And he will love thee, and bless thee, and multiply thee: he will also bless the fruit of thy womb, and the fruit of thy land, thy corn, and thy wine, and thine oil. –Deuteronomy 7:13

Most religions posit the existence not just of a supernatural realm, but of supernatural persons, with loyalties, preferences and other human psychological qualities including emotions. This is true in the case of traditional Christianity, which asserts the existence of a whole realm of supernatural beings including angels, giants, demons, human souls and “God in three persons, blessed trinity.”

What is a person? A few years back, my daughter, then in the sixth grade, wrote an impassioned essay arguing for the personhood of chickens. Chickens should be considered persons, she said, because they are conscious, with feelings, preferences and intentions. They experience pleasure and pain. They know what they like. They have distinct personalities. (She was arguing that they should be treated kindly and not have their beaks cut off.)

In an entirely different realm, Arthur D’Adamo’s book, Science Without Bounds, explores theologies that historically have identified God as a person and contrasts them with others that have not. His treatment is deep and nuanced and I recommend it. But his starting definition of personhood is remarkably similar to Brynn’s. It includes awareness, intellect and emotion (p. 210). The personhood of God, Adamo argues, is at the heart of traditional monotheism, including Christian belief and practice.

Even when believers say they that they believe in the more abstract God of theologians, most don’t — at least not completely. In their day-to-day lives (and in a laboratory setting) they talk and behave as if they were relating to a human-like person god. For example, students who say that God is outside of time will still analyze a story as if he completes one task and then moves on to another (Barrett & Keil, 1996). Our brains naturally incline towards interpreting stimuli — rocks, ships, stuffed animals, clouds — in anthropomorphic terms, and gods are no exception.

Christian apologists, meaning defenders of the faith, argue for the possibility of the existence of a highly abstracted form of God that exists beyond the realm of human reason and the reach of science. But what they usually want is something more specific: to create intellectual space for their belief in the person-god of the Bible. In this regard they are similar to virtually all religious believers. Humans in a monotheistic context ask four basic questions about God:

Does God exist?
What is God like?
What does God want from us?
How can we get what we want from God?
In reality, the first of these questions tends to be interesting only in the context of the other three: God is interesting only if he is knowable and has “hedonic relevance.” By this I mean that understanding or pleasing God can make my life better or worse.

Baruch Spinoza

Within Christianity, Bishop John Shelby Spong takes a stab at making this vision personally relevant : “I do not think of God theistically, that is, as a being, supernatural in power, who dwells beyond the limits of my world. I rather experience God as the source of life willing me to live fully, the source of love calling me to love wastefully and to borrow a phrase from the theologian, Paul Tillich, as the Ground of being, calling me to be all that I can be.” But contrast this with the God of Evangelical Christians: “God loves me. I have a personal relationship with Jesus. If I ask from God in prayer, I will receive. People who die are going to heaven or hell.”

Understanding emotions is irrelevant to Einstein and Spinoza’s god-concept because the God of Spinoza and Einstein is not a person and does not have emotions. On the other hand, if one is trying to assess the Evangelical’s god-concept, understanding emotions is highly relevant. In fact, one of the defining attributes of the Evangelical’s God is actually an emotion: love.

Evangelicals call themselves “biblical” or “Bible-believing” Christians. Many are proud to claim the Bible as the literally perfect and complete word of God. (In fact, some modernist critics would say that Evangelicals and other biblical literalists engage in “bibliolatry” or text worship.) Whether right or wrong, biblical literalists like Evangelicals pin their life priorities and hopes for eternity to the god-concept of the Bible writers, and the Bible writers thought of God as a person, who not only loves but manifests a whole host of emotions.

