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Growing up as a Muslim in the United States was often difficult, but it provided me a wonderful gift - the privilege of being an observer. As I have discussed in previous posts, the Muslim experience in America is in many ways similar to the feeling that many Jews have in our society - the loneliness that comes from being different in a nation of Christians. But this position allows members of minority religions to be observers, to notice the paradigms and the assumptions under which American society functions. And it allows us at times to provide an objective critique of America's worldview.

So in the spirit of that observer's duty, let me jump into the fray about an issue that is dominating the conversation among American Christians today - Jesus and his economic views. Pope Francis struck a very painful nerve in recent days, at least for Christians in the United States, when he made critical comments about predatory business behavior and called for increased compassion for the poor in the modern capitalist world. In one fell swoop, the Pope has become Socialist Enemy # 1 in American political discourse, dethroning President Obama as the most feared threat to capitalism today in the minds of many conservative Christians.

But for those of us who aren't Christian, Pope Francis was simply reiterating what all of us instinctively know - Jesus Christ's entire life was spent on helping the poor and attacking those of wealth and privilege who abused the weak. As a Muslim, hearing the vitriol against the Pope for simply pointing out what everyone already knows - that Christianity should be about helping the poor - was shocking. I turned to a Jewish friend and asked: "Well, isn't that what Jesus Christ was all about?"

And his response was: "Mahatma Gandhi was right. Everyone in the world knows what Jesus Christ was about - except for Christians."

Ouch.

So the question arises - why? How did the Jesus of the Gospels, the good shepherd who fed and healed the poor and overturned the moneychangers in the Temple, become the poster boy for Wall Street? How is it that the Pope's simple reminder of Christ's values create such outrage among the economic elites that think they are good Christians?

As an observer inside the United States, I am able to see many of the myths by which this country was founded for what they are - intentionally crafted stories that were effective in pulling together a diverse group of European immigrants into a cohesive political entity that would go on to conquer this continent. America's entire myth is rooted in the idea of Manifest Destiny - that God had chosen the European newcomers to subdue and colonize this country. And it is an idea that worked. Manifest Destiny brought together the United States into one nation (under God!) and that idea remains deeply embedded in American psychology.

The vast resources and open space provided by this new continent provided the chance for an entire civilization to be built from scratch. And new myths were required to motivate the incredible effort needed to build a New World out the forests, plains and deserts of this virgin continent. The Calvinist movement with its focus on "salvation through hard work" provided exactly the kind of ideology that could tie in with Manifest Destiny and build a prosperous nation. American Christians from the very beginning believed that commerce and conquest were not only a practical necessity of survival, but also a divinely-ordained endeavor. And the results are clear. Within a few centuries, the United States became the richest and most powerful country on Earth. For believers in the American Dream, this was proof of God's divine favor toward this country.

Sadly, the American Dream has been somewhat tarnished over the past few decades. America was once the creditor to the world, and is now its largest debtor. Military adventurism, fueled by the military-industry complex President Eisenhower warned of, has weakened the United States both financially and morally, and its influence in world affairs is arguably losing ground to China, Russia and other emerging powers. A student of the great Muslim historian Ibn Khaldun would simply see this as the natural cycle of history that all nations go through, from birth to prosperity to inevitable decline.

And yet this idea, that America is like every other country and subject to the laws of history and economics, violates its foundational myth. The United States was born under Manifest Destiny, and the idea of "American exceptionalism" - that the rules of the world don't apply to us - is deeply embedded into the psyche of a nation built by risk-taking entrepreneurs and explorers. The fact that this myth has always been expressed in religious terms, that God supports America in a special way, makes facing its current problems inherently a question a faith. What are we doing wrong that God has taken His favor away from us?

The answer is of course the bogeyman of "socialism." For a civilization built on the myth of self-reliance and frontier independence, the idea of a powerful government is inherently threatening. And the idea that this powerful government could swoop in and "enslave" people with high taxes and strip them of the very guns that their ancestors used to conquer the land from its native population is a threat not only in physical terms, but also in psychological terms. The rest of the world, for better or worse, is accustomed to mundane government activities such as taxes, regulations and restraint on weapons possession by the populace (since by Max Weber's definition, a state's very claim to existence is its monopoly on violence).

But these regulatory norms of the Old World are seen as a direct attack on the Manifest Destiny of the New World, the Divine force that underlies American identity and individualism. And so the inevitable rise of the bureaucratic state is seen in terms of religious conflict. And its current head, President Obama, is not just demonized, he actually becomes a demon in the eyes of his opponents - the Antichrist of Revelation sent to unravel God's plan for America and the world.

When Pope Francis made his noble and inspiring comments calling for the world to help the poor, he was interpreted in the ugliest and stupidest possible way by the right-wing media machine that labeled the leader of 1.2 billion Catholics as an enemy "socialist." And yet all the Pope did was actually point to what Jesus Christ taught according to the Gospels.

I have been fascinated by the history of Christianity all my life. And I am currently working on my third novel on the birth of Christianity (my first, " Mother of the Believers" followed the birth of Islam, and my second, " Shadow of the Swords" chronicled the Crusades). The more I study the early sources on the Christian tradition, the more remarkable the journey appears from the simple Jewish sect that Jesus led into the global culture that Christianity has created in his name.

I have come to realize that the reason that Pope Francis hit such a deep nerve among many American Christians is that they are willfully ignorant of who the Jesus of the Gospels actually was, as it violates their foundational myth of Manifest Destiny. I have already stirred the pot with my post on whether Jesus was a vegetarian, where I question whether the Christian vision as promulgated by Paul was in conflict with the practices of the earliest followers of Jesus who knew him in his lifetime. And I must ruffle feathers again, by asking whether Christianity as imagined through the lens of American Manifest Destiny has any relation to the actual teachings of Jesus in the Gospels.

In the past several decades, many American Christians have been drawn to the claim that Jesus was a teacher of free market capitalism, leading to very successful " prosperity gospel" movement. This movement has indeed inspired many people to lift themselves up from poverty and find financial success, and I applaud its efforts to guide poor people to work hard and become prosperous. In fact, the "prosperity gospel" movement is a natural extension of the frontier entrepreneurialism inspired by the Manifest Destiny myth. But does it actually have anything to do with Jesus Christ as the Gospels portray him?

What we know of Jesus from the Gospels does not support the idea that Christ was a successful businessman or entrepreneur (unlike Islam's Prophet Muhammad, who was a prosperous merchant before his spiritual calling). As discussed in " Young Jesus" by Jean-Pierre Isbouts (an excellent primer on the economic realities of first century Palestine), Jesus is called a "tekton" in Greek (often translated as carpenter, but the term also covers others artisans and craftsmen). Dr. Isbouts suggests that Jesus probably worked as a laborer in the Greek city of Sepphoris, near the hamlet of Nazareth where the Gospels say he was raised. His familiarity with agriculture in his many parables makes it likely that Jesus also learned farming skills necessary for survival in rural Galilee. There is no evidence that I am aware of to suggest that Jesus was involved in the merchant trade that could have brought him riches and social standing in the economy of his world.

The Jesus of the Gospels is an itinerant teacher and healer, moving among working class people, fisherman and the like. He appears deeply suspicious of wealthy merchants and landowners, such as the rich man who wished to join his movement, only to be told that he would be required to give away all his wealth to the poor to follow Jesus (Matthew 19:16-24). When the wealthy man left dismayed, Jesus made his famous comment: "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." This incident, which is seen by many Christians as simply a nice parable about greed, may actually reveal much more about Christ's attitude toward personal property than many Christians are comfortable admitting, as we shall soon see.

The Jesus we see in the Gospels is most comfortable nursing the poor, and his opposition to the powerful elites of his time brought his mission to a shocking and bloody end. Indeed, the event that nearly all historians and believers accept as the catalyst for the crucifixion is Jesus going into the heart of the Jewish Temple and overturning the money changers in its midst (as well as releasing the sacrificial animals that served as the economic foundation for the Jewish priesthood). This attack on the rich and powerful of his society branded him a political threat, that soon led to Jesus being labeled as a seditious troublemaker. And the Roman overlords who ruled Palestine disposed of seditious troublemakers quickly and horrifically through public crucifixion.

I don't think any Christian of any political stripe would disagree with my extremely basic characterization of Christ's earthly life here. But these events do not really support the idea that Jesus was a "self help guru" teaching people how to be economically successful, as many American Christians like to portray him. Since Christ's life story is not particularly instructive in wealth building (by all accounts Jesus remained poor his whole life), many Christians choose to prune general principles in support of capitalism from a broad reading of the Bible as a whole. So we are told that Jesus would have supported the free market economy because he taught "personal responsibility." That he would have opposed "big government socialism" because he spoke out against the rulers of his time. And that he believed in private property rights because they stem from the free will God has given us to do right and wrong. Christ's call for helping the poor is transformed into a more complicated idea - "help the poor, but do it freely and don't let the oppressive government tax you to feed the poor, as it takes away your freedom of choice, which God uses to judge righteousness." Wow, that's a lot of caveat to insert into pretty straightforward teachings.

The problem is, in re-imagining Jesus as Adam Smith, many Christians find themselves jumping through tortuous hoops to prevent cognitive dissonance when actually confronted by the man in the Gospels. The Jesus of the Gospels appears to condemn wealth accumulation in his criticisms of the rich. Many "prosperity gospel" proponents soften these harsh words, saying that Jesus meant that wealth accumulation is acceptable if followers tithe 10% of their earnings to the poor. While Jesus does support tithing (Matthew 23:23, Luke 11:42), he also condemns a Pharisee for believing that his tithing is sufficient without embracing justice and righteousness as well.

