling author, nifty website with a paywall that donates to charity, a reputation that prompts the Great Courses Lecture series to engage him as a professor, chair of a university religion department, where he destroys the faith of his students—but since it was founded mostly on the doctrines of churches, it was barely defensible in the first place. No, he has a good gig. Nobody has asked me to chair a Great Courses series.

If not atheist, he certainly is hard-agnostic, unless he has had a recent change of heart. I often wonder what would have happened if those now atheist had been presented accurate Christian teachings first—would they have gone atheist in that case? A naive me once assumed that the answer would be no. 

Sometimes it has worked that way, but these are crazy times, and if you keep up with atheist writings, you find that they are likely to detest JWs most of all! It does not help that JWs have “accurate” Bible teachings. The allure of breaking free from any “control” is just too enticing to be countered by a fresh look at Bible teachings. There is no way that those on the “cramped and narrow road” are not going to be derided as “cult” members by those on the broad and spacious one. This is so predictable that I kick myself for not having predicted it long before—it is so obvious. 

To break free of “control” holds irresistible appeal today, and the atheists add to the list of who does it (and even put foremost) those who would claim to represent God, as our brothers do, and they lambasted them for “controlling”  people by that means. You might think they would look upon Witnesses with admiration for such things as eliminating racism among their midst, or not engaging in physical violence on any account—least of all that of the government trying to sign them up for the latest war.

Alas, to them, JWs are the worst of the lot, because most churches have watered down “speaking in God’s name” to “God works in mysterious ways,” and have pretty much learned to roll with whatever happens, being content to add a smiley “God” emoji to events. Most have made their peace with the world—they seek to hopefully modify it for the better. Atheists are vested in the world even more so, and think the view of JWs far too extreme—even “murderous”—that God means to replace it. 

From the ranks of atheists come those most likely to present the picture that obedience “to men” is essential if you are a JW, how they are under enormous pressure always from top leaders, and how they terrify children with expectations of Armaggedon. (How about when Newsweek surveys the world scene, and presents the magazine cover “What the *@#! Is Next?” I countered to one of them.)

The “obedience” that JWs are expected to render is no more than following directions of the teacher, the coach, the mentor, the employer, the counselor, the traffic cop—something that was once the most unremarkable thing in the world, but is now presented as selling out one’s soul. JWs have not changed—the world has. One may look no farther than it’s collective response to Covid 19 to see what chaos follows. Mark Benioff, the Salesforce founder, the fellow who purchased Time Magazine, has stated that if everyone had masked up for just three weeks, the virus would have been defeated. Of course, this is what JWs have done, because being obedient to authority is not an issue for them, but the illness is out of control today because the world ridicules obedience and challenges the authority of any who would advance it. The very first sign that this would escalate to disaster occurred very early on—when toilet paper sold out, despite knowledge that the virus doesn’t hit people that way. I told Hassan, the CultExpert, he of the“FreedomofMind” hashtag, that my people have behaved far more responsibly than his—you don’t think some will use their “freedom of mind” to tell the government where they can go with their “rules?”

It doesn’t matter if the world’s obsession with “independence” ends in disaster—as it surely will—as it is with Covid 19. As one tweet puts it: “Folks want to believe this pandemic is nearing an end because they’re tired of living in a broken world. But I fear we are just at the beginning, and that we’ve squandered the first six months with our bickering.” You know they will squander the next six months, too—you just know it. That is the way the world works.

To be free of “control” is just too strong a pull for anything to be otherwise. Those on the broad and spacious road—that’s what makes it broad and spacious, ones on it listen to no one but themselves—will invariably present those on the cramped and narrow road as manipulated by a cult. That should have occurred to me long ago.

Take a good look at this chart, for it is a serious attempt to prove God doesn’t exist. If he did, the thinking goes, he would have patched up evil long ago.

Note how the chart assumes God is like a Santa Claus who must shower presents regardless of naughty or nice. Note how the bottom-left two boxes present the point, “Can God make a world in which there is free will and yet ensure that no one will use their free will to the detriment of others?” Note how whoever wrote this chart thinks he is smart for positing a question akin to: “Can God make a mountain he cannot move?” He (she) thinks he has scored a ‘gotcha.’

