Jesus for Unitarians

...Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come. It is like a man going on a journey, when he leaves home and puts his slaves in charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to be on the watch. Therefore keep awake – for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn, or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly. And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake. Mark 13: 33-37 NRSV

Don't you find people who talk this way irritating? “Beware, keep alert...” For what? It's bad enough that we get stressed out by things in everyday life:  our jobs, traffic, the news, our kids, our neighbours, our health without piling some bigger but hypothetical concern on top of everything else. That must be the way a lot of people feel about environmentalists: “look I realize that we need to do something about pollution. But there's nothing I can do about it right now so quit bothering me!” That sense of urgency. It can really get under your skin because after all we've gotta get on with our lives, no matter how urgent worldwide problems are. And it's hard to know if what we do can ever make a real difference.

.....It is like the mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground; is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade. Mark 4: 30-32

But what if you heard some guy saying stuff like that and you dropped everything you were doing and followed him. Your family and friends would be saying: “Get real. Are you crazy? You've got a job, you've got responsibilities. Get over it.” But no. All of a sudden you've got a sense of purpose. You want to help save the world and nothing else matters. Are you crazy? Maybe, but there's something about this guy. You've never met anyone like him before. He cares about people, forgotten people, the ones that have been left behind and he doesn't defer to any big shots or the rich.

Not very likely that we would drop everything and follow such a person is it? And two thousand years ago when Jesus told these two parables it wasn't very likely either. Let's face it, his group of followers was small. The New Testament exaggerates his influence when he was alive because, well, that was the writers' job. During his lifetime Jesus was essentially an unknown. His teacher, John the Baptizer was much more well known than him and had a bigger following. How do we know? Because we have reports about John from an independent source: Josephus, The Antiquities of the Jews. Be that as it may, what was Jesus' message?

The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed onto the ground and would sleep and rise night and day. And the seed would sprout and grow, he knows not how. For the earth brings forth fruit of herself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head. But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle because the harvest has come. Mark 4: 26-29 NRSV

According to Mark, Jesus starts his ministry by proclaiming: The time is fulfilled , and the kingdom of God is at hand, repent, and hear the good news. Like the man in the parable, Jesus doesn't bother with explaining why the time is fulfilled, it just is. The Gospel of Mark is the only one of the four New Testament Gospels that shows that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet. Apocalypse was a kind of perspective among certain groups of Jews in the first and previous century – particularly the Essenes, the Pharisees, and the followers of John the Baptizer. This perspective is oriented towards the near future when God will destroy this world along with all the evil people in it and create a new world populated with the few righteous people left. It's basically wish fulfillment for seriously oppressed people. Jesus preached that the apocalypse was immanent, eg., “The kingdom of God is at hand....”, which might explain his spontaneity and sometimes rash judgment.

Apocalyptic thinking has had a pernicious influence, right up to this very day. And that sense of urgency to speed things along – the “Let's have an apocalypse now.” mentality is alive and well in the Christian Right's neglect of the environment and encouragement of war.

Jesus taught that very soon the coming of God's kingdom would result in a radical reversal of fortunes. The Gospel of Mark in the New Testament quotes him as saying “The first shall be last and the last shall be first” And he practiced what he preached. He befriends notorious sinners and outcasts. His disciples are poor and illiterate. He tells a rich young man who wanted to join him to come back after he gives all his wealth to the poor. Of course the rich young man does no such thing. So Jesus loses a potential convert. But he doesn't care. He tells his disciples: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” People walk away amazed by what Jesus says or they are outraged.

He acts spontaneously. He picks his disciples on the spot and they decide to follow him – a bunch of fishermen: Andrew, James, Peter and John; a tax collector, Matthew; a zealot named Judas. (Zealots were the first century equivalent of terrorists) Perhaps being spontaneous he sometimes makes errors of judgment.

According to Mark, Jesus taught in parables. These are short stories that are often kind of earthy, often about farming or some aspect of nature: planting seeds, running a vineyard, feeding the pigs.... all of them ostensibly simple but all with a paradoxical twist at the end.

This tells us something about Jesus. He's not a philosopher or a theologian. He doesn't lay down his beliefs deductively. Parables are open-ended – they create ambiguity in the listener's mind because the conclusion is left open, so it invites active participation from the audience. It gets people to think about things in a different way.

The apostle Paul's letters are the first surviving Christian documents. But the Gospel of Mark is the first written narrative about Jesus. It was probably written about thirty years after his death. My Mennonite friend believes that it is a first person account of Jesus – as if to say that Mark was one of the disciples who hung around with Jesus, writing down everything he said or did with a quill, a bottle of ink and a papyrus notebook.

But if you read Mark with an open mind you will find, like reading any other book, it has a point of view. And that point of view rejects the authority of Jesus' disciples. So it's not likely that Mark was one of them.

Mark never tires of pointing out how the disciples didn't understand what Jesus was really talking about. It doesn't matter how clearly and simply Jesus explains what he's about, they just don't get it. They're a bunch of dimwits. According to Mark, even Jesus' family think he's a nut-case and want to get him committed. Jesus most important disciple, Peter, who Mark acknowledges is the first person to recognize that Jesus is the Messiah – still doesn't understand what his being the Messiah actually means.

(Jesus asked:) “Who do you say that I am?” Peter answered, “You are the Messiah.” Then he gave them strict orders not to tell anyone about him; and he began to teach them that the son of man had to undergo great sufferings, and to be rejected by the elders, chief priests, and doctors of the law; to be put to death, and rise again three days afterwards. At this Peter took him by the arm and began to rebuke him. But Jesus turned around, and, looking at his disciples, rebuked Peter. “Away with you Satan,” he said, “you think as men think, not as God thinks.”

