Schweiz, Schweiz, Über Alles!?

Nationalism really sucks. It is unfortunate that xenophobia is a fundamental characteristic of human beings. There's little doubt the attribute was carried down for millions of years from the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees, which brings up the following question: can it ever be eradicated? Almost certainly not, but it doesn't mean we shouldn't fight it.

....
Swiss Fury at Foreigners Boiling Over
Grisly Attack on African Underscores Race Issue In a Harsh Campaign
By Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, October 9, 2007; Page A10

...One of the world's oldest democracies is at the center of Western Europe's most divisive political debate: to embrace an increasingly globalized, multicultural society or to retreat into social isolation in an effort to preserve eroding traditional identities.

Across Switzerland, anti-foreigner and anti-Islamic attitudes have become so pervasive on the streets, in politics and within governmental institutions that the United Nations, European Union, Amnesty International and Switzerland's own Federal Commission Against Racism have expressed alarm in recent months.

The theme is dominating the campaign for national parliamentary elections Oct. 21 and is crystallized in a controversial campaign poster showing three white sheep kicking a black sheep off a Swiss flag above the slogan, "For more security."
....
Read the full article.

The Connection between Disease, Evolution, and Life: Survival of the Sickest by Sharon Moalem

Book Review
Survival of the Sickest by Sharon Moalem
Published in 2007 by William Morrow

"DNA isn’t destiny—it’s history. Your genetic code doesn’t determine your life. Sure, it shapes it—but exactly how it shapes it will be dramatically different depending on your parents, your environment, and your choices. Your genes are the evolutionary legacy of every organism that came before you, beginning with your parents and winding all the way back to the very beginning. Somewhere in your genetic code is the tale of every plague, every predator, every parasite, and every planetary upheaval your ancestors managed to survive. And every mutation, every change, that helped them better adapt to their circumstances is written there."

So writes Dr. Sharon Moalem, a geneticist and evolutionary biologist in Survival of the Sickest--the story of how disease is forever linked to our and the Earth's past through evolution.

Why after all, is there, and always has been, so much disease afflicting humanity? From numerous plagues to influenza pandemic to AIDS to cancer millions have died of regardless of space or time.

There will always be disease because of the nature of life: all organisms want to live and reproduce, Dr. Moalem explains. Diseases are caused by bacteria, parasites and viruses, some of which survive by harming humans. Bacteria and viruses reproduce and evolve much faster than humans, and a new strain of either can potentially cause harm to a person or population that doesn't have a built-in response to fight it. That is exactly what happened with the bubonic plague in the 14th century in Europe. However, over time, the plague subsided. Fast forward a couple hundred years and the medicinal practice of bloodletting is widespread on the continent. Fast forward to the late 20th and 21st century and scientists discover that hemochromatosis, afflicting a small but not insignificant number of people with European ancestry, is an inherited disease whose victims die prematurely because of excess iron in their blood. What is the connection between these three events? It turns out that--Sharon Moalem explains--people with hemochromatosis are immune to the bubonic plague (probably caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis). The downside is that their excess iron will eventually kill them, unless the excess iron is periodically released from the body--via bloodletting! The answer to the whole mystery was evolution: people who had a natural immunity to the bubonic plague were more likely to survive and reproduce, and therefore pass on their hemochromatosis genes onto the next generation.

This is just one amazing story of how evolution plays a role in disease. There are many others discussed by Moalem, including, the reasons why so many northern Europeans inherit a propensity to develop Type 1 diabetes, why malaria victims are bed-ridden, and why mothers affected by malnutrition have babies that can cope better in harsh environments.

The only downside of the book is that the somewhat frequent colloquialisms are unnecessary and written as if the target audience was in middle school. Otherwise, the content of Survival of the Sickest is so engrossing that one is almost guaranteed to pull an all-nighter reading it.

Is Life Guided or an Accident? The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder

Book Review
The Bridge of San Luis Ray by Thornton Wilder
First Published in 1927
This Edition Published in 2003 by Harper Perennial

This is one of the best books I have read in a long time, and it happens to be a classic (and it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1928). The Bridge of San Luis Rey is a story about the lives of three people who are among the five who die when a rope bridge snaps near Lima, Peru in the early 1700s. Was it an accident or an act of God? Brother Juniper, a Fransiscan friar, attempts to answer that questions by reconstructing each of the victims' lives through interviews with those who knew them. Were those characteristics good? Did they live noble lives? Or did evil overtake them, and in that case they deserved to die?

Here then, are snippets of the characteristics of the three main characters:

Doña María, Marquesa de Montemayor (and servant Pepita)

"The Marquesa, beside not having heard the scurrilous songs, was in other ways unprepared for the actress’s visit. You should know that after the departure of her daughter, Doña María had lighted upon a certain consolation: she had taken to drinking. Everyone drank chicha in Peru and there was no particular disgrace in being found unconscious on a feast day. Doña María had begun to discover that her feverish monologues had a way of keeping her awake all night. Once she took a delicate fluted glassful of chichi on retiring. Oblivion was so sweet that presently she stole larger amounts and tried dissimulating their effects from Pepita; she hinted that she was not well, and represented herself as going into a decline. At last she resigned all pretense. The boats that carried her letter to Spain did not leave oftener than once a month. During the week that preceded the making of the packet she observed a strict regimen and cultivated the city assiduously for material. At last on the eve of the post she wrote the letter, making up the bundle towards dawn and leaving it for Pepita to deliver to the agent. Then as the sun rose she would shut herself up in her room with some flagons and drift through the next few weeks without the burden of consciousness. Finally she would emerge from her happiness and prepare to go into a state of 'training' in preparation for the writing of another letter."


Esteban (and his twin brother Manuel)

"Camila seized the note the moment it was done, pushed a coin along the table and in a last flurry of black lace, scarlet beads and excited whispers left the room. Manuel turned from the door with his candle. He sat down, put his hands over his ears, his elbows on his knees. He worshipped her. He murmured to himself over and over again that he worshipped her, making of the sounds a sort of incantation and an obstacle to thought.

