Does religion make you nice?

If you want to see an example of academic double-think have a look at this article in Slate. It discusses whether religion makes us behave better or worse than we would do otherwise.

This is a complicated question which I don’t want to delve into too deeply here. Rather I am interested in the conclusions drawn by Professor Paul Bloom, the psychologist from Yale who wrote the article. He notes surveys report that, in the United States, atheists give less to charity and are less happy than religious people. However, in some secular countries (which he weirdly calls atheist countries) like Denmark and Sweden, people are generally as generous and happy as believers in the US. Bloom notes that although most people in Denmark and Sweden are not believers in an afterlife or a personal God, they nonetheless describe themselves as Christians. The Church regulates their lives through baptism, marriage and funerals.

He suggests, on this basis, that it is not religious faith that makes us charitable and happy, but the support of a religious community (this is an arguable point although it fails to ask how long a religious community can survive without any believers). Thus, says Bloom, American atheists are not miserable tightwads because they don’t believe in God, but because they are lonely and isolated. But then, he concludes that this is the fault of religious people! He claims,

The sorry state of American atheists, then, may have nothing to do with their lack of religious belief. It may instead be the result of their outsider status within a highly religious country where many of their fellow citizens, including very vocal ones like Schlessinger, find them immoral and unpatriotic. Religion may not poison everything, but it deserves part of the blame for this one.

I was just about keeping up with him until this point, but fell off my chair at how ridiculous his final sentence was. Bloom is actually saying that it is the fault of religious communities that Christopher Hitchens, PZ Myers and the head bangers at Internet Infidels are not part of their group. Wow.

I’ve heard religion blamed for all sorts of things that it bears no responsibility for, but this takes the biscuit.



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Debating God

On my other blog I wrote recently that, while I enjoy debates, I don't really trust them. My childhood experiences taught me that not being able to come up with a snappy retort off the top of your head in front of others does not mean that you're in the wrong.

However, perhaps a bit perversely, I do enjoy watching and listening to debates on Christianity. One of the most prolific debaters of the last two decades or so has been William Lane Craig, one of those annoying people who has two Doctorates. I recently discovered a link to nearly all of the debates he's taken part in. Some you can listen to, some you can watch, and for a few you can read transcripts. The two most common debate subjects are the existence of God and the historical Jesus. There are also others on meta-ethics, and a few more on Islam. It's worth checking out.


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A Time to Dance, A Time to Die

“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” So begins L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between, with a first line that is both punchy and true. Historians always have to accept that we can never see the world through the eyes of the characters we study. But sometimes we do feel we can come close. I enjoy the connection I can feel with someone who lived five hundred years ago by reading their letters or just enjoying the doodles they’ve drawn in the margin of their books.

Every so often, though, things happened which were just so weird that it is extremely hard to make sense of them. One such occasion was the dancing plague that struck Strasbourg in 1518 and forms the subject of John Waller’s new book A Time to Dance, A Time to Die. The plague affected dozens if not hundreds of people, several of whom died as a result. The idea that people could dance themselves to death seems shocking and it is a relief to find that the people of Strasbourg were no less horrified than we would be.

Waller’s first task is to convince us that the dancing plague actually happened. He convincingly achieves this by lining up the sources and also showing that similar events had occasionally occurred over the previous three hundred years. His other task – to explain the plague – is far more difficult. He attributes it to extreme spiritual anxiety brought about by a series of disasters that afflicted the Strasbourg poor. While the sources rarely concern themselves with the common people, Waller is able to tease out a picture of their life from information on grain prices, chronicles of popular revolts and the sermons by the city’s preachers. He leaves us in no doubt that existence for the poor was always precarious and frequently became dire. Their material wants were exacerbated by the common belief that the disasters that befell the faithful were evidence that God had turned his back on them. It is easy to see how the radical theology of Martin Luther found so many ready listeners even if Strasbourg itself remained essentially Catholic through the Reformation.

