Out of Reach

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Last weekend I had hoped to see the movie Creation: The True Story of Charles Darwin. This is a movie that has had trouble in the United States since distribution companies felt it would be too controversial for American audiences. Believing that evolution is still a taboo topic in the most “advanced” nation on the planet is a peculiar conundrum. Why are we so sensitive concerning our natural pedigree?

Primatologists are constantly discovering new and unexpected connections between the great apes and homo sapiens. We share biological, and as we are increasingly aware, cerebral traits. Empathy and xenophobia, two features once believed unique to humans, are in evidence among our great ape cousins. We are on a continuum rather than a segmented train.

Bearing these provocative thoughts in mind, I was ready to head out to the theater, even if I had to go alone, to see the story of Darwin. I’ve read enough biographies to know there are some heart-rending moments in the story, situations that I would not be able to face – but it is a story of truth. It is ironic that we sometimes fear the truth, since religion is our effort to find exactly that. So, resolve firmly in hand, I searched for New Jersey theaters showing the film. None. The nearest show was in Midtown Manhattan. Add a twenty-dollar train ticket to the cost of admission, and to an underemployed academic the price was out of reach. Perhaps some day the movie will become available for general public consumption. Until it does, however, I’ll just have to lament my frustration to a local empathetic ape.

A scene from the movie, so I'm told

Inter-species Prognostication

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Groundhog Day is a holiday easily forgotten by all but Bill Murray fans and residents of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. The day, however, has a role deep in European folk religion that was reflected in the “cross-quarter days.” From ancient times, the four days of the year that fall precisely between the solstices and equinoxes were known as cross-quarter days, based on the day of the month that rent was due in England (“quarter days”). The Celts recognized this cross-quarter day in early February as Imbolc (later Christianized as Candlemas). Part of the folk religion held that animals had special powers on cross-quarter days, and that fair weather on Imbolc meant that more wintry weather was on the way.

In America, where Groundhog Day has its original burrow, the tradition began among German immigrants. The first historical reference to Groundhog Day was made in 1841 in Morgantown, Pennsylvania. By 1886 Punxsutawney had its groundhog Phil and the tradition has continued ever since.

Although it is a lighthearted holiday, I always tell my Hebrew Prophets class (which begins near Groundhog Day) that this is a form of socially accepted prognostication. Few believe that a marmot can predict the weather, but we like to believe that winter is on its way out when the cold starts to feel old and stubborn and we are ready for a few sunny days. The old tradition states that if Phil doesn’t see his shadow he won’t dash fearfully into his den and spring is on its way. Fact is, spring falls six weeks from Groundhog Day, so no matter what the rodent says, spring is on its way. Ancient religions always stress the hope that nature will continue as it has in the past and that spring will follow winter as it should. It is nevertheless a fun day to watch the largest member of the squirrel family amble out of his heated burrow, no doubt confused by all the furless bipeds standing around with cameras, and play the prophet for his fifteen minutes of national fame.

The world's hairiest prophet?

Missing Links

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Dinosaurs hold a fascination like few other creatures. Perhaps it is because of their exotic and tragic rise to dominance and their meteoric plummet to obscurity. Maybe it is because of their impossibly creative adaptations to their environment leading to frills, fans, and pointy bits in unexpected places. It might even be that they reveal our own future to us. Whatever the reason, dinosaurs still rule.

In the news yesterday, a man was arrested for stealing a dinosaur. Not a Jurassic Park living model, but a fossil excavated from private land in Montana. A few years back I took my family on a dinosaur-based trip to the west. Trundling across the endlessly flat eastern half of Wyoming, I insisted that we turn down a rutted and washed out dirt road to an obscure site where dinosaur footprints had recently been discovered. Rolling into Red Gulch (seriously!), we were, surprisingly, not the only people there. Staring down at my feet next to the fossilized prints of some ancient carnivore was like feeling the very pulse of evolution. There was no fear of divine retribution here, just a sense of tangible continuity with a long and very distant relative on the tree of life. Creationists insist that dinosaurs and other creatures were each separately created, fearing, I suppose, an interspecies miscegenation, in keeping with their overall fear of sexuality. I was envisioning myself shaking claws with cousin dilophosaurus.