He emptied his mind of everything but a singsong, and it was this vacancy that permitted him to become aware of Esteban’s mood. He seemed to hear a voice that proceeded from the shadow saying: “Go and follow her, Manuel. Don’t stay here. You’ll be happy. There’s room for us all in the world.” Then the realization became even more intense and he received a mental image of Esteban going a long way off and saying good-bye many times as he went. He was filled with terror; by the light of it he saw that all the other attachments in the world were shadows, or the illusions of fever, even Madre Maria del Pilar, even the Perichole. He could not understand why Esteban’s misery should present itself as demanding a choice between him and the Perichole, but he could understand Esteban’s misery, as misery. And at once he sacrificed everything to it, if it can be said we ever sacrifice anything save what we know we can never attain, or what some secret wisdom tells us it would be uncomfortable or saddening to possess. To be sure there was nothing on which Esteban could base a complaint. It was not jealousy, for in their earlier affairs it had never occurred to either of them that their loyalty to one another had diminished. It was merely that in the heart of one of them there was left room for an elaborate imaginative attachment and in the heart of the other there was not. Manuel could not quite understand this and, as we shall see, he nourished a dim sense of being accused unjustly. But he did understand that Esteban was suffering. In his excitement he groped for a means of holding this brother who seemed to be receding into the distance. And at once, in one unhesitating stroke of the will, he removed the Perichole from his heart."

Uncle Pio

"He never did one thing for more than two weeks at a time even when enormous gains seemed likely to follow upon it. He could have become a circus manager, a theatrical director, a dealer in antiquities, an importer of Italian silks, a secretary in the Palace or the Cathedral, a dealer in provisions for the army, a speculator in houses and farms, a merchant in dissipations and pleasures. But there seemed to have been something written into his personality, through some accident or early admiration of his childhood, a reluctance to own anything, to be tied down, to be held to a long engagement. It was this that prevented his thieving, for example. He had stolen several times, but the gain had not been sufficient to offset his dread of being locked up; he had sufficient ingenuity to escape on the field itself all the police in the world, but nothing could protect him again the talebearing of his enemies. Similarly he had been reduced for a time to making investigations for the Inquisition, but when he had seen several of his victims left off in hoods he left that he might be involving himself in an institution whose movements were not evenly predictable.

As he approached twenty, Uncle Pio came to see quite clearly that his life had three aims. There was first this need of independence, cast into a curious pattern, namely: the desire to be varied, secret and omniscient…. In the second place he wanted to be always near beautiful women, of whom he was always in the best and worst sense the worshipper…. In the third place he wanted to be near those that loved Spanish literature and its masterpieces, especially in the theatre."

Can Atheism Save "The Death of The West"?

This is an interesting article from The Wall Street Journal about the rise of atheism in Europe. I couldn't help but recall Pat Buchanan's The Death of the West.

THE NEW CRUSADERS
As Religious Strife Grows,
Europe's Atheists Seize Pulpit
Islam's Rise Gives Boost
To Militant Unbelievers;
The Celebrity Hedonist

By ANDREW HIGGINS
April 12, 2007; Page A1

CAEN, France -- With 40 minutes to go before show time, the 500-seat Alexis de Tocqueville auditorium was already packed. A fan set up a video camera in the front row. A sound engineer checked the microphones.

The star: Michel Onfray, celebrity philosopher and France's high priest of militant atheism. Dressed entirely in black, he strode onto the stage and looked out at the reverential audience for his weekly two-hour lecture series, "Hedonist Philosophy," which is broadcast on a state radio station. "I could found a religion," he said.


Mr. Onfray, 48 years old and author of 32 books, stands in the vanguard of a curious and increasingly potent phenomenon in Europe: zealous disbelief in God.

Passive indifference to faith has left Europe's churches mostly empty. But debate over religion is more intense and strident than it has been in many decades. Religion is re-emerging as a big issue in part because of anxiety over Europe's growing and restive Muslim populations and a fear that faith is reasserting itself in politics and public policy. That is all adding up to a growing momentum for a combative brand of atheism, one that confronts rather than merely ignores religion.

Karen Armstrong, a former Catholic nun and prominent British author on religion, calls the trend "missionary secularism." She says it mimics the ardor of Christianity, Islam and Marxism, all of which have at their core an urge to convert nonbelievers to their worldview.

Mr. Onfray argues that atheism faces a "final battle" against "theological hocus-pocus" and must rally its troops. "We can no longer tolerate neutrality and benevolence," he writes in "Traité d'athéologie," or Atheist Manifesto, a best seller in France, Italy and Spain. "The turbulent time we live in suggests that change is at hand and the time has come for a new order."

As with many fights involving faith, Europe's struggle between belief and nonbelief is also a proxy for other, concrete issues that go far beyond the supernatural. In this case, they involve a battle to define the identity of a continent.

Half a century after the 1957 Treaty of Rome laid the foundations for the now 27-nation European Union, Europe has secured peace and prosperity. But it is deeply uncertain about what binds the bloc together beyond mere economic self-interest. Says Ms. Armstrong: "There is a big fight going on to define European civilization."


Read more here (subscription required).

We Are (Unique) Animals: The Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond

Book Review
The Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond
First Edition Published by Harper Perennial in 1992

Jared Diamond’s best known work is Guns, Germs, and Steel, the Pulitzer Prize winning thesis of why and how Euroasians were able to conquer, displace, or decimate Native Americans, Australian Aborigines, and other peoples, and why these groups were not able to do the reverse. In that groundbreaking book, Jared Diamond postulated how geography and its effect on the distribution of plant and animal life played a role in the relatively modern eventual displacements of sets of peoples by other distant groups. In The Third Chimpanzee, the author digs much further back—to the animal kingdom and ape life especially—to conjecture how we developed our unique and not so unique human characteristics and were able to eventually conquer the world and dominate each other and all other species.