Perhaps less convincing is the last chapter where Waller ventures into psychology. While he effectively debunks earlier the attempts to explain the dancing plague and similar phenomena, psychology itself is not yet able to provide the explanation that he seeks. Furthermore, at a distance of five hundred years, we do not have sufficient facts to make an accurate medical diagnosis of the victims of the dancing plague.

Overall, this book helped me understand the lot of the common people just before the Reformation. For historians like me who concentrate on high literary and scientific culture, this is a powerful and necessary corrective. I'd recommend it for anyone interested in the Reformation or religious practice in general. It also has the virtue of being a quick read.

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Skepticism and Blind Faith

Dallas Willard is a philosopher at USC who's an expert in Husserl's phenomenology. His popularity in Christian circles, however, is due to his excellent books on spiritual living; I highly recommend them. In one of these books, Hearing God, he makes an interesting point near the end regarding skepticism.

The test of character posed by the gentleness of God's approach to us is especially dangerous for those formed by the ideas that dominate our modern world. We live in a culture that has, for centuries now, cultivated the idea that the skeptical person is always smarter than one who believes. You can be almost as stupid as a cabbage, as long as you doubt. The fashion of the age has identified mental sharpness with a pose, not with genuine intellectual method and character. Only a very hardy individualist or social rebel -- or one desperate for another life -- therefore stands any chance of discovering the substantiality of the spiritual life today. Today it is the skeptics who are the social conformists, though because of powerful intellectual propaganda they continue to enjoy thinking of themselves as wildly individualistic and unbearably bright.

This is an interesting point. Skepticism is the refusal to believe; how exactly is this intellectual? How is it rational or wise? As he says, an unintelligent person can doubt something just as easily as an intelligent person; so how could doubting be a sign of intelligence or of rational method?

It seems to me that skepticism is essentially blind faith that something is false, and any form of blind faith is not rational. Of course, someone could come up with an ad hoc proposition that no one would believe, like Russell's orbiting teapot or a flying spaghetti monster. The rational response to such suggestions is not to remain undecided; it's to not believe them. Doesn't this prove that skepticism, doubt, is the fallback position in terms of rationality?

The problem with this is that we do have a reason to disbelieve such claims: they are ad hoc, and the more ad hoc or contrived a claim is, the less likely it is true. The degree to which it is ad hoc is the degree to which it is implausible. This is particularly evident with the absurdly ad hoc propositions mentioned above: we react against such suggestions because they are completely contrived. It's not merely that we have no reason to think they are true; we think, for whatever reason, that they are just "made up," and this is a specific reason to think they are not true.

However, this gets into burden of proof issues, and my understanding is that these issues are notoriously difficult to resolve. It's food for thought, though.



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The New Charles Simonyi Professor

The new Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford is the mathematician Marcus du Sautoy. Judging by his website, he has done lots of worthy media work to promote mathematics and he is colour-blind (if you doubt that, click on the link but make sure you are wearing shades). The website isn’t terribly up-to-date but he does appear to have plenty of experience communicating with the public. He is also an A-list academic.

And that, folks, is the last you will ever hear about him, on this site or anywhere else, unless you watch educational programmes on British television. To prove my point, consider what you know about the other Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, Kathy Sykes at Bristol University. She works hard to make fun programmes about science that pull in a niche audience on the box. But the press have no interest in her and none of her books have troubled the bestseller lists. I mean no disrespect to Professors Sykes or du Sautoy when I say this. But for the wider public and those who thrive on controversy, they provide thin gruel.

The fact is, it was Dawkins who created headlines and not the post he occupied. He was, and is, a much bigger fish then the Charles Simonyi chair. When Dawkins speaks, the press take notice. So do we at Quodlibeta. The same will not be the case for Professor du Sautoy. It appears that he is an atheist but is bored by religion. As he is a mathematician, a subject that simply lacks media appeal, I suspect we will hear little from him.

Luckily, Richard Dawkins is still going strong. We must wish him a long and productive retirement.

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Once upon a time...