There be monsters here

Over the years we’ve made many dinosaur trips, stopping at dinosaur museums in North and South Dakota, Montana, and Colorado. Once, at Makoshika State Park in Montana, where you can walk along and see dinosaur fossils in situ, we heard a couple exclaim to the flustered park ranger, “but how can that be when the world is only 6000 years old?” Dinosaurs are symbols. They represent the ultimate in stature and environmental dominance, while at the same time hosting brains that struggled to rival a humble grapefruit. As I read the other, more serious, headlines I realize how much we are like our very distant cousins.

Moby Dickens

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One of the perks, or perhaps afflictions, of not having cable is missing the constant stream of current culture daily rushing by. When I hear others discussing the latest chic program I feel helplessly Bronze Age in the cell phone generation. Occasionally, when visiting family members who can afford to be fully wired, I catch glimpses of what the thousands of networks have on offer. During a visit to my mother’s house last year I caught an episode of Whale Wars. This reality program follows the exploits of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society as crews attempt to foil whalers going about their daily slaughter. The truly disturbing part of the episode I watched was the enmity of the whalers towards these cetacean saviors — let alone their utter disregard for the intelligent creatures in our seas who have the misfortune of not having evolved opposable thumbs. Armed with weapons for disabling, and potentially killing, their species-conscious fellow homo sapiens, the whalers defiantly claim it is their right to destroy these gentle giants.

I confess to having been an advocate of our animal companions since I was a child. I used to contribute regularly to Greenpeace until the non-negotiable bills of adult life routinely began to outstrip my extremely modest income. These great creatures, the largest our planet has ever yielded, are seriously endangered because of the machinations of their only predators — us. Despite the fact that most whale products are not really necessary for economically deprived families, the gruesome harvest continues. Today’s newspaper carried the story of how the Sea Shepherd’s new ship, Ady Gil, was rammed and sheered in two by an angry Japanese whaling crew’s vessel.

In the light of all this, it may seem hypocritical to admit that my favorite novel of all time is Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. I cringe every time I read his descriptions of nineteenth century whaling, but I draw my comfort from knowing that Ahab’s nemesis is not a physical whale but an invisible, silent, immortal deity. As the tortured captain hurls harpoon after harpoon at the implacable god who caused him so much personal harm, no barb can ever kill Moby Dick. The echoes of Melville’s own subterranean cries against cosmic injustice reverberate so clearly through his prose that I simply can not put the book down once I start to read it over again. My heart goes out to the physical whales, however. They are the innocents being hunted by a predator they can’t stop as they are forced by nature to surface for air. In the cetacean version of Moby Dick, which surely must exist in some form of whale consciousness, they too are being relentlessly pursued by unfeeling gods.

Blessed Bovines

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In perhaps one of the greatest ironies of history, throughout the Ancient Near East, cattle were currency. The entire system of fair exchange is based on what humans deem to be valuable — gold is not inherently of more worth than iron. We choose to agree on such value systems and the chosen material becomes a means of trade. In the Bible, before coinage evolved, wealth was measured in animal possession. The rancher with the largest herd was the richest person around. This should be familiar to readers of the Bible, and it is attested in the surrounding cultures of the Near East as well. Even in Egypt, which has the reputation of looking down on cow-pokes (see Genesis 46), bovines were sacred. The apis bull and the usual representation of the goddess Hathor attest to that.

Wikipedia's prized gnu cow

In reading the Iliad over the last few days, the value of cattle among the ancient Europeans also stands out. War prizes from Troy and other conquests are often valued in terms of how many cattle they are worth. Even captured human prizes are symbolically weighed against their worth in moo. The sacrifice that gods appreciate most is that of the beefy variety, although the small-scale farmer may only be able to spare a caprid; when the gods are showing temper, throw another steak on the divine grill and all will be well. It would be difficult to find a stronger religious continuum in antiquity than the pacifying value of bovine sacrifice.