Mark 8 29- 33

This passage is the key to Mark's Gospel. According to Mark, what Jesus' closest followers didn't get is that Jesus was supposed to be crucified. Being a Unitarian my theory about this is that Jesus didn't get it either. He had no idea that he was going to be crucified. Why then was he crucified? I think Mark gives us a pretty good indication, although for his own reasons he doesn't treat it that way.

Passover, is the Holy day when the Jews celebrate their covenant with God through the retelling of the story of Moses and their deliverance from slavery. On the day before Passover Jews from all over the Roman Empire have gathered in Jerusalem to make sacrifices in honour of Passover, and all such sacrifices take place in the Holy Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. Within the precincts of the temple there are stalls of money changers, sacrificial pigeon sellers, etc. But Jesus has a thing about money. He is quoted as saying: “You cannot serve two masters... You cannot serve God and money.”

Jesus goes up to Jerusalem on the day before Passover and walks into the Jewish Temple. He sees the money changers stalls, the pigeon sellers. He is insulted that people are openly making money in the precincts of the Holy Temple. Jesus is not a violent person. At a previous time and place he tells people that if someone strikes you you should turn the other cheek instead of striking back. He tells people that the meek will inherit the earth. But this time something in him snaps. Impulsively, he kicks at their stalls, and overturns them. Money is spilling all over the floor. The stall owners are yelling at Jesus. People are running over to see what's happening and sacrificial pigeons are flying off in all directions. There's general pandemonium, and in the confusion Jesus somehow slips away. That afternoon a woman comes to visit Jesus and she pours an entire bottle of expensive perfume over his head. His followers are incensed at the waste of money, especially Judas. But Jesus defends her. It's the last straw for Judas. That night he goes to the Jewish authorities who are gunning for Jesus for his causing a riot and tells them where they can find him. The next morning they apprehend Jesus and turn him over to the Roman procurator Pontius Pilate who has him crucified the same day. All of Jesus' disciples are completely dispirited and flee the city.

This is not a very flattering portrait of Jesus: on the last few days of his life his own followers are bickering with him, while one of his hand-picked disciples betrays him to his enemies, When he's apprehended his followers scatter to the four winds. It's all the more reason to believe that this actually happened, because why would people who worship Jesus as the Messiah make these things up about him? But it's also a strong reason for Mark to incorporate damage control into his story. It all happened this way because it was supposed to happen. And Jesus followers were not united behind him because they just didn't get it. But Mark and his readership do know better and that's why he's telling the story. So that we can get it, so that we can achieve closer access to Jesus than his own disciples did. It's pretty exciting stuff, even today, two thousand years after this story was first told.

Being a Unitarian I'm interested in the story of Jesus, I'm fascinated by hearing what he did and said, but I'm skeptical about Jesus' divinity.  Still I don't deny that there is something very significant about who Jesus was. And there is plenty of evidence in the New Testament that that's the case, especially in the accounts of his resurrection.

But being a good and skeptical Unitarian how can I possibly use the accounts of his resurrection as evidence? What was the resurrection all about? According to all four gospel accounts in the New Testament no-one saw Jesus actually rise from the dead. The most ancient accounts of the gospel of Mark do not include any accounts of his resurrection, but the entire gospel implies that he did rise from the dead. In later versions of Mark , and in the other three gospels and the book of Acts there are numerous accounts of Jesus' followers experiencing Jesus as alive after he was crucified – people see him , talk to him, eat with him, and even touch him.

There is no doubt in my mind that people experienced Jesus as alive after he died for two reasons. First, in being crucified, Jesus died a shocking and horrific death. But, if that's all that happened why was a religious movement born out of it? There must have been some collective experience that was powerful enough to bring a scattered and demoralized group of his followers back together to form the first Christian church. Secondly One of the authors featured in the New Testament claims that he himself experienced the resurrected Christ and his account is independently corroborated by a different author. This is an account written by the apostle Paul in his letter to the Galatians and first letter to the Corinthians describing his experience and also in several places in the New Testament book of Acts which was written by somebody calling himself Luke. In these famous accounts Saul, who never met Jesus during his lifetime, is riding to Damascus in order to persecute Christians there, when he is suddenly blinded, falls off his horse and hears Jesus voice speaking in Aramaic: “Saul, why do you persecute me.”  Instead of persecuting the Damascus Christians as he had intended, he meets with them, converts to Christianity, changes his name to Paul, hangs out in the desert for a while to think things through, and a couple of years later goes back to Jerusalem to meet with the apostle Peter and James the brother of Jesus.

What is behind the resurrection experiences? For those who knew Jesus there must have been something about him as a person that was very special – perhaps his spontaneity, or his selfless generosity, or his unconditional love for people who were normally despised and rejected. In any event it must have been profoundly personal for his followers to have experienced his resurrection.

But for someone like Paul who never knew Jesus personally, the reasons for his resurrection experience must have been more in a theological vein. After all, he started out by persecuting Christians, so he must have had a reason for that. Paul tells us that he studied under a famous Pharisaic teacher named Gamaliel, and Pharisees figure prominently in the New Testament as intellectual opponents of Jesus. There are discussions about what ought to be allowed or disallowed on the Sabbath, where Jesus' authority comes from, whether it's right to pay taxes to the Emperor, and so on. They are the kind of discussions that could have gone on between friendly rivals. But there was obviously some sticking point, some area of intense disagreement, or Pharisees like Saul would not have been persecuting the early Christians.

