Omnia Sub Sole

I’ve been reading Richard Dawkins’s The Greatest Show on Earth, and today I was particularly impressed by his explanation of the nature of DNA and the way it tells cells in a simple embryo how to grow into a complex body.  In particular, Dawkins refutes the analogy of a blueprint, concluding:

There is no overall plan of development, no blueprint, no architect’s plan, no architect*. The development of the embryo, and ultimately of the adult, is achieved by local rules implemented by cells, interacting with other cells on a local basis.  What goes on inside cells, similarly, is governed by local rules that apply to molecules, especially protein molecules, within the cells and in the cell membranes, interacting with other such molecules.

Cells, says Dawkins, are less like masons directed by an architect, and more like starlings that move in a group, each only thinking about itself and its immediate neighbors, but acting according to a set of rules which make the whole flock seem to be moving with one intelligent mind.  This has an interesting consequence:

Again, the rules are all local, local, local.  Nobody, reading the sequence of letters in the DNA of a fertilized egg, could predict the shape of the animal it is going to grow into. The only way to discover that is to grow the egg, in the natural way, and see what it turns into.  No electronic computer could work it out, unless it was programmed to simulate the natural biological process itself, in which case you might as well dispense with the elctronic version and use the developing embryo as its own computer.

Imagine that – even the analogy of the computer program for DNA is severely flawed.  If it were the other way around – if cells did grow more according to a blueprint – it would have a rather interesting consequence:

This way of generating large and complex structures purely by the execution of local rules is deeply distinct from the blueprint way of doing things.  If the DNA were some kind of linearized blueprint, it would be a relatively trivial exercise to program a computer to read the letters and draw the animal.  But it would not be at all easy – indeed, it might be impossible – for the animal to have evolved in the first place.

Not only is the starling analogy true – it couldn’t have been any other way, if there was to be life on earth!

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*Dawkins admits earlier in the book that he does not intend this to be a proof regarding the non-existence of God.  Part of what makes this book (as well as The Ancestor’s Tale) so good is that by and large, Dawkins stays away from the deep waters of philosophy, where he has severely embarrassed himself.

[quotes from The Greatest Show on Earth, pp 247-8]

In his History of the Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire, Ch 34, Gibbon relates this story from the time when the Vandal King Hunneric, who was an Arian Christian, ruled North Africa (c. AD 480) and was persecuting the orthodox, or Catholic, Christians there:

Their disobedience exasperated the cruelty of Hunneric. A military count was despatched from Carthage to Tipasa: he collected the Catholics in the Forum, and, in the presence of the whole province, deprived the guilty of their right hands and their tongues.

But the holy confessors continued to speak without tongues; and this miracle is attested by Victor, an African bishop, who published a history of the persecution within two years after the event…

At Constantinople we are astonished to find a cool, a learned, and unexceptionable witness, without interest, and without passion. Æneas of Gaza, a Platonic philosopher, has accurately described his own observations on these African sufferers. “I saw them myself: I heard them speak: I diligently inquired by what means such an articulate voice could be formed without any organ of speech: I used my eyes to examine the report of my ears; I opened their mouth, and saw that the whole tongue had been completely torn away by the roots; an operation which the physicians generally suppose to be mortal.”

The testimony of Æneas of Gaza might be confirmed by the superfluous evidence of the emperor Justinian, in a perpetual edict; of Count Marcellinus, in his Chronicle of the times; and of Pope Gregory the First, who had resided at Constantinople, as the minister of the Roman pontiff. They all lived within the compass of a century; and they all appeal to their personal knowledge, or the public notoriety, for the truth of a miracle, which was repeated in several instances, displayed on the greatest theatre of the world, and submitted, during a series of years, to the calm examination of the senses.

I leave the interpretation of this strange and well-attested miracle to the reader.

There is a commercial on TV now, I think it’s for the Kindle, where a woman is trying to defend her use of paper books against the Kindle.  She must be dumb as a post, because the final argument she arrives at is that she enjoys the satisfaction of folding down a page to mark her place in her book.  Even she acknowledges the stupidity of this claim at the end of the commercial.

Now I must admit that I like my first-gen Kindle, because:

• It makes Project Gutenberg books accessible (I read David Copperfield from Gutenberg on my Kindle, as the library book was too bulky and Gutenberg books have no expiration date)
• It enables you to carry multiple very bulky books around with you in a small volume
• It has free 3G and a semi-functional web browser (this was very nice before I had a 3G phone)

For these reasons I think a Kindle is a nice thing to have. But it can never replace the book.  Aside from being able to fold down a page in a real book (if you care about that), many reasons for the overall superiority of real books stand out to me:

1. The used book.  I was at Half-Price Books yesterday and it occurred to me that nobody would ever be able to buy a used Kindle book at Half-Price; but I was able to pick up Nhat Hanh’s Living Buddha, Living Christ for $6. Try finding that price on the Internet!
2. Books require no initial investment.  This makes them an obviously better choice for the 99.5% of us on the planet who don’t have $300 to sink into a platform just to read books on, when such a platform is unnecessary.
3. Books require no specialized gadget-knowledge.  The Kindle may seem intuitive to those of us young enough not to remember the Carter administration, but let me tell you that my grandmother has owned one for three years now and is still not quite sure how to use it.  She is not technologically ignorant, either; she uses a computer every day to edit the small newspaper she owns and runs.

