Goodness Not From God

“The greatest tragedy
in mankind’s entire history
may be the hijacking
of morality by religion.”

--Arthur C. Clarke


By Diane Petryk-Bloom

Religion makes us good, kind, and morally pure.
Without religion, society would become chaotic and depraved.

Children being properly raised go to church.

This is what you “know” about God that is wrong.

Hard evidence shows that the more godless a society, the more healthy it is by all sociological measures. (We’ll get to the specifics.)

Yet to believe the contrary is as universal as American opinions come.

Even those who doubt the existence of a supernatural being, think we ought to hang on to the idea of a potentially punishing god -- just to keep us all in line.

To be openly atheist is socially – sometimes even physically -- risky. Your neighbors might prefer to live next to a born-again sex-offender. (cartoon) You have better chance being elected to public office openly gay than openly skeptical. You cannot be a pariah faster in this age of diversity, than to blurt out, “I’m an atheist.”

“But you look so nice,” they tell Florida humanist Jennifer Hancock when she reveals her godless state.

“Then you must smoke,” a teacher responds to the high school student who confides she has no religious belief.

“Ask Sally out, you’ll get lucky. She doesn’t believe in God…”
The social worker deciding on a recommendation in a child custody suit gives more points to the parent who attends church regularly.

That an atheist would automatically not be “nice” or automatically break school rules or be more likely to be promiscuous or a bad parent, is the prevailing American view.

Researchers at the University of Minnesota reported in early 2006 that Americans rate atheists below Muslims, recent immigrants, gays and lesbians, and other minority groups when asked to share their vision of American society.

The atheists were not selected for rejection by any small margin of the 2,000 households responding, said one of the researchers, Assistant Professor Joseph Gerteis, and when it came to the possibility of their children marrying into a minority group, respondents wanted them to steer clear of atheists above all.

The study’s lead researcher, Associate Sociology Professor Penny Edgell, said she believes a fear of moral decline and resulting social disorder is behind the findings.

Ten years earlier, in The Last Taboo, Radcliff’s Wendy Kaminer had already observed that intolerance of atheism surpassed that of homosexuality and wrote: “Atheists generate about as much sympathy as pedophiles.”

“Who in her right mind would want to be an atheist in America today?” wrote New York Times science writer Natalie Angier in 2001, “a place where presidential candidates compete for the honor of divining “what Jesus would do” and where Senator Joseph Lieberman can declare that we shouldn’t deceive ourselves into thinking that our constitutional “freedom of religion” means ‘freedom from religion,’ or ‘indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion.”

We might add, where this country’s top law enforcement officer can say: “Civilized individuals,” which he limits to Christians, Jews and Muslims, “all understand the source of freedom and human dignity is the Creator.” That was then-Attorney General John Ashcroft in 2002.

The sense that someone who does not actively believe in God is a morally unreliable or untrustworthy is pervasive in America, confirms James Turner, professor of history and the philosophy of science at Notre Dame University.

To be fair, George W. Bush did say atheists could be as patriotic as religious folks, but he might have been advised to say so against his own personal view after some objection was raised to his father’s 1987 campaign trail comment: “No, I don’t know that atheists should be considered as citizens,” George H. Bush said, “nor should they be considered as patriots. This is one nation under God.”

The Culture of Disbelief, by Yale Professor Stephen L. Carter, pointed out in 1993 that many devout parents see evil -- equally -- in “sex, drugs and secular humanism.”

That’s because, Tufts University Philosophy Professor Daniel C. Dennett said on C-Spann’s Book TV in early 2006, the idea has been “hammered” into us by defenders of the faith.

Even the unabridged Webster’s Dictionary gives, as its second definition of atheist, “… one who lives immorally as if disbelieving in God,” points out University of Pittsburgh’s Adolf Grunbaum. We can be sure “moral atheism” is heavily oxymoronic in America. Yet atheists say they know in their hearts they are just as moral as most believers and more so than many of them.

When we probe these ideas, we encounter Dostoyevsky in every book, article and Google:

“If there is no God, everything is permissible.”

The quote is usually attributed to the 19th century Russian novelist directly, but seems pieced together from the dialog of his fictional characters in Crime and Punishment and, most particularly, The Brothers Karamazov, wherein the question of the existence of God is the overriding theme. Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) seems to have gone from socialist revolutionary to religious convert, but it is unclear whether he believed religion begets morality or a deep human need for a moral system leads to the founding of religions. His character’s opinions do not answer for him, any more than one could say Sir Arthur Conan Doyle approved of crime because his Professor Moriarity did.

A lot of people like the Dostoyevsky quote, however misattributed, believing it neatly explains the necessity of religion.

Dr. Laura Schlessinger, whose radio talk show once topped national ratings and still has claims a weekly audience of 18 million, believes it takes God holding hell and damnation over our heads to make any of us eschew sin.

It’s a cheap view, according to Skeptic magazine’s founding publisher Michael Shermer, author of the The Science of Good and Evil. It says, “in effect, that people are naturally mean and nasty to each other…”

Author Mark I. Vuletic can’t picture everyone abandoning their children even if it were proved that God does not exist. “Christians seem to believe it is wrong to abandon their children only if God exists. Atheists believe it is wrong to abandon one’s children whether or not God exists, and that gives the atheist a much stronger moral foundation than the Christian.”

Schlessinger, nevertheless, sees nothing wrong in letting the Bible be her guide. She said she knows homosexuality is an abomination because it says so in Leviticus, third book of the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible. Her comment inspired an open letter to her, anonymous but well-reproduced on the World Wide Web, which facetiously asks, then, how much to charge for a daughter one wants to sell into slavery, who should be obligated to stone the person to death who works on the Sabbath, and how to kill friends who get their hair trimmed…. all among the stipulations in Leviticus. No answer from Schlessinger has surfaced.

C.S. Lewis, (1898-1963) best known as author of the Chronicles of Narnia fantasy novels, was similarly unequivocal: “It has always seemed ridiculous to me for people to think that you can still have ‘morality,’ particularly Christian morality, without God.”

In a 1972 speech on morality, the Rev. Billy Graham, who has preached to more people than anyone in the history of religion, stopped short of saying atheists are immoral. But he did say: “Our freedom is based on law and this law has been rooted in a faith and universal moral law given by almighty God.”

“Morality begins with the character of God. There is no other foundation for it,” says Anglican clergyman and Cambridge theology graduate Dick Tripp of New Zealand. “He is holy, perfect in his love, in his justice, in his faithfulness, and any other ‘good’ quality you can think of.”

Some would disagree. Eminent English philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806 -1873) revealed in his autobiography in the mid 19th century, that his father thought religion was the greatest enemy of morality for the explicit reason that the character of God was not good or just.

Mill said his father thought religion vitiated the standard of morals by making them consist of doing the will of a being, “on whom it lavishes all the phrases of adulation, but whom, in sober truth, it depicts an eminently hateful.”

Eminent philosophers John Locke (1632-1704) and David Hume (1711-1776) came even earlier to the conclusion that morality derives from human experience and God does not implant morality. The pious man, Hume came to believe, would invariably turn out to be “a rascal.”

In The Impossibility of God, Michael Martin explains that God is called good while his behavior is undeniably bad. “That is, having purposes and acting on motives which in all ordinary circumstances we would recognize as bad. He is depicted as behaving in some respects as a malevolent demon, in others like a petulant tyrant, and in others like a mischievous and thoughtless child.”

Likewise, Steven Pinker, cognitive scientist at Harvard and author of The Blank Slate, says he’s still surprised at the morality/religion link because history suggests otherwise.

“The Bible contains several injunctions from God to the Israelites to slay the occupants of the towns they covet,” Pinker writes in his essay “Evolution and Ethics” in the anthology Intelligent Thought. “…except for the young women, who they are to take as unwilling wives. Since then religions have given the world stonings, witch burnings, crusades, inquisitions, holy wars, jihads, fatwahs, suicide bombers, gay bashers, abortion-clinic gunmen, child molesters, and mothers who drown their children so they can happily be reunited in Heaven.”

C.S. Lewis once wrote that witch burnings were not inconsistent with morality because, at the time, the witch hunters really believed in witchcraft and believed they were doing the right thing.

This would indicate that reasoning is okay, when it comes to figuring out what’s moral and what isn’t. But much of what we read about why religion is essential to morality is that its morality is absolute and handed down from above. No reasoning required.

That’s just the problem, Dennett wrote in his 2006 book, Breaking the Spell “Those who have unquestioning faith …if they themselves haven’t conscientiously considered, on their own, whether their pastors or priests of rabbis or imams are worthy of this delegated authority over their own lives, then they are in fact taking a personally immoral stand.”

Any “Good Book” followers who think, maybe, Mill, Martin, Pinker, and Dennett are full of it, can easily check out Bible tales, moral models and contradictions within at “Notes on Bible Problems” by Richard Packham at http://home.teleport.com/packham/bible.htm Take Moses for one example. Everyone knows and many honor Moses for handing down God’s Ten Commandments.

