Daniel C. Dennett is a big man with a big appetite for intellectual fights. A celebrated philosophy professor and the director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University, he is best known for his arguments that human consciousness and free will boil down to physical processes. When theologians, New Agers and other philosophers and scientists complain about scientific reductionism -- the effort to reduce everything, including human behavior and spirituality, to material properties -- they are complaining about Dennett. To which he retorts: "'Reductionism' has become a meaningless code word for 'I don't like that theory.'"
In 1995, with "Darwin's Dangerous Idea," Dennett provoked a firestorm of controversy for insisting that Darwin's ideas are a "universal acid" that "eats through just about every traditional concept and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world-view." Dennett exposed his own worldview in 2003, when he outed himself in the New York Times as a "bright," a fancy new term for atheist. "We brights don't believe in ghosts or elves or the Easter Bunny -- or God," he wrote.
In his new book, "Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon," Dennett provokes readers to examine religion as a product of evolution rather than a transcendental force. Research into religion, he says, should be "based on empirical studies with all the controls in place, just like in medicine," and draw from biology, psychology, history and art. "I appreciate that many readers will be profoundly distrustful of the tack I am taking here," he writes. "They will see me as just another liberal professor trying to cajole them out of some of their convictions, and they are dead right about that -- that's what I am, and that's exactly what I am trying to do."
In person, Dennett is imposing. He is tall, bald and barrel-chested, with a great white beard not unlike Darwin's, although Dennett's beard is better trimmed. He spoke to Salon at the Stardust Resort and Casino in Las Vegas, where he was a featured speaker at a meeting of skeptics. For all his professorial seriousness, Dennett is given to geyserlike bursts of enthusiasm that transform him from Leo Tolstoy to Kris Kringle.
What spell are you trying to break?
I'm proposing we break the spell that creates an invisible moat around religion, the one that says, "Science stay away. Don't try to study religion." But if we don't understand religion, we're going to miss our chance to improve the world in the 21st century. Just about every major problem we have interacts with religion: the environment, injustice, discrimination, terrible economic imbalances and potential genocide. In our own country, the religious attitudes of people are clearly interfering with the political discussion. So if we fail to understand why religions have the effects they do on people, we will screw up our efforts to solve these problems.
Why do you say religion interacts with the world's major problems?
Because people decide what to do, and whom to listen to, and what to take seriously, partly on the basis of their religious convictions and practices. So things that might seem reasonable and attractive solutions may not be remotely feasible without a great deal of carefully guided presentation to those who must live with the policies.
Some people would argue that by dissecting religion you are destroying it.
Yes, some people are afraid that if you look too closely you'll break the spell of religion and make it impossible for people to gain whatever benefits come from it. But I've considered the worst-case scenarios and just don't find this to be a persuasive argument. The cat is out of the bag. The confrontation between religious faith and the modern scientific world is underway and it's not going to stop. The question is, Are we going to carefully and conscientiously study the phenomena or close our eyes and put our fingers in our ears and just go on a roller-coaster ride?
Studying religious faith sounds as futile as studying love. You either feel it or you don't.
The relationship that many people have with religion is basically a kind of love. This has to be appreciated and understood and not denied or belittled. One doesn't interfere with a love relationship lightly. But that doesn't mean that it can't be studied closely. Certainly the wave of research on sex, by Kinsey and Masters and Johnson, was deeply upsetting to many people, who thought it was a bizarre intrusion that should never have been made. In retrospect, though, we learned a lot that has helped us. Sex is as wonderful as ever, or maybe even better, because we've dispelled a lot of really painful and harmful myths.
Many people say they experience God deep within themselves. There's nothing you could say that would convince them otherwise.
The question is whether you'd want to. There's no policy that I've recommended that everybody should be utterly disillusioned about everything. Look at Santa Claus. Am I in favor of banishing him? Of course not. But some illusions really do hurt people, either the people holding them or others. If you have a friend who thinks she is talking to her dear departed husband, and she is paying some "trance channeler" her life savings for this illusion, I think we want to say, "No, you're being defrauded." Even if the illusion does give her comfort.
Are you comparing religious faith to a belief in channelers?
Well, right now we say, "Hands off all that is really religious." But what's that? Where do we draw the line between the scam religions and the real ones? I'm not playing philosopher's tricks and asking for impossible definitions. I'm quite prepared for this to be a political process, where we work out the best way to distinguish them. But if you want to reserve for special treatment some particular practices and traditions, you're going to have to say what they are and why they deserve such special treatment.