I was excited to hear in the weekend’s telegraph that Richard Dawkins will be retiring from his post at Oxford to write a book aimed at youngsters, in which he will warn them against believing in "anti-scientific" fairytales. He was quoted as saying "The book I write next year will be a children's book on how to think about the world, science thinking contrasted with mythical thinking. As anyone who has tried to read the manuscript of Francis Galton’s ‘Kantsaywhere’ will know; the foray of scientists into fiction writing can often be disastrous. What would a children’s book by Dawkins look like?. Here is how I think he would tackle a rationalist version of Snow White and the 7 dwarfs.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

Once upon a time, as a queen sat sewing at her window, she pricked her finger on her needle and a drop of blood fell on the snow that had fallen on her ebony window frame. As she looked at the blood on the snow, she said to herself, "Oh, how I wish that I had a daughter that had skin white as snow, lips red as blood, and hair black as ebony". Soon after that, the queen gave birth to a baby girl who had skin white as snow, lips red as blood, and hair black as ebony. They named her Princess Snow White.

As all the courtiers at the Queen’s palace knew from reading ‘Ye Olde Scientist’, although Virgin birth has been proven in some bony fish, amphibians, reptiles and birds, and has been suspected among sharks in the wild, it is impossible in human beings - and presumably fairy tale queens - without the sex cells of both the male and the female. Both a sperm and an egg are required to create a zygote and the most rational explanation is that the queen entered into sexual intercourse with a man with the genetic features she desired in her wish. This is therefore an intriguing example of sex selection in human beings, the theory proposed by Charles Darwin that states that certain evolutionary traits can be explained by intraspecific competition.

Soon after, the king took a new wife, who was beautiful but very vain. She possessed a magical mirror that answered any question, to whom she often asked: "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who in the land is fairest of all?" to which the mirror always replied "You, my queen, are fairest of all." But when Snow White reached the age of seven, she became as beautiful as the day, and when the queen asked her mirror, it responded: "Queen, you are full fair, 'tis true, but Snow White is fairer than you.

Of course the mirror did not actually reply to the Queen, since a mirror does not possess consciousness, not does it have the descended larynx needed to produce sound, and manipulate its pitch and volume to create language. The most rational interpretation of the facts was that the queen had been infected by a memetic mind virus, which convinced her that the mirror was her imaginary friend. Children often develop this tendency and this psychological paedomorphosis may have continued into the Queen’s adulthood. Of course there is no law in nature against there being a mirror that might communicate through non verbal means. Perhaps all the atoms of the mirror just happened to move to spell out the message - a low-probability event to be sure, but possible, and a far simpler explanation than magic (As I explained in 'The Blind Watchmaker', the same also applies for waving statues of the Virgin Mary).

The queen became jealous, and Snow White was forced to run away to the forest. In the forest, Snow White discovered a tiny cottage belonging to seven dwarfs, where she rested. There, the dwarfs took pity on her, saying "If you will keep house for us, and cook, make beds, wash, sew, and knit, and keep everything clean and orderly, then you can stay with us, and you shall have everything that you want."

Snow White was not convinced by the specious argument which circulated amongst some of the forest's more deluded inhabitants that the dwarfs had appeared by magic. From reading the manuscripts of Daniel C Dennett she knew this was a ‘skyhook’. Instead she knew that the dwarfs had evolved through a process of natural selection acting on heritable genetic variation. Either the men in the cottage were suffering from the condition Dwarfism, which can be caused by more than 200 different medical conditions, the most common of which is achondroplasia ; or intriguingly, they could have been a microcephalic modern human or a subspecies of hominid similar to the recently discovered Homo floresiensis in the Indonesian Archipelago. What they most certainly were not, was the products of ‘intelligent design, which Snow White knew was….. Kids?, are you still listening?, Kids?!?


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I Was Wrong

Richard Dawkins successor has been announced. Not who I predicted.

And no, I've never heard of him either.



