Created Equal
As should be well known to avid readers of FI, I am a secular humanist who holds the opinion that the philosophy of secular humanism is not equivalent to that of modern political Leftism. I take umbrage at supporters of modern political Leftism who hijack the enlightening philosophy of secular humanism and automatically assume that anyone who is a secular humanist also follows the mind-numbing, behavior-controlling political philosophy of modern political Leftism. Ophelia Benson is one of these individuals, as is Shadia Drury and other authors. I will confine my remarks to Ms. Benson.
Aspects of modern political Leftism include its penchant, inter alia, not only for debasing the history of the United States and the character of its Founding Fathers but also its distorting the history to achieve a political end. Whereas secular humanism is guided by data and reason, modern political Leftism is driven by ideology and cherry picking data to support its aims.
In true modern political Leftist philosophy, Benson immediately accuses Americans: “… when we are slaveholders.” Then she doubles down: “Oh, and we are slaveholders.” Who does Benson think she is that she has the right to debase me (I am an American), my family (all of whom are Americans), my parents (naturalized American citizens), and my ancestors? I never owned a slave nor sold a slave. Yes or no! Did any of you? When my parents legally came to the United States (through Ellis Island: my father in 1908 who served in the American Army in WWI and my mother in 1924), they had no slaves. When they left Poland/Austria—where there was no Christian love of Jews—where they were born and raised, neither they nor my grandparents nor my ancestors, generations back, had slaves to ease their lives—lives that were embittered by centuries of Christian religious persecution. Ditto for my wife’s ancestors. When my parents met and married in the United States and set up home and had children, they had no slaves nor nannies to ease their lives. Who is Benson to cast aspersions on me? If her charge against me isn’t true, then for how many millions of other Americans is her charge false?
Further, in colonial America and at the time of the writing of the Declaration of Independence, not all Whites owned slaves, and some of the biggest slave holders were Black. Also, unlike what the modern political Leftists would have people accept as truth, it should never be forgotten that Whites were not the only people involved in the slave trade: even Edgar Rice Burroughs noted that the Arab Muslims were among the world’s leading slavers; and, it was Black Africans who, for a variety of reasons—greed, jealousy, power—sold their own people into slavery while other Black tribes engaged in slavery. True secular humanists would not omit so much history from its narrative while omission, a form of lying, is typical of modern political Leftism.
For example, Benson, as a modern political Leftist, uses the magnificent, lofty words of freedom in the Declaration of Independence as a weapon to berate Americans for not living up to their ideals. She and her ilk denounce the great Founding Fathers such as Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, Madison, and Washington for not living up to the ideals they wrote and adopted. Yes, these were flawed human beings, as everyone knows and always knew. Yet she has no compunction of using the values of a later age to lambaste the people of an earlier era even though the individuals of the later times are also flawed. What Benson and her ilk forget is that the Declaration of Independence is primarily a statement of ideals and need for independent governance, and not a governing document. When the time came, the Founding Fathers wrote a magnificent governing document, the Constitution, in which they recognized their flaws – and that future generations undoubtedly also will be flawed – and did something positive to correct any undesirable situation. Benson and her cohorts do not seem to realize that we are not governed by the Declaration of Independence but by the Constitution.
Sheldon F. Gottlieb
Author: The Naked Mind
Prof. Biological Sciences, Ret.
Boynton Beach, Florida
Ophelia Benson responds:
I just want to address one misunderstanding. The fragment “… when we are slaveholders” is misleading, because it sounds as if I think we, here, now are slaveholders. That’s not what I think and not what I was saying. The full paragraph is: “We’ve always had this problem with freedom—this problem of what do we think we mean by it? Especially what do we think we mean by it when we are slaveholders?” It wasn’t an accusation directed at all of us Americans here and now, but a question that troubled Jefferson and his colleagues. He and John Adams went on arguing about it for the rest of their lives; they died on the same day, July 4, 1826.
I have heard that there are Dead Sea Scrolls that have been discovered that do not support the traditional history of Christianity and, as such, have been suppressed, never to see the light of day, because to face the truth would be too much for Christians to bear.