Jesus' saying, “The Last shall be first and the first shall be last.” comes to mind. For it could be seen to imply that non-Jews or Gentiles could be more easily saved than Jews who follow the Jewish Law. And that could have been hard to take for someone like Paul who spent the first part of his life learning to be a pious Jew. The fact that Paul later appoints himself as the apostle to the Gentiles, points to this kind of reversal in his philosophy. There are universal elements in Judaism, elements that imply that God's Justice ought to reach all peoples equally and this comes out in Jesus' teachings and may have spoken directly to Paul, first enraging him and later converting him.

The interesting thing is, what was Paul thinking about during those two years he spent in the desert? Bart Ehrman, a New Testament scholar, suggests that the process of Paul's thought goes something like this: If Jesus is resurrected from the dead then he must be the Messiah,(the Messiah being a Jewish Apocalyptic figure who was thought to be the person who God chose to rule the world and vanquish all evil.) But Jesus was crucified by the Romans. But God wouldn't have allowed his Messiah to be crucified unless he meant it to be that way. But why would He have meant it to happen that way? Paul reasons that it couldn't have been for anything Jesus did so therefore he was meant to be crucified because of what everybody else has done. God was making the ultimate sacrifice in order to save all of humankind, both Jews and Gentiles together if they accepted Jesus as Lord.

I believe that it is significant that Paul states in his first letter to the Corinthians that he received the idea of the ceremony of the Eucharist from the resurrected Jesus himself. The Eucharist which is the symbolic sharing of Jesus' body and blood is a reenactment of Christ's sacrifice of his life. It would make sense that if Paul was the person who created the idea of Jesus dying for our sins he would also have created the ceremony which physically reenacts that sacrifice.

Most Christians believe that the Eucharist was passed from Jesus to his disciples at his last supper, the night before he died. That's because it's part of the passion narratives of all three synoptic gospels. I admit it makes for a great story but being a Unitarian I'm skeptical, (we're such killjoys).... First Jesus was Jewish and Jews do not believe in human sacrifice. Of course Paul was Jewish too. But he is known to have stretched the rules by not requiring gentile Christians to eat kosher or gentile males to be circumcised. And what's more interesting is that Paul tells us in his letters that he did this in opposition to the Jerusalem church. Indeed, Paul argues logically that because Jesus saves us through his death on the cross, Jewish laws such as keeping kosher and circumcision are no longer necessary.

He's got a valid argument if you accept the premises. So why did the Jerusalem church not see things the same way? After all they were the ones who sat in on the last supper. Boy are they ever stupid! Jesus tells them all this stuff about his having to die for us and they still don't get it. Or, maybe they didn't get it because they knew Jesus and he never said those things because he had no idea he was about to be crucified.

The only place in the Bible where someone says Jesus told me “This is my body....” is in Paul's letters. Everywhere else it's in the third person, it's “Jesus told them...” Could it be because all the narratives about Jesus were written under Paul's direct or indirect influence? The vast majority of Biblical scholars agree that Paul's letters predate all of the Gospels. And the last half of the book of Acts, which is written by the same author who wrote the Gospel of Luke, is basically a narrative about Paul spreading the Christian gospel to the far corners of the Roman Empire. The one gospel with the least influence from Paul is the gospel of John and , oddly enough, it's scene of the last supper has no mention of the Eucharist.

You don't need to go outside the Bible to some esoteric interpretation of Jesus sayings to learn that things are not as they seem. When you think about it the New Testament is simply an astounding treasure trove of documents. You've got Paul's letters. You've got four different narrative versions of Jesus' life to compare and contrast. You've got a biography of Paul. The only thing you don't have is anything written by Jesus but that's because he never wrote anything.

I admit it's a bit of a dilemma trying to figure out what Jesus really said and did. It makes things a lot more complicated than if you just believed everything that's written in the Bible is true. But it's the doctrine of the atonement that is crucial here because it's how one treats this doctrine that ultimately determines how you look at everything else. And I mean “everything else”. Fundamentalists believe that all that's really important about Jesus is that he was the son of God who was born a human male and died on the cross so that our sins could be forgiven. Liberals and Unitarians believe that what Jesus actually said and did during his life is important enough to know that it is worth the risk of eroding some of the basic tenets of Christian faith to find out. It was liberal Christians who, in setting out to uncover the authentic Jesus, became the first religious group in history to critically analyze their own sacred texts. And Christian fundamentalism evolved out of a widespread reaction to the liberals' critical text analysis. Unfortunately, by holding the atonement above everything else, fundamentalists have backed themselves into a corner that they can't get out of. That's why they insist on the literal truth of everything that's written in the Bible and that's why they reject the theory of evolution and a lot of other scientific knowledge.

Fundamentalists were more motivated by the fear of change than by the pursuit of truth and so they closed their minds to the truth. “Stay the course.” Let's continue to wage war, let's continue to create social inequality, let's continue to pollute and degrade the environment, and let's continue to consume more and more of the earth's resources. “Stay the course.” “Stay the course....” And if we do, in less than one hundred years our global civilization will collapse. Much faster than what happened to the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire lasted four hundred years after Jesus died so his timing in claiming that the apocalypse was to happen within the lifetimes of his audience was a bit off. But in some important respects Jesus had it right. If we want to have a future for the human race we must reject inequality, war, and overconsumption and embrace simplicity.