Bovine worship gone crazy

One of the lesser recognized features of our ancient ancestors’ bovine-fixation is found in our own alphabet. Writing began with pictographic symbols representing their referents. Since cattle were so important, their characteristic visage made up a frequently utilized symbol. As cuneiform developed, drawing was replaced by wedge-shaped writing on clay, and the bovine head was represented as a series of wedges and lines. When the inhabitants of ancient Aram (very roughly our Syria) devised their non-cuneiform alphabet, the very first letter was an ox head. The Greeks turned our abstract cow onto its horns and gave the world its alpha, a form that survives in Western scripts today as a Latin capital A. In this industrialized age when, unless they go to the 4-H fair, many people never even see a real cow, every time we tap out messages on our keyboards, we still acknowledge the sacred bovine.

Compassion Divine

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A very generous relative graced this holiday season with the gift of the first season of Star Trek, the original television series. I am not now, nor have I ever been, a “trekkie.” I did, however, enjoy the show as a child and have come to appreciate it even more as an adult. I can’t cite episode and scene like a trekkie can, and a surprise FBI raid would not turn up any pointy Spock ears or a model phaser (although my wife’s cell-phone looks like a sophisticated communicator). As a child the show appealed to my love of science fiction, and as an adult the morality play aspect of the original series fascinates me. Yesterday we watched an early episode where a crew member has his mind boosted by a trip beyond the edge of the galaxy (a la Forbidden Planet). As this character becomes more and more omniscient and powerful, he refers to himself as a god. Captain Kirk, in his attempt to stop his old friend calls out that gods are marked by compassion rather than strength.

I have been rereading Homer’s Iliad in preparation for a course on mythology. Quite apart from the fact that Star Trek borrowed heavily from classical mythological themes, one of the features I have especially picked up on in this reading has been the appeals to the compassion of the gods. As Diomedes, Odysseus, and Ajax (and finally Achilles) battle Hector and Paris both sides call out for the kindness of Zeus, appealing to his compassion (as well as to his baser instincts). Reflecting the ancient perception of the world, Zeus’ responses are fickle.

Biologists have been probing the origins of human sympathies ever since Darwin. Creationists used to argue that compassion, altogether lacking in the animal world, could not have evolved naturally. Many recent studies, however, have demonstrated a naturalistic base for our altruism and compassion. These traits are certainly displayed in a number of animal species, particularly mammals. The ancient Egyptians believed animals to be superior to humans in many respects, lacking our weaknesses and being more adept at survival. It seems that they were right and some of the nobler human traits evolved from our animal milieu. If so, what is divinity beyond the gospel according to Star Trek — compassion to those in need by those who find themselves in positions of power?

Birds of a Fang Suck Together

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It reads like a cross between a Hitchcock movie and a Lovecraft story — paleontologists have unearthed a fanged bird fossil from the Cretaceous Era. Despite the cartoonish images this news flashes into my head, the startling find also suggests that this turkey-sized predator was also venomous. The first known ancestor to the avian family that used poison to immobilize its victims. A venomous bird.

Don’t let the cherubic Sinornithosaurus fool you! (From Wiki Commons)

Martin Luther is rumored to have said that you can’t prevent birds from flying over your head, (but you can prevent them from nesting in your hair). This new discovery suggests that there might be poisonous birds hovering around out there. And of course, Creationists must make room on the ark for this extraordinary creature. Since all critters, according to Genesis, were on the ark, our Sinornithosaurus must have lurked in some dark corner. I wonder how old Noah classified them — were they nestled among the birds or were they roaming about in the dinosaur wing? These toothy pterosaur wannabes were closely related to the velociraptors and microraptors that once served as the tetrapod mosquitoes of the Cretaceous Park world, stealth biters who’d glide down upon you undetected. The Creationists railing against transitional forms are scratching their theologically inclined heads.

I welcome the discovery like an early holiday gift. Although no one will ever see a living poisonous reptilian turkey soaring down from a Cretaceous canopy, we can all wonder and imagine. Fangs bared, venom dripping, it drops into our comfortable world and makes us reconsider. Apparently poisonous birds did not make the evolutionary cut, but I, for one, will be keeping a closer eye on the sky when I’m out in the woods or jogging around town early in the morning.

Oral Octopus

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Veined Octopus

Juxtapositions fascinate me. As a former editor I notice the layout of stories on a page knowing that word counts, subject matter, photo sizes, and general interest all play into the placement of material. I recently posted an entry on Sacraments and Sea Cucumbers that had been suggested by such an editorial flourish. Yesterday’s paper wafted another such epiphany.