Regarding the intent of Thomas Jefferson’s writing “we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal” in our Declaration of Independence, I am continually amazed at the tortured explanations reconciling the author of those words with the man who owned over 600 slaves, sold over 110 slaves in his lifetime, gifted eighty-five slaves to family members as dowries for his sister and daughters, freed only two slaves in his lifetime, and freed only five in his will.
Further troubling the reconciliation is Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings, a slave often referred to as his mistress but whom in reality was his property. She was the mother of six of his children, one of whom was born when she was only sixteen years old, thus making him a rapist. Her room, where she and her children lived, was underground. Jefferson would summon her to his grand bedroom. She did not live with him upstairs. He did not free her in his lifetime or in his will. Only four of their children survived into adulthood. Two were allowed to leave Monticello in 1822 and passed as White, effectively disappearing never to be heard from again. Jefferson did free Hemings’s two other sons in his will.
While Jefferson did not personally beat slaves, he did order their physical punishment for transgressions large and small.
At any one time, Jefferson typically owned about 130 slaves. His attitude toward them was very much that of a businessman. In 1820, he commented, “I consider a woman who brings a child every two years as more profitable than the best man of the farm. What she produces is an addition to the capital while his labors disappear in mere consumption.” Note that he referred to slaves as “capital.”
Jefferson was a racist. He wrote that black people were “inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.” Accordingly, his vision of equality did not include slaves.
Jefferson’s definition of men would be property-owning White males. That would be consistent with his writings. Thus, women were not included in his vision of equality either.
Yet in his lifetime, Jefferson was regarded as a dangerous progressive. Why? Because the prevalent existing government model was a monarchy, and any model of society based on people having an equal opportunity to succeed was dangerous to the existing aristocracy—even if “people” included only property-owning White males.
Rather than trying to reconcile the wonderful words of the Declaration of Independence with the actions of a very imperfect man, perhaps we would be better served to accept him as a progressive for his era but a bigot for the ages. We can take his “all men are created equal” as a good starting point and make certain that in the future any definition of equality specifically includes everyone.
Bill McIntyre
Kent, Ohio
Public Discussion
Russell Blackford (FI, October/November 2020) has given us a thoughtful analysis of the ideas of John Stuart Mill about “the liberty of thought and discussion.” It does not extend, according to Mill, to libel, misrepresentation, or invasion of privacy among the individuals involved in the discussion. But nothing is said about what seems to me to be the prime object of controversy today: hate speech. Isn’t that the equivalent of libel and misrepresentation, this time among social groups identified by their race, religion, nationality, sex, or gender rather than among individuals?
Let me make it clear that I am a First Amendment absolutist. The government should never be allowed to decide what is acceptable or unacceptable speech. Legal charges of libel and slander should be decided by juries, not public officials. But shouldn’t the civil-society forces of public opinion and group pressure be mobilized against speakers who violate the morality of public discussion by insulting, misrepresenting, scapegoating, and demonizing groups other than their own? Isn’t the flagging, fact-checking, or banning of such hateful expressions what is being demanded of social media platforms today? And shouldn’t speakers who defend freedom of thought and discussion make it clear that they are not defending hate speech?
Homer Edward Price
Sylva, North Carolina
Pink Race
S. T. Joshi’s op-ed in the October/November 2020 issue of Free Inquiry is such a totally brilliant and hilarious assault on the so-called “white folks,” you will laugh all the way through it. It’s that good. First, these “white folks,” unless they’re genuine albinos, really aren’t white at all. They are new people of color, and it happens to be the color pink. As you might have expected, Joshi’s clever subtitle for his op-ed is this: “Farewell to the Pink Race!”
Arthur Hooton
Riverton, West Virginia
Cultural Revolution
I would like to add a comment to the op-ed by Barry Kosmin. The article includes a bold-text inset from the article, “A full-fledged cultural revolution that seeks to reorder and rewrite the past … poses dangers to the secular movement in the United States.”