“That is ridiculous!” some Christians might say. “It’s obvious that when the Bible talks about God’s emotions it is speaking in metaphor.” For several reasons, this argument is weak:

Historians of religion and philosophy tell us that theology has a flow which can be studied in the historical record. We have a tendency to project our own intellectual culture, including abstract god concepts back into history, However, during the Axial Period when the world’s great religions emerged, the gods (think Shiva, Zeus, Mithra, Yahweh) were typically person-gods.
If we look at the internal record of the Bible itself, it would appear that earlier documents were taken literally by later writers. The book of Matthew, for example, gives Jesus a literal understanding of Old Testament events.
Literalists say that the Bible was uniquely inspired or even dictated by God to the authors. In this case, claiming that in the Bible God’s emotions are simply metaphors makes God a bad writer. A good writer doesn’t use metaphors that he or she knows will be taken literally. Communication isn’t just about transmission — it is about knowing your audience. Today, many, many Christians take the notion of God’s emotions literally, as have most of their spiritual ancestors. To say that God was communicating in metaphor through the Bible writers is to say that God needed communications training.
For the rest of this series, then, I’m going to assume that “Bible believing” Christians mostly mean what they say when they use words like, “God loves you.” Or “God is disgusted by homosexuality.” Or “God is grieved by our sin.” We owe it to ourselves to not play word games about life’s most important questions. And, barring evidence to the contrary, we owe it to other people to take their words at face value. And if we value honesty, integrity and truth-seeking, we owe it to the world to ask what those words mean.

If you don’t want to miss this series, you can email her at vt {at} ValerieTarico.com with the word “Subscribe” in the subject line.

Dig Deeper:

Art d’Adamo, Science Without Bounds.

Justin L. Barrett and Frank C. Keil, (1996). “Conceptualizing a Nonnatural Entity: Anthropomorphism in God Concepts” Cognitive Psychology, 31, 219-247.

I am a compulsive reader, and in the long interlude since high school, my teacher’s three conflicts have jumped to mind as I consumed stories ranging from The Brothers Karamazov to Peter Rabbit. But in recent years I’ve found myself interested in one story to the exclusion of all others: the grand story that we all are living. It is the story of a universe, and a small blue planet, and her transient fabric of life, and a fascinating self-conscious species of primates who love and kill and create — of which I am one. Through the biggest or smallest lens this story is beautiful and terrifying and intricate. At no distance does it become vanishingly irrelevant. At no proximity does it break down into two dimensional pixels. There are subplots that take place in the course of seconds and subplots that emerge over millions of years.

I read this story partly in books — glimpsed and analyzed by other human minds. I absorb it with my eyes and ears when I wake up to the sounds of birds and traffic. I feel it in my dusty sandals. I breathe it in. And beside it all stories by human authors pale. (Despite claims to the contrary, to a devoted reader it becomes laughably improbable that this great story was authored by a psychic primate, like ourselves only bigger and endowed with superpowers, who cares about whether small primates cover their heads or bow in obsequious praise.)

In our boundless capacity for arrogance, most humans think the great story is about us, though of course it is not. The only subplot of the great story that we humans can influence is the one playing out in the thin mesh of life on the crust of the blue planet, the story of our own destiny and the other species whose destinies are bound to ours. What we seek, according to mythos, history, and sociology, is life and happiness: healthy humans flourishing endlessly in a Garden of Eden. The surface of this planet records the chronicle of our quest.

For millennia we have lived as if we will attain this paradise through competition and conflict: beating nature and beating each other with spear and hoe and axe and gunship. The stories we tell and write reveal our identities — who we are and what matters to us. And like my teacher said, the three conflicts are the stuff that most storytelling is made of. Conflict is the raw material of Barnes & Noble the way that corn syrup is the raw material of Coca Cola. It is also the raw material of Hollywood and new media and even the little narratives we create to explain our day over the dinner table. We love conflict. It grabs our attention. It pumps us full of adrenaline and resolve and a sense of the heroic. And since in our own minds we are, each of us, the protagonist of every story, the heroes are us.

But it struck me recently that when it comes to the story we are actually living, our subplot on the blue planet, my teacher’s analysis may be not merely overly simple; it may be wrong. Sometimes in our attempts to make sense of complexities we reduce them to the wrong skeleton. In conflict stories — man against man, or against nature, or against self — the satisfaction comes when man, our protagonist, wins regardless of what happens to other species or even other humans. Our hero can emerge from the ashes of civilization on a post apocalyptic planet and we go home satisfied.

But what if reality is fundamentally different than our preferred fiction plotlines? What if the conflicts that are so satisfying in books and movies actually leave us less satisfied in real life? What if, in our perennial quest for Eden, beating nature and beating each other somehow means we lose? Or what if the fabric of health and bounty is made instead of something more mundane than winning and losing: Collaboration, for example. Mutuality. Interdependence. Unity. Balance. What if, as a species, we have come this far in spite of (rather than because of) our competition and conflict?