By now everyone knows that televangelist Oral Roberts died on Tuesday. Although he pioneered much of what is now recognized as televangelism, his true motives were clear when the money began piling up. I’m not the judge of his religious sincerity, but his ministry was a multi-million dollar enterprise, and he even founded a “university” named after himself. Meanwhile, housebound octogenarians on limited incomes gladly sent him their money to continue his good work. There is a very substantial profit to be made in preaching to the choir. All televangelists know that.

Immediately beneath the Oral Roberts story in the New Jersey Star-Ledger was a much more fascinating story about the veined octopus. Biologists have long known that octopi use large shells and other natural detritus for shelter. Octopi had been known to use coconut halves for that purpose as well. What is new in this story is that veined octopi have been observed collecting coconut halves (often discarded by human gatherers), emptying them out, and moving them to a place where two halves can be made into a neat shelter, thereby demonstrating a more advanced brain structure than most televangelists. In short, these invertebrates are utilizing tools. It is only a short step on the way to octopus televangelists, but if they know how to gather their valuables, this development can’t be far behind.

Im in ur blogz

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Translation. The Bible as we know it would not exist without translation. Ours is a culture of convenience — Americans want divine revelation dished out in easy-to-swallow portions in their own tongue. Going through the rigors of learning new alphabets and grammatical systems, not to mention the eerie specter of textual apparatus, are enough to frighten off all but the most stalwart of truth-seekers. This is a good thing. We would never advance as a culture if we all had to spend our time learning actually to read our religious texts as they were written, only to find out that we have no original texts at all. So we trust our translators.

A few weeks back I posted an entry on Andrew Schlafly’s misguided (imho) Conservative Bible, devoid of liberal bias. Since then Stephen Colbert’s interview with Schlafly has been making its rounds on the internet and thousands of people are now aware of the project and its biases. I stand by my original objection that biased translations are unfair representations of the actual ancient texts. But it looks now like I’ll have to be eating crow. A new translation is scheduled to arrive in stores next month, and it looks like it may have a bias. Still, it is a translation that no internet-savvy reader can afford to ignore. Yes, the Lolcat Bible is nearly ready to pounce from the press.

The culmination of the Lolcat Bible Translation Project, over two years in the making, a Bible in Lolspeak will soon be available. Comparing what I’ve seen of the two projects, I think there is more truth in the Lolcat Bible than in the Conservative Bible. I’ve studied more ancient languages than any sane person rightfully should, but I do rely on my able research assistant (aka daughter) to help read Lolspeak. She suggested the title for this post, but the full text reads, “Im in ur blogz, postin mah wurdz of wizdum.” That’s straight from the mouth of Ceiling Cat!

Moses and the Calf

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It seems that Moses just can’t get away from that calf. Last week in a manger in rural Connecticut a calf was born. The calf is brown rather than golden, but it bears a distinctly cross-shaped white marking on its forehead. The owner suspects it might be a divine message, but he’s not sure what the message is. The children of the area named the calf Moses.

Does this all fall into the category of coincidence? Or is it indeed a long-awaited sign from on high? It does fall a bit on the C.E. side of the long-expected red heifer, but it looks like it just gamboled out of a bovine White Ash Wednesday service. And it was born in December! In a manger! (Or at least the present-day equivalent of one.) He bears the name of the arch-nemesis of venerated calves — Moses, the solemn monotheist. Even the chair of the Dairy Sciences Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison declares the Catholic birthmark to be unique.

All in all, I think the farmer got it right. If divine messages come in the form of calves, we’ve got a serious mixed-signal problem down here. The greatest crime, according the book of Kings, that the Northern Kingdom of Israel perpetrated was the erecting of a set of golden calves. And the sign we get is a denominationally confused calf? Perhaps the appropriate question at this juncture would be, “how now, brown cow?”