Don't you think people's faith in God is more important than their faith in Santa Claus?
Yes, that's why the issue of how, and even whether, to approach such questions must be very carefully addressed. I decided that it was important to explore people's faith scientifically, that the risks we run if we don't are much more pressing than the risks we run if we do.
Are you saying a person is better served by relinquishing his faith in search of a more rational truth about the universe?
That's a very good question and I don't claim to have the answer yet. That's why we have to do the research. Then we'll have a good chance of knowing whether people are better served by reason or faith.
If society doesn't get its moral foundation from religion, where will that foundation come from? What will keep us being good to each other, if not rules laid down by God?
Rules that we lay down ourselves. We've been doing this for centuries. There've been revisions about what counts as a sin in God's eyes. It has changed quite a bit since the days of the Old Testament. It has changed because people thought about it hard and could no longer stomach some of the old rules and practices and changed their minds. It became politically obvious that something had to give, and so it has, and will continue to do so. Now we can continue to expand the circle and get more people involved, and do it in a less disingenuous way by excising the myth about how this is God's law. It is our law.
The political consequences of undermining faith are monumental, spurring riots and killings around the world. Are you -- is science -- willing to take responsibility for these deadly outcomes?
We cannot let any group, however devout, blackmail us into silence by their expressions of hurt feelings whenever they feel that we are getting close to the truth. That is what con artists do when their marks begin to get suspicious, and that is what children do when they can't have their way, and it should be beneath the dignity of any religious group to play that card. The responsibility of science is to safeguard the well-being of those it studies and to tell the truth. If people insist on taking themselves out of the arena of reasonable political discourse and mutual examination, they forfeit their right to be heard. There is no excuse for deliberately insulting anybody, but people who insist on putting their sensibilities on a hair trigger demonstrate that they prefer pity to respect.
Does it worry you that American politics under the current administration have become infused with religion?
It does. The separation of church and state is very important and is not as uncontroversial today in the United States as it should be. Around the world we see clear cases of how seriously bad theocracies are. So we certainly have to take steps to preserve the secular foundation of this country. I put my faith in secular, free societies and democracies like the United States.
You have "faith"?
By faith, I don't mean an irrational belief. I've got to leap and secular democracy is the lifeboat I leap to. Somebody else may think, "If I have to choose between my religion and country," I choose religion. We're beseeching people in Iraq not to do that. But what about at home? It's all right to have an allegiance to a religion, but is your allegiance to democracy and a secular state more important than your allegiance to your religion? If the answer is no, then I don't want you in office. I think that's a pretty reasonable test.
How does President Bush do on that test?
His religiosity seems quite sincere, but it may be more of a political display than a real commitment. I hope he's smarter than he seems! I'd rather he be faking than be deadly earnest about his conviction that God tells him what to do.
What evidence do we have of an evolutionary basis for religion?
Nothing persists in the living world without constant renewal. Religions depend on human brains and bodies just as much as language and music and art do. It has been designed by evolution and human religion tinkerers to thrive in the human environment.
Why does religion have such a powerful hold on us?
Our fundamental instinct -- and this really is in our genes -- is that whenever something surprising and novel happens, we say, "Who's there? What do you want?" That's a very good response to have because maybe what that somebody wants is you. Always being on the lookout is a sort of built-in alarm system that flavors everything we do.
In every culture, people are inclined to personify the forces of nature. What do the weather gods want? What does the sun god want? Out of this bias, built into our nervous systems, comes a machine of sorts for generating ghosts and phantoms and gods and goddesses and goblins and imps. That's not religion, that's superstition. But I think that's part of the biological underpinning of religion.
Are you saying God is a product of our biology?
I'm saying that if God does not exist, many of us would believe in him anyway because of the way we have evolved, both genetically and culturally.
How does evolution contradict the idea of God as creator?
Probably as far back as Homo habilus, there was this sense that it takes a big fancy thing to make a less fancy thing. You never get a horseshoe making a blacksmith, never a pot making a potter, always the other way around. The trickle-down-from-on-high theory of creation is extremely natural. It's a way of seeing the world that is probably built right into our genes.