First, the cultural revolution is here and has been continuously misrepresented in our country. The cultural revolution is not viewed as tearing apart the country as has been conveyed to the press and then to the population of the United States. It represented an internal struggle within the Party in China between those pushing for a road to communism led by Mao Tse-Tung and those wanting China to go down a capitalist road led by Deng Xiaoping. That cultural revolution was defeated, Deng assumed power, and today China is called a communist country in the United States but is indeed and in fact another capitalist class government with imperialist goals.
The second comment that I would like to make is that the cultural revolution did not attempt to rewrite history. The history of the cultural revolution was not complete, and writing its history would be at best forecasting. The question of who gets to write history is one answered by Ben Spinoza, “Might makes right.” Those in power get to write the history. To the victor falls the spoils, and one of those is to write their version of what happened. As stated above, the history can be much different when not written by those in power. It could be called propaganda by either the loser of the winner’s story or by the victor of the loser’s story. In my earlier years, I was told that Joseph Stalin killed five million in his purges. Twenty years later, the number that Stalin had killed was fifteen million. Stalin was dead, and I seriously doubt that even he was able to kill post mortem. Another twenty years has passed, and I heard the number fifty million being quoted by political talking heads. In 1946, there were less than 100 million living in Russia. The latter figure would have been over half the population. Somewhere, this ought to beggar someone’s imagination and get him or her to question the facts.
W.C. “Rusty” Lyon
Katy, Texas
The American Empire
In her op-ed in the October/November issue, Professor Shadia Drury states that “no sooner did the Mexicans liberate themselves from Spanish rule then they found themselves fighting Americans in the Mexican War of 1846 and losing large swaths of territory, which were annexed by the American juggernaut to make up Florida, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Oregon and California.”
This list of states, however, is both under-inclusive and over-inclusive. Florida, which was never part of Mexico, was acquired from Spain under an 1819 treaty, which also defined the northern border of Spanish (subsequently Mexican) territory to exclude the area that subsequently became the Oregon Territory. Texas, including lands that subsequently became parts of New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Kansas, and Oklahoma, declared independence from Mexico in 1836 and was annexed to the United States in 1845. The Mexican Cession of 1848, to which Professor Drury is referring, included lands that became the states of California, Nevada, and Utah in their entirety and parts of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming.
Michael Ticktin
Roosevelt, New Jersey
In her “The American Empire” column in the October/November 2020 Free Inquiry, Shadia B. Drury cited Florida and Oregon as states that were originally included in the territories taken from Mexico at the conclusion of the Mexican War in 1848. This is incorrect, as Florida was ceded by Spain to the United States shortly after the War of 1812, and Oregon became a U.S. territory in 1846 via a treaty with Great Britain.
Dennis Middlebrooks
Brooklyn, New York
Respectability Politics
I read “Raised on Respectability Politics” by Leighann Lord and the other racial articles with interest. Race relations and discussions about them have engulfed our culture—or at least mine. With these discussions, there are concepts that have taken on religious, dogmatic, sacred cow characteristics for which free inquiry often earns a person the “racist,” “bigot”—or racial “heresy” label. Some members of the Black community and others have written or spoken critically about these topics that other people believe are taboo topics to challenge or debate—people such as John McWhorter, Coleman Hughes, Thomas Sowells, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and so forth (all Black).
As a freethought organization, will these sacred race topics ever be discussed critically and objectively without deferring to race ideologies or dogma?
Sacred-cow topic examples:
1) Are Blacks safer today than during previous generations, especially prior to the Civil Rights movement?
2) While I think there is systemic racism within policing with non-lethal force, there are research papers that I’ve read that cast some doubt on whether police lethal force is as common as the media and my gut feelings tell me. And I don’t think that racial biases with police lethal force is as conclusive as the media (and the movement) makes it appear to be, even though my gut feelings tell me differently.