More problematically for American conservatives, Jesus has no problem whatsoever with paying taxes to the government. Indeed, he commands his followers to "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's" (Matthew 22:21) specifically when questioned as to whether he opposes paying taxes to Rome. Jesus as a Tea Party activist simply doesn't fit with scripture.

But perhaps the most troubling fact to many American Christians is that the earliest Christian community was essentially a socialist commune. According to Acts of the Apostles, the followers of the Jerusalem Church were required to reject private property and give up all their goods to be shared in common with the community and the poor (Acts 2:44-45, Acts 4:32-35). So when Jesus told the rich man to give away all his goods and follow him, he appears to not be making a broad point about greed, he appears to have been presenting an actual membership requirement to his movement!

Of course, it is inevitable as Christianity expanded from a small fellowship of believers into a global civilization, that such communal practices would be rationalized away and forgotten. Trade is the lifeblood of a nation and people will always be self-interested despite moral exhortations otherwise. The failure of ideologies such as Marxism and communism is proof of that. It makes perfect sense that the developing Church tolerated and eventually embraced business enterprise because there was no other way for the Christian movement to survive and grow. And yet the asceticism and anti-materialism at the heart of Christ's words can never be erased. And it is that painful reminder that fills many American Christians with pangs of secret guilt, despite all their talk of "Jesus was a Millionaire." No matter how hard they try to justify it, the poor and pacifist Jesus will never fit into the box of capitalism, imperialism and Manifest Destiny they have constructed. And that deep subconscious guilt feeds the rage toward sincere Christians like Pope Francis.

The tragedy is that it is humble believers like Pope Francis who provide the world something greater to aspire to than just material success. Christ won over the hearts of the crowds exactly because he did not judge the weak or blame the poor for their plight. He offered love, kind words, healing and forgiveness to all. And in the process he inspired within people a hunger for something more than the kingdom of this material world. He showed them a glimpse of the Kingdom of God that they could find within themselves through humility, service and compassion. And this hunger cannot be satiated with all the shiny baubles offered by the free market.

If I can provide any insight as a Muslim observer of Christianity, it is that many American Christians do not really appreciate what wondrous beauty they have in the character of Jesus, their teacher. Too often, they place Jesus on a pedestal as a divine being to be worshipped, rather than doing the hard work of moulding their lives according to his simple and powerful human example. I encourage my Christian brothers and sisters to emulate the beauty that they have in Christ's living example and not just pay lip service to his legacy with empty words. Christ's simple actions of generosity and compassion feed the soul more than all the complex theology Christians use to explain and justify their beliefs. It is Christ's living example, his actions, that draw people to faith, not convoluted arguments about the Trinity or clumsy efforts to disguise economics as spirituality. The latter are merely breadcrumbs of words that get stuck in the throat and don't touch the heart.

And as Jesus Christ so wisely said 2,000 years ago: "Man cannot live on bread alone."
Kamran Pasha is a Hollywood filmmaker and the author of Shadow of the Swords, a novel on the Crusades (Simon & Schuster; June 2010). For more information please visit: http://www.kamranpasha.com

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Growing up as a Muslim in the United States was often difficult, but it provided me a wonderful gift - the privilege of being an observer. As I have discussed in previous posts, the Muslim experience in America is in many ways similar to the feeling that many Jews have in our society - the loneliness that comes from being different in a nation of Christians.

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Christianity immediately started becoming irrelevant when irrelevancy started becoming Christian.

Irrelevancy has become Christian

One: Christianity immediately started becoming irrelevant when irrelevancy started becoming Christian.

What does that mean? First, a little biblical history: We humans have always had trouble doing even the simple things God asks of us. The Old Testament story of Israel and Judah reveals repeated cycles of their following God for a while but inevitably being drawn away. Often they were tempted to integrate their neighbors' religious practices or to substitute their own ideas of righteousness.

We've been doing the same ever since. Christianity came on the scene; but from its inception, people quickly started altering nearly everything about it.

For humans to try to "improve" on God is not only arrogant and presumptuous, it also renders our religions irrelevant. The legitimacy of Christianity is totally dependent on whether its creator-Jesus the Christ, who was God on earth-is involved and active in it.

If He isn't, it's irrelevant.

Wouldn't it seem logical that whatever Jesus and His apostles did, we should do; what they said, we should say? When churches desperately try to reinvent themselves to appeal to what people want, as so many are doing today, they abandon what's relevant to God. True Christianity is about changing to find our relevance in God-not God finding His relevance in us.

And if Christianity isn't changing people, it isn't relevant.

Jesus' own words remain a devastating indictment of Christianity today: "Not everyone who says to Me, 'Lord, Lord,' shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven," He said. "Many will say to Me in that day, 'Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?' And then I will declare to them, 'I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!'" (Matthew 7:21-23).

He wasn't talking about Islam, Buddhism, Judaism or any other religion. He was targeting those who claim to represent Him-modern Christianity. He's pretty clear: Slapping the "Christian" label on yourself doesn't necessarily make you so.

If God says something is irrelevant-meaningless to Him-then all the popular customs, Bible-quoting and righteous talk of humans cannot somehow override that. And what's more, sooner or later, human religious inventions will fail to satisfactorily explain the spiritual questions for which we seek answers.

Human explanations cannot satisfy spiritual voids, and people will eventually start looking elsewhere for relevancy. Like they are today.

Bad produce at the fruit stand

Two: Most people eventually stop eating bad fruit. They may move on to other bad fruit, but move on they will.

Jesus had a lot to say about fruit when He came on the scene some 2,000 years ago. The mainstream religious institutions and teachers of the day smugly assumed they were leading people to God, but to Jesus they had long ago become irrelevant.

"By their fruits you will know them," He said, and He was unsparing and withering in His assessments. Jesus' harshest words were not aimed at the pagan Romans, but at the religious leaders claiming to follow God! Their carefully crafted religious practices made them appear pious, but He cut through their facade, calling them hypocrites, "whitewashed tombs" that are beautiful on the outside but inside are full of dead men's bones (Matthew 23:27).

They marketed their religion well, but their spiritual lives were reprehensible!

What would Jesus say if He was observing the fruit stand of Christianity today? A big reason people cite for walking away is the bad fruit of its leaders-abuse of people and power, scandals and immorality, cover-ups, confusion and opposition over moral and social issues, hypocrisy, greed and opulence, doctrinal disunity, embarrassing extremists.

Bad fruit doesn't just bring shame and embarrassment on churches. It makes Christianity appear irrelevant as a genuine, life-changing entity.

Counterfeit Christianity

Three: Counterfeit money works only if it's fooling people. Once everyone knows it's fake, it's irrelevant. But until then, a lot of people can be cheated.

The same is true with counterfeit Christianity. Here are Jesus' own words of warning: "Many will come in My name, saying, 'I am the Christ,' and will deceive many" (Matthew 24:5).

He established Christianity with two strong assertions: It would never die, He promised, but it would be corrupted. It didn't take long for the "many" deceivers to come.

Within just a few years, they began creeping into the Church; and in only a matter of decades, "Christianity" began to morph into something resembling little of His original church. It wasn't long before the counterfeiters overwhelmed-both in numbers and popularity-the remaining "little flock." Their primary tools of deceit-false doctrines-are now the unquestioned norm.

But Jesus' words then are just as true today: "You have made the commandment of God of no effect by your tradition. Hypocrites! Well did Isaiah prophesy about you, saying: 'These people draw near to Me with their mouth, and honor Me with their lips, but their heart is far from Me. And in vain they worship Me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men'" (Matthew 15:6-9).

That didn't slow anything down, though. A history of the first few centuries of Christianity reveals a magnitude and pace of doctrinal change that was staggering.

Regardless, Christianity's real credibility is based on the truth of God, not ideas of man. The Bible's testimony is that man's ideas and ways have never ceased to fail. So if Christianity is failing today, a core reason is that so much of what masquerades as Christianity is man's way, not God's.

The foundation on which Christianity stands is the truth taught by Christ and the apostles as faithfully recorded in the New Testament. Humans cannot change the essence of something God created and expect success. False teachings may create an attractive building that looks great, but it sits on a foundation of sand that eventually will not stand the test of time.

God will not be mocked, and He does not suffer lies. Truth will eventually expose the many distortions about God and life that false doctrines have foisted off on people.

It's time for hard questions

If Christians are alarmed by their faith's waning influence, it's time for a long look in the mirror. It's time for religious leaders to ask, Why haven't we learned that we can't take the Church Christ founded and turn it into whatever we want? If our spiritual forefathers took what Jesus taught and turned what was relevant to God into what was relevant to people, do we have the courage to admit it and turn it around?

It's time to ask, If Jesus didn't endorse the religious institutions of His day, what makes us confident that when He returns He'll endorse the followers of nonbiblical practices and false doctrines that have been slowly integrated into mainstream Christianity?

It's time to ask, Where do I go from here?

What can you do?

True Christianity IS relevant-it's meaningful, life-changing, and it gives sensible answers. But anything that masquerades as Christianity isn't. The masqueraders have fooled millions of people for hundreds of years. It's only the truth, Jesus said, that can make you free.