“The character of Moses is the most horrid….” writes religion scholar William Edelman. “Moses said (according to the Bible) ‘Kill every male among the little ones…and kill every woman that hath known a man by lying with him…but of all the women who have not known a man…keep alive for yourselves.” Were the women expected to have any right to object to being kidnapped and raped? The Bible doesn’t consider that a moral problem. Today, most of us would. Our laws so indicate.

Was the wretchedness of Moses an isolated case? Consider Abraham, whose marrying his sister and seducing her handmaid were his lesser crimes. Abraham drove one child and its mother into the desert to starve, drove out his other children and their mothers, and was willing to butcher his other child to please God.

Packham breaks it down for you by Bible characters or subjects, such as human sacrifice; animal sacrifice; war; genocide and slaughter; cruelty, barbarity and violence; deceit and treachery; lying; incest; extortion; cannibalism; slavery; drunkenness; religious intolerance and closed minds; polygamy and concubinage; prostitution; abuse of women and women’s inferiority; abandonment of wife, children and family; hypocrisy; homosexuality; and obscene, offensive and erotic passages.

It’s all in there.

God will punish David (II Sam 12:11-12) by giving his wives to another to enjoy in public view. What would Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority think of that spectacle? (Not to mention the morality of punishing the wife who hadn’t irked God in her own right.)

But, throughout the Bible God likes to punish people for the sins of others.

He likes to kill children.

In Steve Allen on the Bible, Religion and Morality, Allen points out that God says, while making his commandments, “in what is supposed to be the moment of his most supremely important communication with the children of earth…that if a man does not happen to bow down before a religious picture he will not only punish that man, but also his children, his grandchildren and his great-grandchildren!”

“It is nonsense for the Deity to describe that man or woman and perhaps hundreds of innocent offspring as “those who hate me.” Humans who make such statements are usually identified as suffering from severe paranoia. Why a god is supposed to be admired for so speaking is unclear.”

Atheists are atheists because they see no evidence for God. But they are buttressed in their views by the inconsistency, irrationality, and brutality of the Bible.

Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene, who thinks teaching children that there is a hell in which they might suffer eternal punishment is worse child abuse than a bit of fondling by a priest, despises the Catholic church’s “extraordinarily retrogressive stand on everything to do with reproduction. Any sort of new technology which makes life easier for women without causing any suffering is likely to be opposed by the Catholic Church.”

Philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), in Why I Am Not A Christian, complained about the immorality of forcing women to bear child after child until they die worn out rather than approve contraceptives and birth control information. He saw the churches as retarding progress, mitigation of racial discrimination and slavery and “every moral progress there has been in the world.”

Allen wondered why the Catholic church never censured the Mafia or denied its members a Christian burial.

“I’ve known very few atheists,” Allen wrote, but, without exception they have been men and women or principle and admirable as citizens. Of the few truly despicable human beings I have encountered, I regret to report that almost every one of them was at least a nominal believer in one religion or another.

Oft-quoted early 20th century columnist H.L. Meneken (1880-1956) said religion is “so absurd that it comes close to imbecility.”

Harris is impatient for the view to spread: “Surely there must come a time when we will acknowledge the obvious: theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance.”

Science/science fiction writer Isaac Asimov (1920-1992), author of more than 500 books, said Bible believers ignore all the patient findings of thinking minds throughout the centuries since the Bible was written. “And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all…”

On the flip side, claiming super intelligence for atheists may be a stretch – for all except Dennett. Dennett has started a movement aimed at a new moniker for atheists – brights. Because they are ‘bright,” he thinks, atheists are living better lives.

“About the best that can be said for religion is that it helps some people achieve the level of citizenship and morality typically found in brights,” Dennett writes.

Of course, Dennett considers himself a bright and tells those offended by his elitism that they need to adjust their perspective.

What do the facts show?

There are many, examples of atheists living moral lives – honest, generous, law-abiding, compassionate -- but individual examples don’t prove anything –except that perhaps religious zealots should give a non-believer the benefit of the doubt. Rather, those who think Christianity or other religions, exclusively, deliver our morals, dismiss the good citizen atheists and moral humanists as isolated cases of people who will behave well for a short time, but only because they have absorbed the attitudes of a religion-saturated society.

They are wrong.

Not only are some good, moral atheists not rendered good and moral from living among believers, they are better.

And societies are better the more atheists they have!

What?

Social scientists using data from the International Social Survey Programme, Gallup, and other research bodies concluded, in general, “higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, sexually transmitted disease infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies.”

Also:

“The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so.”

It is the world’s only prosperous democracy where murder rates are still high; with “uniquely high” teen abortion and syphilis, and adolescent gonorrhea 300 times higher than in less devout countries.

The report was authored by Gregory Paul and reported in the Journal of Religion and Society, an American academic journal.

Paul said evidence accumulated by a number of different studies suggests that religion might actually contribute to social ills.

Falwell can say, “If you’re not a born-again Christian you’re a failure as a human being,” but born again Christians have a slightly higher divorce rates than non-Christians and find few atheists to room with in prisons.

Researcher George Bara, himself a born-again Christian, said Bible Belt Americans have the highest divorce rate and atheists and agnostics the lowest of all – although that may be due to other factors than religion, such as economic status. And don’t think those divorces happened then the couples sought religion. Bara said 90 percent of the divorces among born again come after the individuals in the marriages had their spiritual rebirths, not before. (religioustolerance.org)

Of course, marriage in the Bible does not impede a man’s right to take concubines. It is valid only if the wife is a virgin (and if not she must be killed). And a man must marry his brother’s widow. Stipulations that we don’t think the Moral Majority has in mind when it considers the sanctity of marriage.

Meanwhile, statistics show more atheists than God-fearers obey the Ten Commandments –at least the sensible ones – and the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

At a time when slave holders were pointing out that slavery was sanctioned by the Bible, Abraham Lincoln said, “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master.” This is reasoning along the lines of the Golden Rule, which appears many millennia before Christianity. Most religions encorporate an ethic of reciprocity, but monotheistic ones, like Christianity and Judaism, teach that God’s whim trumps the Golden Rule.

Angier: “In one classic study, sociologists at the University of Washington compared students who were part of the “Jesus people” movement with a comparable group of professed atheists and found atheists were no more likely to cheat on tests that were Christians and no less likely to volunteer at a hospital for the mentally disabled.”

As this was being written, sociologist Phil Zuckerman was in Demark finishing up research for his upcoming book, Society Without Religion. As the title suggests, Zuckerman has looked at countries where atheism dominates.

His findings support Gregory Paul’s report.

“High degrees of non-belief clearly do not result in societal ruin, and vice versa,” Zuckerman said in a telephone interview.

Demark and Sweden in Europe and Vietnam and Japan in the Far East, have the lowest levels of religious belief in the world, Zuckerman said. They also have the lowest homicide, infant mortality, poverty, illiteracy, and the highest wealth, life expectancy, educational attainment, and gender equality.

“I’m not saying atheism brings on societal health,’ Zuckerman said. “Societal health causes widespread atheism. Social insecurity equates with a widespread belief in God.

“From Muslim fundamentalism in Iran to Christian fundamentalism in Indiana, the argument is loudly trumpeted that belief in God is good for society and rejection of God is bad. That thesis is badly incorrect.”

Zuckerman is the author of An Invitation to the Sociology of Religion (2003) and teaches at Pitzer College in California

Organic atheism, that is, atheism not state-imposed and enforced, is highest, he said, in Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Japan, Vietnam and Taiwan. Atheism is virtually non-existent in Africa, South America, the Middle East and much of Asia.

Scandinavia doesn’t have high suicide or alcoholism, is lower on all the other indicators of societal pathology. Religion proponents will point to problems in atheist Russia, Zuckerman said, but there non-belief was imposed. “Totalitarian nations are always a nightmare,” he said, “regardless of religious faith or non-faith.”

If you ask someone in Denmark where the got their moral values, they will point to ancestral Christianity, Zuckerman said. But even at that, he said, they were pagan longer than they were Christian. Christianity came very late.

Zuckerman said he was surprised at the citizens’ “absolute indifference” to religion, even the possibility of a human soul. He asked doctors operating on a cadaver if they thought the deceased had a soul and they simply said they never thought about it.

His over-all finding: “In Scandinavia, people were committed to helping others, there was a general belief in being a good person. Society without strong religion is not only possible, but quite pleasant.”

If atheists have morals but they aren’t derived from Christian, Jewish or Muslim teachings, from who or what do they derive?

The answer will not please fundamentalist believers: Evolution.

The relatively new science of evolutionary psychology says we get our morals from our animal ancestors.

“Profoundly, neurology tells us that we are born with an ability to be moral thanks to evolution,” wrote Dorion Sagan and John Skoyles in Up From Dragons. “We have not just a sense or right and wrong but, as important, a concern with ethics….We did not evolve from animals that were solitary and met only for mating, disappearing for the rest of the year from each other’s sight. We evolved from apes that had to find a way to live together. We thus need to share socially predictable ways of doing things. This, of course does not mean we cannot be self-oriented in our actions. We are out to get the best for ourselves; behind social cooperation is social competition. But we do this like other apes, against a background of finding ways to live and work together in our social group….a world governed by ‘oughts.’”