Someone asked Jesus, “Which commandment is the first of all?” Jesus Answered, “The first is, “Hear O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.” The second is this, “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” There is no other commandments greater than these.” ( Mark 12: 29-31, note also Deuteronomy 7: 4-6)

There are no other commandments greater than these. We can follow him or we can persist in misunderstanding him. And we don't have much time to choose.

A Message From the Garden

One of my favorite stories is the story of the garden of Eden. As a story it's got everything: sex, nudity, the loss of innocence, the quest for power, deceit and betrayal... It could have been written yesterday.

When God first made the world God made a garden and created a man and a woman to live there. God named the first humans Adam and Eve. Before there were any other people Adam and Eve didn't wear any clothes – not a stitch. They didn't need to work because everything they needed was ready at hand, in the garden. God told them that there was only one thing they couldn't have and that was to eat from the fruit of the tree of knowledge. God told them straight out: if they ate from that tree they would die.

In the garden lived a talking snake. And being innocent, Eve didn't realize that snakes are something to be afraid of. So she listened politely as the snake suggested to her that, in spite of what God said, she and Adam could really benefit from eating that forbidden fruit. “God is putting you on.” said the snake, “God knows that if you eat of that fruit you won't die. Instead you can use this knowledge to become as powerful as the Gods.”

So Eve talked it over with Adam. And being a man it's hard to argue with a naked woman. So they both ate of the fruit and their eyes were opened. And the first thing they realized was that they were naked. Ah knowledge – there goes innocence. So Adam and Eve made the first pair of bermuda shorts out of a bunch of fig leaves. Then they hid from God because, having knowledge, they knew they were in big trouble.

But God also knew what was going on and so God called out to them: “Why are you hiding?” At this point Eve knew that there was no sense in lying to God because God knew everything. So she confessed to their eating the forbidden fruit. Even though God knew everything, this still made God angry. “No more innocent fun for you two. Adam, from now on you will have to work by the sweat of your brow. Eve, you will have to suffer the pain of childbirth.” And God sent them out of the garden.

What do we get from this story? Even when we humans come to know things we still get it wrong. Knowledge is not certain knowledge. We can only make guesses and the longer we are around the better we are at guessing what is going on. But we can never be certain. Being human, we are guaranteed to screw up because we can't know everything. But we can learn from our mistakes and improve.

Christians call this “original sin”, but I call it being fallible. If we are fallible then we must be open to other points of view because we can never be certain that our point of view is the truth. This leads to Open Society. Since we always fall short of perfection we should always be open to improvement.

Fundamentalist Christians call the idea of Open Society “secular humanism” and “moral relativism”. They believe that there is only one standard of truth and it's in the Bible. When there is only one standard you don't need to ask questions, you simply follow what authority says. This is Closed Society. There is no room for improvement because we have certainty, no learning from mistakes because we don't make
mistakes, no listening to other points of view because every point of view but ours is wrong.

The problem is there are as many interpretations of the Bible as there are people. How can we know which interpretation is the “true” interpretation? If the story of the garden of Eden is anything to go on – even when we think we have certain knowledge, we still get it wrong.

Gaia and Global Warming

Life originated in an atmosphere of ninety-five per cent carbon dioxide. We know carbon dioxide as the gas that we breathe out and that forms the bulk of a car's exhaust. Four billion years ago or four eons ago it was volcanoes, not cars that were belching it out. The air would have been poisonous to humans and any other animal life. You wouldn't think that such an atmosphere would be conducive to life and yet it was. The sun was younger four eons ago and it was a lot cooler – twenty-five per cent cooler than it is today. If it wasn't for the atmosphere of carbon dioxide the Earth would have been a ball of ice, just like the outer planets. But the carbon dioxide magnified the heat from the sun because it is a greenhouse gas. It is transparent to the sun's light rays, letting them pass directly through to the Earth but reflecting back the infrared heat rays that emanate from the Earth.

Carbon dioxide is what kept Earth at just the right temperature given the weakness of the sun relative to today. And the conditions of the sea were just right for life to develop at .9 % salinity. Today the sea is 3.5 % salt. The conditions were just right. What is it about life? Life is bound by certain constraints and living cells perish when conditions are not right.

So how did life survive in the face of changing conditions if it needed the conditions to stay the same? Just as the environment changed life, life began to change the environment, affecting the salinity of the oceans, changing the content of the atmosphere, and altering the climate. And it wasn't by conscious purpose, it was more a consequence of certain properties of life.

James Lovelock, a British scientist, tells us how these environmental constraints work:

.... They depend upon the tolerances of the organisms themselves. All life forms have a lower, an upper, and an optimum temperature for growth and the same is true for acidity, salinity, and the abundance of oxygen in the air and water. Consequently organisms have to live within the bounds of these properties of the environment.

Notice Lovelock talks about the optimum amount of oxygen – and yet I've been telling you that there was no oxygen in the atmosphere when life was born. Now there is 21% oxygen in the air. If there wasn't we'd be having trouble breathing because all animals and insects need at least 15% oxygen in order to make their muscles move. At the same time if the air had 25% oxygen, even wet vegetation would burn and all the forests on Earth would go up in flames in a matter of months. At the time that life came into being there was only trace amounts of oxygen in the air. Oxygen is a very reactive element. It's what gives many red things their colour, like red rocks, the surface of Mars, and blood. Oxygen in the atmosphere is also what gives the sky its blue colour.

The very first life was a cell. A bacterial cell we call “Archaebacteria” . Its closest relatives are still living today – but they survive only in places where there is very little oxygen. In muds and in the guts of herbivores like cows. All living cells are related to Archaebacteria because it was the first cell.