I’m sitting at an outdoor café in Toliara on the southern coast of Madagascar. It is a stark, dry town — French Africa meets Old West — surrounded by badlands and spiny scrub and a mud flat that serves as a tidal outhouse. In the streets, plastic bags swirl in dust devils like eddies of dry leaves, and a fine reddish brown powder covers everything from my computer screen to my eyelashes by the end of day. Cafes serve pain au chocolat for breakfast and foie gras for dinner. But after dark the police, who have been extorting money from passing drivers all day, go home and lock their doors. Armed bandits stake out the highway, using cell phones to coordinate up the road with compadres who roll stone blockades across canyon passes. Valuables like sapphires from a regional mine travel to the port by convoy — by day — accompanied by paid gunmen.

Scattered across the arid plain, poor villagers escape the banditry and extortion only because they own nothing of interest. Carts pulled by tough lean zebu (the local cattle) or by equally tough and lean humans haul their most precious commodity, water, which is in such short supply that people bathe and wash clothes on the roads whenever it rains. In pockets along the shore, where fresh water emerges into the sea, more prosperous villagers live on fish and shellfish, casting their nets from outriggers carved from baobab trees. The peculiar baobabs, which sport crowns of scrawny branches and sparse leaves, store water in vast soft trunks each of which can be carved into a single buoyant dugout.

On the face of it, this is the stuff of Hollywood or Barnes & Noble: Men triumph over the harsh environment, feeding on turtles, chameleons and grasshoppers when necessary to survive; resourcefully planting prickly pear cactus from afar to feed their cattle. Men battle the seas in small spry outriggers, competing with commercial fishing fleets offshore to feed their families and the occasional traveler. Cattlemen with spears fend off rustlers, tribes assert their identity in a post-colonial era, townsfolk defy bandits (and bandits in uniform) to keep their town running.

But in reality, the conflicts which necessitate these small acts of heroism may be largely a product of our self-fulfilling tendency to see the world as a set of conflict dynamics. In other words, they may be consequences of our failure to notice a larger narrative, which is that in the broadest sense, man against nature is man against man, and man against man is man against self. We exist only in community with each other and with other species. By triumphing too well too often, we destroy ourselves.

This desert in which I sit wasn’t always a desert; living village elders can recall when things were different. It was a fragile “spiny forest” that survived in delicate balance for hundreds of thousands of years, has been in decline since humans arrived here and began winning battles against nature, and, according to World Wildlife Fund calculations, could be gone completely in just five years. There are no mature baobabs within walking distance of the fishing villages. The baobab takes up to 1000 years to grow and the last remaining giants stand on the far side of the desert plane. Mangrove swamps that served as nurseries for the migratory fish are largely gone. (Recently the media proudly featured a grove of newly planted mangrove seedlings and interviewed the lead volunteer. A week later, the seedlings had been eaten by goats.) The reef that nurtures the local varieties is a crumbling ruin, having fallen prey to rising temperatures. With crops this season threatened by drought, villagers along the shore are digging roots they call wild potatoes in the last fragments of the spiny forest. They don’t replant.

In the pared down simplicity of this herding culture on the edge, I am struck by how much human energy goes into simply protecting possessions from other people. In any village family that can afford a cow or goat, one member spends all day every day playing the role of herdsman. The cattle — the goatherd doesn’t care for the animals in any way — just guards them from other young men who, in turn, win status by stealing cattle. In town, night watchmen sleep in the entries of hotels. Market stalls sell deadbolts. Someone somehow gets taxed enough to support a military. Parasitic police officers maintain a veneer of legitimacy as guardians of the public against the bad guys. Van Damme plays in a back room video parlor that functions as a movie theater.

This dance of man against man in a self-created desert is different only in scale and naked exposure from how we live in the U.S. with our armies and watchmen and willingness to desiccate the lands that feed us. The dust swirls in the streets and sweeps across the plains and through the croplands and still, the stories that compel us are the ones about our win-lose games with each other. As much as Toliara’s desert dwellers, we are like twenty people crowded into a Malagasi taxi brousse, a mini van serving as public transport, holding onto our stuff and vying for space while the bus goes off a cliff.