Just Another Species of Big Animal
Diamond first explains why we are indeed the third chimpanzee besides the pygmy (a.k.a. Bonobo) and the common chimpanzee. Because taxonomy is based on physical characteristics and often anthropocentric, Diamond argues that cladistics—the classification of animals based on genetic distance of time of divergence—is more objective and scientifically sound:

“All taxonomists agree now that red-eyed and white-eyed vireos belong together in the genus Vireo, the various species of gibbons in the genus Hylobates. Yet the members of these pairs of species are genetically more distant from each other than are humans from the other two chimpanzees, and diverged longer ago. On this basis, then, humans don’t constitute a distinct family, or even a distinct genus, but belong in the same genus as common and pygmy chimps. Since our genus name Homo was proposed first, it takes priority, by the rules of zoological nomenclature, over the genus name Pan coined for the ‘other’ chimps. So there are not one but three species of genus Homo on earth today: the common chimpanzee, Homo troglodytes; the pigmy chimpanzee, Homo paniscus; and the third chimpanzee or human chimpanzee, Homo sapiens. Since the gorilla is only slightly more distinct, it has almost equal right to be considered a fourth species of Homo.
Even taxonomists espousing cladistics are anthropocentric, and the lumping of humans and chimps into the same genus will undoubtedly be a bitter pill for them to swallow. There is not doubt, however, that whenever chimpanzees learn cladistics, or whenever taxonomists from Outer Space visit Earth to inventory its inhabitants, they will unhesitatingly adopt the new classification.”

It wasn’t until after the Great Leap Forward, perhaps as recently as 40,000 years ago, that humans diverged from other apes through mainly cultural and not genetic change. Diamond suggests that the enormous cultural changes since then were made possible because of the development of human language.

An Animal with a Strange Life Cycle
The focus of the next section is the human life cycle, including sexuality and lifespan. Diamond’s analysis of why women developed ovulation and menopause, why it’s mostly men and not women who practice adultery, how we pick our sex partners, and why we grow old and die are fascinating and convincing because of his use of precedents in the animal kingdom. Another thought-provoking hypothesis is on extraterrestrial life: Diamond argues that even with billions of potentially habitable planets, we could be the only intelligent life in the universe because convergent evolution is not universal (he cites the family of woodpeckers, which evolved only once), and because the lifespan of an intelligent species such as ours could be short given humans’ destructiveness of each other and other species. And if contact with intelligent extraterrestrial life were to happen? Diamond writes,

“I find it mind-boggling that the astronomers now eager to spend a hundred million dollars on the search for extraterrestrial life have never thought seriously about the most obvious question: what would happen if we found it, or if it found us. The astronomers tacitly assume that we and the little green monsters would welcome each other and settle down to fascinating guidance. We’ve already discovered two species that are very intelligent but technically less advanced than we are—the common chimpanzee and pygmy chimpanzee. Has our response been to sit down and try to communicate with them? Of course not. Instead we shoot them, dissect them, cut off their hand for trophies, put them on exhibit in cages, inject them with AIDS virus as a medical experiment, and destroy or take over their habitats. That response was predictable, because human explorers who discovered technically less advances humans also regularly responded by shooting them, decimating their populations with new diseases, and destroying or taking over their habitats.”

Uniquely Human
They include language, art, agriculture, and our propensity to use addictive substances. With respect to art, it may not be uniquely human at all—the paintings of Siri, a captive elephant, were described as having “a kind of flair and decisiveness and originality” by Willem de Kooning himself (he of course did not know that the artist was not human). As to why animals don’t paint in the wild, Diamond writes:

“Perhaps we can now answer the questions why art as we know it characterizes us but no other animals. Since chimps paint in captivity, why don’t they do so in the wild? As an answer, I suggest that wild chimps still have their day filled with problems of finding food surviving, and fending off rival chimp groups. If wild chimps had more leisure time plus the means to manufacture paints, they would be painting. The proof of my theory is that it actually happened: we’re still 98 percent chimps in our genes.”

The author also proposes an interesting theory on dangerous behaviors: they may have a biological purpose as a useful tool for sexual selection. Equally intriguing is the section on human language—it turns out that some animals learn to emit the correct sounds (words in their language) based on the context from their parents, just as human babies learn to pronounce words correctly and use them in a proper context.

World Conquerors
Diamond next discusses how contacts between distant people change culture and language (it is essentially a prelude to Guns, Germs, and Steel). The author’s first-hand accounts of his visits to and his analysis of New Guinea are fascinating:

“Europe today has only about fifty languages, most of them belonging to a single language family (Indo-European). In contrast, New Guinea, with less than one-tenth of Europe’s area and less than one-hundredth of its population, has about a thousand languages, many of them unrelated to any other known languages in New Guinea or elsewhere. The average New Guinea language is spoken by a few thousand people living within a radius of ten miles. When I traveled sixty miles from Okapa to Karimui in New Guinea’s eastern highlands, I passed through six languages, starting with Fore (a language with postpositions, like Finnish) and ending with Tudawhe (a language with alternative tones and nasalized vowels, like Chinese).
New Guinea shows linguists what the world used to be like, with each isolated tribe having its own language, until agriculture’s rise permitted a few groups to expand and spread their tongue over large areas.”

The section on the Indo-European group of languages (of which English is a part of) is likewise intriguing and surprising. Diamond convincingly speculates that the origins of the Indo-European languages lie on the Ukrainian/Russian steppes north of the Caucasus, not in Western Europe as some anthropologists believe.