Life is four billion years old. That's old. And during those four billion years – that's one quarter the age of the universe – the Earth's environment has always supported life, even though the heat of the Sun has increased by 25% during that time. Eventually the Sun will grow too hot for life to exist on Earth and life will perish. We've only got about one billion years left. Better make your wills now. But it could be a lot sooner if we manage to raise the proportion of greenhouse gases high enough.

Remember James Lovelock's saying that life needs to live within environmental constraints. I call this the “goldilocks property of life” because life prefers to live in just the right conditions like baby bear's porridge - “not too hot and not too cold”; not too salty, not too watery, etc. Lovelock lists three other significant properties of life.

The second property is that if the right environmental conditions open up a living organism will grow vigorously until it has occupied its entire niche. I call this the “kudzu property” after the aggressive green leafy vine that inundates vacant lots and fields in the American South.

When life first existed, the conditions must have been just right – ocean salinity was in the right range because of the ocean's relative youth, and the temperature of the Earth was in the right range. So archaebacteria was able to thrive and fill its entire niche – which happened to be the entire global ocean four eons ago.

But archaebacteria didn't just fill its entire niche. It started changing, generation after generation. And some of those changes survived and new types of bacteria developed. This brings us to Lovelock's third property: All life undergoes Darwinian natural selection – organisms with the most progeny survive. We often understand Darwin's theory of evolution to mean: When the environment changes, organisms that can adapt to those changes survive and those that don't become extinct. The problem is if the environmental changes become too extreme then no life can survive.

Three and a half eons ago a bacteria called cyanobacteria came into existence. The big difference between cyanobacteria and archaebacteria is that cyanobacteria can photosynthesize. It can take carbon-dioxide out of the air and by using energy derived from the sun, split the molecule into carbon and oxygen, keep the carbon atom for its own use while liberating two atoms of oxygen into the air. And that's what cyanobacteria did for two billion years until the amount of oxygen had built up to its present concentration of 21%.  At the same time it was producing all this oxygen it was sequestering carbon and so the amount of carbon dioxide diminished.

That leads us to Lovelock's fourth significant property of life: All organisms change their physical and chemical environment. The easiest way to understand this is to think about breathing: we change the air every time we breathe by taking in oxygen and breathing out carbon dioxide. If we are in an enclosed space and there is no air circulation then the air would quickly become too high in carbon dioxide and too low in oxygen and if we weren't removed from that environment we would die. If there were no photosynthesizers on Earth, the same thing would happen to our atmosphere, but it would take thousands of years. But it is not just the air that gets changed according to Lovelock.

Evidence... shows the Earth's crust, oceans, and air to be either directly the product of living things or else massively modified by their presence. Consider how the oxygen and nitrogen from the air come directly from plants and microorganisms and how the chalk and limestone rocks are the shells of living things once floating in the sea.

To summarize so far: James Lovelock has listed four significant properties of life which I call:

1. The goldilocks property
2. The kudzu property
3. Darwinian natural selection
4. Life's ability to change its environment

These four properties are the main ingredients of a recipe for “Gaia” according to Lovelock. What exactly is Gaia? And who is James Lovelock?

“Gaia” is the Greek name for the mythical Mother- Earth godess. Lovelock used that name to call the Earth, seen as a single physiological system, an entity, ... that is alive, at least to the extent like other organisms, its chemistry and temperature are self-regulated at a state favorable for its inhabitants.

Gaia is an evolving system, a system made up from all living things and their surface environment, the oceans, atmosphere, and crustal rocks, the two parts tightly coupled and indivisible. It is an 'emergent domain' – a system that has emerged from the reciprical evolution of organisms and their environment over eons of life on Earth. In this system the self-regulation of climate and chemical composition are entirely automatic. Self- regulation emerges as the system evolves. No foresight, planning, or teleology are involved.

James Lovelock is a British scientist who invented several devices that measured the presence and amount of trace gases in the atmosphere. In the 1960's he got a job working for NASA at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena California. At the time, one of NASA's goals was to discover whether or not there is life on Mars. Lovelock, after thinking about the problem, realized that the easiest way to tell whether there was life on Mars was by examining its atmosphere – which could be done without actually sending a rocket into space. Needless to say, this was not a popular point of view at NASA because their main purpose is to send rockets into space.

I argued that if there was life on Mars it would have to use the atmosphere as a source of raw materials and as somewhere to deposit its wastes; this would change the atmosphere's composition and make it recognizably different from a dead planet.

Since the atmosphere of Mars is ninety per cent carbon dioxide, there is no methane, and only trace amounts of oxygen, Mars is chemically inert and very stable. On Earth there is oxygen and methane in the atmosphere, which means that Earth's atmosphere is chemically unstable. Over time free oxygen will combine with the surface rocks and with hydrogen in a process called oxidization. Only the continued existence of life could keep that proportion of oxygen in the atmosphere stable over time. On Mars there is no life. You may recall that I said that when life first began on Earth the atmosphere was mostly carbon dioxide with almost no oxygen, which, it turns out, is the same atmosphere as Mars has now. There is very little water on Mars, but there is evidence that there used to be water on Mars. Lovelock argues that it is the presence of life on Earth that is the reason Earth has water and it is the absence of life that has led to Venus and Mars losing theirs. It is the presence of life that changed Earth's atmosphere to what it is today, hence it is the absence of life that left the atmosphere of Venus and Mars unchanged.