For millennia we humans could indulge the naïve assumption that we would win paradise by beating out nature and each other. (Our appeals to magical super-humans often were pleas for help in one of these contests. “Dear God, please make my feet swift, my arm strong, my spear sharp, my aim true.”) In the childhood and adolescence of our species, we had no way of grasping the greater story except in small fragments. Nor could we comprehend our own power to destroy the very fabric of life. We were weaker then, and fewer, and nature more forgiving. Destruction happened more slowly, beyond the scope of a human lifetime; beyond the scope of collective memory.

The world-altering capacity of our ancestors is visible only in retrospect. Even in small numbers with primitive technologies, earlier humans eliminated other species — the mammoths of the New World, the Stellar Sea Cow, Mauritius’ dodo, Madagascar’s elephant bird. They converted the cedar forests and farmlands of the Fertile Crescent into the deserts of Iraq, Lebanon, and the Sahara. By altering the balance of nature, they eliminated themselves in small pockets like the early settlements on Greenland and Easter Island. But only a few eccentrics noticed. For most people, slow change is no change.

It took the atomic bomb for large numbers of humans to recognize the magnitude of our destructive power. Big explosions vaporized whole islands — and then whole cities — in seconds, and people took notice. We are only just beginning to grasp the slow cumulative frog-in-a-pot destructive potential of our man-against-nature and man-against-man daily lives.

And yet consciousness is rising. Despite our history and our storytelling, there is a growing sense among people old and young that we cannot exist in conflict with the rest of humanity and other species. Some scientists have been clamoring desperately for generations. But now, finally, our mythologies are changing. In the West, pagan earth religions, though small, are on the rise. New Age woo has mass appeal even among intellectuals (e.g. The Secret; What the Bleep Do We Know?). Best-selling authors like Eckhart Tolle (A New Earth) promote inclusive, karmic, quasi-Buddhist spirituality and gain devoted followings. And conversations about the sacred feminine are penetrating the Christian patriarchy. (Conflict is a male-centric plot line; it is no accident of linguistics that the literary conflicts are called man against man and nature and self.)

This spring the most expensive movie of all time, Avatar, captivated tens of millions of viewers with images of a fertile planet where the interweaving of life forms was more tangible and cherished than on our own. Leaders of conflict-centered, human-centric ideologies, railed against the film. In Seattle, megachurch minister Mark Driscoll, who leads one of the most aggressive and patriarchal institutions in the city, spent a Sunday morning expounding about the evils of excessive reverence for nature. The Vatican, which brutally crushed the earth religions of the Americas, had similar complaints. Heaven forbid that their god-in-the-image-of-man, should have to compete (that’s how they think of it) with something as primal and fecund and wet as the planet that gave us birth.

My point is not that all of these exploratory perspectives are reasonable ways of understanding our world, but that they all are more centered in unity and interconnectedness than the ideologies that have been dominant in the last two thousand years (and are dominant still). At the leading edge of consciousness, we are reaching for something beyond the three conflicts. We no longer claim a divine right to dominion over nature and “lesser” humans. We seek instead a way of thinking that allows humankind to live in community with each other and with the broader web of life — a way of thinking that allows the generations of the future simply to live.

The undercurrent of collaboration and cooperation, of give and take, has been there all along. Here in Madagascar, apple sellers waiting patiently to sell their pile of ten to twenty apples each, help a “competitor” communicate her prices in French. Five rural villages team together to reserve their last patch of native forest, just twenty acres. They stop shooting the lemurs, instead guiding tourists to see them, and use the entry fees to buy fruit trees, a school, and clothes for the elderly. Cross country drivers who could put each other out of business, instead put heads together about the best lodging, warn each other about hazards, and tow each other’s cars when needed. Many, many people give more than they must and take less than they could.

This, I think is the real story of our species, of our quest for Eden. And when it captures our imaginations even more than do the three conflicts, our future will look quite different.

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read.