Then along comes Darwin, who simply shows how all of that design work, all of that creation, can be done by a process that has no purpose, no intelligence and no foresight. It is a very strange inversion of reasoning and it's very upsetting to people to see that something that seems so obvious is being denied. Darwin does away with the reason for believing in a divine creator. This doesn't prove there is no divine creator, but if there is one, it -- he -- need not have gone to all that trouble because natural selection on its own would have created all the biological diversity we see.
Some neuroscientists have isolated spiritual impulses, a belief in God, in the brain's limbic system, the seat of emotions. Do you agree with them?
I think the pioneering work on this is, inevitably, too simple to be true. But there may be something to it. In one sense it is obvious. Everything we believe -- like the fact that the Earth goes around the sun and that Sacramento is the capital of California -- has its signature in the brain. So of course if you believe in God, your brain will be somewhat differently arranged -- at the microscopic level! -- than if you don't believe in God. That just follows from the fact that the mind is what the brain does.
Tell us the story from your new book about the ant and the blade of grass.
Suppose you go out in the meadow and you see this ant climbing up a blade of grass and if it falls it climbs again. It's devoting a tremendous amount of energy and persistence to climbing up this blade of grass. What's in it for the ant? Nothing. It's not looking for a mate or showing off or looking for food. Its brain has been invaded by a tiny parasitic worm, a lancet fluke, which has to get into the belly of a sheep or a cow in order to continue its life cycle. It has commandeered the brain of this ant and it's driving it up the blade of grass like an all-terrain vehicle. That's how this tiny lancet fluke does its evolutionary work.
Is religion, then, like a lancet fluke?
The question is, Does anything like that happen to us? The answer is, Well, yes. Not with actual brain worms but with ideas. An idea takes over our brain and gets that person to devote his life to the furtherance of that idea, even at the cost of their own genetics. People forgo having kids, risk their lives, devote their whole lives to the furtherance of an idea, rather than doing what every other species on the planet does -- make more children and grandchildren.
The capacity of human beings to devote their energy, time, safety and health to the stewardship of an idea is itself a biological phenomenon. That's what distinguishes us from all the other species. We're the only species that can set aside our genetic imperatives and say, "That's not that important, I've got more important things in mind." That uniquely human perspective, unknown by any other species, is a gift of cultural selection.
In an interview with Alan Alda, you said the key to being happy is to find something larger than yourself and work for it. What are you working for?
Truth and freedom. These are terrible times and our ability to destroy the planet has never been greater. But if we can educate each other, listen to each other and learn more about each other -- and as long as we can preserve the free-society traditions of informed political discussions -- I think we have some hope.
It is possible in this day and age to fly south in December and three hours later land in a city where you can sit comfortably in your T-shirt and linen jacket and eat your dinner at a cafe under palm trees and still enjoy the protections of the U.S. Constitution, which is a wonderful, wonderful thing. Paradise, in fact.
The problem with paradise is that it's temporary: You don't belong here and the neighbors are nobody you care to know, so it's only blissful for a week or so. You're in a city built on sandy marsh in a boom period, and when you look around at the freeway, the office parks, the malls, the curvy streets of houses, your hotel, you see nothing that predates 1980, nothing that distinguishes this city from Scottsdale or Fort Lauderdale or any other suburb in America, which is exhilarating to some people but not to you.
And the people around you are all in the throes of relaxation. As we know, people are at their best when engaged in the endless heroic quest for whatever -- truth, love, literary excellence, supremacy in tennis, a royal flush, the perfect salad -- and relaxation makes them dull. It's true. We're hunters. Once we chase down that wildebeest and devour its hindquarters, we get suddenly stupider.
I'm sitting with wife and child at a cafe at a marina, and the big motor yachts parked in the water bring back the memory of long boring afternoons aboard boats. There is no boredom like that boredom, sitting in the stern of a big expensive boat as it churns through the coastal waters, watching your host, the wheel in one hairy hand and a bowlful of scotch in the other, woofing at you about how much he loves this, meanwhile the sun is beating down, turning your brain to tomato aspic. The conversation deceased an hour ago and the cheese dip has gone bad and the jouncing of the waves is making you very queasy.
And yet -- you yourself have gazed at million-dollar cruisers in boatyards, imagining the euphoria that could be yours. It's a beautiful dream and God forbid it should come true and you become just one more drunk driving a boat.