One of the most popular photographs, perhaps the most popular photograph ever, is a snapshot taken by an astronaut of the Earth – from the window of an Apollo spacecraft as it journeyed from the Earth to the Moon. You can see Antarctica, almost all of Africa, the Arabian peninsula, the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans and a massive weather system in the Southern Ocean. This picture has had a profound effect on many people. We all live here on Earth but it's difficult to see the bigger picture because we are in the midst of it. But this particular photograph changed many peoples' perspective. In James Lovelock's view,

.....to see the Earth from space forces questions about the composition of the air we breathe not previously asked.

For instance:

......Why is everything on our planet so comfortable and well suited for life? .......The air is a mixture that almost always keeps constant in composition. My flash of enlightenment that afternoon was the thought that to keep constant something must be regulating it and that somehow the life on the surface was involved.

A living cell regulates its internal environment – keeping its salt content at .9% and all the other essential elements at various optimal concentrations. This it does in spite of changes in the external environment..... up to a point. If the environmental changes are too severe - if the salt content of the water bathing the cell reaches 6% the cell dies. And the same thing happens if the salt content of the water bathing the cell becomes too low. Life is bound by constraints. And if those constraints are breached life perishes.

A cell cannot regulate its internal temperature because it is too small. But multicellular organisms can. Cold-blooded animals do not regulate their body temperature internally but they can do it by changing their behavior – by seeking the sunlight to raise their temperature and seeking shade in order to lower their temperature. Warm-blooded animals can also regulate their temperature through behavior. Birds in the northern hemisphere fly south for the winter. People make clothes and build houses.

Our bodies regulate our temperatures by a complex interconnecting system of internal organs. When we are cold our autonomic nervous system causes our muscles to twitch uncontrollably – this is called shivering. The blood vessels near the skin surface constrict, keeping the majority of blood in the body's well-insulated core. When we are hot the blood vessels in the extremities open up, passing the body's heat into the surrounding air. Glands in our skin secrete sweat and this cools our bodies through the evaporation of water. You get the picture. Although no solitary cell is able to regulate its internal temperature, over vast spans of time, life has evolved the ability to do this because it enhances an organism's survival.

Now we are a life form, a part of Gaia, and like Kudzu we have thrived and our population has expanded until we have filled our biological niche. But there is a big difference between us and other forms of life. Because we use automobiles and many other kinds of machines, we are magnifying our environmental effects on Gaia exponentially. We are producing so much carbon dioxide that it's affecting the global climate. By now most everybody except a President and a couple of Prime Ministers believe this to be the case. But suppose Lovelock is right and Gaia is a self-regulating entity. Then we have just fooled with Gaia's thermostat. By continuing with business as usual we will be undermining Gaia's ability to repair herself and ultimately to support us. The consequences are likely to be very unpleasant and we have very little time to correct what we have done.

Scientists predict a rise in global mean temperature of as much as five degrees centigrade in this coming century. However, they may have underestimated the projected rise in temperature because many of the climate change models leave out positive feedback effects.

There are several positive feedback mechanisms that could come into play in a hotter world. One is the “albedo” or reflective capacity of the Earth's surface. Ice has a high albedo – it reflects the Sun's rays and helps keep the Earth cool. Open water has a low albedo – it absorbs heat from the Sun. As sea ice melts away and as the Earth's glaciers shrink in size, the Earth's albedo will decrease causing an acceleration of warming.

There is frozen methane at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean and locked away in the Arctic permafrost. If it were to melt, we would have significant increases in the amount of methane which is an even stronger greenhouse gas   causing more global warming.

There is the problem of forest fires. As temperatures increase more moisture evaporates from the soil leaving forests dryer and more prone to catch fire. As more forests burn more carbon dioxide is released into the air causing yet more global warming.

There is the ocean plankton. Plankton consists of microscopic algae and animal life that forms the basis of the oceans food chains. It gets its sunlight because it is always in the surface waters. It gets nutrients from the deep waters that form upwellings along the continental shelves. As the temperature of the surface waters increases, the top layer of warm water expands, thus growing lighter. This locks away the heavier colder nutrient-rich waters deep underneath, decreasing the upwelling and starving the plankton of nutrients. Result: less carbon dioxide will be absorbed and sea life in general will decline.

Finally there is the solubility of carbon dioxide in water. The warmer the water the less soluble is carbon dioxide. As the temperature of the oceans increases they will release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere increasing the amount of global warming. Note, that when the oceans are cooler they have the opposite effect, they act as a negative feedback on global warming by absorbing carbon dioxide.

About these positive feedbacks to global warming there is nothing we can do.... On the other hand, there is one way of reversing global warming that we do have control over. We can decrease our use of fossil fuels. By doing this we may be able to limit global warming before it becomes a runaway process.

The solutions are all around us – small-scale hydro, solar and wind power, tidal power, wave power, nuclear power, increasing household energy efficiency, local community supported agriculture, investing in mass transit, bicycles, recycling, walking.

Global warming is not just a problem for some people. It is a risk to the entire human race. It therefore has the potential to unify human society because no-one can escape it. Like the tsunami in Banda Aceh, when enough people realize that it threatens everyone we will unite in order to save our future.

One of our key problems is inertia. It is natural to overestimate the cost of change and underestimate the cost of doing nothing. It's not just President Bush who does this. We all do it. Think of the decision to get out of bed on a cold morning. The idea of throwing off the covers and braving the cold can seem daunting . Yet, when we finally do it it's no big deal. What paralyzes us is the perception of being cold, not the reality.