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The Tale of a Comet

It is well-known that people who lived before the Enlightenment were hopelessly superstitious. They believed, for example, that "odd" occurrences in the sky were omens signifying that odd occurrences would soon happen down here on Earth. The most blatant example of this took place when Halley's Comet appeared in 1456. While it was still visible, the siege of Belgrade by the Turks began; thus it was feared that this portent in the heavens had some relevance to the battle. Halley's Comet so upset Pope Callistus III that he resorted to drastic measures: he excommunicated it.

For years, this story was repeated as an example of how absurd and superstitious religion is, especially when contrasted with science. Carl Sagan referred to it in his book on comets. But of course, you know where I'm going with this: it didn't really happen. The story appears to have been popularized by Pierre-Simon Laplace at the end of the 18th century; Laplace, in turn, apparently got it from Vitæ Pontificum, a 15th century work, by Bartolomeo Platina. The Catholic Encyclopedia article on Platina dutifully translates the relevant text as follows:

A maned and fiery comet appearing for several days, while scientists were predicting a great plague, dearness of food, or some great disaster, Callistus decreed that supplicatory prayers be held for some days to avert the anger of God, so that, if any calamity threatened mankind, it might be entirely diverted against the Turks, the foes of the Christian name. He likewise ordered that the bells be rung at midday as a signal to all the faithful to move God with assiduous petitions and to assist with their prayers those engaged in constant warfare with the Turks.

Now there are a couple of things to note right away. First, there is no mention here of the Pope excommunicating the comet. Second, while the Pope had indeed issued a papal bull calling upon people to pray, and while Halley's Comet did appear in the sky at about the same time, there was simply no perceived link between the two. The bull doesn't even mention the comet. Platina just tied two events together that had no connection.

Laplace took Platina's account and suggested that Callistus sought to exorcize Halley's Comet -- and I can't help but wonder if he intended this as a metaphor. Regardless, subsequent writers took it literally, and replaced "exorcize" with "excommunicate" since all those religious terms mean the same thing anyway. The final paragraph of the afore-mentioned article summarizes this development well.

Of course, no doubt there were people who thought Halley's Comet had something to do with the siege of Belgrade. That's the kernel of truth in this story. For that matter, it may very well be true that people in the 15th century were in general more superstitious than people today tend to be. But we still have astrology. Most newspapers print the horoscope every day.

What interests me is how people who hold themselves up as skeptics were taken in by such a ridiculous story as this. Carl Sagan was, by any account, a brilliant man. Yet he uncritically repeats an urban legend in order to show how other people are gullible. What this shows, I think, is that there are no true skeptics. People are only skeptical of things that they want to be skeptical about.

For example, in his book My Life Without God, William Murray describes how his mother Madalyn Murray O'Hair would tell groups of atheists that religious people were so stupid that nobody realized sex led to pregnancy until the 19th century. This is difficult to write without chuckling, but her throng of skeptics bought it. O'Hair herself attended seances, and believed she could talk with dead people. Murray wrote that, as far as he knew, his mother never tried to reconcile this with her belief that there is no afterlife. The skepticism with which she and her fans approached religion was obviously not consistently applied.

The point of all this is that we should be skeptical of our skepticism. The reason why an intelligent person like Carl Sagan could be taken in by such a silly story as a Pope excommunicating a comet is because it fit with his views on the nature of science, the nature of religion, and the relationship between the two. Madalyn Murray O'Hair and her followers were completely contemptuous of religion and religious believers, so any claim that justified this attitude, no matter how insane, was plausible to them.

I have different biases: I am skeptical of the claim that science and religion are opposed to each other. This makes me prone to accept stories that seem to affirm this bias without showing them the same level of critical analysis that I would show to a story that contradicts it. I have to examine myself to determine, as far as possible, what my biases are, and how they might be influencing my beliefs.

(cross-posted at Agent Intellect)


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God is Dead.....Probably

Gott ist tot’ - 1882

In 1882 Friedrich Nietzsche published what he described as ‘the most personal of all my books’, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (The Gay Science). The book contains the first occurrence of what is possibly his most famous formulation:

‘God is dead: but as the human race is constituted, there will perhaps be caves for millenniums yet, in which people will show his shadow.—And we—we have still to overcome his shadow!’