Some of the people around us at the cafe under the palms look like boat people. Geezer gents and their geezerettes looking a little exhausted in the company of grandchildren, tired of their incessant questions -- e.g., What do we do tomorrow? Why can't we go back to Reptile World? Can I watch a movie now on my iPhone? -- longing for a quiet deck chair and the muffled rumbling of the generator and the burbling of the hot tub. The grandmas sip their Campari and sodas, the grandpas sit back walrus-like, digesting their seaweed and krill, and I know I'm not going to walk over and strike up a conversation with them. I wouldn't know how.
What we talk about up north in December is the existence of God, but I don't sense much theology here in paradise, just a large sense of entitlement. Up north, you talk about God because life is brutal when the wind blows hard on the borderline. You need a reason to keep trudging forward across the frozen tundra.
The fundamental religion of most of mankind is the faith that God has revealed Himself to us and not to the barbarians. Our tribe is the one God chose and so if we vanquish the other tribes and rain fire and destruction on them, we're only carrying out God's Will.
There is a countervailing faith that says that God is in and of the world and has bestowed vast gifts to be shared with others, and that our understanding of God is faint and incomplete and so we should walk softly and not assume too much.
When I'm up north, I naturally tend toward the warrior view, believing myself to be one of the Chosen, the select few to whom The Great Giver of Truth has vouchsafed the sacred secrets, but now, in the suburban tropics, eating blackened grouper under the Southern moon, I am sliding into hedonistic pantheism, slouching down the coast of Florida toward Key West, on a quest to make my wife and daughter happy until the money runs out and we regain our senses and head home. More certitude next week. Meanwhile, Happy 2010, dear reader. I lift a glass of sparkling water to you.
It was Sunday morning in my scruffy Brooklyn, N.Y., neighborhood, and I was wearing a dress. Walking to the subway, I ran into a friend heading home from yoga class. She wore sweats and carried her mat over her shoulder. "Where are you going so early all dressed up?" she asked, chuckling. "To church?" We shared a laugh at the absurdity of a liberal New Yorker heading off to worship.
The real joke? I totally was.
Inside the church, it's cool and quiet. I read the Collect of the day in the Book of Common Prayer, which urges us: "While we are placed among things that are passing away, to hold fast to those that shall endure." My recent layoff no longer seems like the end of the world. I take Communion and exchange the peace and listen to the sermon. As I'm walking back up the aisle, I feel reoriented and calmer, the indignities of the week shift into perspective.
These moments are not only sacred; they are secret. Outside, on the steps of the downtown Manhattan church, I think I see someone familiar coming down the sidewalk, and I bolt in the other direction.
Why am I so paranoid? I'm not cheating on my husband, committing crimes or doing drugs. But those are battles my cosmopolitan, progressive friends would understand. Many of them had to come out -- as gay, as alcoholics, as artists in places where art was not valued. To them, my situation is far more sinister: I am the bane of their youth, the boogeyman of their politics, the very thing they left their small towns to escape. I am a Christian.
I certainly wasn't born one. I was raised bohemian in New York's East Village in the '80s. I was fascinated by religions but also baffled by them. (If anything, I assumed I was Jewish.) When I began traveling around the world alone at 18, I longed for a religious experience, something that would inspire me to cast my lot with a denomination the way you choose a political party. But nothing really clicked.
I got a taste of the divine at Hindu shrines in south India, and when Mother Teresa grabbed my head and blessed me while I was working for her ministry in Calcutta I felt a kind of electricity rush through my body. Later, when I almost died from amoebic dysentery in New Delhi, I did hallucinate that the Jesus poster on the wall of the clinic moved. But these experiences were no more formative than the Tolstoy books I read on those 24-hour train trips across India.
In college, I majored in Sanskrit and translated part of the Atharvaveda for my senior thesis. I studied Jewish history, Zen and Hinduism with equal interest. The closest thing to my religious sensibility back then was either Pure Land Buddhism ("the world is emptiness ... and yet") or Gnosticism (though my penchant for makeouts kept me from achieving their level of physical self-denial).
When I hit my early 20s I found existential gratification in that feeling at the end of the night, drunk and awake and looking out into the rain while the bar closed and not knowing what was going to happen next. I worshiped at the altar of the Replacements and had romances that only made sense in the context of a Paul Westerberg song. I felt closest to figuring things out when I drank too much coffee and smoked too many cigarettes and stayed up too late.