- Mark Twain

The ability to read was sacred in my family; being a Tarico meant being a reader. I remember sulking when my parents bribed my younger sister, Kathy, with candy to get her through her first easy readers–Where was my candy? I read constantly if picture books were provided, which they were. Mom took us to the library weekly and came home with a box of picture books; thirty years later she would maintain the same ritual with Kathy’s sons, who she was raising. When I was in high school, my father suffered retinal hemorrhaging that left him with only blurry peripheral vision, 20/200 in one eye and 20/500 in the other. He was stoic, but until he got a brightly-lit magnifying glass that allowed him to scan a few lines at a time, he was lost–lost to the point that he actually instituted Days with Daddy on Saturdays with his five kids. Later, he got books on cassette from the Library for the Blind. The player let you speed them up, and over time he learned to listen at a speed that must have been close to his previous reading rate. To the rest of us it sounded like Alvin and the Chipmunks. But it also sounded like life-as-normal.

Around the world, even the developing world, beautiful imported books including children’s books can be found in major cities. But most people have no access to such luxuries. John Wood, author of Leaving Microsoft to Save the World, is founder of Room to Read, a charity that partners with small communities to build and stock children’s libraries. He describes the school in rural Nepal that inspired his work. On a spontaneous visit to a highland village, he was shown the school’s library, an empty room with a locked cabinet: “My heart sank as the school’s treasure trove was revealed. A Danielle Steel romance with a couple locked in passionate and semi-clothed embrace on the front cover. A thick Umberto Eco novel, written in Italian. The Lonely Planet Guide to Mongolia. And what children’s library would be complete without Finnegan’s Wake.”

John’s experience in that Nepali school illustrates the three core problems with reading materials for literate children–and, I think, for millions of literate adults around the world:

1. The variety available is in no way sufficient to sustain an interest in reading through childhood and beyond.

Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book, Outliers, talks about the “10,000 hours” effect. Getting good at anything, he says, takes practice -more than we ever imagine. He talks about thousands of hours the Beatles spent playing covers in German bars. He talks about elite athletes and musicians. Over dinner last week, we speculated about whether Brynn (age fifteen) and Marley (age 13)–had hit the 10,000 hour mark. If you count being read-to, they are astonishingly close. The problem is, 10,000 hours of reading requires 10,000 hours of interesting reading materials.

2. The grammar and vocabulary often are inaccessible for beginning or intermediate readers, especially if they are in a second language.

To get interested and stay interested in reading, you have to get lost in it. My undergraduate degree is in Spanish. I graduated with “A’s”, but after four years of study and travel to both Spain and Latin America, reading in Spanish was and still is a conscious, intentional process. It takes focus and effort to extract the narrative from the newspaper, and I can only image how much nuance I miss. As a young adult studying in Madrid, I made myself read those papers, but even then if I wanted to read for enjoyment, I had to buy novels written for young adults. Luckily, a graduated array of materials was available in local bookshops and I could choose what fit.

Back when Marley started sounding out her first Bob books at age four or five, I promised her that someday reading would be just like hearing: she would see letters on a page and the words would simply jump into her mind. She hit that point with Dr. Seuss a few months later -and Phillip Pullman in seventh grade. How many literate people ever have the opportunity or reason to hit that point?

3. It is hard to argue that the contents are anything that makes people wiser, more virtuous, or better equipped to deal with our increasingly complex world.

Let me elaborate this third point a point because I think in the end it is a far bigger challenge than the other two. The first two problems exclude people from a high quality of literacy (rather than simply a high rate) . The third says, even if they can read effortlessly, what is the point?

Reading is a conduit for information, just like movies, arts, and the spoken word, no more, no less. We elevate reading as a member of the education trinity, first of the three “r’s”: reading, writing, and as they say here in India, maths. That is because we assume reading is a means of obtaining important information about the world around us–historical information, social perspective, scientific findings, practical how-to’s for day-to-day living. But that isn’t necessarily the case.

In fact, there may be situations where literacy makes people worse off. At an individual level, women with eating disorders often find that a part of their recovery is not reading women’s magazines and pop culture rags, which perpetuate for them an impossible body image. The challenge comes because these magazines, with their demeaning cover images, are virtually the only material sold in grocery lines and drug stores. They are, ironically, the only reading material available in many doctors’ offices. To not read them requires keeping your eyes focused on the chewing gum display or the fellow patient at the counter signing away her medical privacy.