3) Most Black people are not poor. Why does the media and entertainment often portray us as living in poverty when that is certainly not typical? Even within the Black community, poverty is still a minority group. What are the implications of this false portrayal? Why aren’t there more stories about the common successes of Black people and prosperous Black communities—more normal success stories, not just those superstars?
4) What about Black on Black crime? I know and heard of more friends who’ve been killed by other Blacks than police. However, I get the impression from the media that police are a greater threat to Black lives. Both are problems, but Black on Black homicide within Black communities is seldom discussed and causes havoc within our communities, including people and businesses fleeing to safer areas in my experience.
Again, free inquiry, critical analysis, and debate of these and other sacred cow race topics to get closer to the truth are taboo (I know); however, Free Inquiry bravely had previous debates about various controversial positions on pornography, right-to-life, abortion, and so forth in past issues. Will some of these forbidden race topics be discussed or argued from different perspectives within the Free Inquiry pages ever? Or, is that heresy?
Aliyah Johnson
California
SOS and AA
Re: “James Christopher, Founder of SOS.” I am an addict in recovery and a committed secular humanist. Today Alcoholics Anonymous recognizes hundreds of secular meetings. There are websites that list secular AA meetings around the world. Secular websites such as AA agnostica.org offer secular AA literature and list dozens of alternative twelve step recovery plans. There are now several secular daily readings, including the popular “Beyond Belief.” The traditional AA Grapeview publishes “One Big Tent,” a collection of shares from atheist and agnostic AA members. There is still a lot of God in the traditional literature, but as the Al Anon closing statement says, “Take what you need and leave the rest.” I have attended almost 200 traditional live AA meetings, and I was never challenged for my “higher power” of people instead of God. I accept and respect the believers and they accept me. The only area of disagreement I’ve had was from calling my disease “addiction” instead of “alcoholism.” Even some secular AAs aren’t ready to accept that modern addictions include many substances beyond alcohol. I live in Los Angeles, and my recovery is relatively new. At secular meetings, I have heard horror stories, but they are usually from times past or “bible belt” parts of the country. I’ve heard of AA meetings that are Christian even though this is a clear violation of AA principles. Nonetheless, times are changing, and today’s AA program accepts diversity. I am committed to attending at least one AA meeting a day for the rest of my life because the fellowship is the backbone of my recovery. No one should dismiss AA because of its history or a few bigots. Today’s AA works for thousands of diverse people, including many atheists, agnostics, and humanists.
Sherman Lambert
Los Angeles, California
Pivot Points
While I have enjoyed many of the “pivot point” accounts blasting out of your “fire hose” of a October/November issue, I would like to question your long-standing assumption that nearly all of Free Inquiry’s readers and subscribers are people who were raised in religious families and communities until they experienced the kinds of Saul/Paul-on-the-road-to-Damascus ”epiphanies” that you have printed with such relish here.
I am a seventy-three-year-old man who was raised by atheist parents, and while I early came to reject many of their views (sexist, racist, xenophobic, old-style Republican), I was never tempted to extend my rebellion by becoming religious. Nonetheless, I find many of the matters brought up in issues of Free Inquiry of great interest, even though that interest is not fueled by the memory of a “pivot point”—or even, for that matter, the feeling of what Salman Rushdie likes to call a “God-shaped hole” in my psyche.
I may be in the minority of your readership and subscribers in this respect, but I wonder if our numbers are really as small as you seem to suppose.
Why not invite the “non-pivoters” to come out of the closet and express themselves? I believe that some of the responses may be thought-provoking.
Indeed, it is not just us “never-believers” who have failed to experience “pivot points.” Many of the most intelligent and intellectually honest former believers have abandoned religious belief and practice only after a long and thoughtful process that neither involved nor required anything as flashy as an “epiphany.”
Why not hear from both those groups—both those of us who were never religious (though many of us came to appreciate the richness and complexity of religious belief, practice, and culture) and those whose long, intellectually engaged, and, yes, respectful assessment of their own religious background never experienced—or needed—a “pivot point”?