Sometime later I got married, and the priest with whom my husband and I did premarital counseling had firsthand experience of closing bars, but he also was smart and eloquent and fulfilled. He showed me the best side of Christianity. Not how it's right or just, but how -- and this may sound stupid, but it's what I think about religion in general -- it works.
All of us need help with birth and death and good and evil, and religion can give us that. It doesn't solve problems. It reminds you that, yes, those challenges are real and important and folks throughout history have struggled and thought about them too, and by the way, here is some profound writing on the subject from people whose whole job is to think about this stuff.
The idea of an eternal community brings me comfort: I like the image of a long table extending backward and forward in time, and everyone who's ever taken Communion is sitting at it. The Bible at the 1920s stone church where my husband and I were married was filled with the names of people in the community who'd married, been born and died. When my son was baptized in our church in a traditional Easter eve service, the light spreading from candle to candle through the pews of the dark church made me feel, at least for one moment, we were united in a sense of gratitude for new life and awe in the face of the numinous.
Oh, I don't know. Unless you're William James or Saint Catherine of Siena it's hard to talk about any of this without sounding dumb, or like a zealot, or ridiculous. And who wants to be lumped in with all the other Christians, especially the ones you see on TV protesting gay marriage, giving money to charlatans, and letting priests molest children? Andy Warhol went to mass every Sunday, but not even his closest friends knew he was a devout Catholic until his death. I get that.
"[Closeted Christianity] definitely exists in Manhattan, some Democratic corners in Washington, and I'd bet parts of Northern California," says Amy Sullivan, author of "The Party Faithful: How and Why Democrats Are Closing the God Gap." Sullivan says after her book about the Christian left came out, "colleagues in New York were taking me out for these clandestine lunches and leaning across the table and whispering excitedly, 'Pssst! I'm one of them!'"
The Panel Study of American Religion and Ethnicity asked people how they felt about those outside their close friends and family knowing they were religious. About 2 percent said they didn't want people to know, and that percentage is higher among people with liberal politics and people, like me, who are part of Generation X.
Barry Kosmin at the Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture at Trinity College says it's ridiculous that, in a city like New York, where there is a church on every corner, anyone would hide their religion. He says he was at a conference in Seattle recently where atheists complained about having to hide their lack of beliefs. "Everyone's paranoid!" he says.
But if you're in a place like New York City -- or Austin, Texas, or Portland, Ore., or Los Angeles -- the "new atheists" surround you. In October 2009, the atheist organization Big Apple Coalition of Reason (COR) started a poster campaign to celebrate non-belief. "A million New Yorkers are good without God. Are you?" reads one such poster. A similar campaign in London led by the bestselling author Richard Dawkins reads, "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life."
Writers like Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Victor J. Stenger -- and, of course, performers like Bill Maher -- get loads of press mocking the dummies gullible enough to believe some guy a couple thousand years ago was God's son. But come on. It's like shooting Christian fish car magnets in a barrel.
I'll give the atheists a lot: The Creation Museum is a riot. The psychos shooting up abortion clinics and telling gay couples they're going to hell are evil, and anyone of faith has an obligation to condemn them. Abominable stuff has been done in God's name for centuries. The Bible has a lot of crazy shit in it about stoning people for using the wrong salad fork. Up with science and reason!
And yet, atheists are at least as fundamentalist and zealous as any religious people I know, and they have nothing good to show for it: no stained glass, no great literature, no great art, no comfort in the face of death. Just dissipated Christopher Hitchens sounding off on "Larry King Live" and a stack of smug books with childishly provocative titles.
A lot of my best friends are atheists, and there's no reason they wouldn't be. They find what I get from religion elsewhere, like from music and art. Not long ago, I told a priest at my church that my friends equated religion with horrible things. I expected her to tell me I had some obligation to stop hiding my faith, but she said, pulling a scarf around her neck to hide her priest's collar, "Those preachers on the subways make me cringe." She said she prefers Saint Francis: "Preach the gospel at all times. If necessary, use words."
I could reassure my atheist friends that the Episcopal Church is a force for equality and social justice. It ordained its first gay bishop, Gene Robinson, in 2003. It takes the Bible as a mandate to fight hunger and disease and to rebuild after disasters. I believe that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and other politically involved religious groups who take the gospel as an excuse to spread hate and support specific candidates and propositions should have their tax-free status taken away.
