5 West of Eden

5 West of Eden
COMPARED with the theocratic terrors of medieval Europe, or those
that persist in much of the Muslim world, the influence of religion
in the West now seems rather benign. We should not be misled by
such comparisons, however. The degree to which religious ideas still
determine government policies—especially those of the United
States—presents a grave danger to everyone. It has been widely
reported, for instance, that Ronald Reagan perceived the paroxysms
in the Middle East through the lens of biblical prophecy. He went so
far as to include men like Jerry Falwell and Hal Lindsey in his
national security briefings.1 It should go without saying that theirs
are not the sober minds one wants consulted about the deployment
of nuclear weaponry. For many years U.S. policy in the Middle East
has been shaped, at least in part, by the interests that fundamentalist
Christians have in the future of a Jewish state. Christian "support
for Israel" is, in fact, an example of religious cynicism so transcendental
as to go almost unnoticed in our political discourse. Fundamentalist
Christians support Israel because they believe that the
final consolidation of Jewish power in the Holy Land—specifically,
the rebuilding of Solomon's temple—will usher in both the Second
Coming of Christ and the final destruction of the Jews.2 Such smiling
anticipations of genocide seem to have presided over the Jewish
state from its first moments: the first international support for the
Jewish return to Palestine, Britain's Balfour Declaration of 1917,
was inspired, at least in part, by a conscious conformity to biblical
prophecy.3 These intrusions of eschatology into modern politics sug-
153
154 THE END OF FAITH
gest that the dangers of religious faith can scarcely be overstated.
Millions of Christians and Muslims now organize their lives around
prophetic traditions that will only find fulfillment once rivers of
blood begin flowing from Jerusalem. It is not at all difficult to imagine
how prophecies of internecine war, once taken seriously, could
become self-fulfilling.
The Eternal Legislator
Many members of the U.S. government currently view their professional
responsibilities in religious terms. Consider the case of Roy
Moore, chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court. Finding himself
confronted by the sixth-highest murder rate in the nation, Justice
Moore thought it expedient to install a two-and-a-half-ton monument
of the Ten Commandments in the rotunda of the state courthouse
in Montgomery. Almost no one disputes that this was a
violation of the spirit (if not the letter) of the "establishment" clause
of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. When a federal
court ordered Justice Moore to remove the monument, he refused.
Not wanting to have an obvious hand in actually separating church
and state, the U.S. Congress amended an appropriations bill to
ensure that federal funds could not be used for the monument's
removal.4 Attorney General John Ashcroft, whose sole business is to
enforce the nation's laws, maintained a pious silence all the while.
This was not surprising, given that when he does speak, he is in the
habit of saying things like "We are a nation called to defend freedom—
freedom that is not the grant of any government or document,
but is our endowment from God."5 According to a Gallup poll,
Ashcroft and the Congress were on firm ground as far as the American
people were concerned, because 78 percent of those polled
objected to the removal of the monument.6 One wonders whether
Moore, Ashcroft, the U.S. Congress, and three-quarters of the American
people would like to see the punishments for breaking these
WEST OF EDEN 15 5
hallowed commandments also specified in marble and placed in our
nation's courts. What, after all, is the punishment for taking the
Lord's name in vain? It happens to be death (Leviticus 24:16). What
is the punishment for working on the Sabbath? Also death (Exodus
31:15). What is the punishment for cursing one's father or mother?
Death again (Exodus 21:17). What is the punishment for adultery?
You're catching on (Leviticus 20:10). While the commandments
themselves are difficult to remember (especially since chapters 20
and 34 of Exodus provide us with incompatible lists), the penalty for
breaking them is simplicity itself.