Nietzsche looked at the ebbing belief of the society around him and recognised that the rejection of the cosmic order would lead to the collapse of humanity’s belief in an objective and universal moral law, and eventually to nihilism. Seeking to avoid this, Nietzsche looked for foundations that went deeper than Christian values and defined the "will to power" as "the essence of reality. The Christian values of Western culture, Nietzsche reasoned, were simply a way to make the individual conform to something that was less than desirable and corrupt the character. Christianity, said Nietzsche, is the most dangerous system of slave-morality the world has ever known.

‘It has waged a deadly war against the highest type of man. It has put a ban on all his fundamental instincts. It has distilled evil out of these instincts. It makes the strong and efficient man its typical outcast man. It has taken the part of the weak and the low; it has made an ideal out of its antagonism to the very instincts which tend to preserve life and well-being.... It has taught men to regard their highest impulses as sinful - as temptations.’

Christianity, according to Nietzsche, robbed mankind of all those qualities which fit any living organism to survive in ‘the struggle for existence’. For the culture of the West to depart from basing its values on superstition it would have to throw out the values which had enslaved it and prevented it from reaching its potential. Christianity, he said, ordered that the strong should give part of their strength to the weak, and so tended to weaken the whole race.

‘Another Christian concept, no less crazy: the concept of equality of souls before God. This concept furnishes the prototype of all theories of equal rights’

Self-sacrifice, he said, was an open defiance of nature, and so were all the other Christian virtues such as pity.

‘Christianity is called the religion of pity. Pity stands opposed to the tonic emotions which heighten our vitality: it has a depressing effect. We are deprived of strength when we feel pity. That loss of strength which suffering as such inflicts on life is still further increased and multiplied by pity. Pity makes suffering contagious’

Humanity should reject Christianity, as the "greatest of all imaginable corruptions," and admit freely and fully, that the law of natural selection was universal and the only way of making real progress. ‘God is Dead’ thus became a rallying cry to society to rid itself of its shackles.

‘There's probably no God’ - 2008

In October 2008 the news broke that the UK's first atheist advertising campaign will begin proclaiming the gospel to the streets of London in the form of an evangelising bus. The poster will bear the powerful slogan ‘There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life’. ‘God is dead, but keep the Christian values anyway, and don’t worry about any philosophical inconsistency’.

I would suggest that it would be better for all concerned if the bus were to steer well clear of the borough of Tower Hamlets, unless of course they change the slogan to ‘There’s probably no God but Allah!’ as per the Shahada.

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Some thoughts on Christianity and survivalism

These are truly momentous times we live in. The world is caught in the grip of the worst financial crisis in decades, governments and individuals are just beginning to come to terms with a future of diminishing natural resources (peak oil being just one example of the more general trend) and uncertainty and anxiety seem to pervade the cultural milieu. All these factors have renewed interest in the possibility of a systemic collapse of civilized order, whether through resource depletion, economic catastrophe, military escalation or all three, and the concomitant question of what life would be like on the other side of this collapse. Can we in the developed world really imagine a situation in which basic services like electricity, running water, medical assistance and food delivery to supermarkets were greatly reduced or non-existent? More importantly, what would be a proper Christian response to such a situation if it ever came about? What does Christian faith look like in a situation of perpetual crisis?

I want to frame this discussion with a theological critique of the so-called 'survivalist' movement. It goes without saying that survivalism is not a monolithic or even broadly consistent body of beliefs and practices, but it is possible to isolate certain common features. Examples: 1) the emphasis on developing self-reliance by stock-piling food and learning how to grow it for oneself, teaching oneself basic skills like first-aid, carpentry, etc. 2) the emphasis on the need to withdraw from mainstream society, to 'live off the grid' as it were and 3) the emphasis on the right to self-defense, the importance of learning how to use guns and the psychological readiness to protect oneself, one's family and one's stockpile of resources from those who failed to prepare and consequently become desperate enough to turn to violence and plundering to feed and clothe themselves. 