Throw back at these yo-yos  the dilemma of how the lead runner in any race can never be overtaken, since to do so the pursuing runner would have to close half the distance first, and then half that remaining distance, and then half that remaining distance, and then half that remaining distance, and then half that remaining distance. It becomes clear that the second runner cannot overtake the first. Then lead these this person to a foot race where exactly that thing happens and watch his brain fry.

There are a few other turds masquerading as diamonds in the chart  Each of them is a result of the chartist’s rigid presumption of what God must be like. How many can you find?

Completely absent from the chart is any conception that evil might be temporarily permitted to achieve a certain higher and lasting aim. It is a chart presented from the standpoint of a child—who knows what he wants and does not care to know anything else.

Let your finger go down the flow chart until it reaches the box: “Then why is there evil?” Note the three choices supplied and the chartist’s rash assumption that he has covered all bases. They are:

1) If God is all knowing, he would know what we would do when tested, so there is no need to test us.

Note how this takes all the dignity out of being human. Some people cherish the opportunity to prove their loyalty to a cause greater than they. They will not be satisfied with a test tube result that predicts their loyalty, and so in that event, let the good times roll!

2) An all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving God could and would destroy Satan.

Note the assumption that if he could and would do it, he can and must do it NOW. Again, it is the reasoning of a child who expects presents under the tree on Christmas Day, and not one minute later.

3) Could God have created a universe without these?

This choice leads to the dilemma already mentioned, akin to: ‘Can God make a mountain that he cannot move?’ Maybe these guys can feast on this as ‘wisdom,’ but it doesn’t quite cut it for me.

Does not all of this validate such verses as 1 Corinthians 1:19-20?

“For it is written: “I will make the wisdom of the wise men perish, and the intelligence of the intellectuals I will reject.” Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this system of things? Has not God made the wisdom of the world foolish? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not get to know God through its wisdom, God was pleased through the foolishness of what is preached to save those believing.... Because a foolish thing of God is wiser than men, and a weak thing of God is stronger than men.”

Where to go to find an explanation for why God would permit evil?

Here is one I wrote for Bible-believers: It is notable for being a true story—it actually happened—and it was a hoot while it was happening, let me tell you—even though it gave me a splitting headache.

Here is one I wrote for agnostics and atheists: This one was written because Moristotle gagged on the first. In it I seek to present the Bible’s creation account as a metaphor, its meaning to be discerned without regard to whether it really happened or not.

Here is one off JW.org, presented as a series of online lessons:

Note that all of them involve Adam and Eve. This will make it a non-starter for many people today. Do not let it be so with you. Treat it as though it were the cover of a jigsaw puzzle that you assemble for the pure satisfaction of assembling it. Only afterwards do you consider whether the scene actually exists or not.

Tweeted Richard Dawkins one fine day (11/13/19): “You could easily spot any Religion of Peace. Its extremist members would be extremely peaceful” 

Can it be? Is Richard Dawkins referring to Jehovah’s Witnesses—universally known for being “extremely peaceful” yet declared “extremists” in Russia? If so, I will take back the relatively few bad things I have said about him.

I have not really said THAT many bad things about him. At times, I have even been complimentary. When he blessed the atheist buses rolling out in London, I said that he raised a good point—his was a reaction to existing “hellfire’ buses, with advertising from the church. He did wuss-out, though, with a: “There probably is no God.” Probably?

It wasn’t until I began following him on Twitter, though, that I noticed how breathtakingly contemptuous he was toward anyone who disagreed with him—not merely about God, but also on geopolitical things—and then I did say a few mean things. For example, I said of him that “he does not suffer fools gladly, and a fool is anyone who disagrees with him.”

However, he has largely repented over this online meanness. I’ve noticed it over the months. He has not banished it entirely, but it is much less prevalent, so that I regret that I ever said what I did.

The temptation to be disdainful of opponents is well-nigh irresistible, particularly if you think that they are willfully choosing ignorance. I have (more or less) mastered the temptation, of course, but I have a source of effective and unending counsel that he does not.