Contemporary examples of governmental piety are everywhere
to be seen. Many prominent Republicans belong to the Council for
National Policy, a secretive Christian pressure group founded by
the fundamentalist Tim LaHaye (coauthor of the apocalyptic "Left
Behind" series of novels). This organization meets quarterly to discuss
who knows what. George W. Bush gave a closed-door speech to
the council in 1999, after which the Christian Right endorsed his
candidacy.7 Indeed, 40 percent of those who eventually voted for
Bush were white evangelicals.8 Beginning with his appointment of
John Ashcroft as his attorney general, President Bush found no
lack of occasions on which to return the favor. The departments of
Justice, Housing and Urban Development, Health and Human
Services, and Education now regularly issue directives that blur the
separation between church and state.9 In his "faith-based initiative"
Bush has managed to funnel tens of millions of taxpayer dollars
directly to church groups, to be used more or less however they see
fit.10 One of his appointments to the Food and Drug Administration
was Dr. W. David Hager, a pro-life obstetrician who has declared
publicly that premarital sex is a sin and that any attempt to separate
"Christian truth" and "secular truth" is "dangerous."11 Lieutenant
General William G. Boykin was recently appointed deputy
undersecretary of defense for intelligence at the Pentagon. A highly
decorated Special Forces officer, he now sets policy with respect to
the search for Osama bin Laden, Mullah Omar, and the rest of
156 THE END OF FAITH
America's enemies in hiding. He is also, as it turns out, an ardent
opponent of Satan. Analyzing a photograph of Mogadishu after the
fateful routing of his forces there in 1993, Boykin remarked that
certain shadows in the image revealed "the principalities of darkness
. . . a demonic presence in that city that God revealed to me as
the enemy."12 On the subject of the war on terror, he has asserted
that our "enemy is a guy named Satan."13 While these remarks
sparked some controversy in the media, most Americans probably
took them in stride. After all, 65 percent of us are quite certain that
Satan exists.14
Men eager to do the Lord's work have been elected to other
branches of the federal government as well. The House majority
leader, Tom DeLay, is given to profundities like "Only Christianity
offers a way to live in response to the realities that we find in this
world. Only Christianity." He claims to have gone into politics "to
promote a Biblical worldview." Apparently feeling that it is impossible
to say anything stupid while in the service of this worldview, he
attributed the shootings at the Columbine High School in Colorado
to the fact that our schools teach the theory of evolution.15 We might
wonder how it is that pronouncements this floridly irrational do not
lead to immediate censure and removal from office.
Facts of this sort can be cataloged without apparent end—to the
vexation of reader and writer alike. I will cite just one more, now
from the judicial branch: In January of 2002, Supreme Court Justice
Antonin Scalia, a devout Catholic, delivered a speech at the University
of Chicago Divinity School on the subject of the death penalty.
I quote Scalia at some length, because his remarks reveal just how
close we are to living in a theocracy:
This is not the Old Testament, I emphasize, but St. Paul.... [T]he
core of his message is that government—however you want to
limit that concept—derives its moral authority from God. . . .
Indeed, it seems to me that the more Christian a country is the
less likely it is to regard the death penalty as immoral. . . . I
WEST OF EDEN 157
attribute that to the fact that, for the believing Christian, death is
no big deal. Intentionally killing an innocent person is a big deal:
it is a grave sin, which causes one to lose his soul. But losing this
life, in exchange for the next? . . . For the nonbeliever, on the
other hand, to deprive a man of his life is to end his existence.
What a horrible act! . ..
The reaction of people of faith to this tendency of democracy
to obscure the divine authority behind government should not be
resignation to it, but the resolution to combat it as effectively as
possible. We have done that in this country (and continental
Europe has not) by preserving in our public life many visible
reminders that—in the words of a Supreme Court opinion from
the 1940s—"we are a religious people, whose institutions presuppose
a Supreme Being." . . . All this, as I say, is most un-
European, and helps explain why our people are more inclined to
understand, as St. Paul did, that government carries the sword as
"the minister of God," to "execute wrath" upon the evildoer.16
All of this should be terrifying to anyone who expects that reason
will prevail in the inner sanctums of power in the West. Scalia is right
to observe that what a person believes happens after death determines
his view of it—and, therefore, his ethics. Although he is a
Catholic, Scalia differs from the pope on the subject of capital punishment,
but then so do a majority of Americans (74 percent).17 It is
remarkable that we are the last civilized nation to put "evildoers" to
death, and Justice Scalia rightly attributes this to our style of religiosity.