Maybe, though, apolitical Christianity is on the rise. The Obamas are now in office -- a good Christian family in the truest sense of the term -- and the right wing is more marginalized than it was a year ago. My friend, the young (and kind of ridiculously hot) priest the Rev. Astrid Storm, whom I used to edit at Nerve.com, says she's sensing more acceptance:
"When I said I was a priest, it was always a conversation stopper," she says. "Recently someone asked what I did, and when I told him he said, 'How interesting. There are a lot of exciting things happening right now in the Episcopal Church, aren't there?' The diversity of opinion people are reading about in the news -- about gay marriage, female priests, poverty issues -- are showing how Christianity isn't monolithic."
Christianity in the popular imagination is decreasingly linked with evangelicals, agrees John Spalding, founder of the SoMa Review, so it's freed up people who were once embarrassed to self-identify as Christians. "It's no longer like, 'You're just like Pat Robertson. Leave this dinner party,'" Spalding says.
But faith and religion are hard to talk about; maybe they're not necessary to talk about. Even though I am a feminist, I've always had a problem with the personal being political. It gave me a lot of anxiety back in the '90s. If I enjoyed a book with a titillating rape scene in it, did that mean I should be stripped of my membership in the Women's Action Coalition? If I liked wearing Blackberry Revlon lipstick and an off-the-shoulder shirt, was I a tool of the patriarchy?
And now, too, I wonder: When I go to church, am I liable for every monstrous thing every denomination has ever done in the name of Jesus? Am I allowed to get spiritual fulfillment from something that has been, and continues to be, so disastrously invoked by other people? Am I allowed to just go to church sometimes and read the Bible sometimes without wearing a huge cross necklace and checking an official box on forms?
But also, increasingly, I wonder: When I'm getting a ride from some friends and they start talking about how stupid religious people are and quoting lines from "Religulous," do I have an obligation to point out how reductive and bigoted they're being, the way I would if they were talking about a particular race? Increasingly I wonder if I should pipe up from the back seat and say, "Excuse me, but these fools you're talking about? I'm one of them."
In a world gone mad for secular pursuits like divorce and evolution, there's only one man bold -- and crazy -- enough to save us all from eternal damnation. That man is Kirk Cameron.
The former child star of "Growing Pains" and hero of the hit rapture-panic franchise "Left Behind" has been an evangelical superstar for years now. But in 2009, he distinguished himself by seizing on the anniversary of "The Origin of Species" to take on Charles Darwin himself. In November, he and his ministry went to college campuses and handed out free copies of the seminal work -- with a meandering foreword debunking the whole thing.
The world is full of kooky religious extremists. Cameron gets plenty of street cred there for his Living Waters ministry Web site, where he and fellow science revisionist Ray Comfort test whether you are "good enough to go to heaven" (Hint: Don't bet on it) and let "hell's best secret" out of the bag.
But it takes a very special kind of kooky religious extremist to mess with one of the most influential works ever written. Who but the former Mike Seaver would use "common sense" to explain why evolution is just so much random crap? Fossil evidence be damned -- literally! Not since the Vatican got uppity about Galileo has the world seen such umbrage over scientific thought.
The sincerity of Cameron's mission is clear in the enthusiasm he brings to his ministry. And his ardent concern about evolution -- a subject God himself has never issued a statement on -- is genuine. The guy is really, really concerned that we are in the throes of a holocaust of souls here, bless his heart. And anybody who can show up at a college campus and tell students "Darwinism is atheism masquerading as science" may not be super high up on the intellectual food chain, but he's got crazy to spare.
On Thursday night, Michelle Duggar gave birth to her 19th child via emergency C-section. Michelle had been suffering from gallstones and elevated blood pressure last weekend, and at some point her health made it necessary to deliver Josie Brooklyn three months before her due date and at only 1 pound, 6 ounces. Michelle is reportedly resting comfortably, while Josie is stable in the neonatal intensive care unit, but neither is necessarily out of the woods.
Unfortunately, only time will tell how the extremely premature baby will fare. In the meantime, as OpenSalon blogger LadyMiko put it, "One question is going off in my head like a strobe light: Even in the healthiest of circumstances, how many children can a woman have, before it becomes a danger to her health? I'm not asking this as a judgment, but as a sincere question." Luchina Fisher and Lauren Cox at ABC News asked the same question of Rhode Island OB-GYN Joanna Cain, and learned that "women who've borne more than five children risk hemorrhage and even the loss of their uterus because repeated pregnancies sometimes thin the walls of the uterus." Furthermore, "women such as Duggar, after their child-bearing years, are also at greater risk of incontinence and even uterine prolapse, in which the uterus falls to the pelvic floor."