As Jesus told the Samaritan woman who was struggling to sort through conflicting religious views, the standard is truth. "The hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for the Father is seeking such to worship Him," He said. "God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth" (John 4:23-24).

Are you willing to swim against the tide and go on a quest for the truth? To "test all things; hold fast what is good," as Paul wrote in 1 Thessalonians 5:21?

If you know God exists and know the Bible is His Word, start by searching out what it really says, not what religious spin doctors tell you. How did the people in the Church Jesus built worship God? What does the Bible say about what He, and His followers, believed and practiced?

Once that's established, ask, How did the plain, simple teachings of the Bible and the practices of His Church come to be changed? Why were the practices of His Church discarded and substituted, mostly with ideas and traditions borrowed from old pagan religions?

Finally, find out from God-from His words in His Bible-whether or not it makes any difference to Him! Did all these changes mean anything to Him, or is He okay with our choosing any way we want to worship and relate to Him?

A humble, sincere quest for truth-and then a willingness to live it-will make Christianity relevant in your life!

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Why Is Christianity Becoming Irrelevant?

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Christianity immediately started becoming irrelevant when irrelevancy started becoming Christian. One: Christianity immediately started becoming irrelevant when irrelevancy started becoming Christian. What does that mean? First, a little biblical history: We humans have always had trouble doing even the simple things God asks of us.

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History of Modernism

click to see a PowerPoint presentation

Modernism: Characteristics

Arising out of the rebellious mood at the beginning of the twentieth century, modernism was a radical approach that yearned to revitalize the way modern civilization viewed life, art, politics, and science. This rebellious attitude that flourished between 1900 and 1930 had, as its basis, the rejection of European culture for having become too corrupt, complacent and lethargic, ailing because it was bound by the artificialities of a society that was too preoccupied with image and too scared of change. This dissatisfaction with the moral bankruptcy of everything European led modern thinkers and artists to explore other alternatives, especially primitive cultures. For the Establishment, the result would be cataclysmic; the new emerging culture would undermine tradition and authority in the hopes of transforming contemporary society.

The first characteristic associated with modernism is nihilism, the rejection of all religious and moral principles as the only means of obtaining social progress. In other words, the modernists repudiated the moral codes of the society in which they were living in. The reason that they did so was not necessarily because they did not believe in God, although there was a great majority of them who were atheists, or that they experienced great doubt about the meaninglessness of life. Rather, their rejection of conventional morality was based on its arbitrariness, its conformity and its exertion of control over human feelings. In other words, the rules of conduct were a restrictive and limiting force over the human spirit. The modernists believed that for an individual to feel whole and a contributor to the re-vitalization of the social process, he or she needed to be free of all the encumbering baggage of hundreds of years of hypocrisy

The rejection of moral and religious principles was compounded by the repudiation of all systems of beliefs, whether in the arts, politics, sciences or philosophy. Doubt was not necessarily the most significant reason why this questioning took place. One of the causes of this iconoclasm was the fact that early 20th-century culture was literally re-inventing itself on a daily basis. With so many scientific discoveries and technological innovations taking place, the world was changing so quickly that culture had to re-define itself constantly in order to keep pace with modernity and not appear anachronistic. By the time a new scientific or philosophical system or artistic style had found acceptance, each was soon after questioned and discarded for an even newer one. Another reason for this fickleness was the fact that people felt a tremendous creative energy always looming in the background as if to announce the birth of some new invention or theory.

As a consequence of the new technological dynamics, the modernists felt a sense of constant anticipation and did not want to commit to any one system that would thereby harness creativity, ultimately restricting and annihilating it. And so, in the arts, for instance, at the beginning of the 20th-century, artists questioned academic art for its lack of freedom and flirted with so many isms: secessionism, fauvism, expressionism, cubism, futurism, constructivism, dada, and surrealism. Pablo Picasso, for instance, went as far as experimenting with several of these styles, never wanting to feel too comfortable with any one style.

The wrestling with all the new assumptions about reality and culture generated a new permissiveness in the realm of the arts. The arts were now beginning to break all of the rules since they were trying to keep pace with all of the theoretical and technological advances that were changing the whole structure of life. In doing so, artists broke rank with everything that had been taught as being sacred and invented and experimented with new artistic languages that could more appropriately express the meaning of all of the new changes that were occurring. The result was a new art that appeared strange and radical to whoever experienced it because the artistic standard had always been mimesis, the literal imitation or representation of the appearance of nature, people, and society. In other words, art was supposed to be judged on the standard of how well it realistically reflected what something looked or sounded like.

This mimetic tradition had originated way back in ancient Greece, had been perfected during the Renaissance, and had found prominence during the nineteenth-century. But for modern artists this old standard was too limiting and did not reflect the way that life was now being experienced. Freud and Einstein had radically changed perception of reality. Freud had asked us to look inwardly into a personal world that had previously been repressed, and Einstein taught us that relativity was everything. And, thus, new artistic forms had to be found that expressed this new subjectivity. Artists countered with works that were so personal that they distorted the natural appearance of things and with reason. Each individual work begged to be judged as a self-sufficient unit which obeyed its own internal laws and its own internal logic, thereby attaining its own individual character. No more conventional cookie-cutter forms to be superimposed on human expression

What were some of the artistic beliefs that the modernists adopted? Above all they embraced freedom, and they found it in the artistic forms and emotions of the primitive cultures of Africa, the Orient, the Americas and Oceania. This act was the repudiation of all of the stylistic refinements that were the basis of 19th-century artistic endeavor. On the one hand, primitivism represented the simplification of form, which was to become one of the hallmarks of modernism. This abstraction of form suggested that some essential structure, previously hidden by realistic technique, would come to light. Art had, according to the modernists, become too concerned with irrelevant sophistications and conventions that detracted from the main purpose of art: the discovery of truth. On the other hand, primitivism was the expression of all that civilized man had to repress in order to enter into contract with society. According to Sigmund Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents, in order for man to partake in civilized society, he had had to lay aside many uncivilized urges within the self, such as the natural appetite for adultery, incest, murder, homosexuality, etc., all held as taboos. It is this repression of natural desires that, Freud argues, is the source of modern neurosis. As a Jew, Freud was too well acquainted with the THOU SHALL NOTS of the Ten Commandments. Symbolically, the embrace of primitivism is a negation of the very principles of the Judeo-Christian tradition and an affirmation of authentic expression of that hidden self that only finds expression at night when we dream.

The modernist interest in primitivism also expressed itself in its correlative, the exploration of perversity. This obsession with the forbidden and the lurid was tantamount to the re-discovery of passion, a way of life which so many creative people at the time believed to have been repressed or had lain dormant. Frederich Nietzsche blames this dormancy on the 19th-century's preoccupation with form. In his seminal work The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche had traced the origins and development of drama back in Ancient Greece to the balance that existed between two gods who existed in opposition to one another, Apollo and Dionysius. Apollo represented the essence of light, rationality, civility, culture, and restraint. In contrast, Dionysius suggested wine, the primitive urge, all that was uncivilized. Although these two gods existed in opposition to one another, they were both, nevertheless, revered equally, thus striking a balance between form (the Apollonian) and creative impulse (Dionysius). The modernists concurred with Nietzsche that art had degenerated because it was too concerned with the rules of form and not enough with the creative energies that lie underneath the surface.

It is that exploration of what is underneath the surface that the modernists were so keen about, and what better way to do so than to scrutinize man's real aspirations, feelings, and actions. What was revealed was a new honesty in this portrayal: disintegration, madness, suicide, sexual depravity, impotence, morbidity, deception. Many would assail this portrayal as morally degenerate; the modernists, on the other hand, would defend themselves by calling it liberating.

Ironically, the modernist portrayal of human nature takes place within the context of the city rather than in nature, where it had occurred during the entire 19th-century. At the beginning of the 19th-century, the romantics had idealized nature as evidence of the transcendent existence of God; towards the end of the century, it became a symbol of chaotic, random existence. For the modernists, nature becomes irrelevant and passé, for the city supersedes nature as the life force. Why would the modernists shift their interest from nature and unto the city? The first reason is an obvious one. This is the time when so many left the countryside to make their fortunes in the city, the new capital of culture and technology, the new artificial paradise. But more importantly, the city is the place where man is dehumanized by so many degenerate forces. Thus, the city becomes the locus where modern man is microscopically focused on and dissected. In the final analysis, the city becomes a "cruel devourer", a cemetery for lost souls.

The Forces That Shaped Modernism

The year 1900 ushered a new era that changed the way that reality was perceived and portrayed. Years later this revolutionary new period would come to be known as modernism and would forever be defined as a time when artists and thinkers rebelled against every conceivable doctrine that was widely accepted by the Establishment, whether in the arts, science, medicine, philosophy, etc. Although modernism would be short-lived, from 1900 to 1930, we are still reeling from its influences sixty-five years later.

How was modernism such a radical departure from what had preceded it in the past? The modernists were militant about distancing themselves from every traditional idea that had been held sacred by Western civilization, and perhaps we can even go so far as to refer to them as intellectual anarchists in their willingness to vandalize anything connected to the established order. In order to better understand this modernist iconoclasm, let's go back in time to explore how and why the human landscape was changing so rapidly.