James Lovelock concludes his latest book, The Revenge of Gaia, by

saying,

.....Our task as individuals is to think of Gaia first. In no way does this make us inhuman or uncaring; our survival as a species is wholly dependent on Gaia and on our acceptance of her discipline.

The human race now faces the greatest challenge in history. We've already seen how denial and ignorance can bring out the worst. If people unite to face this challenge it can bring out the best in us. I want to conclude with the words of Al Gore from his book “An Inconvenient Truth”:

The climate crisis also offers us the chance to experience what very few generations in history have had the privilege of knowing – a generational mission; the exhilaration of compelling moral purpose; a shared and unifying cause. The thrill of being forced by circumstances to put aside the pettiness and conflict that so often stifle the restless human need for transcendence, the opportunity to rise...

It is about who we are as human beings. It is about our capacity to transcend our own limitations, to rise to the new occasion, to see with our hearts, as well as our heads, the response that is now called for. This is a moral, ethical, and spiritual challenge.We should fear this challenge. We should welcome it. We must not wait. In the words of Dr. King, “tomorrow is today.”

c. 2006 by Charles Justice

Books Quoted:

James Lovelock, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth

Oxford University Press, 1979.

James Lovelock, The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of the Living Earth

WW Norton, New York, 1988.

James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia

Penguin Books, 2006.

Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth

Rodale Press, 2006.

The Cure For Ebola - Strong Central Government

The epidemic of Ebola disease in West Africa is bringing to the fore something that needs to be said loudly and clearly:  strong central government and well funded public health services are essential for our continued survival.  

There has been a lot of blame passed around in the Developed world for the way that Ebola has gotten so out of hand.  Things that we could have anticipated, should have known sooner, etc. .. The fact is, the real reason that the present epidemic got out of hand is because it originated in countries that all have weak central governments and rudimentary to non-existent public health services.  

When Ebola threatened to invade Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, it was beaten back by prompt and effective public health measures.  

Suppose that Nigeria had had a government like Sierra Leone’s.  We would now be looking at an unimaginable catastrophe with hundreds  of millions of lives at stake.  

Now that we have seen a handful of Ebola cases turn up in Europe and the United States, we are about to see a controlled experiment unfold.  One can easily guess what the results will be.  Ebola will be safely contained in any country with a strong central government and a good public health system  and it will not be contained in countries that lack these things.  

We take a lot for granted about the way we live.  We may want to live free, without the restraints of big government.  But some of those restraints are there to keep society from breaking down.  Vaccinations, and universal access to medical care benefit everyone because they help prevent the spread of disease, and they allow more people to be productive members of society. Without public health and an educated public  there is widespread ignorance about how a disease spreads, and how it can be contained.

We are seeing the results of a serious epidemic  in West Africa when the governments in question are too weak to respond effectively.  What happens is an exponential increase in infections and death rates and the ominous breakdown in social institutions. Schools closed,  transportation and trade affected,  the breakdown of local governments, communities and families.  All of these things magnify the spread of Ebola and make the job of fighting the disease many times harder.   

The Ebola epidemic is a valuable real-time lesson in the importance of the Public Sector.  Simply put, if you want to avoid the plague, drowning the government in a bathtub is not a good idea.  

Answer to Ayn Rand

When a young man kills much meat, he comes to think of himself as a chief or a big man, and he thinks of the the rest of us as his servants or inferiors.  We can’t accept this.  We refuse one who boasts, for someday his pride will make him kill somebody.  So we always speak of his meat as worthless.  In this way we cool his heart and make him gentle.  - !Kung Healer ,  quoted by Boehm   1999   from Lee, The !Kung San.  

                                               VS

Talent and ability create inequality…. to rectify this supposed injustice, we are told to sacrifice the able for the unable.  Egalitarianism demands the punishment and envy of anyone who is better than someone else at anything.  We must tear down the competent and strong - raze them to the level of the incompetent and weak…     - Gary Hull (Ayn Rand Institute)  

Ayn Rand was an American intellectual, born in Russia, who has been very influential in the U.S. conservative, Republican and libertarian circles.  Her philosophy, which is reproduced  here by Gary Hull, is a glorification of capitalism, and an attack on altruism.

I don’t think Ayn Rand is just wrong, I think her philosophy is fundamentally false from its beginning to end. Egalitarianism does not mean the suppression of human abilities, instead, it is the very foundation of  human civilization.   

 I believe that egalitarianism was the major factor in creating a difference  between humans and the apes.   What differentiates us from the chimpanzees and other great apes is our ability to intentionally impose egalitarianism, to use social rules and mores to both control and eliminate the alpha male, replacing him by group enforced monogamy, and it is this milestone that led to language, and culture - without which we would not be here today.

What do I mean by alpha male? A human equivalent is John Galt, the hero in Ayn Rand's, Atlas Shrugged, . He is the most dominant male. In ape societies the alpha male is a very significant and unavoidable figure. He terrorizes and intimidates all the other apes in his group. There is only one rule in ape society - "Might makes Right".

Egalitarian hunting and gathering groups are made up of loose associations of nuclear families with pair bonded couples.  By divorcing sexual competition from hunting and sharing food,  groups without alpha males were able to out-compete groups that didn’t eliminate their alpha. 

 It was conscious egalitarianism that   led to the enormous human capacity to excel at so many different activities, and to the human ability to exchange with and tolerate other groups because these things are not possible with an alpha male present.    

  This is the exact opposite of Ayn Rand’s Objectivism.  It was social levelling in hunting and gathering that eventually led to markets, economies and capitalism, because if we hadn’t gotten rid of the alpha male hierarchy we would still be selfish chimpanzees.  