Perhaps we can take a moment, in this context, to wonder
whether our unique position in the world is really the moral accomplishment
that Scalia imagines it to be. We know, for instance, that no
human being creates his own genes or his early life experiences, and
yet most of us believe that these factors determine his character
throughout life. It seems true enough to say that the men and
women on death row either have bad genes, bad parents, bad ideas, or
bad luck. Which of these quantities are they responsible for? Resort158
THE END OF FAITH
ing to biblical justifications for capital punishment does nothing to
reconcile our growing understanding of human behavior with our
desire for retribution in the face of the most appalling crimes. There
is undoubtedly an important secular debate to be had about the ethics
of the death penalty, but it is just as obvious that we should be drawing
upon sources that show a greater understanding of the human
mind and modern society than is evident in Saint Paul.
But men like Scalia—men who believe that we already have
God's eternal decrees on paper—have been inoculated against
doubts on this subject or, indeed, against the nuances of a scientific
worldview. It is not surprising that Scalia is the kind of judge that
President Bush has sought to appoint to the federal courts.18 Scalia
supports the use of capital punishment even in cases where the
defendant is acknowledged to be mentally retarded.19 He also
upholds state sodomy laws (in this case, even when they are applied
in an exclusive and discriminating way to homosexuals).20 Needless
to say, Scalia has found legal reasons to insist that the Supreme
Court not leaven the religious dogmatism of the states, but he leaves
little doubt that he looks to Saint Paul, and perhaps to the barbarous
author of Leviticus, for guidance on these matters.
The War on Sin
In the United States, and in much of the rest of the world, it is currently
illegal to seek certain experiences of pleasure. Seek pleasure
by a forbidden means, even in the privacy of your own home, and
men with guns may kick in the door and carry you away to prison
for it. One of the most surprising things about this situation is how
unsurprising most of us find it. As in most dreams, the very faculty
of reason that would otherwise notice the strangeness of these
events seems to have succumbed to sleep.
Behaviors like drug use, prostitution, sodomy, and the viewing of
obscene materials have been categorized as "victimless crimes." Of
course, society is the tangible victim of almost everything human
WEST OF EDEN l59
beings do—from making noise to manufacturing chemical waste—
but we have not made it a crime to do such things within certain limits.
Setting these limits is invariably a matter of assessing risk. One
could argue that it is, at the very least, conceivable that certain activities
engaged in private, like the viewing of sexually violent pornography,
might incline some people to commit genuine crimes against
others.21 There is a tension, therefore, between private freedom and
public risk. If there were a drug, or a book, or a film, or a sexual position
that led 90 percent of its users to rush into the street and begin
killing people at random, concerns over private pleasure would surely
yield to those of public safety. We can also stipulate that no one is
eager to see generations of children raised on a steady diet of
methamphetamine and Marquis de Sade. Society as a whole has an
interest in how its children develop, and the private behavior of parents,
along with the contents of our media, clearly play a role in this.
But we must ask ourselves, why would anyone want to punish people
for engaging in behavior that brings no significant risk of harm
to anyone ? Indeed, what is startling about the notion of a victimless
crime is that even when the behavior in question is genuinely victimless,
its criminality is still affirmed by those who are eager to punish
it. It is in such cases that the true genius lurking behind many of
our laws stands revealed. The idea of a victimless crime is nothing
more than a judicial reprise of the Christian notion of sin.
IT is no accident that people of faith often want to curtail the private
freedoms of others. This impulse has less to do with the history of
religion and more to do with its logic, because the very idea of privacy
is incompatible with the existence of God. If God sees and
knows all things, and remains so provincial a creature as to be scandalized
by certain sexual behaviors or states of the brain, then what
people do in the privacy of their own homes, though it may not have
the slightest implication for their behavior in public, will still be a
matter of public concern for people of faith.22
A variety of religious notions of wrongdoing can be seen conl60
THE END OF FAITH
verging here—concerns over nonprocreative sexuality and idolatry
especially—and these seem to have given many of us the sense that
it is ethical to punish people, often severely, for engaging in private
behavior that harms no one. Like most costly examples of irrationality,
in which human happiness has been blindly subverted for
generations, the role of religion here is both explicit and foundational.