Vyckie Garrison, a former member of the "Quiverfull" religious movement that's spiritually responsible for the Duggars' enormous brood, suffered a partial uterine rupture during one of her seven pregnancies, and doctors told her that for the sake of her own health, she shouldn't conceive again. But according to her religious beliefs at the time, using contraception or even abstaining from sex when she was ovulating would be defying God's will. In a recent post on her "No Longer Quivering" blog, Garrison reprints a letter she once wrote to a 21-year-old mother of two who wondered if there were any circumstances under which it would be all right for a woman to "abstain during her fertile time." When she wrote it, Garrison was stull fully committed to the Quiverfull lifestyle.
I know you are well aware that often when a doctor tells a woman that future pregnancies might jeopardize her life -- it is simply not true. It is rare that pregnancy is actually life threatening to the mother. In many cases, when a woman's health is severely compromised, infertility goes along with the health condition (i.e. amenorrhea due to extreme weight loss or gain, etc.) -- this most likely is God's way of protecting the woman from the risks of pregnancy during that time. But what about the cases when the woman's reproductive system continues to function normally in spite of her other health conditions, or in the (very rare) case of a woman whose health is otherwise fine -- it is only pregnancy which puts her at risk?
Many would argue that in those cases, a couple ought to trust God to supernaturally close the woman's womb. After all, she cannot get pregnant outside of the will of God -- and He knows whether a pregnancy will endanger her life, so He can be trusted to do what is best for the woman in her situation. Abstaining during the woman's fertile period would be a lack of faith and therefore, the couple should not expect to receive God's protection for the woman's health.
Got that? If you abstain just because some doctor told you pregnancy could kill you, God will get mad and wreck your health anyway -- so what have you got to lose? Garrison adds a postscript written recently, years after she left the Quiverfull movement and her abusive husband, admitting that even that wasn't as extreme as what she truly believed at the time. "I didn't come right out and say that I honestly doubted that for some women, pregnancy is a life-threatening condition. (My years as a staunch pro-life advocate taught me that the 'life of the mother' argument was really only a convenient fallacy promoted by the pro-aborts.)" Chillingly, Garrison says she still refused to believe it after that uterine rupture nearly killed her and her son. Because if God personally authorizes each pregnancy for a specific purpose, why would he greenlight one that would leave a child -- or six or seven or 18 children -- motherless?
Enduring a dangerous pregnancy, then, is simply a test of faith. In an e-mail, Kathryn Joyce, author of "Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement," told me, "What may be more disturbing than these potentially deadly health effects is the response that Quiverfull women might get from the movement's leadership, many of whom emphasize that women's duty to bear many children should be viewed as a 'missionary' calling, with all the risks that traditional missionary work entails." And if you don't survive all those risks? Well, we know God doesn't fuck anything up, so it must have been something you did. Says Joyce, "Other leaders have said that women's health problems during or related to pregnancy are the result of unrepented sin -- in other words, their own fault." And yes, this God would, in fact, punish a woman for sinning by leaving her children motherless. In an interview for Salon, Vyckie Garrison told Joyce that after doctors advised her not to conceive again, her religious leaders told her that if she died doing her maternal duty, God would care for her family."
According to MSNBC, while Michelle Duggar was hospitalized last weekend, a reporter asked what she'd do if doctors told her that future pregnancies might be life-threatening. Her reply was as heartbreaking as it is mind-boggling to most of us: "I don't know. I'm not at that place. I guess we would just cross that bridge when we got there. If there was something that were life threatening for me, that would be a matter of prayer."
Salon national correspondent Mark Benjamin talks with Rachel Maddow about the "ex-gay" movement's programs for curing homosexuality, and their connection to the new gay execution laws in Uganda.
Benjamin went undercover for Salon in 2005 to report on the ex-gay movement's programs.
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Another week, another grotesque mass shooting: In Washington state this time, leaving four police officers dead, four families destroyed and nine children's lives shattered. As it's politically unfashionable to wonder whether Americans shouldn't do more to keep semi-automatic handguns away from crazy people, attention soon focused on why mass murderer Maurice Clemmons wasn't locked away, where he belonged.