I may be over-reacting to what is essentially a dumb and insulting commercial, but I felt obligated to defend books, as they have given me so much.

I’d like to share something from a book that is worth its weight in gold and then some: Thich Nhat Hanh’s Peace is Every Step.

Nhat Hanh is a Buddhist monk, but his writings aren’t at all sectarian, nor do they contain lots of Buddhist inside-baseball jargon.  His style is plain and simple, and his compassion and friendliness comes through in everything he writes. His books are at once accessible and conversational.

The thing I found most valuable in Peace is Every Step is the technique of mindful breathing.  Nhat Hanh describes it in its simplest form:

As you breathe in, you say to yourself, “Breathing in, I know that I am breathing in.”  As you breathe out, say, “Breathing out, I know that I am breathing out.”  Just that. You recognize your in-breath as an in-breath and your out-breath as an out-breath. […] As you practice, your breath will become peaceful and gentle, and your mind and body will also become peaceful and gentle.

You focus on your inhaling and exhaling to bring yourself away from past, future, imagination, etc., in order to be fully in the present moment.  It’s really an absurdly simple thing, but nonetheless I find it extremely beneficial.  I am often very caught up in my own thoughts, or sometimes I’m very caught up in no thoughts at all, and if I am lucky I remember this technique and it brings me back to myself fully.  As Nhat Hanh writes,

If we keep breathing in and out this way for a few minutes, we become quite refreshed.  We recover ourselves, and we can encounter the beautiful things around us in the present moment.

In my own experience I have found this to be true.

I hope to expound more on Nhat Hanh in later posts, but for now I hope I’ve at least piqued your interest about this great gift which that Buddhist monk has given me.

On the eve of the beatification of Pope John Paul II*, I’d like to examine what I think will be his most lasting legacy, the apostolic letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis.  This is the one where he infallibly and irrevocably declared:

the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful.

It is a brief letter that the Pope gave in 1994, and it’s clear that he considers the intellectual heavy lifting to have been already accomplished in the 1976 Inter Insignores and the 1988 Mulieris Dignitatem. The arguments in these documents are lengthy, but their core thesis** is this: that Jesus did not ordain any women as Apostles, and the Church today must follow his example.  While the first part of this statement is of unknowable historical accuracy, and the latter part of it asserts the dubious necessity of following a negative example, I’d like to call attention rather to two other claims in the documents: that (A) Jesus ordained only men by his own choice, but not because of the common inequality of women in his day, and (B) the Church claims to maintain the dignity of women because of its continuing practice of male-only ordination.

To point (A), the apostolic letters do point out the many examples of Jesus talking to women, which was shocking to the sensibilities of his day: conversations with the Samaritan woman, the woman suffering hemmorages, the sinful woman in Simon the Pharisee’s house, the adulteress of the “cast the first stone” incident, and perhaps most importantly the fact that Mary Magdalene was the first to see the risen Christ in the Gospel of John (whence the haunting words of the Easter sequence: Dic nobis Maria / Quid vidisti in via?).  Jesus clearly was flouting social norms in his interactions – so then why did he “ordain” only men to the Apostolate?  The letters seem to bend over backwards to avoid acknowledging that this question could even arise, which may be an indication of how much the authors disliked the possible answers to it.

To point (B) I would like to quote a bit from Mulieres Dignitatem:

Rereading Genesis in light of the spousal symbol in the Letter to the Ephesians enables us to grasp a truth which seems to determine in an essential manner the question of women’s dignity, and, subsequently, also the question of their vocation: the dignity of women is measured by the order of love.

Pope John Paul quotes directly the second chapter of Genesis, which tells us that woman was created for Adam “as a helper fit for him,” as well as referring to the fifth chapter of Ephesians, where wives are told to be subordinate to their husbands.  Things like “the dignity of women is measured by the order of love”, and “the truth about woman as bride” are roundabout and diplomatic ways of saying that God’s intention is that a woman’s proper role is always as follower, never as leader.  Inter Insigniores reiterates this by quoting one of the medieval Popes:

as Pope Innocent III*** repeated later, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, ‘Although the Blessed Virgin Mary surpassed in dignity and in excellence all the Apostles, nevertheless it was not to her but to them that the Lord entrusted the Keys of the Kingdom of Heaven.’