At a societal level, it has been suggested that religious fundamentalism has followed literacy around the world. Helen Keller said, “The highest result of education is tolerance.” But if these sociologists are right, literacy has actually reduced tolerance, lending its support to a more rigid form of faith based on book worship. Consider: As a set of oral traditions and rituals, religion has room to shift with the culture in which it exists. But a perfect Koran or Bible is far less flexible . In a situation where few words are written, the written word is precious and powerful. Appallingly, it is the goal of many Christian missionaries to put that perfect Bible into the hands of literate people who have little access to any other reading materials.

This is a time honored practice in Christianity. During the Irish potato famine in the 19th Century, teenage girls who had been orphaned were shipped to Australia to serve as servants and brides for the predominantly male (ex-convict) population there. Each girl’s possessions were dictated by contract and packed into a small wooden box. The list prescribed a few dresses, toiletries, a Bible and a book of prayer (which varied, depending on whether the girl was Catholic or Protestant). In the Twentieth Century, an Evangelical organization called the Summer Institute of Linguistics identified tribal people with unwritten languages and then sent missionaries to codify their languages and translate the Bible. This work continues today.

The rise of the Taliban may rest in part on a similar missionary strategy that combines literacy and ignorance. When the Soviet and American forces stopped using Afghanistan as their boxing ring, they went home and took their nonmilitary resources with them, including resources for schools. Who stepped into the void? Iran and Saudi Arabia. Generously they built schools, schools called madrassas that taught only Koran, and only to boys. Watching the results play out around the world I can’t help but be reminded of another quote from Mark Twain:

It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.

It is not just poor or marginally educated people that overrate the written word. All of us have to remind ourselves from time to time that just because something is in print it doesn’t make it real, or just because something was written a long time ago doesn’t make it particularly insightful. We have a bias to deify the words of our ancestors, forgetting the human process that wrestled them into existence. Americans speak of the constitution, for example, as if it were beyond question. Many Christians literally worship the Bible–giving it attributes of Divinity such as perfection and timelessness. In Afghanistan the Taliban outlawed recycled paper on the grounds that it might contain some small fragment of a paper that once had been part of a Koran.

So, imagine a situation where Bibles or Korans (perhaps with a counterbalance of pop culture schlock and ads) are literally the only written texts around. Imagine, too, that schools are virtually all in the hands of sectarian interests, and that most other printing presses are in the hands of the vast multinational multi-corporate sales force: PepsiCo (the written word tells me) is working to ensure that local people have free flowing natural water for future generations–not–like I had mistakenly thought–to ensure that drinking water requires plastic bottles and fossil fuel transport and produces profits in New York. Indian people actually are white, not brown, (it’s right there in print) and Ponds lightening cream can help to reveal the naturally fair color that is being hidden by that ugly dark surface layer of skin. Jesus saves; I read it on the front of an auto-rickshaw—one of the ones that didn’t have beautiful Arabic and a beautiful scimitar printed on the back.

I oversimplify, as always. But the reality that hits home in Tamil Nadu and even in Kerala (where the literacy rate tops ninety percent) is that literacy isn’t worth much if the vistas it opens up are a wasteland of Middle Eastern tribalism and Western gluttony. The ability to read, poorly or well, is a pipeline, constricted or free-flowing. Either way, a pipe is only as valuable as the stuff being pumped through it. Some contain black gold. Others contain sewage.

What is the solution? It cannot be to recreate the North American or European system in which billions of trees become leather bound classics, Tom Clancy thrillers, glamour magazines, and tabloids–or even self help books, scientific journals, poetry, and nuggets of timeless wisdom from Valerie Tarico. Our planetary life support system cannot afford it. In the ten years between the last two census counts, India’s population increased by twenty percent. The tree cover, as you might suspect, did not. The native forests are mostly gone to farm land and badlands – and to dusty groves of Australian eucalyptus planted by people in need of quick growing firewood.

So what is the next step? I think we have to begin by asking questions about content before we ask questions about technology. What if the reality-based community took “books”, including the next generation of communications technology, as seriously as the Gideons do? (I found Gideon Bibles in Fiji, Australia, Singapore and India in the last six weeks–in short, in every country we have passed through.) What is the collection of writings we would want in every hotel room or around the world? What information would we want to give the people of Haiti (instead of solar-powered Bibles like the ones that were sent after the recent earthquake)? What would it mean to be as devoted to education as the Saudis or Jesuits have been? What if we, rather than the Wahabis had rushed into Afghanistan with books and curriculum plans when the cold war ended?