To see that our laws against "vice" have actually nothing to
do with keeping people from coming to physical or psychological
harm, and everything to do with not angering God, we need only
consider that oral or anal sex between consenting adults remains a
criminal offense in thirteen states. Four of the states (Texas, Kansas,
Oklahoma, and Missouri) prohibit these acts between same-sex couples
and, therefore, effectively prohibit homosexuality. The other
nine ban consensual sodomy for everyone (these places of equity are
Alabama, Florida, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina,
South Carolina, Utah, and Virginia).23 One does not have to be a
demographer to grasp that the impulse to prosecute consenting
adults for nonprocreative sexual behavior will correlate rather
strongly with religious faith.
The influence of faith on our criminal laws comes at a remarkable
price. Consider the case of drugs. As it happens, there are many substances—
many of them naturally occurring—the consumption of
which leads to transient states of inordinate pleasure. Occasionally,
it is true, they lead to transient states of misery as well, but there is
no doubt that pleasure is the norm, otherwise human beings would
not have felt the continual desire to take such substances for millennia.
Of course, pleasure is precisely the problem with these
substances, since pleasure and piety have always had an uneasy
relationship.
When one looks at our drug laws—indeed, at our vice laws altogether—
the only organizing principle that appears to make sense of
them is that anything which might radically eclipse prayer or procreative
sexuality as a source of pleasure has been outlawed. In particular,
any drug (LSD, mescaline, psilocybin, DMT, MDMA,
WEST OF EDEN l6l
marijuana, etc.) to which spiritual or religious significance has been
ascribed by its users has been prohibited. Concerns about the health
of our citizens, or about their productivity, are red herrings in this
debate, as the legality of alcohol and cigarettes attests.
The fact that people are being prosecuted and imprisoned for
using marijuana, while alcohol remains a staple commodity, is
surely the reductio ad absurdum of any notion that our drug laws
are designed to keep people from harming themselves or others.24
Alcohol is by any measure the more dangerous substance. It has no
approved medical use, and its lethal dose is rather easily achieved. Its
role in causing automobile accidents is beyond dispute. The manner
in which alcohol relieves people of their inhibitions contributes to
human violence, personal injury, unplanned pregnancy, and the
spread of sexual disease. Alcohol is also well known to be addictive.
When consumed in large quantities over many years, it can lead to
devastating neurological impairments, to cirrhosis of the liver, and to
death. In the United States alone, more than 100,000 people annually
die from its use. It is also more toxic to a developing fetus than
any other drug of abuse. (Indeed, "crack babies" appear to have been
really suffering from fetal-alcohol syndrome.)25 None of these
charges can be leveled at marijuana. As a drug, marijuana is nearly
unique in having several medical applications and no known lethal
dosage. While adverse reactions to drugs like aspirin and ibuprofen
account for an estimated 7,600 deaths (and 76,000 hospitalizations)
each year in the United States alone, marijuana kills no one.26 Its
role as a "gateway drug" now seems less plausible than ever (and it
was never plausible).27 In fact, nearly everything human beings
do—driving cars, flying planes, hitting golf balls—is more dangerous
than smoking marijuana in the privacy of one's own home. Anyone
who would seriously attempt to argue that marijuana is worthy
of prohibition because of the risk it poses to human beings will find
that the powers of the human brain are simply insufficient for the
job.
And yet, we are so far from the shady groves of reason now that
l62 THE END OF FAITH
people are still receiving life sentences without the possibility of
parole for growing, selling, possessing, or buying what is, in fact, a
naturally occurring plant.28 Cancer patients and paraplegics have
been sentenced to decades in prison for marijuana possession. Owners
of garden-supply stores have received similar sentences because
some of their customers were caught growing marijuana. What
explains this astonishing wastage of human life and material
resources ? The only explanation is that our discourse on this subject
has never been obliged to function within the bounds of rationality.
Under our current laws, it is safe to say, if a drug were invented that
posed no risk of physical harm or addiction to its users but produced
a brief feeling of spiritual bliss and epiphany in 100 percent of those
who tried it, this drug would be illegal, and people would be punished
mercilessly for its use. Only anxiety about the biblical crime
of idolatry would appear to make sense of this retributive impulse.