In The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are, Richard Wright says the evolutionary mandate that created morality was the need to get our genes into the next generation.p 325 A mother who takes good care of her children is more likely to have them survive. Thus, good mothers get their genes passed on.

“What is in our genes’ interests is what seems “right” – morally right, objectively right, whatever sort of rightness is in order. Sympathy, empathy, compassion, conscience, guilt, remorse, even the very sense of justice, the sense that doers of good serve reward and doers of evil deserve punishment – all these can now be viewed as vestiges of organic history on a particular planet.”

Emperor Penguins, for instance, huddle together during the worst weather. Those on the outer edge of the huddle, exposed to the worst blasts of icy artic air, are rotated into the middle of the group periodically, so the burden of the outer edge is shared. All in the group survive, and that is better for all.

Empathy seems to increase as organisms become more intelligent, as one can see in the behavior of higher mammals, says New Age writer Barbara Marx Hubbard, who many regard as heir to visionary Buckminster Fuller. The process of evolution began and proceeded for million of years without organized religion, she said, and will continue beyond any organized religion into the ever-evolving future. Only now, man has progressed to the point where he can effect the direction of his change, she writes in her book, Conscious Evolution. “Humans are bringing more humaneness into the process.”

But that, too, may be just evolution at work. The more we learn about what causes human behavior, says psychiatrist Armando Favazza, the more we diminish the concept of free will and the concept of sin depends on free will. Favazza is the author of PsychoBible: Behavior, Religion and the Holy Book.

Once humans began to write, they wrote about morality. Plato and Socrates, certainly, discussed morality.

Religion, says author Salman Rushdie, was a way of codifying morality already established before humans gave up multiple gods and myths.

Rushdie, who knows how dangerous religious “morals” can be, having had to live about 10 years of his life in hiding due to an Islamic fatwah issued against him for ostensibly insulting the faith in his book The Satanic Verses, said morality is independent of religion.

But what is it, really?

If morality isn’t “what God wants,” how do we define morality?

Humanist Jennifer Hancock says secular humanist define it as acting with compassion toward others. Oh, sure, honesty and responsibility are often mentioned as elements of morality, she says. “But if you say honest and responsible, you’ve described Hitler,” Hancock says. “Compassion is the essential element.”

Moslems complain that the Scandinavians are promiscuous, but by the standard of compassion, sex between the consenting doesn’t rank as immoral. Beheading foreigners does.

Humanistic ethics considers choices regarding shared human interests, wants, needs and values, writes American Humanist Association founder Paul Kurtz. “We judge them by their consequences for human happiness and social justice.” Humanists agree to support: the dignity and autonomy of individuals; self-determination and freedom exercised responsibly; pursuit of excellence; carrying out responsibilities and duties to others; exercising empathy and caring; providing moral education for the young; use of reasoning in framing ethical judgments; willingness to modify ethical principles in the light of reality and new discovery; and respect for principles – the end does not justify the means. (see The Humanist Manifesto 2000)

It might surprise many to find out that Mother Teresa, who was made a Saint for her supposed selfless care of others, believed that suffering was a good thing and did not go out of her way to alleviate pain. She collected vast sums in donations, according to journalist Christopher Hitchens, and did not spend it on the poor and medically needy. Her care facilities were grotesquely primitive, platforms for proselytizing not healing, Hitchens wrote in his 1995 book, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice. Hitchens also criticized Mother Teresa for helping tyrannical dictatorships like that of the Duvaliers in Haiti, taking money from swindler Charles Keating, and maintaining a double standard on divorce – no good for the Irish, but okay for her friend Princess Diana. And when she needed medical care she took herself to fancy clinics in California.

Matt Cherry of the Council for Secular Humanism, said Mother Teresa compares unfavorably with an atheist doctor Indumati Parikh, who sold her home in a middle class are of Bombay to open a clinic in a slum area and lived and worked among the poor for the next forty years. She brought not only medical care but education to the poor, and brought down the birth rate by improving the infant mortality. Mother Teresa took care of her image, Cherry said, Dr. Parikh took care of people. In convincing us that religious people own morality, religion has performed an amazing sleight of hand, Cherry said.

Schermer defines morality as “right and wrong thoughts and behaviors in the context of the rules of the social group.”

But what happens when divergent social groups cross paths? In Mogadishu, Somalia, today a judge will impose a death sentence on anyone who doesn’t pray daily. Moral for them; immoral to us.

“Morality is simply the avoidance of unnecessary harm,’ says ex-preacher Dan Barker, now a staff member of the Freedom From Relgion Foundation. “If we minimize pain and enhance the quality of life, we are moral,” Barker said. To be moral, atheists have access to the simple tools of reason and kindness. There is no cosmic code book directing our actions,”

Rushdie said morality is that which is intrinsic within us which wishes to distinguish right from wrong. It’s hardwired in us. “Religion is one of the answers,” he said, “but it’s perfectly possible for me to say we can create codes to live by. One is democracy. We continue to argue what’s okay and what’s not. Slavery at one point was okay. It’s not anymore. Women were not allowed to own property, now they are.”

Times change, technology develops and so we evolve. And so does morality. This is one of the big problems with trying to impose a morality with codes written thousands of years ago, even if they were not internally contradictory. Could the Bible address the problem of how to decide the fate of frozen embryos whose parents have died? Does the Koran say women shouldn’t drive, or, more importantly, should be denied modern medical care because the doctor is a male? Could any ancient religious text say if separating Siamese twins who share a heart is taking a life or allowing one? If we should colonize Mars?

The only way to look at these issues is from the standpoint of the greatest good for the greatest number.

Sometimes it isn’t easy. Moral dilemmas abound. It was easier when we lived in more homogenous, socially isolated groups. But we are a global society now. If we look to religion for our morals, we will have only conflict, because religions don’t agree.
If one religion says it is necessary to stone someone to death for kissing on a beach, and we take the position of honoring all religions, then we must allow that. But reasoning individuals will see that normal human activity is not criminal, and even criminality may not deserve the death penalty.

No one wants “everything” to be permissible. We want to be secure in our homes, free from fear of violence. We do not want to be enslaved, we want to be able to accumulate possessions without concern they will be stolen. We recognize the need for laws and a justice system.

But, as Pinker says, neither scientists nor defender of religion should accept the premise that morality belongs in the province of religion. In practice, religions have sanctioned vile acts throughout human history. In principle, there is no reason to believe religious edicts are inherently moral or that they foster morality, and some reason to believe they have the opposite effect…the recurrence of atrocities committed in the name of God shows that they are not random perversions.”
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“Moral progress over the millennia,” Pinker adds, is explainable in terms of circumstances that encourage people to project themselves into the lives of others and hence expand the circle of empathy.”

We will see this circle grow beyond other cultures. We already have expanded it to the animal kingdom to the credit of the animal rights movement. A hundred or two years hence we may find we are more akin to the Star Trek universe envisioned by Gene Roddenberry, with empathy for alien life forms, androids, humanistic holograms, and a even a ship showing budding sentience. And as Arthur C. Clarke was fond of reminding us, what we can imagine is probably already on the way. There will be things we haven’t imagined that will strike from out of the blue.

Only knowledge can prepare us.

“The way to be moral is to learn what causes harm and how to avoid it,” Barker says. This means investigating nature: who we are and what we need, where we live, how we function, and why we behave the way we do. This gives an objective basis to morality, even though the values themselves are not objective things.

As we know, one of religions’ claims is to have “objective” morality. This claim is nonsense. Even “thou shalt not kill” has its myriad of exceptions, under religion, not the least of them the edict to kill non-believers, former believers, and those who believe in other religions or even sects of the same religion.

There is no objective morality, Dr. Laura. There never has been and never can be standards that remain true no matter what the circumstances. The criticism of “relativism” or “situational ethics,” therefore, is not legitimate. You would tell a lie not to hurt someone’s feelings, steal food to save a starving child, shoot down a killer before he kills more, etc. Those are the easy ones. Think of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Did the atomic bomb drops on Japan at ending the World War II in the Pacific save more or kill more? Would you be here today if your father or grandfather had been needed for a foot-soldier invasion of Japan? Would your Japanese daughter-in-law? Are all lives equal? Should we consider a brain surgeon worth more than a rock musician? An athlete more valuable than a stay-at-home mom? How about a seeing-eye dog compared to an unemployed drifter? Irradicating a pest that destroys food crops against causing an environmental imbalance?

Some times, discerning the compassionate act, or the right action, is terribly, terribly difficult.

Howard Bloom, author of The Lucifer Principle, says no one should be killed –ever. But we live in a world of dangerous forces. “I hate to think of the idea of preemptive war,” Bloom says, “but we are forced to think of it.”

The best hope for answering the moral questions we face now and in the future comes from science, That’s why the current trend of disdaining science in America is disturbing.

Eminent sociobiologist E. O. Wilson, who was raised a creationist, writes that there is “something deep in religious belief that divides people and amplifies societal conflict. The toxic mix of religion and tribalism has become so dangerous as to justify taking seriously the alternate view, that humanism based on science is the effective antidote, the light and the way at last placed before us.”