Contact between peoples also involves genocide, an unfortunate human hallmark that has roots in the animal kingdom as well:

“…of all our human hallmarks—art, spoken language, drugs, and the others—the one that has been derived most straightforwardly from animal precursors is genocide. Common chimps already carried out planned killings, extermination of neighboring bands, wars of territorial conquest, and abduction of young nubile females. If chimps were given spears and some instructions in their use, their killings would undoubtedly begin to approach ours in efficiency. Chimpanzee behavior suggests that a major reason for our human hallmark of group living was defense against other human groups, especially once we acquired weapons and a large enough brain to plan ambushes. If this reasoning is correct, then anthropologists’ traditional emphasis on ‘man the hunter’ as a driving force of human evolution might be valid after all—with the difference that we ourselves were our own prey as well as the predator that forced us into group living.”

Reversing Our Progress Overnight
Diamond argues that the two most pressing issues facing humanity are our destruction of the environment (a prelude to his most recent book, Collapse) and the possibility of nuclear obliteration:

“The risks of a nuclear holocaust and of an environmental holocaust constitute the two really pressing questions facing the human race today. Compared to these two clouds, our usual obsessions with cancer, AIDS, and diet pale into insignificance, because those problems don’t threaten the survival of the human species. If the nuclear and environmental risks should not materialize, we’ll have plenty of leisure time to solve bagatelles like cancer. If we fail to avert those two risks, solving cancer won’t have helped us anyway.”

As sociobiologist Edward Wilson has done in numerous books including The Future of Lifeand The Creation, Diamond writes that the rate of extinction has indeed gone up exponentially in modern times, and that the interdependence of species is part of our survival and that is why it is important to try to save all species.

“Dismissing the extinction crisis on the grounds that extinction is natural would be just like dismissing genocide on the grounds that death is the natural fate of all humans.”


The Third Chimpanzee is an all-encompassing book on the evolution of human traits, many of which are shared or have precedents in the animal kingdom. The drawbacks, if any, are miniscule: the contents are a bit jumbled, some of the theories are perhaps incomplete (he fails to mention the theory that the click sounds of Khoisan and Bantu languages in southern Africa may have roots of the first spoken human languages in the “Bridges to Human Language” section), and some facts are omitted (in describing genocide, he names all “tribes” by their nationalities except for Germans in WWII, which he calls “Nazis”; he also does not mention the Chinese genocide of millions in the 1950s and 1960s). The Third Chimpanzee is well-written, fascinating to read, and because it has elements of seminal theories expounded on in his later books, it may be Jared Diamond's best book yet.

"Sex not War": Bonobos' Closeness to Humanity

Bonobos seem to have behavior characteristics which humans hope for (somewhat naively perhaps), at least in terms of their overall peacefulness. It seems that we are, however, more closely related to the common chimpanzee, which shows much more aggressive behavior within a troop, and especially towards "foreigners."

From Wikipedia:

Frans de Waal, one of the world's leading primatologists, states that the Bonobo is often capable of altruism, compassion, empathy, kindness, patience and sensitivity.
...
Recent observations in the wild have seemed to indicate that the males among the Common Chimpanzee troops are extraordinarily hostile to males from outside of the troop. Parties are organized to "patrol" for the unfortunate males who might be living nearby in a solitary state. (Some researchers have suggested, however, that this behaviour has been caused by a combination of human contact and interference and massive environmental stress caused by deforestation and a corresponding range reduction.) This does not appear to be the behavior of the Bonobo males or females, both of which seem to prefer sexual contact with their group to violent confrontation with outsiders.
...
Bonobos are capable of passing the mirror-recognition test for self-awareness. They communicate through primarily vocal means, although the meanings of their vocalizations are not currently known; however, humans do understand their facial expressions and some of their natural hand gestures, such as their invitation to play. Two Bonobos, Kanzi and Panbanisha have been taught a vocabulary of about 400 words which they can type using a special keyboard of lexigrams (geometric symbols), and can respond to spoken sentences. Some, such as bioethicist Peter Singer, argue that these results qualify them for the "rights to survival and life", rights that humans theoretically accord to all persons.

An Attack on Religion: The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

Book Review
The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

Published by Houghton Mifflin in 2006

Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist by trade (author of The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker), is also one of the world's best known and most avowed atheists. In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins makes the case that religion is not the foundation of humanity's moral values, that it has and is a major source of violence in the world, and that it instills ignorance which deprives free thought and pursuit of knowledge.

The author begins by defining the difference between a true believer, an agnostic, and an atheist, followed by debunking the major arguments for God's existence, from Thomas Aquinas' 'proofs' to the scriptures to Blaise Pascal's wager ("You'd better believe in God, because if you are right you stand to gain eternal bliss and if you are wrong it won't make any difference anyways."). Dawkins uses eloquent logical reasoning to counter these claims and is utterly convincing. The explanation of scientific facts in the next chapter, "Why There Almost Certainly Is No God", is likewise powerful and cogent. For example, Dawkins argues that even though the origin of life is still a mystery and the chance of it happening is statistically small (relatively small, because even if the chance was one in a billion, there would be a billion planets with life on them, given that there are a 100 billion galaxies and probably a billion billion planets in the universe), the probability of a God is even smaller because if a divine creator designed life, who designed the creator?

The chapters "The Roots of Religion" and "The Roots of Morality: why are we good?" are also immensely interesting. In the former, Dawkins cites a postulation that religion could be a by-product of mechanisms that were built into the brain by selection for falling in love. Another complimentary hypothesis is that irrationally strong conviction was useful in early human evolution as a guard against fickleness of mind ("It would be a severe disadvantage, for example, when hunting or making tools, to keep changing one's mind."). In the latter chapter, Dawkins theorizes that altruism towards strangers is another by-product of our ancestral altruism towards close kin, just as sexual desire is not diminished in a couple where the woman is on the pill even though they both know that she cannot conceive.

Dawkins justifiably has a problem with parents who teach their children a certain religion without proper explanation:

"I thank my own parents for taking the view that children be taught not so much what to think as how to think. If, having been fairly and properly exposed to all the scientific evidence, they grow up and decide that the Bible is literally true or that the movement of the planets rule their lives, that is their privilege. The important point is that it is their privilege to decide what they shall think, and not their parents' privilege to impose it by force majeure."