By 1900 the world was a bustling place transformed by all of the new discoveries, inventions and technological achievements that were being thrust on civilization: electricity, the combustion engine, the incandescent light bulb, the automobile, the airplane, radio, X-rays, fertilizers and so forth. These innovations revolutionized the world in two distinct ways. For one, they created an optimistic aura of a worldly paradise, of a new technology that was to reshape man into moral perfection. In other words, technology became a new religious cult that held the key to a new utopian dream that would transform the very nature of man. Secondly, the new technology quickened the pace through which people experienced life on a day to day basis. For instance, the innovations in the field of transportation and communication accelerated the daily life of the individual. Whereas in the past, a person's life was circumscribed by the lack of mechanical resources available, a person could now expand the scope of daily activities through the new liberating power of the machine. Man now became literally energized by all of these scientific and technological innovations and, more important, felt a rush emanating from the feeling that he was invincible, that there was no stopping him.

Modernity, however, was not only shaped by this new technology. Several philosophical theoreticians were to change the way that modern man perceives the external world, particularly in their refutation of the Newtonian principle that reality was an absolute, unquestionable entity divorced from those observing it. The first to do so was F. H. Bradley, who considered that the human mind is a more fundamental feature of the universe than matter and that its purpose is to search for truth. His most ambitious work, Appearance and Reality: A Metaphysical Essay (1893), introduced the concept that an object in reality can have no absolute contours but varies from the angle from which it is seen. Thus Bradley defines the identity of a things as the view the onlooker takes of it. The effect of this work was to encourage rather than dispel doubt. In one of the most seminal works of this century, "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies," Albert Einstein's theory of relativity held that, if, for all frames of reference, the speed of light is constant and if all natural laws are the same, then both time and motion are found to be relative to the observer. In other words, there is no such thing as universal time and thus experience runs very differently from man to man. Alfred Whitehead was another who revised the ideas of time, space and motion as the basis of man's perception of the external world. He viewed reality as living geometry and believed in the essential relevance of every object to all other objects: "all entities or factors in the universe are essentially relevant to each other's existence since every entity involves an infinite array of perspectives." For all of these thinkers, subjectivity was now the main focus.

Several psychological theoreticians were to also fundamentally alter the way that modern man viewed his own internal reality, an unexplored heart of darkness. Sigmund Freud was the first to gaze inwardly and to discover a world within where dynamic, often warring forces shape the individual's psyche and personality. To explain this internal world within each of us, he developed a complex theory of the unconscious that illustrated the importance of unconscious motivation in behavior and the proposition that psychological events can go on outside of conscious awareness. And so, according to Freud, fantasies, dreams, and slips of the tongue are outward manifestations of unconscious motives. Furthermore, in explaining the development of personality, Freud expanded man's definition of sexuality to include oral, anal, and other bodily sensations. Thus his legacy to the modern world was to expose a darker side of man that had been hidden from view by the hypocrisy of 19th- century society.

Freud was not the only psychological theoretician who asked us to gaze inwardly to better understand the human psyche. His disciple, Carl Jung, was also to develop another theory delving into the unconscious which explored the nature of the irrational self and which explained the common grounds shared by so many cultures. Jung's Theory of the Collective Unconscious, about an area of the mind that he believed was shared by everyone, states that there are patterns of behavior or actions and reactions of the psyche which he calls archetypes that are determined by race. These instinctive, universal patterns manifest themselves in dreams, visions, and fantasies and are expressed in myths, religious concepts, fairy tales, and works of art.

The French philosopher Henry Bergson was also to turn his gaze to the unconscious to explore the nature of memory as experienced in the present moment. Bergson's Time and the Free Will was an attempt to establish the notion of duration, or lived time, as opposed to what he viewed as the spatialized conception of time measured by the clock and commonly known as chronological time. According to Bergson, states of conscious memory permeate one another in storage within the unconscious, in the same way that "oldie-goldies" are stored in a juke-box. A sense impression, such as whiff of cologne or the taste of sweet potato pie, might trigger consciousness to recall one of these memories, much like a coin will cause the record of your choice to play. Once the submerged memory resurfaces in the conscious mind, the self becomes suspended, there might be a spontaneous flash of intuition about the past, and just maybe, this insight will translate into some kind of realization of the present moment. In fact, isn't this what we do when we listen to an old song, forget the present, re-experience the past, and, then, all of a sudden, apply it all to our lives in the present? And thus, intuition leads to knowledge.

Politics and the economy would also transform the way that modern man looked at himself and the world in which he lived. Science and technology were radically changing the means of production. Whereas in the past, a worker became involved in production from beginning to end, by 1900 he had become a mere cog in the production line, making an insignificant contribution. Thus, division of labor made him feel fragmented, alienated not only from the rest of society but from himself. One of the effects of this fragmentation was the consolidation of workers into political parties that threatened the upper classes. And, thus, the new political idealism that was to culminate in the Russian Revolution that swept through Europe.

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History of Modernism click to see a PowerPoint presentation Modernism: Characteristics Arising out of the rebellious mood at the beginning of the twentieth century, modernism was a radical approach that yearned to revitalize the way modern civilization viewed life, art, politics, and science.

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If you have an aversion to Eastern philosophy (even though Christianity is, by origin, an Eastern religion), bear with me, I think you'll find this interesting anyway. I've been trying to find a cohesive way of expressing what I believe the person of Jesus calls us towards that steps into something much deeper than just a conversion to a codified religion and its accompanying world-view (Christianity). The Tao (Dao) offers something into this space. With that in mind, here I want to explore Jesus and the Tao.

Many will be aware of the Tao through a writing called the Tao Te Ching - a philosophical piece. We could have some amazing and lengthy discussions about the Tao Te Ching, but underpinning it is the idea of the Tao. It's important to understand that the Tao is not a thing to be grasped. The Tao is most easily understood as the underlying natural order of the universe. It could be said to be the essence that underpins everything. Translations of the word 'Tao' give us English words like 'way', 'route', and 'path'. Thus it's not a thing to be grasped, but more a mode of existence that underpins everything.

C.S Lewis in his work, The Abolition of Man, talks of the Tao as a natural law and as unchanging (his dystopian future in which the grounded reality of the Tao is done away with among humans is fascinating and places power in the hands of an elite group who come to resemble something that is not human). He noted that new systems that spring up and new ideologies that are born are merely fragments of the Tao and that they owe the Tao any sense of validity they may have. It's important to note that the Tao is different from the Christian concept of God where God is a personal entity (though such a description falls well short of the reality) whereas the Tao is an impersonal, universal way of being - it simply is. To understand it in Christian thinking (as much as it could possibly be understood), if God is the Creator then the Tao is the underlying law at work in the created universe and the intended 'way' for all of creation (though, as we shall see, in Christian thinking the two are brought together in a person).

All of this is an extremely superficial way of understanding these concepts - which is why the Tao Te Ching uses various forms of writing to draw one towards harmony with the Tao - much of it causes a certain amount of cognitive dissonance for the average western reader. The pursuit of much Chinese religion and various philosophies and ways of living that connect with the Tao, is harmony with it - this way of being is known as 'De' - cultivation of the way. Harmony with the Tao, for many, is the chief mode of life, but there isn't a set of 'dos and don'ts' to such a way of life. Of course, as with any of humanity's philosophical approaches to life there are more rigid forms of 'De' such as Confucianism, but I'm intrigued by the idea of our lives being about cultivating 'the way' (De). It is along this line and the implied natural form of 'being' both for us and the universe that I want to focus.

In many Chinese versions of the Bible, the Greek word 'Logos' is translated as 'Dao' (Tao). Knowing that, read John 1 and where it says 'Word', replace it with 'Dao' with the understanding that we've been talking about. I don't want to try and make connections that aren't there but there is some clarity to be found in drawing it all together that strips away some of the baggage we have placed on Christian thinking. Also, I would caution trying to make John say something that he may not be saying by drawing on Greek and Chinese philosophy and then placing the words of those concepts into what he says. This is more about connections that I find interesting and that take my faith into the language of another's way of seeing and understanding the world.

In the thinking of Greek Stoic philosophers who followed in the footsteps of Heraclitus, 'Logos', most often translated as 'word', was a principle of order and knowledge; they saw it as a divine principle that pervaded the universe - hence the translation to 'Dao'. Therefore Jesus could be said to be the Tao, or the Logos of the Stoics, embodied. Where Christianity differs from most thinking around the Tao is that we believe Jesus is God - is Divine. So in Jesus we have the embodiment of the Creator ("Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father." John 14:9) and we have the embodiment of the intended natural order of the universe (the Logos or Tao from which everything comes - "through him all things were made" John 1:3). Thus Jesus and the Tao can be talked of in the same sentence.

So here's the kicker - when we look to the person of Jesus (and His Divine form) we do not see the call to a religion (though the practice of said religion can be useful for what we are being called to) and we do not see the call to adhere to a predetermined list of beliefs. Rather than these things, we see the call to something much deeper - harmonization with the Tao and therefore the very intention for our humanity. We are called to be fully human; nothing more and nothing less. The language of sin then isn't simply about breaking a predetermined set of moral rules, it's about that which inhibits our intended life in the Tao/Logos and therefore creates conflict; establishing something other than the intended reality.

The 'rules' of Christianity and all the dos and don'ts it's turned into are, at best, a derivative and a shadow of the Tao - where Christianity is too often reduced to a moral and ethical code to live by. Rather than this, Christianity is the rules stripped away and the spotlight put on the transformation God works in us to recreate us to our true state as part of the Tao or Logos - His intended order for the universe/creation. Our role is to simply open our lives up to that transformation and to walk 'the way'. Christ as both God and the Tao/Logos is the gateway ("I am the way") to us being a new creation shaped towards that intended reality - the reality that underpins the universe - Jesus.