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Music Heals

By Diane Petryk

Hospital green. Children's ward. The 6-year-old boy with a tracheotomy tube lay motionless. Medical staff couldn't lift his despondency. Kathy Lord and Susan Weber tip-toe in.
A parent nods. Softly, they begin to sing. It was the holiday season, so they chose “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”

At first, said Laurel Whitaker of the Brooklyn Children’s Medical Center, the boy watched listlessly.

“But before long one hand came up and he began to snap it to the music, then his other hand came up and he began to clap," she said. "By the time they finished he had both hands over his head and was mouthing words to the song." When the musicians were about to leave, he clasped his hands together and reverently bowed his head and mouthed ‘thank-you.’”

The boy’s reaction wasn’t unusual. Hospitals across the city have seen music’s almost magical power for triggering metamorphosis. Moods lift. Blood pressure falls. Will to live can be brought back. Music -- especially the gentle and loving Lord and Weber style -- can often trump medicine.

Musicians Kathy Lord and Susan Weber, who play guitar and electric bass respectively, had been performing together for more than a dozen years when, one day in 1997, Weber experienced a numbness in her left hand. Her doctor referred her to “the best,” Beth Israel Medical Center’s chief neurosurgeon, Dr. Fred J. Epstein. It turned out that Weber’s problem was transitory, but she sought some way to repay Epstein for his kindness and expertise.

Epstein was also head of the Pediatrics Department at the Institute for Neurology and Neurosurgery at Beth Israel and therein lay the answer. Lord and Weber would donate a performance for the hospitalized children. That day, as they sang and strummed for children gathered in the ward’s playroom, miracles began to happen. Depressed kids brightened. Unresponsive faces soon beamed. Some children forgot their pain and picked up tambourines. They sang, they laughed; they were swept from their cares by melodies and harmonies. And the effect lasted long after the duo had gone. Epstein was thrilled with the residual positive effects of the performance. It had actually helped the children heal! He insisted Kathy and Susan return, and soon. The rest is history.

“A fire got lit under us,” said Lord. Before long, they had formed Music That Heals, a non-profit organization to raise money and provide performances for hospitals, nursing homes, homeless shelters, hospices and other groups of people needing their spirits lifted. Lord and Weber, with and without their band of 4 to 6 others, already had a full bookings schedule. They were in demand at colleges, for weddings and church groups, and on cruises. They soon found, however, their Music That Heals gigs were the most satisfying.

Kathy, who grew up in Gravesend, said, when she was young, she couldn’t go near a hospital because seeing sick and suffering people upset her. Now, a rare week will go by when she doesn’t make the rounds in one hospital or another.

“It’s not like I don’t see the tragedy,” she said. “I just don’t take it in. I focus on the gift we have to give.” Sometimes it’s more than music. At the Brooklyn Hospital Center recently, Susan had to catch up with Kathy after being delayed with a 3-year-boy. He had a big IV needle in his arm. “He said it felt better if I held his hand,” she said. At the hospital, Weber, a Bronx native, now of Valley Stream, and Lord, now of Bensonhurst, are familiar faces. They stroll the hall in pediatrics and peek into each room.

“Would you like a song?” Kathy asks. Sometimes the child is alone and the music also alleviates loneliness. When parents are present, they are often surprised at the request and shrug an indifferent “okay.” Then they see how their child perks up and hope the women will sing another.

"How about that Lion King song, or a little Bob Marley?" Kathy strums her guitar and sings. Susan sings and shakes a small egg with little pellets inside that make a soft maracas-like sound. She keeps a supply of the eggs in her bag and gives one to each child so he or she can shake it in time to the music, too, and they get to keep it. In the intensive care unit, a nurse is washing her hands with a weary look on her face. She turns and sees Kathy and Susan and her lips curl upward.

“Listen,” she says to a young boy as the women begin with some Kenny Loggins lyrics: “Christopher Robin and I walked along Under branches lit up by the moon Posing our questions to Owl and Eyeore . . .” The atmosphere in the ICU changes for doctors, parents and patients. A young boy talks about his school and learning to play the guitar himself. In another room, Kathy finds out the young girl would like a sad song. They play Sarah McLachlan’s “I Will Remember You.”

“You have to respect what the child wants,” Susan explains. “But nobody is too sick,” she adds. “Some will decline. Often it’s because they’re unfamiliar -- culturally they’ve never seen someone playing in a hospital. We make sure they realize it’s free.” She’s quick to point out she and Kathy are artists and not clinical musical therapists. Where a clinical therapist is limited to certain textbook methodologies, they are free to adapt to the dynamics of each situation.

“Kathy and Susan are so soft in terms of their playfulness that kids let them in even when they won’t let others in,” says Honey Shields, Beth Israel’s director of Child Life Therapy. “Sometimes they’ll follow them down the hall. It’s a form of empowerment for them.” “We use our intuition and our sensitivities,” Kathy says. “We express feeling in song.” That’s important, even in situations where it’s clear that neither medicine nor music will cure.

At Beth Israel once, they encountered a child with a brain tumor, near death. Many of her family members were gathered in her room. None of them spoke English, but Susan, with her perfect Spanish, was able to learn that the family did want them to play. Softly, they launched into Guantanamera, LaBamba, Cielito Lindo and more. Susan learned that the dying girl loved music. As they played, her family began to sing to her.

“Suddenly there were about 20 people singing and crying and it was beautiful,” Kathy said. “It was a bonding experience for the family and a poignant send off. And I think the girl heard it. I think she got it on some level, the love they had for her they were able to transmit in vibrations of sound. I think she got it.”

Another time they were in a neo-natal unit where a physician was working on a baby the size of one’s palm,” Kathy recalled. The baby was just a few days old. The doctor nodded for them to sing and they did, with several family members around the tiny bed. After awhile, the baby stopped breathing. “The doctor said to us, ‘At least she got to hear a song before she died.’”

In another type of venue, Lord and Weber can reveal more of their rock ’n roll roots. Recently they played for a group of about 30 autistic and developmentally challenged youngsters and young adults at Holy Name Church’s basement rectory in Prospect Park. Able to forget their handicaps for a while, the youths danced exuberantly for more than hour to tunes like “Blue Suede Shoes,” “Hot, Hot, Hot,” and “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.” They had a great time, but it was Susan and Kathy who were grateful.

“We were born to do this. We are grateful to be able to give them our gifts,” Weber said. “That’s the satisfaction. If I died today I would feel my life had been worthwhile.” Now in its 10th year, Music That Heals has grown to include about 15 additional musicians who tour the same types of venues. But the organization is still small.

“I’m a musician, not a fundraiser,” Kathy says. Still, she’s also a runner and that led her to arrange an annual 5K Run to help raise funds. The event is held in Prospect Park each Fall. It has grown from about 80 participants the first year to about 200 in 2004. Last year it raised $8,000. Matty Heavey, owner of Circles Restaurant, always donates his restaurant space for a party after race day.

Some of the children who heard Lord and Weber when they were ill, inevitably turn up for the race, giving testimonials to the power of music in general and Lord and Weber in particular. ”Chase all the clouds from the sky Back to the days of Christopher Robin Back to the ways of Christopher Robin and Pooh.”

"Come By the Fire"

by Diane Petryk-Bloom

Winter comes early to Michigan’s upper peninsula, especially the windy Straits of Mackinac linking Lake Huron and Lake Michigan above the mitten part of the state.

It was only early November, but we had our first serious snow storm already.

They say it’s a sign of good insulation if snow doesn’t quickly melt off your roof, but I had no cause to be pleased with my new 2-bedroom A-Frame on that account .

I was about to have a hole cut in the roof and for some reason the man set to come up from Cheboygan to do the job on my St. Ignace dwelling was on the phone asking me if there was ice up there.

On examination, one side of the steeply pitched roof was fairly dry. The other side looked like a giant splattered snow cone.

“Not much,” I said. The sun will probably burn it all off by the time you get here. Was there ever sunshine in northern Michigan in November? Why was I willing to risk this man slipping into oblivion?

In a word: Imprinting

We are all indelibly imprinted with certain image and experiences from our childhood -- those that stick and dictate our lifelong preferences.

Back in 1950-something, I’m in second grade at Jefferson Elementary School in Livonia, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. The school was six or seven blocks from my home – too close for school bus service.

On a morning that didn’t even hint at a need for leggings, I set off for school. But by 3:15 it had started to snow and turned much colder.

Two things about this era: Many moms didn’t drive, mine among them, and girls weren’t allowed to wear slacks or jeans to school—even little ones. That wouldn’t change in my district until 1968.

So on that afternoon – no bus, no car, no long pants, I turned my newly 7-year-old self into the wind and pushed for home. The sharp, icy gusts bit into my bare legs. I was only halfway home when they started to numb.

My mom had no means to rescue me. She did the next best thing. She started a fire in the fireplace.

When she saw me tumble in red-cheeked and red-kneed, she looked relieved and said, “Hurry, come by the fire.”

I still see her kneeling there before the fireplace rolling newspapers into paper logs to put under the grate to help ignite the wood above.

In choosing a floor plan in this post World War II suburb, I knew my parents had sacrificed the third bedroom for the larger living room with fireplace. Considering they had a boy and a girl who would soon outgrow sharing the same bedroom, you can see the importance they placed on that.