In the same chapter, titled "Childhood, Abuse, and Religion", Dawkins quotes a few dozen idioms, phrases, and cliches used in English that come directly from the King James Authorized Version of the Bible. In concluding the chapter, he writes:

"Let me not labour the point. I have probably said enough to convince at least my older readers that an atheistic world-view provides no justification for cutting the Bible, and other sacred books, out of our education. And of course we can retain a sentimental loyalty to the cultural and literary traditions of, say Judaism, Anglicanism or Islam, and even participate in religious rituals such as marriages and funerals, without buying into the supernatural beliefs that historically went along with those traditions. We can give up belief in God while not losing touch with a treasured heritage."

It is here that Dawkins is incomplete in his reasoning and omits a very important point. Besides providing personal psychological needs, religion also serves ecological and ecclesiastic roles that strengthen the community. There is something to be said of a weakening culture due to weakening religion as evidenced in Europe, where many churches lay empty or are being converted into nightclubs.

At the outset of the book, Dawkins declares, "I am not attacking any particular version of God or gods. I am attacking God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural, wherever and whenever they have been or will be invented." Indeed, attack would have been a good subtitle for the book--Dawkins leaves all pleasantries at teatime and does not mince words. In doing so however, he covers a diverse issue of topics, from the Afghani Taliban to the prayers of John Paul II to the policies of the Bush administration. His expression of opinions on a plethora of subjects begs the question--why is an evolutionary biologist writing about these issues? Richard Dawkins has gotten criticism for his inclusion of political opinions in an otherwise unrelated discourse, such as his excellent book The Ancestor's Tale--which traces Homo sapiens' ancestry species by species back to the origin of life--which would have been a masterpiece save for his quips about the Bush administration. In fairness to Dawkins, his opinions are much more appropriate in this book than in any other because religion and politics are deeply intertwined in many countries, but especially in America and the Muslim world. Yet even if some of his opinions are relevant, they are not always explained in scientific terms. For example, he correctly compares the U.S. government's and media's use of "terrorism" to the Salem witch trials, yet when he writes about suicide bombers who justify their actions through religion, he does not dig into their ultimate causes (for example, territorial and cultural transgression, etc.). This is why his previous bestseller The Blind Watchmaker is a much better book on why God almost certainly does not exist (and had nothing to do with the creation or subsequent evolution of life) precisely because it is void of political and philosophical opinions and only advances scientific facts and theories.

The God Delusion is still a good, mainly philosophical discussion on religion and its current-events implications, and is worth reading. But given Richard Dawkins' confrontational style--in contrast with the Southern politeness of Edward O. Wilson, for example--readers, especially religious ones, who are interested in learning more about evolution will be better served reading The Blind Watchmaker and The Ancestor's Tale.

A Question of Personality

My girlfriend and I went to look for a second dog. We're looking for a female to give companionship to Koya, a male Golden Retriever. We looked at four dogs. The first was a small/medium-sized mix of a Whippit and some other breed--I can't remember it offhand--but she was very playful--too playful in fact for my girlfriend. She bit her a couple of times playfully. My girlfriend thought the dog’s personality would be too strong for her even though the dog wasn't too big. (You can see her excitement in the picture above).

The next one was a black Labrador that was somewhat energetic but mostly shy. We liked her more than the first one, but she had an eye infection and we'd have to take her to a vet to get surgery.

The third one was almost perfect (to the right), but after awhile she started to bark and looked for holes to get out of the fenced area. We read her profile and she was surrendered because she kept on escaping! The fourth was a small male who didn't pay any attention to us, which the volunteer told us is normal for a small breed. We found out that they are also very nervous.

The experience today made me think of a) the personalities of people, b) the personalities of other species throughout the animal kingdom, and c) the link between environment and genes in developing character/personality. In reference to the first two, they're very similar and everyone who's ever owned a dog knows it (as a very general rule, it seems that the lower the brain mass of a species, the lower the variability in personality within the same species). As to the third point, I think that obviously the environment affects a person, but for the most part our actions are fixed. Just as no matter how much healthy food you give a dog, the longest it will live is 12 or 15 years. The same applies to personality (and the lifespan of a human, incidentally). Some abused dogs act shy for the rest of their lives; others afflicted with the same abuse will be aggressive. The biological and behavioral range of every species is fixed. The environment affects actions within that range, but the range itself can never change within a lifetime of any single living being (unless exposed to radiation?).

Hopefully I've applied my understanding of Sociobiology and On Human Nature by E.O. Wilson correctly.

A Personal Encounter with Religion

I was working this morning at home when I heard knocking on the door. I ran downstairs--I though it my be my girlfriend who had just left--to see the faces of two men. One of them looked like a friend from New York so I thought it might be him because he's coming to Seattle at the end of the month. He wasn't--it was two Jehovah's Witnesses. I recognized the other guy who came by with someone else a couple of weeks ago. I wasn't very welcoming this time, nor the last time, but I didn't turn them away. I told him I didn't have a chance to read the pamphlets he gave me--they are called "Awake!^®" and "Watchtower", and according to the pamphlet the current average printing for the former is 34,267,000 in 81 languages!--but I was interested in religion and would like to discuss it with them next time. He asked me when I am usually home. I told him I am in and out all the time but that he can "try to stop by the same time next week." I am sure that didn't sound too encouraging from his point of view (not that I care since he is imposing himself on me).

I had some time today to read a portion of the first pamphlet the focused on health and religion. The title of the piece is, "When sickness is no more!" and is preceded by another article called "Will science cure the world?" that discusses recent and current advances in health-related issues such as nanomedicine and genomics. This piece is very general and basic but provides a list of some key advances as well as the challenges that remain--specifically diseases such as measles, HIV, malaria, etc.