Photo credit: Aaron Flaum, Associated Press

Dog-Headed Saints

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Eastern Saint Christopher

In Stephen Asma’s recent book, On Monsters, he discusses the role of early Christianity in perpetuating or perhaps even inventing various monstrous creatures. As is clear from sources going all the way back to Sumerian times, ancient religions are the spawning beds for monsters. One of the monsters Asma mentioned that caught my attention was the familiar St. Christopher. According to sources as orthodox as St. Augustine, there lived races of dog-headed people in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. These Anubis-like cynocephali were barbarians in the extreme, eating human beings like the more familiar werewolf.

In some Eastern Orthodox traditions, St. Christopher was said to be among the cynocephali. Converted to Christianity, the dog-headed saint was martyred and entered the great kennel in the sky. The message proclaimed by this strange story is the tolerance of the early Christian movement. While battles raged over Orthodox vs. heterodox vs. Gnostic vs. pagan, there was still room to allow dog-headed humans into the fold. (They could be quite useful in rounding up straying sheep as well, one supposes.)

One of the hallmarks of modern Christianity is its exclusiveness. Naturally, not all Christians fit this profile, but many of the current movements define themselves by those not permitted to enter. In the sordid history of the Religious Right there are many chapters demonstrating a stark mistrust of non-Anglo believers. Roman Catholicism maintains that it is the only historically correct version of the faith. Other religions also erect barriers to keep others out. If religions truly promoted tolerance we might see a few more dog-headed saints in the news today instead of those who earn headlines for their exclusive claims on the truth.

What Would Dinos Eat?

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A recent edition of Science Illustrated ran an article about a potentially revolutionary understanding of mammalian evolution. Reponomamus robustus, a large mammal from the Cretaceous Era has been found with dinosaur bones in its stomach. The implication, of course, is that this early mammal may have eaten dinosaurs instead of the conventional reverse of the scenario. Science is open to such radical ideas, but my thoughts turned to the culture war being waged on automobile bumpers across the United States.

Several years ago the Jesus Fish or ichthus symbol began appearing on the backend of cars in what seemed at first to be a “baby on board” tactic with a don’t-ram-me-I’m-a-Christian subtext. Some drivers, however, associated the Jesus Fish with an evangelical power play, a showing of numbers that indicted all other drivers as “non-Christian,” and therefore, by implication, accident-worthy. The Darwin Fish showed up soon thereafter, a counter-symbol for those who seemed to be declaring that Christians could be evolutionists as well. Sensing a challenge — which always appears as a threat in neo-con eyes — the Jesus Fish or Truth Ichthus swallowing the Darwin Fish swam onto car posteriors. Then the dinosaur eating a Jesus Fish came out, and I am certain that I once saw a Jesus Fish eating a T-rex on some oversized vehicle hind-end.

A friend once asked me why I spent my time arguing with those who are so obviously wrong (the anti-evolutionists). The unfortunate answer showed up in the White House at the turn of the millennium and the radical restructuring of society encouraged by the “religious right” gains credibility from the sheer number of people willing to adorn their cars with Jesus Fish. The real victim in this volley of statements in chrome is a guy who said nothing about evolution and who, I’m sure, would be amazed at how misrepresented he is. As the love-hate relationship between Jesus and dinosaurs continues to wax and wane, I’m staying out of it, but I’m more frightened by the fish than by the dinosaur.

Sacraments and Sea Cucumbers

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Directly across the fold from each other on pages 4–5 of today’s New Jersey Star-Ledger are two articles that my brain comprehends as related by more than mere proximity. On page 4 the headline reads, “In sunless depths, marine life thrives.” In an Associated Press article bi-lined New Orleans (where many of my colleagues are currently enjoying the Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting), scientists reported that over 17,000 deep-seas species have been found below the point where sunlight ends. What was thought to be a barren zone just decades ago, it turns out, is teeming with organisms adapted to living without light.

One page 5 the headline reads “Bishop admits barring Kennedy from sacrament.” In a ploy that has become distressingly frequent of late, the Roman Catholic bishop claims that Representative Kennedy’s political views on abortion effectively excommunicate him. I find it unconscionable that clergy feel that they have the right to direct public policy when they are not publicly elected officials. Any clergy attempting to coerce officials democratically elected are guilty of abusing their putatively divinely appointed trust. The millions of Catholic laity who privately support freedom of choice they may rhetorically chastise from the pulpit or by some papal bull but they do not deny them the sacrament. Let’s be honest here, this is about politics, not theology.