It might have been the wisest choice. Through the fifties and sixties and into the seventies that fireplace warmed us while we read or watched TV, its amber aliveness welcomed relatives and guests and it pitched in for the furnace in a crunch.

I learned the importance of opening the flue before building a fire by smoking up the entire house a few times.

Every Christmas my mom would tuck the red ribbon bow of her pine cone cluster in the same gap in the fireplace fieldstone. I knew the fold-out Hallmark Christmas card train would be on the long mantle to display the greetings that would come in the mail. And the little candle carolers and a gum-drop tree from the dime store would be up there as well.

At college in East Lansing I had a house with a fireplace which became a social gathering spot for students in the neighborhood.

When I got my first job, I rented for awhile and always missed the hearth part of making a home. So when I was offered a deal on my first house my first question was “Does it have a fireplace?”

Nevermind that it was Florida. (The air conditioning system could be added later) Yes! It had a fireplace. Sold. The only thing to do before moving in was have the white paint sandblasted off the fireplace bricks.

My memories of that fireplace include two glasses of wine and conversation that lasted well into the morning.

Apartment hunting in Savannah, Georgia, was a dreary until I was shown the garden-level two-bedroom on Monterrey Square. The landlady talked up the picturesque view and the history of the square, which included the mansion you could see to the left, already scene of the murder that would be depicted in the bestseller “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.” But all I needed to see was the fireplace. It was small with no mantle, just a curved black marble framed opening.

Does it work?” I asked.

“Sure,” she said. “But you have to sweep the ashes out – there’s no chute.”

In Livonia, the ashes dropped to the incinerator in the basement, but this was a 100-year-old townhouse. I didn’t mind. Eye level out the front windows were the feet of passersby and the wheels of tour buses. I preferred to watch the logs flame-dance in purple, orange, yellow and blue. That fireplace assuaged the lonely hours between work and sleep.

A baby son and a new life took me to North Carolina and the fireplace that came with the house in the Blue Ridge foothills was necessary for Santa to make his stop. It also roasted marshmallows at Halloween parties and – history repeats – helped us survive a year of pesky furnace woes.

When we decided to return to our home state of Michigan in 1995, we first rented an old Victorian home with bay windows and – of course – a fireplace. It served us well, but when the time came to buy a home there was nothing available with a fireplace in my price range in the small town of St. Ignace.

There was a cute 2-bedroom that had everything but.

Then someone leaned into my ear, and, in the manner of the man who whispered “plastic” to Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate, said "Vermont Castings."

I bought the fireplaceless house with the pitched roof. From the loft bedroom you could see Lake Huron. Undulating water has somewhat the same effect – waves and fire both roar in strength and then ebb – like life.

After the closing, I headed south across the Mackinac Bridge to the fireplace shop in Cheboygan. I picked out a beige, enameled Vermont Castings wood stove with a glass door front, top lid for loading while burning, and mitten-warmer sides. I chose a gray stone base and black chimney pipe. The pipe would extend the full height of the 2-story living room, take a dramatic jog to avoid the central beam and go out above the roof. All this for $4,200. I didn’t hesitate.

Which brings us back to the man on the icy roof. He survived. We had a fireplace in time for Santa.

The night my 7 year-old and I strung some holiday lights around the porch railing we made a snowman, frolicked in the snow, and studied the brilliant constellations visible on a northern Michigan night.

Then, after midnight, we stomped off the snow, chucked the boots, and started a log. When the fire flared we settled on a sheepskin rug to real The Railway Children.

Night after night that winter we read in front of that glowing, glossy robot with the very tall, crimped stove pipe hat.

Will my son remember me chopping the icy logs free on the porch or lighting the kindling as I remember my mother rolling newspaper logs and wielding the poker under the grate? And know that “come by the fire” means “I love you.”

Pakistan's Nuke Submarine Threat Credible

By Diane Petryk-Bloom

The cold white illumination of the computer screen was the only light in the bedroom.

It overlooked our bed like a wide-mouthed monster that never slept.

It was the 3 a.m in New York. My husband clicked open his email inbox.

“Here it is,” he said.

I had long gone to sleep, but not really. I got up on my knees behind him and put my chin on his left shoulder as he clicked open the email he had been waiting for.

Former top CIA agent Robert D. Steele had responded in just four words:

“Your scenario is credible.”

I know emails don’t flash. But whenever I remember that moment I see the words flashing in my mind.

There would be no more sleep that night.

My husband, Howard Kenneth Bloom, author of The Lucifer Principle, is a mass behavior scientist, a scholar of the history of Islam, as well as a human encyclopedia of history and science. Earlier, he had been researching for his upcoming appearance on Coast to Coast AM, a radio talk show. He is often invited on the show to talk about current events. A 9-11 anniversary was at hand. The question was – what could happen next?

Pakistan was a likely place for him to start, because Pakistan, he says, has one of the most violently fundamentalist and anti-American populations among the world’s 57 Islamic states. Many of those hate us a lot, so that’s saying something, he told me.

Pakistan sucks you into a vortex of political and religious issues that branch offin endless threads: Osama Bin Laden in the hills, military dictator Pervez Musharaff holding on against great odds, fundamentalist agitation, religious vigilantes, the “Islamic” bomb…

Among these, Howard discovered Pakistan’s Agosta 90-B submarines.

You probably haven’t heard about those. For some reason, mainstream media just doesn’t want to report about them. But here’s what you should know:

These are state of the art stealth subs that pose a challenge even to our Navy’s sophisticated tracking equipment.

• Each can carry 16 Harpoon Stand-Off Land Attack cruise missiles
• Those are nuclear missiles
• Since Pakistan tested its first nuclear bomb in 1998, every nuclear device it has made has been a missile warhead.
• The Agosta 90-Bs have a range of 12,000 miles

That means they could slink into Chesapeake Bay or up the Hudson River undetected.

Pakistan has these powerful subs courtesy of our wise friends, the French. Their government-owned shipbuilder, DCN, which builds France’s naval vessels, helped the Pakistanis build not only the subs, but a shipyard that can make more.

“According to the Pakistani Navy Captain Iftikhar Riaz Qureshi, who commanded both of these subs in their test phases,” Howard wrote, “Pakistan acquired its Agosta 90Bs to provide itself with ‘second strike nuclear capability.’ Since Pakistan tested its first nuclear bomb in 1998, every nuclear device it's made has been a missile warhead. Qureshi's words imply that from day one, Pakistan's intention has been to tip these missiles with atomic warheads.

After a 12,000 mile journey, these subs, according to Defence Journal, could unleash their missiles on New York and Washington, and still be able to take refuge in mid-ocean, lay low and threaten other world capitals.

“The United States operates a network of hydrophones scattered all over the Atlantic and Pacific seabed. We are listening for subs like these,” Howard posted on his website, Howardbloom.net, “but we may not be able to hear them. The Pakistani subs use a methanol-and-liquid-oxygen engine bedded on a suspension system that quiets its purr to a whisper. We may not be able to detect their silent running beneath the sounds of zebrafish fanning their tails.”

Steele confirmed Howard’s fears that we’d need intuition like The Hunt for Red October’s fictional heroes – every time out.

Who is Robert D. Steele? After a distinguished career a a CIA operative, including three dangerous tours of duty as a clandestine officer under deep cover, Steele spent seven years training intelligence professionals from 40 nations and consulted directly with 18 nations. He served in three of the four Directorates of the Central Intelligence Agency, helped program for overhead imagery satellites and managed an offensive national-level counter intelligence program. Steele was responsible for creating the newest US national intelligence production facility, the US Marine Corps Intelligence Center. He’s also an Amazon.com top reviewer of books on national defense.

This is the scenario Howard envisioned and sent to Steele:

Pakistan’s military dictator, Pervez Musharaff, will be killed or deposed (Musharaff is either a genuine ally of United States or pretending to be, but, either way, he has been target of at least five assassination attempts.)

Osama Bin Laden or his successor or followers will take power in Pakistan.

Then, Islamic extremists will have control of the country and its military hardware – including the Agosta B’s.

They unleash them on New York and Washington.

The nuclear devastation is enough to bring other nations to their knees.

Before long, your daughter and mine wear headscarves and live under Sharia, the religious law of the Muslim faith. Equal rights for women are no more.

Western men don’t have it much better. Western freedoms are history.

What facts add crcdibilty to this scenario:

*From 1979 to 1995, Pakistan was the headquarters for a group of ‘Afghan freedom fighters’ who were not Afghans at all. They were an international army paid for by the US, Saudi Arabia, and China, armed by the CIA, and trained, in part, by China's Peoples Liberation Army. We trained an army of 50,000 men from 30 nations to bring down the Soviet Union's most advanced tanks, jets, and helicopters. Why? Our mutual goal was to embarrass a common enemy--the Russians. Chief among the recruits to our proxy Jihad were Osama bin Laden and the founding members of Al Qaeda.