The message of the articles is that while science is "achieving great things in the fight against sickness...the cause of disease has proved too complex for science to resolve fully." According to the article, "the real cause of sickness" is that Adam and Eve "were designed to live on earth forever but "it was not until they willfully rebelled against God that their bodies became susceptible to disease. (Genesis 3:17-19) By rejecting God's authority they severed their ties with the Creator, the Source of their perfect life. They became defective. As a result, they got sick and died, just as God had warned them they would. -Genesis 2:16, 17; 5:5. After their rebellion Adam and Eve could only pass on imperfection to their children. (Romans 5:12) As mentioned in the preceding article, scientists today recognize that there are inherited malfunction that contribute to sickness and death. After extensive research, a group of scientists recently concluded: 'It is an inescapable biological reality that once the engine of life switches on, the body inevitably sows the sees of its own destruction.'"

This short and simple selective application of science to religion in the article is comedic. It's funny because it's extremely stupid--an average third grader should be able to recognize it as such. Now I know why I'm sick! It's because Adam and Eve were bad and so they got sick, and then passed on their sickness to their children (us). This comes from the Bible, which is the authoritative word of God. And wait, that's not all! It is also collaborated by science, which has advanced so much recently, and shows that disease is often inherited!!! However, as the Bible states, man cannot cure sickness by himself because God says "Do not put your trust in nobles, nor in the son of earthling man, to whom no salvation belongs."-Psalm 146:3. But, here's the good news, according to the article:

"However, as the Bible declares, 'the things impossible with men are possible with God.' (Luke 18:27) Jehovah God can undo the cause of sickness. He will heal all our maladies. (Psalm 103:3) He inspired Word promises: 'Look! The tend of God is with mankind, and he will reside with them, and they will be his peoples. And God himself will be with them. And he will wipe out every tear from their eyes, and death will be no more, neither will mourning nor outcry nor pain be anymore. The former things have passed away.'-Revelation 21:3,4."

So when will "sickness be no more?" The article doesn't answer that question, but says that "while you await the future when sickness will be no more, the wisdom and reasonableness found in the Bible can help you to remain balanced in your pursuit of good health."

This article and the sad reality that so many people believe in it shows how gullible humans are to believing in something simply because they don't know any better. I understand if someone believed in this story a few centuries ago when we didn't have knowledge of evolution and genetics. But today the information is out there. Every scientist knows that disease happens because microbes are our Darwinian competitors, and affects probably every single animal and plant species on the planet. It's not Adam and Eve, and on a tangent, even if you didn't have any knowledge of evolutionary biology, why would you believe every scripture in the Bible if you know that there are many other religions that hold a different point of view? At the very least, that knowledge should make a person agnostic. I plan to discuss the scientific point of view--which is in part answered in this excellent article from the Scientific American--the next time I see them (in short, disease is inevitable and people will always be sick).

Incidentally, I was in Nashville for Christmas and found these church offices within a mall! I guess it's good that the marketplace for religion is alive and well.

Can Religion and Science Unite to Save Eden? The Creation by Edward O. Wilson

Book Review
The Creation by Edward O. Wilson
Published in September 2006 by W.W. Norton

In his latest book, world-renowned biologist and evolutionary scientist Edward O. Wilson, makes a case for why saving "The Creation", i.e., Nature and the millions of species that inhabit it, are of paramount importance to humans and our future generations. The reasons for the decline of Earth's biodiversity, Edward Wilson writes, are known in scientific circles by the acronym HIPPO, listed in order of destructiveness:

habitat loss, including that caused by human-induced climate change

invasive species (harmful aliens, including predators, disease organisms, and dominant competitors that displace natives)

pollution

human overpopulation, a root cause of the other four factors

overharvesting (hunting, fishing, gathering)

The prose, as in other E.O. Wilson books including On Human Nature and The Future of Life, is well-written and in the form of a letter to a Southern pastor (Edward Wilson grew up in Alabama). Wilson makes the case, that even tough their views may differ on the origin of the Creation and Homo sapiens, they must put their differences aside to save Earth's living diversity, a goal which he believes they share. If we go back in history, the problem started when "civilization was purchased by the betrayal of Nature." Wilson writes:

"According to archeological evidence, we strayed from Nature with the beginning of civilization roughly ten thousand years ago. That quantum leap beguiled us with an illusion of freedom from the world that had given us birth. It nourished the belief that the human spirit can be molded in to something new to fit changes in the environment and culture, and as a result the timetables of history desynchronized. A wiser intelligence might now truthfully say of us at this point: here is a chimera, a new and very odd species come shambling into our universe, a mix of Stone Age emotion, medieval self-image, and godlike technology. The combination makes the species unresponsive to the forces that count most for its own long-term survival."
...
"The Neolithic revolution, comprising the invention of agriculture and villages, fed on Nature's bounty. The forward leap was a blessing for humanity. Yes, it was: those who have lived among hunter-gatherers will tell you they are not at all to be envied. But the revolutions encouraged the false assumption that a tiny selection of domesticated plants and animals can support human expansion indefinitely. The pauperization of Earth's fauna and flora was an acceptable price until recent centuries, when Nature seemed all but infinite, and an enemy to explorers and pioneers. The wilderness and the aboriginal surviving in them were there to be pushed back and eventually replaced, in the name of progress and in the name of the gods, lest we forget.

History now teaches a different lesson, but only tho those who will listen. Even if the rest of life is counted of no value beyond the satisfaction of human bodily needs, the obliteration of Nature is a dangerous strategy. For one thing, we have become a species specialized to eat the seeds of four kinds of grass-wheat, rice, corn, and millet. If these fail, from disease or climate change, we too shall fail. Some fifty thousand wild plant species (many of which face extinction) offer alternative food sources. If one insists on being thoroughly practical about the matter, allowing these and the rest of wild species to exist should be considered part of a portfolio of long-term investment. Even the most recalcitrant people must come to view conservation as a simple prudence in the management of Earth's natural economy. Yet few have begun to think that way at all.