I have been reading Max Blumenthal’s Republican Gomorrah, perhaps the scariest book I’ve ever read. In it Blumenthal demonstrates how the Catholic Church got onto the pro-life bandwagon in the intricate political maneuverings of the “Religious Right.” They quickly learned techniques up to and including lying to get their agenda across. It should distress all members of a democracy that their leaders are being led by dishonest clerics of all stripes. Those who mix their religious views with politics seek to end the religious freedom that allowed them to be born in the first place. They practice late-term religious freedom abortion.

What does this have to do with the wondrous world of the great deeps? They represent, to my mind, two forms of life that thrive far from the enlightening rays of the sun.

Make Room on the Ark — Another New Dinosaur!

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Enter Aardonyx celestae! A new dinosaur announced yesterday in South Africa is being hailed as a missing link in the sauropod chain of development, much to the chagrin of Creationists. I have to admit that I never outgrew my childhood fascination with dinosaurs, and when we purchased the life-like models for my daughter as she was growing up I secretly coveted them for myself. The rate of discovery among new genera of dinosaurs is between 10 and 20 per year, meaning that the maybe 20 different dinosaur types I knew as a kid has ballooned into well over 500 different species and 1,800 genera. Late at night I still hear the call of paleontology and I slip Jurassic Park into the DVD player and weep.

With each new dinosaur discovered Noah’s ark must evolve into a larger boat for some among the Creationist camp. After all Genesis says “two of every kind” lumbered aboard. The newbie this time is a proto-sauropod, a missing link between bi-pedal herbivores and their earth-shaking descendants who required four tree-like legs to support their immense weight. It seems that Noah must have been quite the engineer to handle all this displacement. And it is a good thing too — scientists predict that the new genera to be discovered represent only about 30 percent of the total, and the number will likely continue to climb for a century and a half yet.

Dinos

Wikipedia proto-sauropods race for the top deck

So it seems that the God-of-the-gaps grows smaller while the ark grows larger. Of course, the dinosaurs might have evolved into all these different genera over time, but then, Creationists can’t allow for that, since it would admit room for evolution. And that seems about as likely as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints backing anti-discrimination laws against homosexuals!

Feline Angels and Demons

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Happy National Cat Day! Well, to you readers in the States in any case. October 29 has been declared National Cat Day, and as a blogger who has frequently posted on ancient cats, I feel a sense of duty to include our feline friends in today’s entry.

Elsewhere on this blog I have extolled the divine nature of cats. The Egyptians revered them to the point that killing a cat was a capital crime, but the evolution of domestication was probably very practical. Domestic cats appear in the archaeological record along with the advent of grain silos, also an Egyptian invention. When the grain attracted rats, the rats attracted cats, and the cats stole Egyptian hearts. Even before the Egyptians, however, archaeology points to associations of cats and humans in Neolithic Jericho, perhaps the oldest city in the world. As early as 9000 years ago, cats were stalking the allies of the city of the moon god. They have been among our most loyal companions.

The domestic cat’s spread into Europe only began in earnest, it seems, when Christianity reached the continent and the cat was no longer considered divine. Perhaps cats had to be profaned before being admitted to the church’s roster of approved animals. Nevertheless, under the influence of a predominantly Christian milieu, in the Middle Ages Europe had come to see cats as the demonic companions of witches and vampires. Did some memory linger of the divine cat of Egypt? Did those dark days of suspected sorcery glance back to the magicians of Egypt and their suspect pets? We will never know the answer as to why cats, long encouraged to join human households, became evil in superstitious Europe. Even my stepfather in the twentieth century America counted to ten after spotting a black cat, and followed the count with a solemn cuss each and every time.

I, for one, cast my vote on the side of the felines. I don’t have cats (allergies and irate landlords, and such), but I enjoy them when I visit those who do. Sure, they rip up furniture and bring unwanted gifts of dead things to you as a kind of feline worship, but with their loving nature I simply can’t see a devil in our everlasting cats.

Swiped from Dr. Jim's Thinking Shop

(Swiped from Dr. Jim’s Thinking Shop)