I think that the best answer to Ayn Rand is this hunter gatherer speech.  even though, in modern standards it appears to be  rather harsh and paranoid. I will explain my reasoning.

Hunting and gathering is a way of life that seems long superseded by our systems of agriculture and industry.  Nowadays, the few hunter-gatherers left are living on marginal lands:   deserts, jungles, scrub lands,  and frozen wastelands that often  have little or no economic value for anyone else.  When the land does end up having economic value, as is the case for oil extraction in Ecuador,  so much the worse for the indigenous tribes living there.

 Hunting and gathering used to be the only way of life,  but then around twelve thousand years ago our ancestors first domesticated plants and animals and created a world of agricultural surplus and plenty of scope for social and political hierarchies.

Before what we call the “Neolithic Revolution”  there were around two million years of hunting and gathering and living close to the bone.  Those two million years drove the evolution of some of the most important aspects of human nature, notably our ability to cooperate, our extended period of infancy, pair-bonding, and the development of language.

The hunting-gathering groups ranged from about thirty to ninety people.  Less than thirty made it difficult for the group to survive and defend itself from other groups.  More than ninety created too much conflict and caused groups to fission.

If the nomadic hunting and gathering societies form the bulk of human history,  then they formed the evolutionary crucible for the development of the human brain, and  the distinctly human forms of cooperation that led to  language and culture.  By the time we get to the neolithic revolution, twelve thousand years ago, brains are modern, languages are present and evolving quickly, and culture is becoming more cosmopolitan and  more representative of life in fixed communities.

Social institutions,  technology, language - all taken for granted, all developed over two million years,  in the stone age.  The real question is:  How was our unique form of human cooperation made possible?  Ayn Rand claims the idea of “property rights" borrowed from Aristotle's "Politics" and eighteenth century British apologists of market capitalism like John Lokce.  But for millions of years, people had no more property than they could wear on their backs.  

Somehow they managed to survive without capitalist economies and fossil fuels.  How they did it is explained by the  !Kung healer’s speech.   The Bushmen don’t tolerate bullies or tyrants in their midst.   They use very effective social methods of persuasion with the threat of ultimate sanctions ever-present in the background.  The way they sustain their way of life is by actively,  vigorously, and collectively  suppressing the alpha male.

With minimal possessions, a nomadic hunter-gatherer group is evidence of the necessary and sufficient social institutions needed for a human group to survive for long continuous periods.  Egalitarianism or social levelling is universally practiced in nomadic hunter-gatherer societies.  It seems plausible that that is because human hierarchies, with alpha males at the top, are inimical to hunter-gatherer survival.

I can anticipate some objections at this point.  Look, if these hunter-gatherers were around two million years before they began to domesticate plants and animals and live in hierarchical societies, maybe they should have done it sooner.   Maybe the whole hunting-and-gathering schtick holds people back and they could have “been somebody”  sooner by coveting property and creating markets. Also someone may say, why is hunting and gathering relevant today?  It has nothing to do with us….

One thing that we do know through science is that climate change played a huge role in human evolution.  Our ancestors survived through a successive series of brutal ice ages.  It was all about survival and nothing but.  Climate change forced humans to be more cooperative than any other animal.  

It’s interesting that Libertarians and followers of Ayn Rand both tend to  deny the existence of human induced climate change. The idea that unfettered Capitalism could actually be bad for our future doesn’t get any traction with these folks.  Nor is there any interest in life before  Capitalism.  If they think about hunting and gathering societies it is just to disparage them as hopelessly primitive.

Why egalitarianism?  All nomadic hunter-gatherer societies are actively egalitarian. The alpha traits of boasting, intimidation, greed, and selfishness are met with social disapproval and censure.  Adultery is discouraged and actively disapproved of.      But instead of discouraging productivity and initiative this has the exact opposite effect because it separates sexual dominance from other skills and abilities that differentiate people and contribute to the group as a whole.

Egalitarianism levels the playing field, and makes it possible for people with diverse abilities and  experiences  to thrive without getting beaten up or intimidated by an alpha male because they somehow threaten the alpha’s status.

It is not a coincidence that Rand’s most popular novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged,  celebrate the alpha male and even celebrate the right of alpha males to destroy things if they don’t get their way and to rape women if they feel like it.  That’s the way it works in both wild and captive chimpanzee groups too.

Humans differ from chimpanzees because we have found ways to avoid conflicts by jointly following rules and we have put severe pressure on alpha males to behave pro-socially and by and large it has worked to our collective advantage.  Humans out compete everything else because of our skills in cooperation.  Individuals add to society but it’s the cooperation between many people that gets most things done.

The alpha male is deep in our instinctual selves.  Even though we internalize social mores, we still need a lot of guidance from others as to their attitudes and judgements about our behaviour.  Our feelings of shame, guilt, and empathy help to guide our behaviour in more pro-social directions.  Without them we are nothing but dangerous psychopaths.   The quote from Objectivist Gary Hull, about the evils of egalitarianism, is true to Ayn Rand’s philosophy but it is also a paean to psychopathy.  Within it there is no recognition of our social reality.

Hunter-gatherers who managed to survive in a direct line of descendents for millions of years before the present, are the minimalists who created human nature.   They didn’t survive for so long because they honoured private property, they survived because they were able to share food in good times and bad, they were able to learn from each other and other groups and they were able to collectively control, and,  when necessary,  eliminate the alpha male, creating a level playing field for the first time, and ultimately leading to human civilization.