Meanwhile, the modern technoscientific revolution, including especially the great leap forward of computer-based information technology, has betrayed Nature a second time, by fostering the belief that the cocoons of urban and suburban material life are sufficient for human fulfillment. That is an especially serious mistake. Human nature is deeper and broader than the artifactual contrivance of any existing culture. The spiritual roots of Homo sapiens extend deep into the natural world through still mostly hidden channels of mental development. We will not reach our full potential without understanding the origin and hence meaning of the aesthetic and religious qualities that make us ineffably human.

Granted, many people seem content to live entirely within the synthetic ecosystems. But so are domestic animals content, even in the grotesquely abnormal habitats in which we rear them. This in my mind is a perversion. It is not the nature of human beings to be cattle in glorified feedlots. Every person deserves the option to travel easily in and out of the complex and primal world that gave us birth. We need freedom to roam across land owned by no one but protected by all, whose unchanging horizon is the same that bounded the world of our millennial ancestors. Only in what remains of Eden, teeming with life forms independent of us, is it possible to experience the kind of wonder that shaped the human psyche at its birth."

Thus, Wilson describes why we should all care about saving Nature, and how human nature is intertwined with it. He goes on to explain the extent of the damage done so far and unless we take concrete steps now (more thoroughly explained in The Future of Life), likely to happen in the near future: an extinction of half of the Earth's living species by the end of this century. This is where he needs the Pastor's help, Edward Wilson writes, because religion plays such an important part in the fabric of society and politics, especially in the United Sates. Edward Wilson ends by writing,

"What are we to do? Forget the differences, I say. Meet on common ground. That might not be as difficult as it seems at first. When you think about it, our metaphysical differences have remarkably little effect on the conduct of our separate lives. My guess is that you and I are about equally ethical, patriotic, and altruistic. We are products of a civilization that arose from both religion and the science-based Enlightenment. We would gladly serve on the same jury, fight the same wars, sanctify human life with the same intensity. And surely we also share a love of the Creation.

In closing this letter, I hope you will not have taken offense when I spoke of ascending to Nature instead of ascending away from it. It would give me deep satisfaction to find that expression as I have explained it compatible with your own beliefs. For however the tensions eventually play out between our opposing worldviews, however science and religion wax and wane in the minds of men, there remains the earthborn, yet transcendental, obligation we are both morally bound to share."

The Creation is a very important book because if we are to take a long-term view of humanity, it is the most important issue facing us today. Indeed, his quote from 1980 (Harvard Magazine, January/February 1980) still serves true today if we continue on our current path of destruction:

"The worst thing that can happen, will happen, is not energy depletion, economic collapse, limited nuclear war, or conquest by a totalitarian government. As terrible as these catastrophes would be for us, they can be repaired within a few generations. The one process ongoing in the 1980s that will take millions of years to correct is the loss of genetic and species diversity by the destruction of natural habitats. This is the folly our descendants are least likely to forgive us."

[Edit 12/14/2006: Charlie Rose interviews E.O. Wilson about the book; and another interview from December 2005 with E.O. Wilson and James Watson]

Letter to Sam Harris

Dear Sam Harris,

I found your book excellent in several respects, while surprisingly lacking in others. Your assessment of the Bible—that it is by no means the moral text of humanity—is right on target. I especially like your use of quotes, that while they made sense to the people who lived at the time the Bible was written, are now seen as quite embarrassing. The fact that the Bible gives permission to have slaves—

“As for your male and female slaves whom you have: you may buy male and female slaves from among the nations that are round about you…You may bequeath them to your sons after you, to inherit as a possession forever; you may make slaves of them, but over your brethren the people of Israel you shall not rule, with harshness.” (Leviticus 25:44-46)

—and to stone a bride found not be a virgin—

“But if this thing be true, and the tokens of virginity be not found for the damsel: Then they shall bring out the damsel to the door of her father's house, and the men of her city shall stone her with stones that she die…” (Deuteronomy 22:20-21)

—are great examples of why, as you imply, the holy text should be questioned as the word of a moral God rather than very intelligent men. Even Jesus, who was much more compassionate than his forefathers, never rejected slavery, as you correctly point out. Furthermore, if I may paraphrase you, there are many other religions, so why should Christianity be the one? What about Jainism, which teaches its adherents to "not injure, abuse, oppress, enslave, insult, torment, torture, or kill any creature or living being.”? I agree with you, it’s much more potent and simpler than the Bible.

I was also gratified that your compared our moral intuition to that of our primate cousins. Your statement is fitting and factual:

“There are obvious reasons why people tend to treat their parents well, and to think badly of murderers, adulterers, thieves, and liars. It is a scientific fact that moral emotions—like a sense of fair play or an abhorrence of cruelty—precede any exposure to scripture. Indeed, studies of primate behavior reveal that these emotions (in some form) precede humanity itself. All of our primate cousins are partial to their own kin and generally intolerant of murder and theft. They tend not to like deception or sexual betrayal much, either. Chimpanzees, especially, display many of the complex social concerns that you would expect to see in our closes relatives in the natural world. It seems rather unlikely, therefore, that the average American will receive necessary moral instruction by seeing these precepts chiseled in marble whenever he enters a courthouse.”

Your analysis of how religious dogma can lead to disastrous and often immoral public policy—you cite HIV, HPV, and stem-cell research is superb and worrying at the same time. Allow me to quote you on the latter:

“Let us look at the details. A three-day-old human embryo is a collection of 150 cells called a blastocyst. There are, for the sake of comparison, more than 100,000 cells in the brain of a fly. The human embryos that are destroyed in stem-cell research do not have brains, or even neurons. Consequently, there is no reason to believe they can suffer their destruction in any way at all. It is worth remembering, in this context, that when a person’s brain has died, we currently deem it acceptable to harvest his organs (provided he has donated them for this purpose) and bury him in the ground. If it is acceptable to treat a person whose brain has died as something less than a human being, it should be acceptable to treat a blastocyst as such. If you are concerned about suffering in this universe, killing a fly should present you with greater moral difficulties than killing a human blastocyst. The moral truth here is obvious: anyone who feels that the interest of a blastocyst just might supersede the interests of a child with a spinal cord injury has had his moral sense blinded by religious metaphysics. The link between religion and ‘morality’—so regularly proclaimed and so seldom demonstrated—is fully belied here, as it is wherever religious dogma supersedes moral reasoning and genuine compassion.”