*Pakistan is the nation whose citizens rioted in the streets in 1989 over the title of a novel they didn't like--The Satanic Verses. It was Pakistan's street activists who forced the Ayatollah Khomeini to issue a Fatwa offering five million dollars to the Moslem who killed Salman Rushdie. The Pakistanis were more extreme than the most extremist Islamic leader of his day. And that was fifteen years ago! Since then anti-Americanism and anti-Westernism has grown.

*Pakistan is also the nation that educated a generation of Afghan refugees who later went home to take over their country in the name of Islamic purity and justice. We know those refugees as the Taleban.

*Today Osama bin Laden is one of Pakistan's two biggest pop-culture heroes. The other is "The Father of the Islamic Bomb" Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan. Khan and Osama have reportedly met in Afghanistan. Khan is the weapons expert. Osama is the weapons user.

*Many a Pakistani militant fundamentalist cell identifies itself as an Osama ally. One of the strongest among these Osama-loyalists is arguably Pakistan's most popular leader, Fazlur Rahman Khalil, the man who told 60 Minutes that: ‘God has ordered us to build nuclear weapons.’

According to Syed Adeeb, head of Information Times, a militant Pakistani press outlet based in the National Press Building in Washington DC, "an Urdu-language letter written by Pakistan Army officers on a Pakistan Army letterhead and sent to many members of the Pakistan Parliament" calls, "'Pervez Musharaff and his clique…a band of thieves and looters…imposed on this nation'" by the United States.

It looks like only this embattled head of state stands between Osama and the Islamic submarines, between Osama and the cruise missiles the subs can carry, and the 40 or more nuclear warheads Pakistan has built since it exploded the first Islamic atomic bomb.

And what bin Laden, in a January 2004 speech broadcast on Al Jazeera, called, "a surprising blow…one that…due to its magnitude…will change the international balances of powers…."

“Here's what I strongly suspect is Osama's dream endgame,” Howard told Steele : “Nuke a few key cities in the United States. Blind and devastate the Great Satan. Then watch while France, Germany, Italy, and England capitulate. Capitulate to what? To Osama's dream, his passion, his vision of truth and freedom--to a global Islamic caliphate.”

“Your scenario is credible.”

It didn’t flash, but it does.

###

Halifax Explosion 90 Years Ago Still Teaches

Ninety years ago today, a blast that set off 400,000 tons of TNT -- the strongest explosion known until the atomic bomb -- obliterated Halifax Harbor in Nova Scotia. It happened because a World War I French munitions ship collided with a Norwegian vessel in a waterway known as The Narrows. It was an accident, but 2,000 people died and about 9,000 were maimed. The accident taught the Red Cross and other emergency workers a lot about dealing with major catastrophe. This article first appeared in The Press Republican in Plattsburgh, New York.

Horrendous Tragedy Met With Quiet Heroism

At 9:05 a.m. December 6, 1917. Dishes rattle in the cupboards of the MacDougall home in Nova Scotia. Family members don’t know it yet, but the tremors are from a blast a hundred miles away in Halifax. An accident has set off 400,000 pounds of TNT fueled by other volatile substances. In time, it would be known as the most powerful man-made explosion before the nuclear age. Its devastation perhaps exceeds that of more famous civic calamities — the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake or Great Chicago Fire of 1871 — with more than 2,000 fatalities, 9,000 maimed and wounded and two square kilometers of buildings leveled. The MacDougalls, who one day became the grandparents of Jeanie Roberts, an upstate New York Red Cross director, find telegraph and telephone communication severed. Train service, too, is canceled, but William MacDougall, a crane operator for Canadian National Railroad, is asked to report to work. He is issued two bottles of brandy to help him cope with what he is about to see ...

It was an accident linked to a war on another continent. A loaded French munitions ship collided with a Norwegian vessel setting off for New York to pick up World War I relief supplies.
At 7:30 a.m. on a cold, clear December morning, the French ship Mont Blanc crept into Halifax’s Bedford Basin to wait for her convoy. To do so, it had to pass through a tight neck of water between Halifax and Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, known as The Narrows. The relief ship Imo sailed out of the harbor at a fast clip.
Although proceeding slowly, the Mont Blanc had not been flying a regulation red warning flag indicating her dangerous cargo. The ships’ crews failed to understand each other’s signals and intents several times. Finally, the Imo’s panic reversal of engines caused its bow to swing right and strike the Mont Blanc.
The collision cut a hole in the ship’s side, missing the TNT, but hitting picric acid stored directly beneath drums of benzol. Sparks from the collision started a fire.
In addition to the 200 tons of TNT, the ship carried 2,300 tons of wet and dry picric acid, 10 tons of gun cotton and benzol that weighed in at 35 tons, an extraordinary explosive cocktail.
Well aware of the potential of its ship’s cargo, the crew of the Mont Blanc immediately abandoned ship. As they rowed toward Dartmouth in lifeboats they waved frantically and screamed warnings toward those on shore. They were not understood.
One woman looking out on the bay with her baby in her arms was astonished when one of the sailors clambered up the shoreline hill, grabbed her child and ran for the bushes. His action probably saved their lives.
Propelled toward Halifax by the impact of the collision, the ship drifted to rest at busy Pier 6. Its flames grew. People, including many children on their way to school, continued to come down to the pier to watch. Others stood at the windows of their homes overlooking the bay.
The Halifax Fire Department responded quickly, but was just positioning an engine at a hydrant when the Mont Blanc disintegrated in a blinding white flash. It was 9:05 a.m.
Three hundred twenty five acres of the city’s industrial north end was laid waste. More than 1,900 people died instantly. Among the 9,000 or so injured, eye damage was horrifyingly widespread. Shattering glass — hardly a pane remained intact anywhere in Halifax or Dartmouth — pierced and cut with astonishing severity. Two hundred fifty eyes were so damaged they would need to be removed. Thirty seven people were left completely blind. Twenty-five limbs had to be amputatedand bewilderment prevailed in the city as survivors began to try to cope in the aftermath. Parents and children were separated.
According to the Nova Scotia Museum in Halifax, 1,600 homes were destroyed and 6,000 people left without shelter.
Since the area used wood and coal as heat, many furnaces continued to burn after homes were gone.
Oily soot got into wounds.
There were rows and rows of babies in emergency shelters that nobody claimed.
And the next day, 16 inches of snow came down on the devastation.
For Jeanie Roberts of Plattsburgh, New York, a native of Halifax, the World War I-era tragedy has both a personal and professional connection.
She is proud to know that her grandfather MacDougall helped with the relief effort. He never talked about it, but she knows the gentle man who used to give her great big peppermints on Sunday and fill a well in her porridge with molasses, did his part with quiet dedication.
As a crane operator, he very likely helped in excavations that turned up some grisly sights.
His daughter, Roberts’s Aunt Sheila, believes the experience traumatized him, but, like those who never talk about their combat duty, he didn’t come home with the gory details.
Stories of the explosion were inevitable, however, as Roberts grew up.
Her friend, Ann, told of her grandmother, only 8 or 9 at the time of the explosion. She was watching from her home’s French doors and windows overlooking Bedford Basin. Part of the hull of the exploding ship hit the front of her house, breaking all the glass. Like so many, she lost an eye.
***
As executive director of the North Country Chapter of the American Red Cross, Roberts has studied how the community administered disaster relief and how Halifax coped.
The disaster gave rise to triage, the method of sorting victims by the intensity of their medical need.
***
Word of the explosion reached Boston the same morning. By nightfall, a train loaded with relief supplies, medical personnel and members of the city’s Public Safety Committee, left for Halifax.
The American Red Cross pitched in with it’s first international relief effort, Roberts said. It sent a train-load of first-aid supplies and living necessities.
Help poured in from all over the world.
Nearby areas in Nova Scotia responded with astonishing speed. When they heard of overcrowded hospitals and shelter, they opened all possible buildings to the disaster refugees. Some were put on trains to other cities.
"Doctors and nurses worked tirelessly into the night for days and days," Roberts said.
The MacDougall family lived in Stellarton, where Roberts’s father, aunts and an uncle lived as children. Aunt Shelia grew up to be a nurse, Roberts said, and told her she remembers the first time she gave an antibiotic — many years after the tragedy.
"I realized then why so many people died," Roberts said. “They didn’t have drugs to fight infection.”
Within two months, 1,500 victims had been buried, many unidentified. Other victims were discovered in the spring, when excavation was easier.
Some 3,000 homes were repaired in the first seven weeks. In the following cold month of January, the construction of temporary apartments went up at the rate of one every hour. A relief committee provided clothing, money and furniture, and it continued in existence for nearly 59 years.
The Canadian government sent $18 million immediately; Britain contributed $5 million.
But that Massachusetts relief train, with its unstinting volunteers — and $750,000 in donated money and goods — remains a generosity that still touches the hearts of Halifax residents, survivors and their children and grandchildren.
Each Christmas, a huge tree glitters in Boston’s Prudential Plaza — a gift from the people of Halifax.
sees her native city, a city she lived in for 20 years, as setting a brave example of human tenacity. It rebuilt. It recovered. And it changed.
The community came together — in much the same way Plattsburgh reacted during a recent Ice Storm; the way New York City pulled together after 9/11. “Positive things come from that,” she said. “It changes the way you move forward."
In rebuilding 328 houses closest to the explosion, Halifax designed forward-thinking, living space.
The houses were built from cement blocks known as hydrostones and had gardens with trees in front and modern plumbing and electricity. The area, known as the Hydrostone, is considered one of the more attractive and desirable residential areas in the city. There is a lesson here, Roberts says.
The quality of life we have here is not an accident. It’s something we all work at. Fifty years from now, the quality of life will be what we made it today."
***
In 1951, William MacDougall died. Aunt Sheila found the two bottles of brandy, dated 1917, in the back of his closet. He never opened them.
###

Heil Humor

Comedy expresses "a stubborn refusal
to give tragedy…the final say.” (1)

By Diane Petryk-Bloom

The morning after Halloween every television network except Al Jazeera had a news crew either staked out on my stoop or calling the house.