There is something formlessly created
Born before Heaven and Earth
So silent! So ethereal!
Independent and changeless
Circulating and ceaseless
It can be regarded as the mother of the world

I do not know its name
Identifying it, I call it "Tao"
- Tao Te Ching Chapter 25

Identifying it, I call it Jesus the Christ - not merely a principle but a person. Food for thought and if you continue with it there are many many head-trips in there when Jesus, our journey, and many popular Christian concepts are considered.

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If you have an aversion to Eastern philosophy (even though Christianity is, by origin, an Eastern religion), bear with me, I think you'll find this interesting anyway. I've been trying to find a cohesive way of expressing what I believe the person of Jesus calls us towards that steps into something much deeper than just a conversion to a codified religion and its accompanying world-view (Christianity).

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A new exhibition signals the end of postmodernism. But what was it? And what comes next?

by Edward Docx / July 20, 2011 / Leave a comment

Published in August 2011 issue of Prospect Magazine

I have some good news-kick back, relax, enjoy the rest of the summer, stop worrying about where your life is and isn't heading. What news? Well, on 24th September, we can officially and definitively declare that postmodernism is dead. Finished. History. A difficult period in human thought over and done with. How do I know this? Because that is the date when the Victoria and Albert Museum opens what it calls "the first comprehensive retrospective" in the world: "Postmodernism-Style and Subversion 1970-1990."

Wait, I hear you cry. How do they know? And what was it? Postmodernism-I didn't understand it. I never understood it. How can it be over?

You are not alone. If there's one word that confuses, upsets, angers, beleaguers, exhausts and contaminates us all, then it is postmodernism. And yet, properly understood, postmodernism is playful, intelligent, funny and fascinating. From Grace Jones to Lady Gaga, from Andy Warhol to Gilbert and George, from Paul Auster to David Foster Wallace, its influence has been everywhere and continues. It has been the dominant idea of our age.

So what was it? Well, the best way to begin to understand postmodernism is with reference to what went before: modernism. Unlike, say, the Enlightenment or Romanticism, postmodernism (even as a word) summons up the movement it intends to overturn. In this way, postmodernism might be seen as the delayed germination of an older seed, planted by artists like Marcel Duchamp, during modernism's high noon of the 1920s and 1930s. (Seen in this light, the start-date that the V&A offers for postmodernism-1970-is quite late.)

Thus, if modernists like Picasso and Cézanne focused on design, hierarchy, mastery, the one-off, then postmodernists, such as Andy Warhol and Willem de Kooning, were concerned with collage, chance, anarchy, repetition. If modernists such as Virginia Woolf relished depth and metaphysics, then postmodernists such as Martin Amis favoured surface and irony. As for composers, modernists like Béla Bartók were hieratic and formalist, and postmodernists, like John Adams, were playful and interested in deconstructing. In other words, modernism preferred connoisseurship, tended to be European and dealt in universals. Postmodernism preferred commodity and America, and embraced as many circumstances as the world contained.

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by Edward Docx / July 20, 2011 / Leave a comment Published in August 2011 issue of Prospect Magazine I have some good news-kick back, relax, enjoy the rest of the summer, stop worrying about where your life is and isn't heading. What news?

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On a bright nineteenth-century morning, a madman lit a lantern and rushed into a crowded marketplace in a German town. "I seek God!" he exclaimed. No self-respecting townsperson in the post-Enlightenment world believed in God, so the madman's cry was met only with laughter.

"I'll tell you where God is," returned the madman. "God is dead! God remains dead. And we have killed him." At this, the townsfolk grew silent. The madman went on to explain the ramifications of this murderous act, but still no response from the crowd. Throwing his lantern to the ground, the madman cried out, "I have come too soon! The deed has been done, but news of it has not yet spread this far." From there, the madman went into church after church, singing a funeral dirge to God and declaring the churches to be nothing more than tombs to the divine.

Friedrich Nietzsche told this parable of the madman (loosely paraphrased above, you can read the whole text of this short parable here -I'd definitely recommend reading it). The story is provocative, to say the least. What exactly did Nietzsche mean when he said that God is dead? How is this possible?

Nietzsche's parable is brilliant. His observation is incredibly astute, even if you don't like what it's saying. Before Nietzsche came on the scene, humanity had indeed killed God. Or the notion of God. With the Renaissance, gifted individuals recovered something of the ancient Greek way of thinking, which set aside myth, superstition, and revelation and focused on what a person could learn for himself. Beginning with myself alone, how can I use my brain and my senses to decide what is true and what is false?

This return to autonomous human reason picked up in the Renaissance, came to a head in the Enlightenment, and then continued to grow bolder and more absolute. By the time Nietzsche came on the scene, people no longer needed God. Science was explaining away the mysteries of the world, and Darwin had finally developed an alternative explanation for the origins of the world.

And so Nietzsche entered the proverbial marketplace declaring the death of God. God had been killed, yet people didn't seem to be aware of the implications of their unadulterated faith in scientific naturalism.

But Nietzsche's parable isn't as hostile toward religion in general as it might appear. Nietzsche had a huge problem with Christianity as an institution, but he kind of admired Jesus (sound familiar?). Nietzsche wasn't trying to get people to stop believing. To the contrary, he recognized that some sort of spirituality was necessary to find meaning in life.

In The Madman, Nietzsche rightly emphasizes the significance of losing faith. The people in the marketplace did not believe in God, but to a large extent their lives would have been shaped by a memory of this belief. Nietzsche warns us that if God is dead-really truly dead, entirely discounted-then everything will change.

What Nietzsche is saying in The Madman is not that God is dead so let's throw a party, he is saying that God is dead and he must be replaced with something. In the post-Enlightenment world, faith in God had been replaced with faith in science. But Nietzsche, himself an atheist, insists that a person cannot live a faith-free life. God is dead, so what must we do to find meaning for our lives in his absence?

"What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?"

Here is why I bring all of this up. Even a bitter atheist like Nietzsche knows that life is meaningful. He understands that life cannot be lived apart from some sort of spiritual pursuit. What "festivals of atonement" or "sacred games" must we develop in order to replace our old, dead religions? Even an atheist fills her life with liturgy. If we deny the existence of a transcendent God, we are the only possible replacements. Prepare yourself, you've got some huge shoes to fill.

Nietzsche's spiritual alternative to God was a fascination with the world around us. We will find meaning for our lives precisely by rejecting false notions about God and jumping into the world around us. For Nietzsche, vitality itself was the meaning of life.

What I find fascinating is that this is exactly the approach that the Preacher tried in Ecclesiastes. He, too, supposed that meaning could be found by throwing himself into life. But what the Preacher found is that all of life is meaningless apart from God, yet overwhelmingly meaningful with God.

This world is a certain type of place, and regardless of what we choose to believe, the world itself does not change with our convictions. As Francis Schaeffer would say, people can choose to believe what they want, but they still have to live in the world that God made. It's a meaningful world, a world that is badly broken yet still overflowing with glory, and a world in which God is anything but dead.

Mark Beuving currently serves as Associate Pastor at Creekside Church in Rocklin, CA. Prior to going back into pastoral ministry, Mark spent ten years on staff at Eternity Bible College as a Campus Pastor, Dean of Students, and then Associate Professor. Mark now teaches online adjunct for Eternity. He is passionate about building up the body of Christ, training future leaders for the Church, and writing. Though he is interested in many areas of theology and philosophy, Mark is most fascinated with practical theology and exploring the many ways in which the Bible can speak to and transform our world. He is the author of "Resonate: Enjoying God's Gift of Music" and the co-author with Francis Chan of "Multiply: Disciples Making Disciples." Mark lives in Rocklin with his wife and two daughters.

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How Nietzsche Killed God - The Archives: Eternity Bible College

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On a bright nineteenth-century morning, a madman lit a lantern and rushed into a crowded marketplace in a German town. "I seek God!" he exclaimed. No self-respecting townsperson in the post-Enlightenment world believed in God, so the madman's cry was met only with laughter. "I'll tell you where God is," returned the madman.

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This weekend, Jesse Myerson advanced five economic reform ideas that he thinks millennials should champion, and various conservative readers' heads exploded for reasons I don't fully understand. Particularly, I don't see what's supposed to be "communist" about Myerson's proposals.

His five big ideas are:

1. Guaranteed jobs for everyone.

2. A universal basic income.

3. Imposing a land-value tax, or maybe having the government own a lot of land.

4. "Make everybody own everything," the specific proposal for which seems to be a sovereign wealth fund.

5. State lending banks like North Dakota's.

Conservatives dismiss this agenda at their peril. Myerson's ideas are aimed at very real problems: Returns to labor are declining relative to returns to capital; America's economy is vulnerable to shocks that sharply raise unemployment; returns to economic growth are accruing disproportionately out of the top, leaving most people out of their share of progress.

Not all of the ideas in Myerson's piece are good approaches to these problems. And since Myerson describes his "political aspirations" as communist, he obviously has some bad ideas that aren't contained in the piece. But the ideas in the piece aren't crazy and should be evaluated on their merits.

The most promising of Myerson's ideas is an unconditional basic income, which is a policy of sending checks to Americans simply for existing.

This policy would have several advantages; for one, it would lift people out of poverty. Unlike means-tested welfare programs, it wouldn't act like a tax that penalizes poor people for working more. It might also reverse the sliding labor share of national income; by allowing people to exit the labor market, it would tighten labor supply and allow workers to bargain for higher wages.