David A. Lupher
Tacoma, Washington
Tom Flynn responds:
David A. Lupher raises interesting points. As for my assumption that most Free Inquiry readers grew up in a traditional religion, it’s actually based on reader surveys that we run every five years or so. Anecdotally, I spent years traveling around the country and speaking to local secular-humanist groups, and a solid majority of those over age fifty with whom I raised the topic reported having to think their way out of a traditional religious background. Of course our surveys (and my travels) also revealed numerous lifelong atheists, including second-, third-, and fourth-generation atheists. People with backgrounds like Mr. Lupher’s are out there, just in much smaller numbers than the former believers over age fifty. By contrast, independent social survey data shows that a plurality of atheists age thirty and under did not grow up religious—and again, my contacts with students participating in programs such as the Campus Freethought Alliance and, later, CFI on Campus confirms it.
As for former believers who didn’t have a single “epiphany” moment, many of their deconversion stories appeared in our four-part feature “The Faith I Left Behind” (February/March to August/September 2014), in the Inquiry Press book of the same name, and in subsequent installments of the “Faith I Left Behind” department. The “Pivot Point” series is an effort to attract shorter commentaries by people who did experience an “epiphany” moment.
Free Inquiry always welcomes first-person accounts of unbelievers’ life experiences. Perhaps Mr. Lupher would care to tell his story. And may it start a trend!
The start of your “pivot point” series in the October/November 2020 issue hit some familiar notes, especially for one raised in a religion who finally “saw the light” of reason. The reminiscences prompted me to think back (way back, as I’m seventy-four). I was born into Catholicism in Los Angeles and spent a dozen years in Catholic schools. Rather than a central pivot point, for me it was more of a steady erosion. Wind and water erode even solid stone, while events, observations, and thinking for oneself erode even the firmest indoctrination.
Memories: a nun tearing up my Mad magazine at recess, claiming it was Communist propaganda; seeing communal hosts arrive in a bakery truck—where’s the magic in that? And if there was a strike by a bakers’ union, could the priest substitute anything round, such as Oreos or Necco wafers? Even sausage biscuits so as to combine communion with breakfast?; involuntarily being an altar boy and butchering the Latin—I must have invalidated every Mass, if those incantations actually meant anything; the wizened crone of a nun in the fourth grade who’d take her ten-year-old miscreants into a back room to swat them with a leather belt or wooden paddle, making me a lifelong foe of corporal punishment; the Bible stories that made no sense (when it comes to “miracles,” I’m a Realist, my credo being, “If it can’t happen, it didn’t happen”).
If there was a pivot point, it was Confirmation. The officiating priest, probably a bishop, had my class stand and repeat after him an oath never to see a film condemned by the Legion of Decency. I stood and raised my hand (fearing ostracism and retaliation) but kept my mouth shut: I wanted to see those films! They lost me for good that night.
Leo Miletich
El Paso, Texas
No pivots, please.
Inaccurate and illiterate misuse of the word pivot has become woefully common in the popular press, but I am appalled to see an example on the front cover of Free Inquiry.
Let me put on my professorial hat and offer some instruction. The word pivot comes to us from mechanical engineering. A pivot joint is a connection between two pieces of solid material. It allows them to rotate relative to each other, but does not allow the distance between them to change.
Speaking metaphorically, if someone were to come to a pivot point in his or her life, he or she would be stuck in a repetitious circular motion that did not allow him or her to make any net progress in any direction. That is certainly not an appropriate metaphor for someone who is breaking with and leaving his or her religion. If we insist on a material science metaphor, the word fracture could replace pivot point in the item to which I am referring.
Leslie Ballentine
Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada
Tom Flynn responds:
Maybe it’s me, but I still think “pivot” eloquently describes the moment when an individual turns away from religious belief toward unbelief. Though I have to admit, “fracture” could work too.
Activism
I would like to offer my perspective on life in the sixties and seventies in regard to Brian T. Watson’s piece about that era. I was never an activist, but in the small rural area I grew up in, I was a true believer in the activism of the time and was also young enough to believe America, indeed humanity, had a destiny – and that my generation was the beginning of delivering the promise of that destiny to America. I’ve since learned that America does indeed have a destiny—only I call it the present. Whatever has happened is destiny. The rest is speculation.