A young American, Neil Mellen, was enrolled in the Virginia Military Institute when he made national news by refusing to pray to a god that he, an atheist, didn’t believe in. Neil is very clear about his values. After graduating, he joined the Peace Corps and like John Wood of Room to Read began building libraries for children by soliciting used books from family and friends. John’s passion has become a full time endeavor, an international NGO with programs across Asia and Africa. Neil’s has stayed personal. After returning to the U.S. he founded Habele, a small nonprofit that pays secondary school tuition for students living on Micronesia’s outer islands. The best schools he can find within reach–and he pays for them–are Christian schools that sell Neil’s kids a supernaturalism he doesn’t believe in. Neil is very clear about his priorities. Why doesn’t he have other options?

Now the creationists have taken a new approach that they hope will help them achieve their goal of teaching religious beliefs in our schools as science. That approach can be summed up in one simple word: whining.

One week from today, the new movie, Expelled, attempts to turn creationist complaints into mainstream media. Featuring Ben Stein, one of the conservative right’s biggest whiners, the film makes several plaintive appeals: There’s a conspiracy among big government and big science, and it’s not fair! All we ask is for our perspective to get equal time! (Read: we lost, so let’s split the prize.) All we want is for teachers to “teach the controversy”! This is all about academic freedom. Americans like freedom, right?

The whiners actually have spent millions of dollars on the movie, and even more on the marketing of it. You have to give them credit: by bundling Creationism with freedom, they have created a sophisticated strategy. Of course, Americans like freedom! More importantly, both democracy and scientific progress depend on intellectual freedom — the freedom to ask questions and, unencumbered by ideology, to follow the answers where they lead. After centuries of heresy trials and book burnings, for biblical creationists to position themselves as the champions of academic freedom is a brilliant Orwellian move.

University of Washington professor, Leah Ceccarelli has pointed out that their “teach the controversy” strategy depends on a very specific sleight of hand: blurring the difference between scientific controversy and manufactured controversy or Manufactroversy.

You can say you first heard it here, well, if you haven’t heard it already on MySpace or Facebook: Manufactroversy — a made up word for a made up controversy. There’s even a new website, Manufactroversy.NewsLadder.net that aggregates articles and blog posts about this manufactroversy and some other pretty famous ones as well.

Scientific controversy exists only when the jury of relevant experts is out on whether a new finding meets the standard of evidence. The debate and evidence gathering still are in process. A manufactroversy is when someone motivated by profit or ideology fosters confusion in the public mind long after scientists have moved on to the next set of questions. Think tobacco and lung cancer. Think Exxon and global warming. Now think Ben Stein and evolution.

The fact is, there is no scientific controversy about evolution, just like there is no scientific controversy about whether tobacco causes lung cancer or whether human activity causes global warming. However, in all three examples, someone powerful and well established loses out when and if the scientific mountain of evidence becomes common knowledge and widely accepted.

The tobacco industry in the 1960′s wasn’t anxious to part with its profits just like the oil companies of the 1990′s had no desire to walk away from theirs. So they manufactured controversies, paying scientists to publish papers they knew would distort the issue.

In the case of creationism, the a vast preponderance of evidence, conflicts with traditional mythos. What possible explanation but that the scientists are colluding, corrupt, and biased. But, of course, they’re not. The proponents of intelligent design can’t gain credibility among hard scientists because their evidence is pathetic. So what do they do? Follow in the footsteps of the tobacco and oil companies and spend millions in an effort to create public doubt. They plea for their side to be told, they imagine vast conspiracies and they cry out for fair play, but the reality is much simpler.

The mountain of evidence supporting mainstream biological science is overwhelming. The paltry evidence for “insurmountable gaps” and “irreducible complexity” is actually shrinking. Evolution should be taught as science and creationism, in its many guises, as religion, including the rich pre-scientific stories about origins from many cultures and traditions. So why not just ignore the whiners and hope they will go away? Because they won’t until we force them to stop their marketing of religious beliefs as science. We’re still fighting the tobacco industry to this day. Oil companies still fund global warming deniers.