Because we are a people of faith, taught to concern ourselves with
the sinfulness of our neighbors, we have grown tolerant of irrational
uses of state power.
Our prohibition of certain substances has led thousands of otherwise
productive and law-abiding men and women to be locked away
for decades at a stretch, sometimes for life. Their children have
become wards of the state. As if such cascading horror were not
disturbing enough, violent criminals—murders, rapists, and child
molesters—are regularly paroled to make room for them.29 Here we
appear to have overstepped the banality of evil and plunged to the
absurdity at its depths.30
The consequences of our irrationality on this front are so egregious
that they bear closer examination. Each year, over 1.5 million
men and women are arrested in the United States because of our
drug laws. At this moment, somewhere on the order of 400,000 men
and women languish in U.S. prisons for nonviolent drug offenses.
One million others are currently on probation.31 More people are
imprisoned for nonviolent drug offenses in the United States than
are incarcerated, for any reason, in all of Western Europe (which has
WEST OF EDEN 163
a larger population). The cost of these efforts, at the federal level
alone, is nearly $20 billion dollars annually.32 The total cost of our
drug laws—when one factors in the expense to state and local governments
and the tax revenue lost by our failure to regulate the sale
of drugs—could easily be in excess of $100 billion dollars each
year.33 Our war on drugs consumes an estimated 50 percent of the
trial time of our courts and the full-time energies of over 400,000
police officers.34 These are resources that might otherwise be used to
fight violent crime and terrorism.
In historical terms, there was every reason to expect that such a
policy of prohibition would fail. It is well known, for instance, that
the experiment with the prohibition of alcohol in the United States
did little more than precipitate a terrible comedy of increased drinking,
organized crime, and police corruption. What is not generally
remembered is that Prohibition was an explicitly religious exercise,
being the joint product of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union
and the pious lobbying of certain Protestant missionary societies.
The problem with the prohibition of any desirable commodity is
money. The United Nations values the drug trade at $400 billion a
year. This exceeds the annual budget for the U.S. Department of
Defense. If this figure is correct, the trade in illegal drugs constitutes
8 percent of all international commerce (while the sale of textiles
makes up 7.5 percent and motor vehicles just 5.3 percent).35 And yet,
prohibition itself is what makes the manufacture and sale of drugs so
extraordinarily profitable. Those who earn their living in this way
enjoy a 5,000 to 20,000 percent return on their investment, tax-free.
Every relevant indicator of the drug trade—rates of drug use and
interdiction, estimates of production, the purity of drugs on the
street, etc.—shows that the government can do nothing to stop it as
long as such profits exist (indeed, these profits are highly corrupting
of law enforcement in any case). The crimes of the addict, to finance
the stratospheric cost of his lifestyle, and the crimes of the dealer, to
protect both his territory and his goods, are likewise the results of
prohibition.36 A final irony, which seems good enough to be the work
164 THE END OF FAITH
of Satan himself, is that the market we have created by our drug laws
has become a steady source of revenue for terrorist organizations like
Al Qaeda, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, Shining Path, and others.37
Even if we acknowledge that stopping drug use is a justifiable
social goal, how does the financial cost of our war on drugs appear in
light of the other challenges we face? Consider that it would require
only a onetime expenditure of $2 billion to secure our commercial
seaports against smuggled nuclear weapons. At present we have allocated
a mere $93 million for this purpose.38 How will our prohibition
of marijuana use look (this comes at a cost of $4 billion
annually) if a new sun ever dawns over the port of Los Angeles ? Or
consider that the U.S. government can afford to spend only $2.3
billion each year on the reconstruction of Afghanistan. The Taliban
and Al Qaeda are now regrouping. Warlords rule the countryside
beyond the city limits of Kabul. Which is more important to us,
reclaiming this part of the world for the forces of civilization or
keeping cancer patients in Berkeley from relieving their nausea
with marijuana? Our present use of government funds suggests
an uncanny skewing—we might even say derangement—of our
national priorities. Such a bizarre allocation of resources is sure to
keep Afghanistan in ruins for many years to come. It will also leave
Afghan farmers with no alternative but to grow opium. Happily for
them, our drug laws still render this a highly profitable enterprise.39
Anyone who believes that God is watching us from beyond the
stars will feel that punishing peaceful men and women for their private
pleasure is perfectly reasonable. We are now in the twenty-first
century. Perhaps we should have better reasons for depriving our
neighbors of their liberty at gunpoint. Given the magnitude of the
real problems that confront us-—terrorism, nuclear proliferation,
the spread of infectious disease, failing infrastructure, lack of adequate
funds for education and health care, etc.—our war on sin is so
outrageously unwise as to almost defy rational comment. How have
we grown so blind to our deeper interests ? And how have we managed
to enact such policies with so little substantive debate?