By noon, they had all congregated outside my son’s high school, Leon M. Goldstein in Sheepshead Bay.

The news, that would be played on top of John Kerry’s gaff about poor study habits being the fast track to Iraq, was my son’s Halloween costume of the previous day.

Months earlier, in much the same way Charlie Chaplin noticed in 1937 that, with his little mustache, he could play Hitler, my son, Walter Petryk, 16, looked as his mustache and decided, with a little trimming, he could play both.

In the weeks before Halloween, he assiduously planned for the dual role.
Why? Creating a nifty costume has been a competitive sport for us since Walter’s first Halloweens in western North Carolina, near the Pisgah National Forest, in a county appropriately named Transylvania. Bearing the name that was also that of Dracula’s stomping grounds gave the county impetus to do Halloween in grand style and so it did. It’s a city-wide festival in Brevard, the county seat, including a downtown parade and costume competition for the kids and families.

At age 3, Walter won a ribbon in the “TV or storybook character” category for his Davy Crockett outfit and the next year took a prize for his Zorro. The year a little combat soldier edged out his Mr. Spock was seriously upsetting – to us both. I had almost had to go to outer space to find those ears!

His 5th grade Sherlock Holmes developed as serendipitously as the others. Costumes always suggested themselves by what we had on hand or stumbled upon. Then we sought out the iconic elements. It was the fringed shirt my mother made out of a burlap bag that my brother wore in 1955, billowing out of a trunk, that suggested a new age Davy. It set us off on a hunt for the coonskin cap. Zorro’s hat appeared in a garage sale and then we looked for a black cape, black mask and plastic sword. The “Don Diego” shirt from a western wear store made it special.

Likewise, the Sherlock Holmesian deerstalker cap we found at a thrift shop set us off on a hunt for the characteristic drop-step pipe. We had a seamstress make the cape out of an old houndstooth-pattern wrap skirt I happened to have.

Even that off-the-rack Spiderman the next year needed web-shooters, red gloves and matching shoes with web lines carefully applied.

In this respect, “Hitler” was no different. Once you get three iconic elements, you’re recognizable. With Hitler, it’s obviously the toothbrush mustache, swastika armband and an Iron Cross medal. Believe it or not, you only need to Google “swastika arm band” and you find this store in Wisconsin…. Add jodpurs, belt and boots. I spent the Saturday before Halloween mixing fabric dye and testing swatches preparing to turn an old beige coat into what we thought approximated Hitler’s mustard-colored blazer, but it really wasn’t essential to the costume.

Of course we knew it was a leap from fictional heroes to world-class, villain out of history. When my son announced his intention, my first response was, flat-out, “no.”

My husband said “Oi.”

We knew it was possible someone would jump to the mistaken conclusion that the costume was worn out of adoration rather than mock-the-villian intent, but we decided to allow Walter his artistic freedom. As my son explained to the news media at the time, he was influenced by Mel Brooks not Mein Kampf.

On Halloween he traveled to school in bowler hat, black coat and carried a cane, as Charlie Chaplin. The Hitler costume was never intended for the world at large. It was for his friends within the somewhat cloistered environment of his school. When he got there, he pealed off Chaplin and unveiled Hitler. His friends were waiting for him, for they knew what he had planned. They all thought it turned out great and a female friend was so delighted, he said, she hugged him. A Jewish girl.

At the school he would have been seen by a few hundred students at most and caused little stir, not worldwide headlines, probably, if Marilyn Horan, his English teacher 2nd hour, had not seen fit to have him removed from her class.

It is my understanding the school may take steps if they have palpable evidence someone’s attire might cause a disturbance. But the first hour of the day had passed with no sign of disturbance. Horan, apparently, acted out of personal prejudice rather than any such concern. Dean Paul Puglia told Walter that Horan said the costume made her sick to her stomach. This is not evidence of pending melee in the halls.

Freedom of expression as we know it in America, gives us a right to express ourselves in ways that may revolt others. It wouldn’t be much good if it didn’t. What’s revolting to someone one day – gays out of the closet, say – can become socially acceptable in short order. Or, foreign concepts, like the desirability of cooking dogs or female genital mutilation, will remain taboo. Society decides – but only after it hears the debate.

Some might say we heard more than enough of Hitler by 1945. But when talk is taboo, myth tends to overtake reality. In Germany, the post-war perception grew that Hitler was a god-like genius. About ten years ago a Turkish immigrant named Serdar Somuncu burst that myth by performing “Hitler.” Some thought he was inconceivably offensive and immoral. But it is pretty well-established now that his performances have torn apart the erroneous image of Hitler that had made him up to be something he wasn’t.

Somuncu will read from Mein Kampf, which is still banned in Germany, and some of the passages, he says, “are so weird, so stupid, that simply reading them straight will burst audiences into prolonged laughter.

“Here was a book that was supposed to be so evil, so seductive, yet it was ridiculous.”
By showing up the banality of Hitler and the absurdity of his writing style, Somuncu put post-war healing in fast forward for Germany and not only that. He has dialogued with those young Germans who have far-right, neo-Nazi tendencies. Some of them have learned to laugh at themselves. One told him to call his next show “Hitler Kebab” and he did.

Here, The New York Post reported on our student Hitler getting “das boot” on its front page the next morning and then everybody wanted a piece of the story.

It became a textbook case of American pack journalism. Not only ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, and Channel 11, but Inside Edition and The O’Reilly Factor followed the Post. The Associated Press sent the story around the world and it appeared from the LA Times to the Jerusalem Post. The neighborhood newspapers jumped on the bandwagon as well.

Not even Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, could have done a better job than the herd mentality here-- the very point I tried to make on Bill O’Reilly’s program. Was there really anything important to report in this incident, or was it a case of media wallowing in its own reflection? Hitler didn’t kill people first hand – he whipped up mass emotion so other people killed people for him.

Mass emotion was being whipped up here to protest something that didn’t need to be protested – a kid in a Halloween costume. Offensive to some, maybe. A local story, maybe. But how do you balance one 16-year-old in a Hitler costume on Halloween, with Iran’s President Mahmoud Amadinejad stating his very real desire to lob a nuke into Tel Aviv? Or with Al Qaeda’s rising star Abu Hamza Al-Muhajir’s expressing thirst for much more American blood? In the costume one may find a sorrowful echo of a past holocaust; the others blare out determination to surpass it with a ghastliness yet unseen.

Walter’s object was to create a good costume and lampoon that ridiculous, perverted little man.

The Post photographer asked Walter to pose and act out expressions. They were theatrical, in no way reflecting his own personality or beliefs. Of course, the Post published the most inflammatory looking expression on their front page. Aren’t people sophisticated enough to know that?

They also had to search hard for the “angry” students and then wrote headlines that led the uncritical reader to believe there was a whole school up in arms. No reporter tried to quantify the “anger” or objectors. How many students were angry versus how many students though it was funny or just had no problem with it? My guess is it was 98 percent of the student body approved or had no problem with the costume and maybe 2 percent objected. I may be wrong, but if so, show me some numbers.

Then remember, our heritage is to fight for a person’s right of expression even if we deplore what they say. In this case, wear. For that reason, Joel Levy of the New York office of the Anti-Defamation League, was 180 degrees wrong when he said Walter’s costume was “anti the values of Western democracy” (as he was quoted in the Courier newspapers). It is precisely the values of Western democracy that allow speech and demonstration, and art, whatever anybody thinks about their offensive or erroneous nature.

Phillipa Strum explains these values in her brilliant book, When the Nazis Came to Skokie. You would think Levy would have read that one.

As this goes to press, Bangladesh journalist Salah Choudhury is on trial for his life. His “crime” is for suggesting that Jews and Christians might not be “pigs” and “monkeys” after all. So when TV reporter Ellen Marks asked me how I felt, after passerby Michael Loweth angrily chided my son for his choice of costume, I said I was delighted. I was delighted that the man could have his say, and my son could stand there and have his, without either of them coming to harm. That’s the wisdom of the West.

Of course Hitler’s image still evokes strong emotion. It should. But it’s going to be inescapable – maybe forever. On November 18 my son and I went to a performance of the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater in Manhattan. The Sky Maul sketch involved a catalog of imaginary products. The Hitler nightlight-that-turns-into-a-werewolf for children’s rooms was one of them.