Anyway, part of the reason that my interest in activism faded was because I thought we’d set America on the right path with the end of the draft and the end of the Vietnam war. We had Civil Rights, the feminist movement, and the EPA. There was also a great deal of optimism of “curing” humanity’s shortcomings through applied mental health techniques that would mitigate racism and fascism in America. Short sighted liberals of the time, me included, didn’t pay enough attention to how short the time lapse would be between the electoral clobbering of Goldwater and the election of Dick Nixon, and how quickly the GOP recovers from landslide losses.
It didn’t go unnoticed by the conservatives what a threat a comfortable middle class, relatively cheap college education, and true job mobility posed to them. With the election of Ronald Reagan, the right wing started systematically dismantling access to anything that encouraged the activists. Low wages, student debt, and punitive drug laws along with a large number of other insidious changes crippled future movements.
Even in the modern era, the overwhelming victory at the polls by Barack Obama was remarkable in how fast we went from Obama’s victory and all the dreaming that went with it, to Donald Trump and democracy hanging by a thread. Democrats, liberals, and progressives must learn that we can’t step back and relax, because the Right never does. I hope today’s activists don’t get comfortable with just winning this election. Keep an eye to the future, and replace self-indulgent, self-righteousness with intelligent voting.
Leonard Bohlman
Waterloo, Wisconsin
Police Brutality
In their article “Police Brutality and the Role of Profit in Black Incarceration’’ (FI, October/November 2020), Williams Iheme and Asress Gikay write, “An overwhelming amount of data now shows that Black people in America are three times more likely to be killed by the police than White people.” They don’t cite sources, and, anyway, such references might not have been appropriate to a relatively short magazine article. In June 2020 in a podcast (a format that has the luxury of greater length), Sam Harris discussed some of the same issues the authors write about. The statistics he quotes and references indicate that the police kill around 1,000 people every year in the United States. While that figure should concern anybody, it should be seen in the context of about ten million annual arrests. Of those killed by police, about 25 percent are Black and about 50 percent are White. Again, this would seem disproportionate given that African Americans make up 13 percent of the population, but Harris offers further context by discussing factors such as the percentage of murders and other violent crimes committed by Blacks and Whites. I would recommend the podcast or its transcript (https://samharris.org/can-pull-back-brink/) to anyone interested in an attempt at a measured discussion of this understandably fraught and emotive topic.
Martin Stubbs
London, United Kingdom
Does the CFI vision statement have meaning? Or are they just empty words?
The CFI vision statement says, “A world where people value evidence and critical thinking, where superstition and prejudice subside and where science and compassion guide public policy.
This vision was tossed out the window by Professor Williams Iheme and Dr. Asress Gikay (both legal experts) in their article “Police Brutality and the Role of Profit in Black Incarceration.”
Without trial or evidence, they name themselves judge, jury, and executioner of former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin by exclaiming “George Floyd was murdered by Derek Chauvin … who used his knee to pin Floyd’s neck to the tarmac … .”
I remind both esteemed professors that in America one is presumed innocent until proven guilty in court. Chauvin has not had his day in court, and until that time comes, both professors would show fairness by reserving their judgement. It is only fair to hear all the evidence before one decides guilt or innocence. As law professors, I would think they would know this cornerstone of American justice.
On October 22, 2020, a district court judge dismissed a third-degree murder charge against Chauvin. A second-degree murder charge still stands. The Hennepin County Coroner autopsy report on Floyd showed that he had a possibly lethal amount of fentanyl in his blood. The autopsy went on to state that Floyd had “no life-threatening injuries” to his face, neck, laryngeal, chest wall, etc. So what killed George Floyd? We will find out at trial, not by watching a video.
Iheme and Gikay seem to be making their verdict from watching the horrific video of Floyd and Chauvin. For me, I will wait until all the evidence is presented in court, where I can see the evidence and use critical thinking to make a decision.