WEST OF EDEN l65
The God of Medicine
While there is surely an opposition between reason and faith, we
will see that there is none between reason and love or reason and
spirituality. The basis for this claim is simple. Every experience that
a human being can have admits of rational discussion about its
causes and consequences (or about our ignorance thereof). Although
this leaves considerable room for the exotic, it leaves none at all for
faith. There may yet be good reasons to believe in psychic phenomena,
alien life, the doctrine of rebirth, the healing power of prayer, or
anything else—but our credulity must scale with the evidence. The
doctrine of faith denies this. From the perspective of faith, it is better
to ape the behavior of one's ancestors than to find creative ways
to uncover new truths in the present.
There are sources of irrationality other than religious faith, of
course, but none of them are celebrated for their role in shaping
public policy. Supreme Court justices are not in the habit of praising
our nation for its reliance upon astrology, or for its wealth of UFO
sightings, or for exemplifying the various reasoning biases that psychologists
have found to be more or less endemic to our species.40
Only mainstream religious dogmatism receives the unqualified support
of government. And yet, religious faith obscures uncertainty
where uncertainty manifestly exists, allowing the unknown, the
implausible, and the patently false to achieve primacy over the facts.
Consider the present debate over research on human embryonic
stem cells. The problem with this research, from the religious point
of view, is simple: it entails the destruction of human embryos. The
embryos in question will have been cultured in vitro (not removed
from a woman's body) and permitted to grow for three to five days.
At this stage of development, an embryo is called a blastocyst and
consists of about 150 cells arranged in a microscopic sphere. Interior
to the blastocyst is a small group of about 30 embryonic stem cells.
These cells have two properties that make them of such abiding
interest to scientists: as stem cells, they can remain in an unspeciall66
THE END OF FAITH
ized state, reproducing themselves through cell division for long
periods of time (a population of such cells living in culture is known
as a cell line); stem cells are also pluripotent, which means they have
the potential to become any specialized cell in the human body—
neurons of the brain and spinal cord, insulin-producing cells of the
pancreas, muscle cells of the heart, and so forth.
Here is what we know. We know that much can be learned from
research on embryonic stem cells. In particular, such research may
give us further insight into the processes of cell division and cell differentiation.
This would almost certainly shed new light on those
medical conditions, like cancer and birth defects, that seem to be
merely a matter of these processes gone awry. We also know that
research on embryonic stem cells requires the destruction of human
embryos at the 150-cell stage. There is not the slightest reason to
believe, however, that such embryos have the capacity to sense pain,
to suffer, or to experience the loss of life in any way at all. What is
indisputable is that there are millions of human beings who do have
these capacities, and who currently suffer from traumatic injuries to
the brain and spinal cord. Millions more suffer from Parkinson's and
Alzheimer's diseases. Millions more suffer from stroke and heart
disease, from burns, from diabetes, from rheumatoid arthritis, from
Purkinje cell degeneration, from Duchenne muscular dystrophy, and
from vision and hearing loss. We know that embryonic stem cells
promise to be a renewable source of tissues and organs that might
alleviate such suffering in the not too distant future.