On the other hand, by allowing people to exit the labor market, it might lower GDP. And it would be very expensive to finance. Despite these drawbacks, conservatives including Charles Murray and Milton Friedman have endorsed a UBI. The policy isn't a slam dunk, but it's definitely not communist.

Or consider a land value tax. Myerson frames this idea as "Take Back The Land," but a tax on land doesn't actually take it back. Such a tax would raise revenue in a way that is friendly to the economy; taxes discourage the creation of the thing that is taxed, but the amount of land can't be increased or reduced. This tax would actually foster economic growth by making it harder for landowners to keep their land unproductive; you could expect to see a lot fewer vacant lots in New York City.

This idea has drawbacks, too. For one, federal property taxes sure look like unconstitutional "direct taxes" to me, though at least one Yale Law School professor disagrees. (States and localities could still impose such taxes, even if the federal government can't.) Land is also illiquid; people who own valuable land and few other assets might be forced to sell it, which would be harmful to retirees and small farmers. Contrary to what I suspect are Myerson's goals, such a tax might actually lead to the consolidation of land ownership in the hands of wealthy landlords with sufficient cash flow to pay the taxes.

Myerson's idea for public land trusts seems like a worse idea. He introduces this idea by complaining that landlords "blow" because "They don't really do anything to earn their money. They just claim ownership of buildings and charge people who actually work for a living the majority of our incomes for the privilege of staying in boxes that these owners often didn't build and rarely if ever improve."

That's wrong - most of what landlords own isn't land but improvements, which are a consumer product like any other except that they can't be moved. Myerson at least implicitly understands this, since he calls for a tax specifically on land value, which is designed to encourage and reward the construction of improvements. Putting land in communal trusts would be harmful to the construction of improvements, because governments are not very good at being real estate developers - it's the government that gives you unsafe, decaying housing projects and grim office developments like Empire State Plaza.

I'm also not keen on a public bank, though I don't think it would be the end of the world. A lot of capitalist countries have institutions like this, including the U.S., where most home mortgage capital is provided by the federal government. State banks are also key parts of the financial system in Germany and Spain; you won't be surprised to learn that system has worked out O.K. in Germany and pretty badly in Spain.

My view is that state banks would tend to become a vehicle for subsidizing borrowing, encouraging excessive leverage. (Non-government banks also often encourage excessive leverage when they're regulated incorrectly, by the way.) They could also, as happened in Spain, become political slush funds. But I think they could be part of a well-functioning financial system, and they particularly might be useful for getting cash-management services to the underbanked.

Similarly, I don't see the appeal of a sovereign wealth fund for the U.S. We're already sort of in this business: state and local pension funds are like mini-sovereign wealth funds. The investment sides of those operations are mostly pretty satisfactory, but problems arise when governments count on high expected returns on equity as a justification to incur fixed multi-year obligations. I see lots of risks from the federal government getting into this game (what promises might it make on the back of expected stock returns?) and few benefits.

In general, countries establish such funds because they have huge public natural resource wealth which they want to diversify. They sell oil and buy stock. How would such a fund fit into the U.S. fiscal picture, since we're not a petrostate?

And while I favor policies to tighten the labor market, I'm not sure how a job guarantee would work. What if you can't do anything useful? What if you're terrible at your guaranteed job? There are things the government could be doing to foster job creation in recessions - deficit spending, nominal GDP targeting, a higher default level of inflation, countercyclical infrastructure investment - that strike me as likely to be much more efficient than a job guarantee.

So, I'm not ready to sign up for Myerson's agenda. But I'm not sure why people are treating it like it's silly, or Soviet.

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Some Of These 'Communist' Economic Ideas Are Actually Pretty Good

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This weekend, Jesse Myerson advanced five economic reform ideas that he thinks millennials should champion, and various conservative readers' heads exploded for reasons I don't fully understand. Particularly, I don't see what's supposed to be "communist" about Myerson's proposals. His five big ideas are: Guaranteed jobs for everyone. A universal basic income.

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Recently we saw a list called Top 10 Reasons Why Capitalism Sucks: consider this list an antidote to that one. The entries in this list are not necessarily replies to the earlier one; it's meant to stand alone. So without further ado, here are ten reasons why communism sucks:

The average person, as George Carlin once observed, is not particularly good at anything. The perfect job for such a person is on the assembly line. But regardless of the governments under which we live, we all have different aspirations. Some people are perfectly happy sweeping floors, but most of us-justly-want more out of life. Not only money, but fame, glory, and a sense of accomplishment. All of these require at least some creative thought.

You may want to be a poet or a painter, but these jobs certainly don't pay the bills-and Communism views them as unnecessary and ridiculous. All that matters is building a super-powerful nation-and one of the first obstacles that must be removed is what Jefferson called "the pursuit of happiness."

The most notorious example of forced collectivization is the land reform carried out by Soviets between 1928 and 1933. It was thought that collectivization would maximize the use and potential of the countryside for urban and industrial needs. Russian industry was just taking off, and enormous quantities of food would be required for the workers.

Masses of resisting landowners-many of them small-scale farmers who worked their own land-died at the hands of executioners. The state's requisition of crops, livestock, and farmland was paid for by the farmers and by the lower class in general, some ten million of whom starved to death in five years.

Exactly the same atrocity took place in Communist China, between 1958 and 1961. During this time, private farming was outlawed as it had been in Stalin's Russia, and about 33 million people starved to death in possibly the single most destructive famine in human history.

Several of these entries are related, and the absence of citizens' rights is at the heart of more than one. In keeping with the last entry, Marx advocated ten rules in his Communist Manifesto for the forced redistribution of all land and property for the good of the national community.

This is theft, from the citizens' point of view. They are forced to join the new Communist government-whether they like it or not. This, of course, must be done with a "might is right" frame of mind: lots of men with guns show up and take everything you have "for the glory of the motherland," as the Soviets might have said.

Incentives-such as higher pay for doctors-are necessary to give people the energy they need to work hard in a difficult job.

When there are no extra incentives available-such as in a Communist state, where all reap an equal share in what some have worked harder to sow -the people in difficult jobs quickly lose their motivation. For example, workers would stop caring about how thoroughly they inspect the cars on the assembly lines, since it makes no difference to them either way. They are also likely to grow bitter at the government for failing to give them recognition when they do a good job. Revolts become a distinct liability; many a Communist state has fallen because of this problem of reduced incentives.

It doesn't take much to bring the fury of a Communist state upon you; in fact, it takes nothing more than simply existing in a capitalist state. The Communist Manifesto advocates the replacement of all governments by Communist governments. This has almost always been put into effect internally: the Russian monarchy was overthrown, as were the Republic of China and the Cuban democracy.

But the threat is not merely internal. The US need not fear a Cuban invasion, but China is indeed a force to be reckoned with. It controls the second-largest portion of American debt, and though that only amounts to about eight percent, the number is rising. Should they ever call in America's entire debt to them at once, America's already depressed economy would be greatly harmed.

A Communist state will make up for its inefficient economy by doing whatever is necessary to produce crops and water. In the 1960s, the Soviet Communist regime diverted two important rivers for irrigation. The Aral Sea, which those rivers fed, has now shrunk to as little as ten percent of its original size. It used to be the fourth largest lake in the world.

The lesson: rather than letting the efficiency of capitalism into its economic model, the Soviet government chose to extract everything it could from the environment-without caring one bit about the health of that environment.

The relative success of the free market economy is a real-world refutation of Marxist economics. The latter never has sufficient information on the market prices of commodities, and therefore cannot properly ration the distribution of a nation's resources.

The only reasonable criticism of the free market economy is the presence of monopolies, which can raise the prices of their products with little fear of reprisal. But monopolies are just like the central control a Communist government exercises on its whole economy; a true free market ensures that there be checks and balances on the price of goods and services.

Marx founded Communist philosophy on the principle that class struggles have been, by far, the primary cause of all strife, wars, economic woes, and regime collapses. There are popularly thought to be three major classes of people: the upper, the middle, and the lower. The upper class has most of the wealth; the lower class the least; and the middle class plays the peacemaker between them, maintaining the hope and sanity of the lower class. Without the middle class, heads are chopped.

Communism itself does not erase the class struggle, as it proclaims, but keeps it going. It does this because it is a government: there must be a group of people in charge, and it's likely that this group enjoys its power. By maintaining their power, the leaders of a Communist state separate the population into at least two classes: themselves as the upper class, and preferably everyone else in the lower class.

Communist states have generally not featured a middle class-and its absence allowed for the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917; the Chinese of 1949, the Cuban of 1953-59, and a host of others. All of these revolutions ended with the rise of a Communist state-and all of them were the ruin of their respective nations, because the Communists themselves became the very same brand of elitist upper class they had deposed.

Communist rule may be directly blamed for the deaths of at least eighty-five million people in the twentieth century. Stalin alone murdered about twenty million, although other estimates range from fifty-three million to eighty million.

In 1975, the Khmer Rouge seized power in Cambodia, and set out to establish a Communist utopia. They immediately committed genocide on their own people. At least two million were executed by brutally primitive methods in keeping with the Khmer Rouge's anti-technology stance; many of the victims were murdered merely for wearing glasses. Intelligence was deemed a direct and serious threat to the Khmer Rouge.