Dan Klein
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Williams Iheme responds:
I think all these reactions go at the heart of the problem we seek to dismantle … the problem rooted in America’s original sin of slavery and racism, which destroy its social cohesion and whittle trust in the justice system. There is the egg head principle, and also the rule that if a matter is self-evident, it requires no further evidence. Klein talks about the presumption of innocence, which Chauvin hardly afforded to Floyd. One who seeks justice must first do equity and seek it with clean hands. The treatment meted to Floyd was not the treatment one who allegedly forged a check would normally get under American law. At least, Chauvin is alive to have his day in court, but did he allow Floyd to enjoy the same presumption of innocence? If I gun down a person on 5th Avenue, borrowing Donald Trump’s analogy, might I truly say “Well, I didn’t murder him unless a court can say so”? And might I say, “Aha, he also had some alcohol in his system at the time I shot him”? The standard of proof in criminal law is proof beyond a reasonable doubt, and I believe the video evidence of Floyd’s death sufficiently discharges that burden of proof unless we are interested in subverting justice on grounds of legal technicalities, which have helped to relieve or exonerate police officers 99 percent of the time, and are the reasons for incessant protests and global condemnation of the American justice system.
Unbelief in Latin America
Re: “Ethnographic Evidence for Unbelief in Non-Western Cultures: Unbelief in Latin America,” by Ibn Warraq (FI, October/November 2020). As a cultural anthropology instructor in my local community college, I was pleased to see Mr. Warraq’s article highlight cultural anthropology and ethnography’s contribution to the issue of “belief and unbelief” in non-western cultures.
While I agree that there was no concept of (the Christian) God in pre-contact and nineteenth-century native American cultures, there is abundant ethnographic evidence from native cultures across the Americas (specifically north and central America) that they did believe in a creator being and the supernatural ,and had/have a religion that anthropologists call animism: belief there is a spirit in everything and each spirit is autonomous from the other spirits; each with power/control over what kind of thing it is a spirit of; each spirit different with different powers from every other spirit. The creator being is transcendent, outside the world, largely unengaged in the day-to-day of the world; spirit beings are immanent, working the levers of our existence on earth. Native Americans had/have religion, just not the Christian religion.
Moreover, archaeological and ethnographic research on Indian cultures of Mesoamerica indicate a belief in many gods, i.e., polytheism, which, like animism, is recognized by anthropologists as a type of religion. Again, polytheistic religions recognize a creator, but a creator nothing like the Christian god: omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. Polytheistic gods are more like members of a corporate board of directors, and the creator is the corporation’s (world/universe) chief executive officer or chairperson of the board. For most cultural anthropologists, Native American and Central American Indians had/have religions and believed in the supernatural (gods and nature spirits).
Mr. Warraq cites former Christian Daniel Everett’s description of the religious beliefs of the Pirahã Indians of Brazil, or rather lack thereof, as evidence in support of the main claim: there is evidence for unbelief in God, religion, and the supernatural in non-western cultures. While I do not question what Mr. Everett claims to have observed about the Pirahã’s religious/spiritual beliefs, that one tribe is a thin thread to hang the main claim on. In addition, while Mr. Warraq cites a number of similar observations from eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and early twentieth-century naturalists, explorers, travelers, and anthropologists, there is reason to suspect the objectivity of those western observers. Cultural anthropologists have become aware of what they call ethnocentrism, that is, the tendency to judge other cultures according to the institutions and mores of one’s own. Add to that the implicit sense of superiority of western civilization over all others, I am not surprised that western pre–World War II observers did not observe any evidence of the supernatural, religion, or God.
My acquaintance with native cultures of North America and Mesoamerica support their belief in the supernatural, a creator being, and non-human spiritual beings, as well as having animistic and/or polytheistic religions. These cultures, however, never appear to have had, before Europeans and Americans showed up, a concept of a single and supreme creator being that is omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent – that is, the Cristian god.
Bruce Sanchez
Harrisburg, Oregon