Enter faith: we now find ourselves living in a world in which
college-educated politicians will hurl impediments in the way of
such research because they are concerned about the fate of single
cells. Their concern is not merely that a collection of 150 cells may
suffer its destruction. Rather, they believe that even a human zygote
(a fertilized egg) should be accorded all the protections of a fully
developed human being. Such a cell, after all, has the potential to
become a fully developed human being. But given our recent
advances in the biology of cloning, as much can be said of almost
WEST OF EDEN l67
every cell in the human body. By the measure of a cell's potential,
whenever the president scratches his nose he is now engaged in a
diabolical culling of souls.
Out of deference to some rather poorly specified tenets of Christian
doctrine (after all, nothing in the Bible suggests that killing
human embryos, or even human fetuses, is the equivalent of killing
a human being), the U.S. House of Representatives voted effectively
to ban embryonic stem-cell research on February 27, 2003.
No rational approach to ethics would have led us to such an
impasse. Our present policy on human stem cells has been shaped by
beliefs that are divorced from every reasonable intuition we might
form about the possible experience of living systems. In neurological
terms, we surely visit more suffering upon this earth by killing a
fly than by killing a human blastocyst, to say nothing of a human
zygote (flies, after all, have 100,000 cells in their brains alone). Of
course, the point at which we fully acquire our humanity, and our
capacity to suffer, remains an open question. But anyone who would
dogmatically insist that these traits must arise coincident with the
moment of conception has nothing to contribute, apart from his
ignorance, to this debate. Those opposed to therapeutic stem-cell
research on religious grounds constitute the biological and ethical
equivalent of a flat-earth society. Our discourse on the subject
should reflect this. In this area of public policy alone, the accommodations
that we have made to faith will do nothing but enshrine a
perfect immensity of human suffering for decades to come.
BUT the tendrils of unreason creep further. President Bush recently
decided to cut off funding to any overseas family-planning group
that provides information on abortion. According to the New York
Times, this "has effectively stopped condom provision to 16 countries
and reduced it in 13 others, including some with the world's
highest rates of AIDS infection."41 Under the influence of Christian
notions of the sinfulness of sex outside of marriage, the U.S. govl68
ernment has required that one-third of its AIDS prevention funds
allocated to Africa be squandered on teaching abstinence rather than
condom use. It is no exaggeration to say that millions could die as a
direct result of this single efflorescence of religious dogmatism. As
Nicholas Kristof points out, "sex kills, and so does this kind of blushing
prudishness."42
And yet, even those who see the problem in all its horror find it
impossible to criticize faith itself. Take Kristof as an example: in the
very act of exposing the medievalism that prevails in the U.S. government,
and its likely consequences abroad, he goes on to chastise
anyone who would demand that the faithful be held fully accountable
for their beliefs:
I tend to disagree with evangelicals on almost everything, and I
see no problem with aggressively pointing out the dismal consequences
of this increasing religious influence. For example, evangelicals'
discomfort with condoms and sex education has led the
administration to policies that are likely to lead to more people
dying of AIDS at home and abroad, not to mention more pregnancies
and abortions.
But liberal critiques sometimes seem not just filled with outrage
at evangelical-backed policies, which is fair, but also to have
a sneering tone about conservative Christianity itself. Such
mockery of religious faith is inexcusable. And liberals sometimes
show more intellectual curiosity about the religion of Afghanistan
than that of Alabama, and more interest in reading the
Upanishads than in reading the Book of Revelation.43
This is reason in ruins. Kristof condemns the "dismal consequences"
of faith while honoring their cause.44 It is true that the rules of civil
discourse currently demand that Reason wear a veil whenever she
ventures out in public. But the rules of civil discourse must change.
Faith drives a wedge between ethics and suffering. Where certain
actions cause no suffering at all, religious dogmatists still maintain
WEST OF EDEN l69
that they are evil and worthy of punishment (sodomy, marijuana
use, homosexuality, the killing of blastocysts, etc.). And yet, where
suffering and death are found in abundance their causes are often
deemed to be good (withholding funds for family planning in the
third world, prosecuting nonviolent drug offenders, preventing
stem-cell research, etc). This inversion of priorities not only victimizes
innocent people and squanders scarce resources; it completely
falsifies our ethics. It is time we found a more reasonable approach
to answering questions of right and wrong.