This is no more concisely stated than it was at a recent Watchtower Study. A Bible verse considered how we ought “do nothing out of contentiousness or out of egotism, but with humility consider others superior to you.” (Philippians 2:3) Practically speaking, this advice is not easy to implement. It may even strike one as nonsensical—how can everyone be superior to everyone else? Said that Watchtower: “The humble person acknowledges that everyone is superior to him in some way.​—Phil. 2:3, 4.”

Of course. In some way everyone is superior to everyone else. Search for that way, hone in on it like a laser beam, and it will not be so difficult to treat even opponents with respect. “Disagree without being disagreeable” is the catchphrase today.

But Professor Dawkins does not have this advantage. Much of his tradition would sway him in just the opposite “survival of the fittest” direction. So he must be given credit for his new, somewhat softer, online personality. Possibly someone who has his best interests at heart—perhaps his wife—said, “Richard, you sure do come across as a cantankerous crank on Twitter,” and he deliberately walked it back. It’s commendable.

Now, I don’t think Richard had Jehovah’s Witnesses in mind with his tweet. He probably has formed his views of them through the contributions of their “apostate” contingent, and those views could hardly be blacker. I looked down among his comments to see whether any of those nasties had reared their heads. Perhaps here was an example:

“Not entirely true. Extremists usually have their own misinterpretation of scriptures.”

I responded to this one: “If “misinterpretation” results in a religion of peace, perhaps it is not a misinterpretation after all. Perhaps the mainline view is a misinterpretation.” Is that not a no-brainer?

Another one, disagreeing with the above tweet: “Actually no. Most extremists do exactly what is written in their book. ‘Misinterpretation’ is used as an argument by believers that cherry pick morals that fit our secular ethics today.”

I know this type, too. This is the type that finds slavery in the Bible or war in the Old Testament and rails at the “hypocrisy.” I responded to this fellow as well:

“Everything has a historical context and to deliberately ignore such context is to be intellectually dishonest. If our side does it to theirs, we never hear the end of it.”

He blew up at this reference to context. Evil is evil, he carried on, across all places and time-frames. These characters are very predictable—you could even write their lines for them and not be too far off.

Has “critical thinking” made us all nincompoops? It was once thought the most intelligent thing in the world to consider historical backdrop; one was irresponsible, even deceitful, not to do it. Very well. If he is going to trash, with blinders affixed, the source that I hold dear, I will do the same with his source:

“You should turn your critical thinking skills upon Ancient Greece, the definer of it. When time travel is invented, history revisionists will give a friendly wave to American slaveholding forefathers as they race back in time to fetch wicked Greek pedophiles—it was an enshrined value of that world—back in irons.”

He was not chastened by this. Hijacking Twitter as his personal courtroom, he cross-examined:

“Is the holding and beating of slaves, as described in Exodus, morally acceptable? Yes or no?”

I countered: “Is the raping of children as endorsed by Ancient Greek society morally acceptable? Yes or no?”

Incredibly, he was not dissuaded. “Last chance!” he shot back. “Is the holding and beating of slaves, as described in Exodus, morally acceptable? Yes or no?”

“To the blockheads, I became a blockhead.”—Paul (sort of) —1 Corinthians 9:19-22,” I tweeted back: “Two can play the game of obstinacy. Last chance: Is the rape of children—it was enshrined in Ancient Greek society—morally acceptable? Yes or no?”

Then I went away, and when I came back, he had deleted all this tweets so that it was hard for me to reconstruct the thread. However, someone else had pointed out a grave sin I had committed:

“Thomas you are guilty of the moral equivalence fallacy.” Am I? I suppose. You can sort of guess by the wording just what that phrase means—I had not heard it before. At least it is in English. I once heard a theologian quip that if there is a Latin phrase and a perfectly clear English phrase that means the same thing, always use the Latin phrase so people will know that you are educated. But my “moral equivalence fallacy” is still is no more than considering historical context, a praiseworthy intellectual technique for all time periods except ours. 