Translation: even the best person that ever lived, aside from Jesus, was still not as fit for leadership as a man.

So why is it that I think this Ordinatio Sacerdotalis will be JPII’s lasting legacy?  It’s because, unlike the two previous documents from which it draws heavily, it decides the question of the ordination of women not just for today, but for all future generations.  Thanks to JPII, the Church can’t ever disconnect itself from Ordinatio Sacerdotalis without abandoning the Vatican I structure of papal infallibility completely.  As the equality of women continues to grow worldwide, and indeed as women perhaps become dominant in the West, the medieval ideas of gender to which JPII has attempted to eternally shackle the Church may confine it to an intellectual ghetto from which it will not escape.  I hope that this never comes to pass; as I’ve said before, despite its failings I think the Church is a tremendous force of good in the world, and to let all that be cast away by a decision like the one in Ordinatio Sacerdotalis would be a great shame.

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*This is totally off-topic, but I have two personal anecdotes about this Pope.  The first is that my father only visited the Vatican once, and it just happened to be on May 13, 1981, the day Mehmet Ali Ağca famously shot the Pope.  The second is that that my cousin, who was kissed by the Pope in St Peter’s square earlier that same day, would often remind his nun teachers in grade school (to no avail) that they couldn’t order him around – he’d been kissed by the Pope!
**A secondary reason in Inter Insignores: Christ was a man, and the priest stands in persona Christi. The argument that the priest also stands in persona Ecclesiae is dismissed.
***Who, by the way, started the Fourth Crusade, which ended up sacking Constantinople.

I’ve lately been reading St.* Oscar Romero’s The Violence of Love.  Romero didn’t actually write it as a whole book; it’s rather a compilation of pieces of his homilies and newspaper op-eds over the course of the three short years between his elevation to the post of Archbishop of San Salvador in 1977 and his assassination.

I could say a lot about Romero, but I want to focus on a specific point about him: he was both a man with much power (as a Roman Catholic Archbishop in a traditionally Catholic country usually is) and he was a champion of the those with no power.  He spoke out against those in his country who were committing so many abuses against the poor:

“This is why the Church has great conflicts… It says to sinful torturers: do not torture. You are sinning. You are doing wrong.  You are establishing the reign of Hell on earth.”

“What marks the genuine church, is the word that, burning like the word of the prophets, proclaims and accuses… so that they may tear that sin out of their hearts, out of their societies, out of their laws – out of the structures that oppress, that imprison, that violate the rights of God and humanity.”

I don’t want to beat it to death – you get the idea.  But these weren’t just platitudes Romero spoke from a lofty cushioned cathedra.  For his three years as Archbishop, he was constantly getting death threats for what he was saying.  People were bombing the radio stations he broadcast on, and his supporters were being murdered.  In 1980 Romero himself was martyred while celebrating Mass, paying the ultimate price for calling out those who sought to oppress the Salvadoran people.

And that, I think, is what marks him as a singular man among men of power.  And what motivated this powerful defender of the defenseless?  The answer is what he returns to again and again in the book: the Gospels.  Romero refers us to Jesus’s words: “whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me” in Matthew 25, the Beatitudes in Matthew 5 and the rest of the Sermon on the Mount, as well as the words of the prophet Jeremiah.

These writings have been universally held in esteem not just in the Christian world, but in the Western world in general for about 1700 years, which brings me (finally) to my titular point.  For in contrast to all the awful things done by people in the name of Christianity, the powerful Western Church from the time of Constantine has again and again caused powerful figures to follow the Gospels and use their own power to denounce abusive authorities and rich people, even risking their own lives to do so.  So many have done so that I’d do a great injustice to name only a few, but off the top of my head: St. John Chrysostom, Pope St. Gregory the Great, St Francis of Assisi, Bartolomé de las Casas, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Mother Teresa, and yes, Oscar Romero, all drew their power from the Church and their inspiration in agitating for social justice from Jesus Christ.

This is why I say that Christianity is a “Progressive Trojan Horse”.  The emperor Constantine set the precedent for the integration of Christianity as the religion of the West, and accepted on behalf of every Western leader to come the moving texts which praise the poor and disparage the rich and powerful.  While the establishment of the Church has meant that the wars, atrocities, and lavish lifestyles of Western kings got “Jesus” bumper stickers slapped on them for centuries, it also guaranteed that the sinfulness of those acts was always and forever codified, and that those who sought to promote social justice and criticize those awful kings always had the ultimate trump card to draw: the words of God Himself.  And that is why I say the establishment of Christianity, even if there is no God and no Resurrection**, is a singular event, and the greatest thing that ever happened to the world.

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*Technically not a recognized Roman Catholic saint.  Yet.
**Although those of you who know me know that I do credo in unum Deum, Patrem omnipotentem, etc… if that weren’t obvious from this post.