And let's not forget Chairman Mao. He may not have been as evil as Stalin, but he was the very definition of indifference towards humanity. His "Great Leap Forward" caused the deaths by starvation of forty-five million Chinese civilians.

Marx's doctrine is fraught with faulty logic, loopholes, and unsolved problems. His idea of economics is based on the labor theory of value, which asserts that a car, for example, should cost more than a TV, because more labor is needed to produce it. But this is an oversimplification of the market.

Sam's Choice Cola tastes almost identical to Coca-Cola, but costs half as much. The labor is the same, but people are happy to pay twice as much for the only difference: the brand name. The same holds true with medicine.

In the same way, tennis shoes can cost over $200 in the US, despite being made in China or Taiwan for only about $3-10. Why do they cost so much? Because the industries that own them sell them based on how highly they are in demand by the public. That's why they have athletes endorse their products: to make them more desirable to the athletes' fans.

This is expressly why Marxist Communism has caused the utter collapse of so many national economies: it thinks in broad strokes, and fails to tell one subtlety from another. This, first and foremost, is because Communism is not grounded in reality.

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10 Reasons Why Communism Sucks - Listverse

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Recently we saw a list called Top 10 Reasons Why Capitalism Sucks: consider this list an antidote to that one. The entries in this list are not necessarily replies to the earlier one; it's meant to stand alone.

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Religion: prop or antidote to capitalism?, by Harold James. Project Syndicate: A provocative book written by a Japanese mathematician has reignited the debate about whether there are specifically "Asian" values.

As yet untranslated ..., "The Dignity of a State" by Masahiko Fujiwara is an emotional plea for a Japanese "special path." In particular, it argues that liberal democracy is a Western invention that does not fit well with the Japanese or Asian character.

The reasoning is peculiar, and seems to revive a 19th-century critique, usually associated with Nietzsche, that Christianity (and Islam) produces an acquiescent or even subservient mentality, in contrast to the heroic virtues of classical antiquity or of warrior societies, such as the world of the Japanese samurai. Likewise, according to Fujiwara, democracy overemphasizes reason, another Western construct. ...

Many non-Japanese Asians will dislike most or all of Fujiwara's message, for they will hear unpleasant historical echoes. ... But Fujiwara's book has also revived an old debate about capitalism and the values that are needed to sustain it. ...

Some thinkers, most notably Max Weber, floated the idea that capitalism must be sustained by a value system... Almost every modern analyst, however, has come to the conclusion that Weber's attempt to link that capitalist spirit historically to a form of Christianity, namely Protestantism, is fatally flawed.

To begin with, the founders of Protestantism, Martin Luther and John Calvin, were, as Weber recognized, more hostile to the dynamic capitalistic world of the Renaissance than was the Catholic Church. Indeed, pious Catholic Italian city-states were the cradle of early modern capitalism.

But there are two crucial aspects of the debate on religious values that should not be overlooked:

First, the core of Weber's argument was that religious values that emphasize restraint and a sense of duty may support dependability and reliability in business relations, which is especially vital in societies that are just opening up market relations. Where there is a legacy of violence and suspicion, it is hard for people to feel secure enough to enter into long-term contracts. ...

Second, religious values that emphasize social solidarity are an important corrective to the tendency of markets to polarize society by rewarding success. Periods of globalization have been eras of considerable economic advance; but they have also increased inequality..., thus fueling powerful political backlashes that endangered the continuation of trade and financial integration.

The debate about the contribution of religious values parallels the debate over the relationship of freedom to economic development - a central issue in the work of Nobel laureate economists Friedrich Hayek and Amartya Sen. It is clearly tempting for critics of authoritarian regimes to argue that freedom is good because it promotes economic growth. But a deeper view of freedom regards it as having intrinsic value.

So, too, with religious values. Backed by evidence from large empirical studies, some claim that belief in religion is good because it boosts economic performance. That may be the case, and it may be a tempting argument to make in authoritarian societies that are unsympathetic to beliefs that challenge their own legitimacy. But is it possible to imagine the pope whispering such a message to the Chinese leadership?

In the 18th century, Voltaire constructed an analogous argument, claiming that religion's major virtue was its social usefulness. He thus sought to subvert religion by making it purely instrumental. But to do that is to destroy the true character of religious belief. By reviving the debate over "Asian" values, Fujiwara's book may contribute to a similar mistake.

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This follows up on a recent post "Economic Prosperity: Human Capital or Protestant Work Ethic?": Religion: prop or antidote to capitalism?, by Harold James. Project Syndicate: A provocative book written by a Japanese mathematician has reignited the debate about whether...

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A growing number of people, millions worldwide, say they believe that life definitively ends at death - that there is no God, no afterlife and no divine plan. And it's an outlook that could be gaining momentum - despite its lack of cheer. In some countries, openly acknowledged atheism has never been more popular.

"There's absolutely more atheists around today than ever before, both in sheer numbers and as a percentage of humanity," says Phil Zuckerman, a professor of sociology and secular studies at Pitzer College in Claremont, California, and author of Living the Secular Life. According to a Gallup International survey of more than 50,000 people in 57 countries, the number of individuals claiming to be religious fell from 77% to 68% between 2005 and 2011, while those who self-identified as atheist rose by 3% - bringing the world's estimated proportion of adamant non-believers to 13%.

While atheists certainly are not the majority, could it be that these figures are a harbinger of things to come? Assuming global trends continue might religion someday disappear entirely?

It's impossible to predict the future, but examining what we know about religion - including why it evolved in the first place, and why some people chose to believe in it and others abandon it - can hint at how our relationship with the divine might play out in decades or centuries to come.

Scholars are still trying to tease out the complex factors that drive an individual or a nation toward atheism, but there are a few commonalities. Part of religion's appeal is that it offers security in an uncertain world. So not surprisingly, nations that report the highest rates of atheism tend to be those that provide their citizens with relatively high economic, political and existential stability. "Security in society seems to diminish religious belief," Zuckerman says. Capitalism, access to technology and education also seems to correlate with a corrosion of religiosity in some populations, he adds.
Crisis of faith
Japan, the UK, Canada, South Korea, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Germany, France and Uruguay (where the majority of citizens have European roots) are all places where religion was important just a century or so ago, but that now report some of the lowest belief rates in the world. These countries feature strong educational and social security systems, low inequality and are all relatively wealthy. "Basically, people are less scared about what might befall them," says Quentin Atkinson, a psychologist at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.

Yet decline in belief seems to be occurring across the board, including in places that are still strongly religious, such as Brazil, Jamaica and Ireland. "Very few societies are more religious today than they were 40 or 50 years ago," Zuckerman says. "The only exception might be Iran, but that's tricky because secular people might be hiding their beliefs."

The US, too, is an outlier in that it is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, but also has high rates of religiosity. (Still, a recent Pew survey revealed that, between 2007 and 2012, the proportion of Americans who said they are atheist rose from 1.6% to 2.4%.)

Decline, however, does not mean disappearance, says Ara Norenzayan, a social psychologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and author of Big Gods. Existential security is more fallible than it seems. In a moment, everything can change: a drunk driver can kill a loved one; a tornado can destroy a town; a doctor can issue a terminal diagnosis. As climate change wreaks havoc on the world in coming years and natural resources potentially grow scarce, then suffering and hardship could fuel religiosity. "People want to escape suffering, but if they can't get out of it, they want to find meaning," Norenzayan says. "For some reason, religion seems to give meaning to suffering - much more so than any secular ideal or belief that we know of."

This phenomenon constantly plays out in hospital rooms and disaster zones around the world. In 2011, for example, a massive earthquake struck Christchurch, New Zealand - a highly secular society. There was a sudden spike of religiosity in the people who experienced that event, but the rest of the country remained as secular as ever. While exceptions to this rule do exist - religion in Japan plummeted following World War II, for instance - for the most part, Zuckerman says, we adhere by the Christchurch model. "If experiencing something terrible caused all people to become atheists, then we'd all be atheists," he says.
The mind of god
But even if the world's troubles were miraculously solved and we all led peaceful lives in equity, religion would probably still be around. This is because a god-shaped hole seems to exist in our species' neuropsychology, thanks to a quirk of our evolution.

Understanding this requires a delve into "dual process theory". This psychological staple states that we have two very basic forms of thought: System 1 and System 2. System 2 evolved relatively recently. It's the voice in our head - the narrator who never seems to shut up - that enables us to plan and think logically.

System 1, on the other hand, is intuitive, instinctual and automatic. These capabilities regularly develop in humans, regardless of where they are born. They are survival mechanisms. System 1 bestows us with an innate revulsion of rotting meat, allows us to speak our native language without thinking about it and gives babies the ability to recognise parents and distinguish between living and nonliving objects. It makes us prone to looking for patterns to better understand our world, and to seek meaning for seemingly random events like natural disasters or the death of loved ones.

In addition to helping us navigate the dangers of the world and find a mate, some scholars think that System 1 also enabled religions to evolve and perpetuate. System 1, for example, makes us instinctually primed to see life forces - a phenomenon called hypersensitive agency detection - everywhere we go, regardless of whether they're there or not. Millennia ago, that tendency probably helped us avoid concealed danger, such as lions crouched in the grass or venomous snakes concealed in the bush. But it also made us vulnerable to inferring the existence of invisible agents - whether they took the form of a benevolent god watching over us, an unappeased ancestor punishing us with a drought or a monster lurking in the shadows.