Being mocked, historians write, is one thing Hitler feared most. He had a horror of being laughed at and viciously punished those who did. Between 1933 and 1945, five thousand death sentences were handed down by his “People’s Court” for treason, a large number of them for anti-Nazi humor, according to scholar John Morreall.

Maybe that’s why the 1960s sit-com Hogan’s Heroes, set in a Nazi prisoner of war camp, was acceptable, and why we laughed at it. Because they made the bumbling Colonel Klink (portrayed by Jewish actor Werner Klemperer) and the goofy Sergeant Schultz into buffoons. This fiction does not take away from the horrors that took place. But it puts the enemy in their place. It tells them we know they’re bumblers and we defeated them and we can do it again.

Sixty-six years ago fans mobbed Charlie Chaplin at the premier of The Great Dictator in Manhattan, a movie he had to fight to get made. It was a box office smash. “I wanted to ridicule their mystic bilge about a pure-blooded race,” he said.

May Hitler ever remain an icon of evil against which we can direct humorous pot shots. If he is surpassed, it may be that western civilization’s vigilance was far too distracted by trivialities.
On the Monday after Halloween, the phone rang at our house – again. This time it wasn’t another network news team or talk show recruiter. The voice was far more sinister.
Throaty and threatening, the caller elongated his words: “H e l l o…. this is Dr. Josef Mengele…”
I paused.

“Oh, Hi Bruce,” I said after a second, recognizing even the disguised voice of my husband’s childhood friend, Bruce Volat, now of Silver Springs, MD. Bruce used to beat up on my husband when they were little boys growing up on a middle class block in Buffalo, New York. A little later, Bruce became his mensch.

“I saw you on TV,” he said, referring to my appearance on the O’Reilly Factor with Walter. “Some people can’t take a joke.”

What, I wondered later, separates Bruce, who would playfully imitate Auschwitz’ Angel of Death – the evil Dr. Mengele who carried out hideous experiments on concentration camp prisoners -- and those who yelled insults, spouted epithets, and uttered denunciations at a kid in a Halloween costume? What separates Walter’s classmates, who laughed and enjoyed the artistry of the costume, the vast majority of them, and the Goldstein’s PTA president, Penny Berman, who vowed to lead a march to denounce him? (It was later changed to a march of “respect and tolerance” when cooler heads prevailed).

What separates them isn’t having personally experienced a tragedy linked to the Nazis or not. My husband’s family lost a hundred members or more in the Holocaust. Bruce’s relatives did, too. One of our relatives lost all her family and survived only because she was hidden in a Catholic home.

It isn’t knowledge of history, either. These kids studied World War II in 10th grade. Walter and I made a trip to England the following summer and toured Winston Churchill’s underground Cabinet War Rooms in London and he absorbed everything about Britain during the Blitz. But that also included the British sense of humor.

In one of my favorite movies of all time – Pimpernel Smith – which was made during World War II – a Nazi General, a Reichminister, is depicted pooring over a book. “Know your enemy,” he tells an underling. “I am told the English have a secret weapon, their sense of humor, and I am determined to find out all about it.” He then reads passages from P.G. Wodehouse, Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll and the humor Magazine Punch and declares them all “painful rubbish.”

“They have no sense of humor,” he says. He looks forward to the day he is put in charge of German-occupied London, when, he says, “he will see to it there is no talk of sense of humor.”

Now that’s funny. But the Reichminister would never get it. There is, writes Josh Schonwald in his essay on Somuncu, a tradition for Germans to disdain humor in response to their history.

For the British, the ancient Greek and Shakespearian humor legacy provides a perspective on the real world. No subject was off-limits, even the gods.

“In the Anglo tradition, later embraced by the Americans,” Schonwald writes, “comedy, even in the 1700s, was irreverent, zany, a source of anxiety relief.” German humor tended to ridicule the disturber of social order, not embrace the agitator seeking relief.

Even in Dachau, a play satirizing the Nazis was performed for six weeks in 1943, with SS Officers as front row guests. A camp survivor, wrote Morreall, said many prisoners who laughed with a full heart never lived to see freedom again. But the actors gave them strength to endure what they had to endure while they lived.

In short, three things separate those who can laugh at a Hitler costume and those who are insulted, offended, and say they are hurt:

The ability to separate fiction and reality, the ability to maintain sense of proportion; and an understanding of western values of free speech and artistic expression.

Surprisingly, American citizens often can’t separate their TV characters from reality. They ask actors who play doctors to diagnose their medical ills. Klemperer (Col. Klink) was once dis-invited to lead a parade in California after locals objected to a “Nazi” taking part. Realty was, his family had to flee the Nazis.

Likewise, a Halloween costume is not a reality. It espouses no views. If it did, we wouldn’t allow those staples of the holiday, witches and devils, to trick or treat at our doorsteps. Likewise, monsters with rats crawling out of their bloody eyesockets or grim reapers. But these are fictional , you say? Well check your Bible or Torah or Koran. Do they not indicate the Devil or Satan is real? Those who believe such teachings, they must be offended.

At a Tennessee High School a couple years ago, a student who came dressed as Jesus was ejected while the Hitler and Satan-attired were virtually ignored. Jesus was “blasphemy,” but Hitler was just another costume there. Are we going to start drawing up lists of banned costumes? If Hitler is out, what about Osama Bin Laden? There was at least one of him in my neighborhood this year. The little suicide bomber outfits okay? While we’re at it, I really don’t approve of Marie Antoinette… Whoa.

Clowns and Princesses not withstanding, what is the primary adjective for Halloween? It’s “scary” isn’t it? Nothing about dressing as a witch or devil or any other goblin is a testament to adoration of that goblin, is it? A child does not sign a paper somewhere saying: “I am Susie Jones and I approve of this character.”

Secondly, a good sense of proportion wouldn’t allow a Halloween matter to trump urgent geopolitical issues, where missteps could cost the lives of millions. My husband, Howard Bloom, tried to approach PTA leader Berman, both by email and at the march, about channeling her energies and those of her constituents, toward stopping the holocaust Amadinejad and his compatriots have planned. She preferred jousting with phantoms and thus gave students a lesson in fiddling while Rome burns.

Her respect was absent, her tolerance forced upon her. Worst of all, she showed disdain for one of our most cherished rights -- free speech.

The third thing that separates those who could laugh and those who couldn’t is the belief in -- and understanding of -- free speech. If you waiver on the Hitler costume, I submit that the day someone doesn’t have the right to wear that get-up is the day you won’t be able to go to the church of your choice or not go; the day you won’t be able to read what you want, watch what you want, study what you want, or report on your research if you do. Not unless it’s politically correct. The day my son doesn’t have the right to wear a Hitler costume is the day you take the first steps toward creating a new facist state.

It may be ironic, but his right to dress up as Hitler helps insure there never will be another Hitler – here anyway.

Why shouldn’t people be protected from insult, offense, blasphemy, what-ever speech they don’t like? Because, as people like Voltaire and Thomas Jefferson have said in words similar, “In a free marketplace of ideas, the truth will win out.” That means, if someone speaks for Nazism, the people to whom it is repugnant can also speak. People can choose and will usually opt for justice and good sense, but only if they can hear all the debate.

My flipside of the Voltaire/Jefferson idea is: “In a closed market of ideas, false notions stick forever.” Stop and think of what would happen to science if researchers and thinkers were not allowed to discuss their ideas and theories without fear. Legitimate l science would come to a stop.

So there are those who laugh at a mock Hitler and those who don’t. Each has his right to his or her attitude. But the laughers have the advantage. Here’s why:

First, humor can focus attention on what is wrong. As it did during the dark days of the Holocaust, Morreall points out, humor can create solidarity among those fighting oppression. And it can help the oppressed get through their trials without going insane.

Despite the efforts of rare Islamic comedians like Shazia Mirza, we know Muslims don’t laugh much. They are counting on our short-range thinking, our scruples and our freedoms to defeat us. But we have that secret weapon the Reichminister in Pimpernel Smith couldn’t understand: laughter. Laughter, even in the face of terror and gore. It really bugs them.

The essence of all humor appears to be incongruity. To find something funny is to spot the incongruity, as Morreall explains in his essay “Humor in the Holocaust: Its critical, Cohesive and Coping Functions,” 1997.

“Jokes, for example,” he says, “typically lead our minds along path A, and then at the punch line, send them off onto path B. Our train of thought is derailed, and if we enjoy the mental jolt, we laugh.”

My son’s “Hitler” was very incongruous in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood, at a school named after a Jewish educator. And as we saw, not everyone enjoys incongruity.

“Enjoying incongruity rather than reacting with fear, anger, sadness, or other negative emotions, requires a certain playfulness and motional disengagement, Morreall writes.

“To see humor in situations, especially our own problems, we have to adopt a higher, more rational perspective. Humans are the only species that laughs because we are the only animals whose minds can rise above the here and now…”
Walter’s friends at Leon M. Goldstein are very smart kids, indeed.
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(footnote for opening quote:)
M. Conrad Hyers, “The Dialectic of the Sacred and the Comic,” in M. Conrad Hyers, ed., Holy Laughter: Essays on Religion in the Comic Perspective (New York: Seabury Press, 1969), p. 232.