Besides, I actually had posted something about slavery long ago. But it is not a topic so simple that it can be hashed out in a few tweets, and so I declined to go there with this fellow, who would debate all the sub-points. If God corrected every human injustice the moment it manifested itself, there would be nothing left. The entire premise of the Bible is that human-rule is unjust in itself and that God allows a period of time for that to be clearly manifested before bringing in his kingdom—the one referred to in the “Lord’s prayer”—to straighten it all out. In the meantime, the very ones who work themselves into a lather at religion “brainwashing” people are livid that God did not brainwash slavery away once humans settled upon it as a fine economic underpinning.

If Dawkins’s tweet and my response hangs around long enough before burial in the Twitter feed, I would expect some of our malcontents to observe as they did in Russia, where the only evidence of extremism cited is proclaiming “a religious view of supremacy.” Huge protest will come at how Jehovah’s Witnesses practice shunning and thus “destroy” relationships and even family. But views inevitably translate into consequences and policies. Refusal to “come together” with those who insist on diametrically opposed views is hardly the “extremism” of ISIS—and yet the Russian Supreme Court has declared that it is, with the full backing in principle of those from the ex-JW community—the ones who go crusading, which is perhaps 10%.

I’m going to write this up as a post and append it to his thread. Let’s see what happens. Probably nothing, but you never know.

Plus, let’s expand on that particular Watchtower some more. The particular article covered was entitled: “Jehovah Values His Humble Servants” (September 2019 issue—study edition)

Unlike nearly all religious services, Witness meetings are ones that you can prepare for. You can comment during them. They are studies of the sacred book, not just impromptu rap sessions, acquiescencing to ceremony, or sitting through someone else’s sermon. You can prepare for them, and you are benefited, as in any classroom, when you do. The focus here, as it so often is, is on practical application.

Humility draws persons to us. Haughtiness repels them, and thus makes next to impossible the mantra to “come together.”

My own comment, when the time was right, was that haughty people can only accomplish so much—it may be a great deal, for haughty people are often very capable people—but eventually they run up against the fact that nobody else can stand them, and so people are motivated to undercut their ideas, even if they are good ones, out of sheer payback for ugliness. Humble people, on the other hand, may be far less capable individually, but their efforts add up. They know how to cooperate and yield to each other in a way that haughty people do not.

Someone else on that Dawkins thread, an amateur wit, played with that them of unlikely extremists: “Jehova's witnesses are peaceful but their extremists are better extremely annoying...”

Why fight this? It is a viewpoint. Viewpoints are not wrong, because they are viewpoints—right or wrong doesn’t enter into the equation. Better to roll with it. I was indeed on a roll, and so I tweeted back: 

“I will grant that they can be. Still, if you had a choice between a team of JWs approaching your door and a team of ISIS members, you would (hopefully) choose theformer. Those 2 groups, and only those 2 groups are officially declared “extremist” in Russia.”

And with that, I included a link to my ebook, “Dear Mr. Putin - Jehovah’s Witnesses Write Russia.” I am shameless in that. No matter how many books I sell, it is not enough. I don’t sell them, anyway. The book is free, a labor of love. It is an application of the theme: “If you have something important to say, don’t hide it behind a paywall.” It is the only, to my knowledge, complete history of events leading up to and beyond the 2017 ban of the Witness organization in Russia.

As to the latest developments there, another one was herded off to prison, who, making the best of a sour situation, or perhaps genuinely finding value there, said: "I want to thank … prosecution. I don't just thank you, but thank you very much, because thanks to you my faith has become stronger … I see I'm on the right path."

Of course. It is unreasonable to oppose so vehemently a people totally honest, hard-working, and given to peace—and yet the Bible says that such will exactly happen. How can it not serve to strengthen faith?

Something is greatly off-base about the New York Times review of Amber Scorah’s new book ‘Leaving the Witnesses’ and it is not Amber. It is the reviewer, C. E. Morgan, who tackles her task with a humanist fervor that merits a review in itself.