Of these three the first is undoubtedly the least controversial. In our overspecialized, overtechnologized world too many people have grown up without skills which were once considered essential to survival. We get our food dressed, packaged and ready to microwave from the supermarket or deli. We go to clinics for the diagnosis of the most common ailments and rely on over-the-counter drugs to soothe headaches, stomach-aches, colds and fevers and control our moods, completely ignorant of how and why they work. We call on plumbers and electricians whenever something in the house breaks down. (What's perhaps more important and troubling, we have divorced these services from any human connection. The cashier at the deli is a cypher to us. He/she just packages our food, mumbles how much it costs and swipes our card or hands us back our change. The electrician or plumber comes into our home, does a very specific job and then leaves, again without our learning anything about him/her. We have become so individualistic that extensive social interaction can become annoying or even aggravating, whereas it is still the norm in many parts of the world. But this is a topic for another post.) It certainly would not hurt anyone to learn some basic skills which relieves their dependence on an artificial and fundamentally vulnerable economic system. It should be praiseworthy from a Christian point of view to work with one's own hands and serve the community with one's skills and talents.

We start running into trouble with the other two tenets of survivalism. Though there certainly have been Christian monastic groups which felt it was their calling to withdraw from the world and its messiness, the mainstream theological consensus has always been that Christians were to be salt and light in a world drowning in darkness (Matthew 5:13-16). Jesus warned his followers against hiding their lights (i.e. the good news of the inbreaking Kingdom of God) under a bushel, and in his final prayer did not ask God to take his disciples out of the world, but that He would protect them from the evil one (John 17: 15). Adherence to these principles was what motivated the Christians to remain in the cities to care for the sick when plague erupted in Roman times, whereas the other citizens would flee for their own safety (see Rodney Stark,The Rise of Christianity, pp.73-94 for documentation). The result was that many Christians did in fact succumb to plague, but overall because they cared for the sick Christians had lower mortality rates, leading outside observers to conclude that the Christian religion had the support of Providence. 

Christians are called to be God's emissaries in the thick of things. If civil order collapses and there is violence, hunger and sickness in the cities, Christians should be on the front lines, tending to the sick and wounded, organizing relief efforts and continuing to spread the Good News (indeed in times like this people are usually very open to hearing about God and salvation). Even if it means risking getting caught in the crossfire or succumbing to disease or accident, Christians have their mandate.

Related to this is of course the issue of gun ownership and self-defense. There is here wide disagreement in Christian ethical circles. Many ethicists embrace a radical pacifism which excludes meeting force with force, even in the face of great harm to oneself or loved ones (prominent supporters of this approach include John Howard Yoder, Stanley Hauerwas andGregory Boyd). They can claim support for this position from the master Himself: "You have heard that it was said: an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. But I say to you, do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also." (Matthew 5:38-39) But there are also many Christians who, based on the constitutional right to bear arms, insist on the legitimacy of owning guns and using force to prevent harm to oneself or loved ones. 

Personally I feel that, if one is to take the Sermon on the Mount seriously, one must embrace a certain kind of pacifism, but that is too big a topic for this post. What I want to focus on instead in my critique is the presupposition of individualism which underlies the survivalist movement. This is not just limited to the emphasis on self-reliance mentioned above, but extends to a deeply troubling perspective on human nature which contains a kernel of truth but also stands in serious contradiction to basic Christian beliefs. The kernel of truth is well summed up by Satan in the Book of Job. When God insists that, whatever Satan assaults Job with, the latter will continue to trust in God, Satan confidently replies with, "Skin for skin! All that a man has he will give for his life." (Job 2:4) This includes any sense of decency and of common cause with one's fellow beings. There are certainly heroic examples of people who sacrificed their own safety and life to help others in a crisis, but there are also appalling examples of people resorting to violence and depredation to avoid starvation or death in a catastrophe (the Bible itself contains particularly grim images of parents cooking and eating their own children during long, brutal sieges, and even selfishly withholding that food from their starving neighbors!). The Joker confidently informs Batman in The Dark Knight that "When the chips are down, these civilized people, they'll eat each other. They're only as good as society allows them to be."