Once again, former Arkansas Gov. and GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee struggled to explain his catastrophically poor judgment. Once again, a violent felon turned loose on his say-so had run amok. Once again, according to Huckabee, currently a Fox News Channel talk show host, the disaster was everybody's fault but his own. He issued a buck-passing statement blaming "a series of failures in the criminal justice system in both Arkansas and Washington."
Assisted by an absurdly deferential Bill O'Reilly on Fox, Huckabee attempted to shift blame to Washington judges who'd freed Clemmons on $150,000 bail pending trial for child rape. Why, had he known Clemmons would go berserk, he vowed, he'd never have commuted his sentence in 2000. (One can only imagine O'Reilly's reaction to this self-serving blather had Huckabee been a Democrat.)
The Washington tragedy almost surely marks the end of Huckabee's political career. Ironically, however, for once his alibi is more right than wrong. For his own protection and everybody else's, Clemmons ought to have been inside a locked-down psychiatric unit. The system failed from top to bottom.
But let's start at the top, shall we? Although he posed as a conservative hard-liner, when it came to crime and punishment, the glib, self-deprecating Huckabee proved as softheaded and gullible as the woolliest sociology professor in the faculty lounge.
During the former Baptist minister's decade as Arkansas governor, it appeared that no matter how heinous an inmate's crimes, all he had to do for a pardon was drop to his knees, praise Jesus and persuade some preacher known to Huckabee of his newfound holiness. "Everybody knows that Mike Huckabee makes up his mind what to do by what God tells him to do," said one minister who gained clemency for a prisoner serving 100 years for the strong-arm robbery of elderly neighbors.
Making the governor's personal acquaintance also seemed to help. Inmates competed to be assigned to do yard work at the Governor's Mansion. "If you do a good job raking the governor's leaves," Pulaski County (Little Rock) prosecutor Larry Jegley complained bitterly, "you can go free."
Altogether, Huckabee commuted 163 inmates' sentences, including a dozen murderers. Several have already ended up back in prison. Indeed, given Huckabee's track record, Maurice Clemmons probably won't be the last to earn notoriety. We must pray that he ends up being the worst. Only a strong public outcry in 2004 prevented the governor from freeing a Lonoke County killer who'd beaten, raped and run over a pregnant woman with his car, only to get religion in the penitentiary.
The most notorious was Wayne DuMond, Arkansas' celebrity inmate of the '90s. Convicted in 1985 of raping a Forrest City cheerleader at knifepoint, DuMond was a glib psychopath who persuaded ideologically deranged crackpots who circulated Clinton administration "death lists" that he'd been framed. DuMond's victim, see, was a distant cousin of the then-president's. Articles appeared in places like the New York Post portraying him as a victim of the Satanic Clinton machine.
Becoming governor after Kenneth Starr deposed his predecessor, Jim Guy Tucker, Huckabee came into office publicly doubting DuMond's guilt and talking about a pardon. After the prosecutor and the victim herself courageously objected, Huckabee pulled some hugger-mugger with the parole board that ended up freeing Dumond -- the proud recipient of a "Dear Wayne" letter from the governor celebrating his release.
In 2001, DuMond was arrested and subsequently convicted of the rape and murder of a Missouri woman. Huckabee's 2007 campaign bio titled, get this, "Character Makes a Difference," falsely claimed that DuMond died in prison awaiting trial. The man's worse than a hypocrite; he's a fool. Even so, establishment pundits pretty much gave Huckabee a pass. After all, he's so charming on television. Anyway, where, exactly, is Kansas City?
Maurice Clemmons, too, played the holy card to Huckabee, who got him turned loose back in 2000. But the governor had no seeming role in Arkansas' failure to revoke Clemmons' parole after he was convicted of two more armed robberies in 2001, bringing his total to seven felonies. He was released in 2004.
Nor was Huckabee involved in Washington's decision to free Clemmons on bail with seven pending felony charges -- one involving forcing 11- and 12-year-old relatives to strip naked and fondle him while he pronounced that he was Jesus. President Obama, Clemmons proclaimed, would soon declare him the Messiah. These are unmistakable symptoms of criminal psychosis.
How and why Washington authorities failed to act is frankly beyond comprehension.
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