She teaches at Harvard Divinity School, per the NYT byline. One wonders what she could possibly teach, or what might be the outcome for students who attend her class—students who presumably went there because they want to learn about God. Her lavish praise of Ms. Scorah’s book: “She teaches us how integrity is determined....by enduring the universe as we find it — breathtaking in its ecstasies and vicious in its losses — without recourse to a God” surely should give those students pause—are they truly in the place they thought they were? Or did they somehow get shunted off into the Atheist Academy? There is such a thing as truth in advertising. 

Ms. Scorah herself, as presented by the Ms. Morgan, is more conventional. Hers is one of the oldest stories of time—of someone disillusioned with her present life, so she reaches out for another, which upon seizing, she finds exhilarating. It is a coming-of-age story, albeit belated. It is a staple of literature.

Since she is ‘leaving the Witnesses’—Jehovah’s Witnesses, a group of Bible-believing Christians—one must at least consider how the Witnesses themselves might have phrased her departure. That can be found in the words of the apostle Paul addressed to Timothy: “Demas has forsaken me because he loved the present world.” Demas himself would not have put it that he “forsook” anyone. He would have presented it as a matter of his eyes at last being opened. “We are regarded as deceivers, and yet we are truthful,” says Paul at 2 Corinthians 6:8. Demas would have been one to say that he had been deceived.

Ms. Morgan cannot be expected to put it as did Paul, but since she teaches at the Divinity school, one might at least expect her to be cognizant of that point of view. Instead, Amber’s departure is a tale of pure heroism for her—that of escape from an “extreme” religion—even worse than a “fundamentalist” religion in her view—and it is “most valuable as an artifact of how one individual can escape mind control.”

“We have wronged no one, we have corrupted no one, we have taken advantage of no one,” says the apostle again. (2 Corinthians 7:2) Demas might have said he had been victimized by all those things. Nevertheless, you say, I was “crafty” and I caught you “by trickery.” (2 Corinthians 12:16) Demas might have said exactly that. Truly, “there is nothing new under the sun.” (Eccles 1:9)

It would appear that any denomination of Christianity would be fundamentalist in Ms. Morgan’s eyes—at least that would be so of any that haven’t interpreted away the resurrection of Christ into oblivion. “The anti-intellectualism of these [fundamentalist] authoritarian movements, their staunch refusal to cede ground to reason and empiricism, often confounds nonbelievers,” and it is hard to believe that she does not count herself as chief of the nonbelievers—never mind what her teaching title might suggest. “How can people devote the totality of their lives to the unseen, the unevidenced?” she laments, seemingly unaware that such was commonplace until relatively recently. Isaac Newton, oft called the father of science, wrote more about religion that he did about mathematics and science combined. “How can faith subsume thinking?” she continues. Her frustration could not be more clear—‘We have fired everything we have at them and yet they keep standing!’

As bad as fundamentalism is, however, it is not as bad in her eyes as an “extreme religion” like Jehovah’s Witnesses. To establish that she has done her homework, she relates that from its 1870 inception, the faith “rejected Christian doctrines it deemed extratextual, including trinitarianism and hell,” as though providing further evidence of descent into superstition, rather than the advance into rationality that it is—early Witness leader C. T. Russell was known within his lifetime as “the man who turned the hose on hell and put out the fire.” The Witness description of death: “extinction or non-being,” is exactly the rationalist view of today, and it is ‘tarnished’ only by their added take of a future resurrection from the dead.

The notion that Christianity should return to its default state Morgan finds “dubious,” as though the inventors of something couldn’t possibly have known what they were doing. Witnesses have a “hierarchy,” as though no other organization does, their publishing constitutes an “empire,” as evidenced by the fact that it still exists, and they have a following who “actively proselytize, warning of an imminent Armageddon,” as though it is wrong to even suggest that an earth carved up into 200 eternally squabbling nations is not exactly what God had in mind.