That human beings can become very nasty in the fight for survival does not need argument. But survivalists often combine this recognition with a particularly chilling utilitarian calculus of the value of human life which exalts the survivalist (and perhaps his loved ones, if they are wise enough to pay attention to him and prepare in advance) over the benighted, foolish masses of people who do not pay attention to the signs of the times and will thus be purged in the coming catastrophes (if this sounds religious, that's because it is: survivalism can easily be conceived as a religious movement; see here). Great emphasis is laid on learning to outwit and subdue the poor simpletons who try to raid your stockpile of food. The survivalist becomes a Nietszchean uber-mensch, standing above conventional morality, or rather beneath it: the circle of benevolence which expands in a time of peace and prosperity to include those farther away from one's immediate family contracts back in on itself: it's every man for himself for the survivalist, and he takes that notion very seriously. 

Christians simply cannot subscribe to such a view. The Christian life is a communal one, and Christian ethics is fundamentally universal in scope, as indicated by the quotations from the Sermon on the Mount. If God makes the sun shine on both the evil and the good, and lets his rain fall on both the just and the unjust, we as Christians are called to such all-encompassing benevolence as well. Who is my neighbor? Not just the one who shows me favors. As Jesus rightly challenges us, "What reward do you have [for only being good to those who are good to you]?" Instead, our neighbor is anyone who needs our assistance and to whom we show mercy. Who are our loved ones (father, mother, brothers and sisters)? Those who hear the word of God and keep it. The Christian response to a crisis situation must be one, not of running off to the hills in our gun-protected bunkers, but of helping people come together as a community to face the problems which arise. In the end, that's the only practical response as well. Holing up in the mountains is only viable until you run out of food and supplies or are over-run by hungry crowds who didn't see it coming. Even if you have a homestead with land for growing crops, animals for meat, cheese and wool, a source of clean water and other amenities, that only makes you a more conspicuous target and in any case it is nearly impossible to imagine complete self-sufficiency in the context of a single family on a single homestead. Only a community of people working together has the potential to maintain a decent standard of living and defend itself against external dangers. Christians should be aware of this and be on the front lines of any such endeavor, even if it means giving up our lives to bring people together or defend the helpless.

There is much, much more that should be said on this issue, but let me close with an interesting observation on the Sermon on the Mount. Few people realize that the context for this challenging, perfectionist code of ethics was apocalyptic (see here, pp. 5-7): whatever Jesus believed about the imminence of the final judgment and confrontation between the forces of light and darkness, his ethics presupposes a crisis situation for his followers: the formation of a radical new community through the in-breaking of the Kingdom of God and the possibility (even inevitability) of confrontations between the kingdoms of this world, and of those kingdoms with the Kingdom of God. Jesus' disciples are to expect persecution, hardship and martyrdom for their trust in him. But in spite of that, they are called to be perfect as their Father in heaven is perfect. A collapse of civil order is the occasion for an even greater display of Christ-like sacrificial love, precisely when it seems hardest to envision (and make no mistake: it is hard to contemplate; I myself am not yet fully convinced that I could display such love in a situation where my life or that of my loved ones was threatened). The outcome, though, as history makes abundantly clear, is that God's name is glorified and His Kingdom advances. The Church has always flourished in times of crisis, and if a time of crisis is indeed upon us (I don't think it's inevitable, but it's certainly plausible) that memory should sustain and encourage us to take up the work of God's Kingdom in an uncertain, troubled, fallen world.

P.S. Here are some helpful reflections for Christians facing a time of trouble due to resource scarcity (the article is framed as a Christian response to peak oil, but it can apply to any widespread crisis situation)

Cross-posted with CADRE Comments

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