Similarly, System 1 encourages us to see things dualistically, meaning we have trouble thinking of the mind and body as a single unit. This tendency emerges quite early: young children, regardless of their cultural background, are inclined to believe that they have an immortal soul - that their essence or personhood existed somewhere prior to their birth, and will always continue to exist. This disposition easily assimilates into many existing religions, or - with a bit of creativity - lends itself to devising original constructs.

"A Scandinavian psychologist colleague of mine who is an atheist told me that his three-year-old daughter recently walked up to him and said, 'God is everywhere all of the time.' He and his wife couldn't figure out where she'd gotten that idea from," says Justin Barrett, director of the Thrive Center for Human Development at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, and author of Born Believers. "For his daughter, god was an elderly woman, so you know she didn't get it from the Lutheran church."

For all of these reasons, many scholars believe that religion arose as "a byproduct of our cognitive disposition", says Robert McCauley, director of the Center for Mind, Brain and Culture at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and author of Why Religion Is Natural and Science Is Not. "Religions are cultural arrangements that evolved to engage and exploit these natural capacities in humans."
Hard habits to break
Atheists must fight against all of that cultural and evolutionary baggage. Human beings naturally want to believe that they are a part of something bigger, that life isn't completely futile. Our minds crave purpose and explanation. "With education, exposure to science and critical thinking, people might stop trusting their intuitions," Norenzayan says. "But the intuitions are there."

On the other hand, science - the system of choice that many atheists and non-believers look to for understanding the natural world - is not an easy cognitive pill to swallow. Science is about correcting System 1 biases, McCauley says. We must accept that the Earth spins, even though we never experience that sensation for ourselves. We must embrace the idea that evolution is utterly indifferent and that there is no ultimate design or purpose to the Universe, even though our intuition tells us differently. We also find it difficult to admit that we are wrong, to resist our own biases and to accept that truth as we understand it is ever changing as new empirical data are gathered and tested - all staples of science. "Science is cognitively unnatural - it's difficult," McCauley says. "Religion, on the other hand, is mostly something we don't even have to learn because we already know it."

"There's evidence that religious thought is the path of least resistance," Barrett adds. "You'd have to fundamentally change something about our humanity to get rid of religion." This biological sticking point probably explains the fact that, although 20% of Americans are not affiliated with a church, 68% of them say that they still believe in God and 37% describe themselves as spiritual. Even without organised religion, they believe that some greater being or life force guides the world.

Similarly, many around the world who explicitly say they don't believe in a god still harbour superstitious tendencies, like belief in ghosts, astrology, karma, telepathy or reincarnation. "In Scandinavia, most people say they don't believe in God, but paranormal and superstitious beliefs tend to be higher than you'd think," Norenzayan says. Additionally, non-believers often lean on what could be interpreted as religious proxies - sports teams, yoga, professional institutions, Mother Nature and more - to guide their values in life. As a testament to this, witchcraft is gaining popularity in the US, and paganism seems to be the fastest growing religion in the UK.

Religious experiences for non-believers can also manifest in other, more bizarre ways. Anthropologist Ryan Hornbeck, also at the Thrive Center for Human Development, found evidence that the World of Warcraft is assuming spiritual importance for some players in China, for example. "WoW seems to be offering opportunities to develop certain moral traits that regular life in contemporary society doesn't afford," Barrett says. "People seem to have this conceptual space for religious thought, which - if it's not filled by religion - bubbles up in surprising ways."
The in-group
What's more, religion promotes group cohesion and cooperation. The threat of an all-powerful God (or gods) watching for anyone who steps out of line likely helped to keep order in ancient societies. "This is the supernatural punishment hypothesis," Atkinson says. "If everyone believes that the punishment is real, then that can be functional to groups."

And again, insecurity and suffering in a population may play a role here, by helping to encourage religions with stricter moral codes. In a recent analysis of religious belief systems of nearly 600 traditional societies from around the world, Joseph Bulbulia at the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand and his colleagues found that those places with harsher weather or that are more prone to natural disasters were more likely to develop moralising gods. Why? Helpful neighbours could mean the difference between life and death. In this context, religion evolved as a valuable public utility.

"When we see something so pervasive, something that emerges so quickly developmentally and remains persistent across cultures, then it makes sense that the leading explanation is that it served a cooperative function," says Bulbulia.

Finally, there's also some simple mathematics behind religion's knack for prevailing. Across cultures, people who are more religious also tend to have more children than people who are not. "There's very strong evidence for this," Norenzayan says. "Even among religious people, the more fundamentalist ones usually have higher fertility rates than the more liberal ones." Add to that the fact that children typically follow their parents' lead when it comes to whether or not they become religious adults themselves, and a completely secularised world seems ever more unlikely.
Enduring belief
For all of these reasons - psychological, neurological, historical, cultural and logistical - experts guess that religion will probably never go away. Religion, whether it's maintained through fear or love, is highly successful at perpetuating itself. If not, it would no longer be with us.

And even if we lose sight of the Christian, Muslim and Hindu gods and all the rest, superstitions and spiritualism will almost certainly still prevail. More formal religious systems, meanwhile, would likely only be a natural disaster or two away. "Even the best secular government can't protect you from everything," says McCauley. As soon as we found ourselves facing an ecological crisis, a global nuclear war or an impending comet collision, the gods would emerge.

"Humans need comfort in the face of pain and suffering, and many need to think that there's something more after this life, that they're loved by an invisible being," Zuckerman says. "There will always be people who believe, and I wouldn't be surprised if they remain the majority."
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A growing number of people, millions worldwide, say they believe that life definitively ends at death - that there is no God, no afterlife and no divine plan. And it's an outlook that could be gaining momentum - despite its lack of cheer. In some countries, openly acknowledged atheism has never been more popular.

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This is going to be the first in what I hope will be a series of posts devoted to common misconceptions about evolution, climate change, and the nature of science. I've already talked about one of the most pervasive evolution misconceptions, that evolution occurs to serve a particular purpose, but there are oh so many more out there that I thought it'd be worth the electrons to dig into a few.

I preface this by explaining that I spent my last two summers in a windowless room up to my eyeballs in student test papers. At the time, I was working for the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education as a member of its science curriculum and instruction team. Most of my time in this role was spent developing our state test, the MCAS, which for science is administered in grades 5, 8, and 10. The high school test is in one of four subjects: biology, chemistry, introductory physics, or technology engineering.

Now, goodness knows there are a lot of opinions out there on the subject of statewide testing, but this is not the place for such a discussion. I will say this, however: I got to spend two years working with some of the most amazing science educators and science professionals in my state. Every single one of those people wants the best for the students in Massachusetts, and I'm proud to have worked with them. I'm also incredibly grateful for the insights I gained. It forever changed how I view the education-related problems we face.

What was my point? Yes, summers in windowless rooms. The MCAS is one of a few state tests that has open-response, long-answer questions. We ask students to answer multi-part questions in their own words. A computer does not score their responses-humans do. And just a few people (for the last two years, myself among them) determine just how this should be done. So we read actual student responses, and we debate, and we argue, and we think about fairness, and intellectual worth, and accuracy...it's exhausting. But it's also an absolutely marvelous way of getting to understand what misconceptions are out there among our students.

Let's start with this one: Natural selection eliminates all "bad" variations.

Where does this misconception come from? Well, that's easy. Ask people on the street what comes to mind when you say "natural selection" or "Darwin" and I bet that a significant number will answer "survival of the fittest!"* The problem is that most people on the street can't accurately explain what that phrase means.

Ask me, and I'd say that it means that in a given environment, individuals in a population that have certain advantageous traits are more likely than individuals without those traits to pass on their genes (including the genes for the traits in question) to the next generation. I know, I know: "survival of the fittest" is way catchier. Which is probably why the majority of people would say something that boils more or less down to: Only individuals that meet the qualification of "fittest" will survive.

So it's no wonder that our students come to think that if, for example, an environment favors dark-colored mice because they are harder for predators like owls to find, then all of the light-colored mice will die. Extinct! Poof! See ya! Good night! But this isn't how it works.

When it comes to natural selection, "the fittest" really is "the good enough." As long as you get a chance to reproduce and pass on your genes, you win. And even when faced with very strong selection pressures, it just isn't the case that only certain individuals will be able to reproduce. A few not-so-ideal individuals are bound to sneak in there. And on top of that, due to the constant shuffling and reshuffling of genes involved in sexual reproduction, phenotypes not present in the parents can show up in the offspring.

All of this adds up to the fact that over the lifespan of a species, phenotypes, even very disadvantageous phenotypes, are almost never completely eradicated. They may be present in only a tiny proportion of the population; they're almost always still in there somewhere.

Do you need help convincing your students of this? Stay tuned for Part 2 later today.

*As an aside, Darwin didn't coin the phrase "survival of the fittest." Sure, he used it: for example, in his 1868 The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, vol. 2, chapter 20. Darwin writes, "The power of Selection, whether exercised by man, or brought into play under nature through the struggle for existence and the consequent survival of the fittest, absolutely depends on the variability of organic beings." However, the first appearance of the phrase in print (according to the OED) comes from Herbert Spencer's 1864 Principles of Biology, which he wrote after reading the Origin. Aren't you happy to know that?

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Misconception Monday! Survival of the Fittest, Part 1

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This is going to be the first in what I hope will be a series of posts devoted to common misconceptions about evolution, climate change, and the nature of science.

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A philosophy webcomic about the inevitable anguish of living a brief life in an absurd world. Also Jokes