Besides, how long has it been since the famous Scopes trial? How long have creationists been talking about “Darwinism” as if no one but Darwin had noticed the fossil record or the DNA code in the last 100 years? It does get tiresome, responding to their ever evolving anti-evolutionary rhetoric. But we need to expose the bizarre supernaturalist agenda behind all the sudden whining about academic freedom. And somebody needs to gently remind Stein and his creationist cronies that they haven’t been expelled from school, they flunked.

Tarico spotted what she saw as a suspicious pattern after Robertson’s recent remarks about the devastation in Haiti. As people lay dying in the rubble of Tuesday’s tragic earthquake and nations around the world are scrambling to provide disaster releif, Robertson spoke to the Christian Broadcasting Network’s “The 700 Club:”

Something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it… They were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon III, or whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the Devil. They said, we will serve you if you’ll get us free from the French. True story. And so, the Devil said, okay it’s a deal… Ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other.

“Christians aren’t perfect, just forgiven,” said Tarico and then articulated:

When Robertson blamed the Katrina disaster on God, and said He was punishing those poor gray-haired Black people for the sins of their gay neighbors, I thought it might just be human error. All we like sheep have gone astray, you know. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. But suddenly, when I read Robertson’s remarks about Haiti, it was like a light blazed down from heaven and a voice spoke saying, ‘Behold, the Father of Lies.’ I picked up the phone and called the only person more familiar with these problems than I am, Dr. Marlene Winell. She confirmed my worst fears.

We spoke with Dr. Winell in her Bay Area office. “Demons need a host, and they can jump from one person to another,” she explained.

We know this because Jesus cast demons out of a possessed man and into a herd of pigs. The pigs drowned themselves, the same kind of self-destructive behavior we are seeing in Mr. Robertson. It is possible that he was infected at or around the funeral of Dr. Jerry Falwell. In hindsight we can see that Dr. Falwell was possessed by a similar — possibly the same — demon.

Back in 2001, when the U.S. was reeling from the 9/11 bombings, Falwell horrified Christians around the world by blaming the disaster on gays and woman who have had abortions. “The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked,” Falwell said on “The 700 Club.”

And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen.

Could this be the work of any old run-of-the-mill demon? “I doubt it,” said Winell. “Those remarks were broadcast to an enormous audience. Probably tens of thousands of people were turned off of Christianity and the Christian God. I think this is an organized media strategy by Satan himself. We’re talking about Beelzebub, the Father of Lies. The guy is a marketing genius. This is the snake that sold Adam and Eve an apple in trade for paradise.”

Winell went on to remind us:

Sarah Palin, as a prominent Christian could easily have been possessed by Satan, like Roberts, but she is deeply vigilant about spiritual warfare. She had the foresight to allow an African Minister pray over her for protection against witchcraft. Now would be the time for Palin to help Robertson. With her connections, she could arrange an exorcism and then get him the same protection treatment. **

Our reporter pointed out that similar comments have been made by Islamic leaders about natural disasters:

A Saudi professor at Al-Imam University said the devastating tsunami that killed over 150,000 people was Allah’s punishment for homosexuality and fornication at Christmastime.”These great tragedies and collective punishments that are wiping out villages, towns, cities, and even entire countries are Allah’s punishments of the people of these countries, even if they are Muslims,” said sheik Fawzan Al-Fawzan.

Both Tarico and Winell saw this as confirmation of their hypothesis. To quote Tarico:

Anyone who listens to Reverend Hagee knows that Muslim leaders are controlled by Satan himself. And now you tell me they have been using words that are virtually identical to those of Falwell and Robertson?! Fawzan Al . . . It sounds a lot like Falwell, doesn’t it. Look no further.

**Friends of Sarah Palin interested in helping Pat Robertson and defending the honor of Christianity can post this article on her wall at http://www.facebook.com/sarahpalin.

In real life, Marlene Winell is a psychologist and writer in Berkeley, California. She is the author of Leaving the Fold: A Guide for Former Fundamentalists and Others Leaving Their Religion. She has a psychotherapy practice and works with people recovering from toxic religion

Valerie Tarico is a psychologist and writer in Seattle, Washington. She is the author of The Dark Side: How Evangelical Teachings Corrupt Love and Truth, and the founder of www.WisdomCommons.org