In short, she found has people—ordinary people for the most part—who disagree with her, and she oozes disdain for them. Children raised in such religion “experience a totalizing indoctrination that so severely limits the formation of an adult psychology that many don’t ever achieve maturity in the way secular society conceives of it...” Necessarily this means that she thinks the adults of that faith are largely immature children. The patronization is simply too much. Any time someone leaves one culture for another, there is some catching up to do—say, in the case of a person migrating from one country to another. Would Ms. Morgan similarly find it necessary to crow her superiority over the country and culture of emigration—where Islam is practiced, perhaps, or Spanish is spoken? She would recoil at the thought, but when it comes to religious views that stray from her worldview, it is as natural to her as breathing air. Let her “world” prove itself reasonably “free from sin” before she casts stones on those who have come to see things differently,

“Witnesses are forbidden to socialize outside the organization,” she says. How enforceable can such “forbidding” be when people live, school, and work in the general community, as Witnesses do? The forbidding amounts to no more than counsel to choose one’s friends wisely—counsel that should hardly be a shocker. It is surprising that the she does not escalate “higher education is discouraged” also into an ironclad rule. When Witnesses partake of the offerings of “higher education,” they usually prefer to take it a la carte.

For all that she might carry on about “mind-control,” it is her environment of higher education that employs a classic tool of it: cut a student off nearly 24/7 from former stabilizing influences to minimize resistance to the absorption of whatever philosophies are taught. It is her environment that normalizes such a drastic shift as no more more remarkable than pursuing health care. Study the Bible with Jehovah’s Witnesses, on the other hand, and there is truth in packaging—you know full well that you are going off the grid of standardized thinking. Still, one remains in the most stabilized environment possible—one’s normal routine and surroundings are entirely undisturbed—the “safest” setting in which to give any new ideas a trial run. It is the very opposite of how one “brainwashes” people.

“Questioning doctrine is an offense punishable by disfellowshipping, or shunning,” she says. It is a matter of degree. Each side of societal uproar that we see on the television news presents itself as merely “questioning” the premises of the other. Amber ran out on a “loveless marriage,” Ms Morgan states, and the implication is clear that Jehovah’s Witnesses think loveless marriages are the bee’s knees, since she presents love as the balm that finally wakes Ms. Scorah up. Seemingly to her, there is no way on earth that love that could be found within the repressive religion. Few cheerleaders are unbiased and Ms Morgan is clearly is not an unbiased reviewer.

“The bravery of [the book] cannot be overstated,” she gushes. I suspect that, not only it can be, but it is. Certainly it pales next to the bravery of a migrant who arrives in a strange country with no money, no common language, and often without family. Ms Scorah, on the other hand, has a new-found partner—the same one who introduced her to her new worldview, and who will presumably be there to give support. 

Notwithstanding that anything with which you agree is “highly readable” on that account, I will take for granted that Ms. Scorah’s book is as it is said to be—an “earnest one, fueled by a plucky humor and a can-do spirit that endears.” Perhaps one day I will read it. And yet it does not completely satisfy the reviewer—it shows too much the “the remnants of a Christian modesty not well suited to the task of memoir.” ‘Come on, SPILL!’ one can all but hear Ms. Morgan urge. ‘Blow this “juvenile” “fundamentalist” tripe out of the water!’ as she totally redefines “miracle” as “enduring the universe as we find it — breathtaking in its ecstasies and vicious in its losses — without recourse to a God.” What will be the subject of her next lesson at the Divinity School?

But she has not yet come to the most gripping part. When she does, she foresees another book. “Many readers know Scorah through her viral article in The New York Times about the death of her son on his first day of day care....” she writes. “This, one senses, is her brutal but beautiful route into a new book — a shorter, wiser one, sharp and devastating. Here she reveals a chastened existence, steeped in grief and unknowing without recourse to pacifying religious answers.” THAT is the book I will read even before this one. Ms Scorah has exchanged a backdrop of: “We do not want you to be ignorant about those who are sleeping in death, so that you may not sorrow as the rest do who have no hope” (1 Thessalonians 4:13) for one that reads: “Stuff happens. Pick up the pieces and carry on if you can.” Ms. Morgans reckons that exchange an unmitigated triumph of the human spirit. Is it? The apostle would have reckoned it as “shipwreck of a faith.” (1 Timothy 1:19)

- Tom Harley is a practicing Jehovah’s Witness in the United States.  He does not teach anywhere, but has written the ebooks “Dear Mr. Putin - Jehovah’s Witnesses Write Russia,” and “TrueTom vs the Apostates!”