Further on, in the section “The Clash of Science and Religion”, you correctly argue that ultimately the two will always be in conflict because fundamentally the Bible is incorrect about the origin of life and there is no “intelligent design”.

Up to this point, I found your book to be a piece of art. Unfortunately, parts of your analysis of “Religion, Violence, and the Future of Civilization” is fundamentally wrong. You favor getting rid of religion entirely rather than religion tolerance because as you point out,

“Religion raises the stakes of human conflict much higher than tribalism, racism, or politics ever can, as it is the only form of in-group/out-group thinking that casts the differences between people in terms of eternal rewards and punishments.”

You also write that it encourages us to lie to ourselves about the compatibility of religious faith and scientific religions. I agree with you on both points, except that I think tolerance is better in the interim, while the people of this earth learn the truth about Darwinism (to give you credit you do point out that religious tolerance is better than religious war).

Here is where you are wrong: you argue that Islam is a violent religion. You say,

“It is now a truism in foreign policy circles that real reform in the Muslim world cannot be imposed from the outside. But it is important to recognize why this is so—it is so because Muslims are utterly deranged by their religious faith. Muslims tend to view questions of public policy and global conflict in terms of their affiliation with Islam. And Muslims who don’t view the world in these terms risk being branded as apostates and killed by other Muslims.”

While there is clearly a problem (and a serious debate within) the Muslim world, your statement that Muslims are “deranged by their religious faith” is inaccurate at best, and racist at worst. There is no doubt that some of its followers are deranged, but every religion has them.

In your last paragraph, you write,

“Nonbelievers like myself stand beside you, dumbstruck by the Muslim hordes who chant death to whole nations of the living . But we stand dumbstruck by you as well—by your denial of tangible reality, by the suffering you create in service to your religious myths, and by your attachment to an imaginary God. This letter has been an expression of that amazement—and, perhaps, of a little hope.”

Again, you insinuate that the whole Muslim world wants to attach non-Muslim nations, and that they’re evil (“death to whole nations of the living” [emphasis is mine]).

While you previously continually stated scientific facts, where is your proof here? You offer not a single fact to back up your claim. The fact is that most wars are fought over economic resources, not religion per se. We were attacked a la 9/11 because we were over there (troops stationed in Saudi Arabia), not the other way around. The terrorists in Iraq are attacking now because they were attacked by us. Where were the Muslim terrorists in, say the 1950s and 1960s? Perhaps you should open a history book, Mr. Harris. If Muslims are so evil now, why weren’t they so evil then? Why would over a billion people be Muslims if the religion was so evil? Some of their beliefs may be false, as they are in any other religion, but the fight today is not about religion—it is about economics, with the violence justified by religion. In other words, you are talking about a subject matter that has little to do with an essay about the fallacies of Christianity.

In summary, you make some very good arguments as to why Christianity is flawed and its negative effects on public policy. What your book doesn’t address—and perhaps it shouldn’t since you’re on one side of the debate—are the positive effects of religion, such as larger and more stable families (as you pointed out, Muslims have the highest growth rate; secular Europe on the other hand, having lost its Christian roots, is experiencing a huge population decline (economics also play a factor). Finally, your attack on Islam is misguided and largely out of context given that your book is called A Letter to a Christian Nation.

Sincerely,

Recogitare

Another Problem with the Religious Right

There is no controversy within the scientific community about evolution, but the religious right wants to keep fighting...

How Different Are We From Ants?

Very different. But we share very similar biological traits, and at least some of our behavior is the same, particularly the way we form groups to wage warfare and survive. In the end, that's what life is about: to survive and pass on our genes. That's not meant to take away anything from the human spirit, but in the end we are just machines that spread genes in the endless struggle for life and domination, just like any of the millions of other species of plants, fungi, and animals (and on a larger scale, bacteria, archaea, and eucarya).

I go crazy, crazy, baby, I go crazy

From the Wall Street Journal:

Holy War

A Texas Preacher
Leads Campaign
To Let Israel Fight

Mr. Hagee Draws Evangelicals
By Arguing Jewish State
Fulfills Biblical Prophecy
'End of World as We Know It'

By ANDREW HIGGINS
July 27, 2006; Page A1

WASHINGTON -- After Israel sent warplanes into Iraq in 1981 to bomb a nuclear reactor, Texas televangelist John Hagee sent letters to 150 fellow Christian preachers to rally support for the Jewish state.

He got just one positive response. When Mr. Hagee pressed ahead with plans for a pro-Israel gathering in a San Antonio theater, he says he got a death threat on the phone and someone shot out all the windows of his station wagon parked in his driveway.

Last week, as Israel's armed forces pounded Lebanon and worries of a wider conflagration mounted, Mr. Hagee presided over what he called a "miracle of God": a gathering of 3,500 evangelical Christians packed into a Washington hotel to cheer Israel and its current military campaign.

Standing on a stage bedecked with a huge Israeli flag, Mr. Hagee drew rapturous applause and shouts of "amen" as he hailed Israel for doing God's work in a "war of good versus evil." Calls for Israel to show restraint violate "God's foreign-policy statement" toward Jews, he said, citing a verse from the Old Testament that promises to "bless those who bless you" and curse "the one who curses you."

The gathering was sponsored by Christians United for Israel, a national organization the 66-year-old preacher set up this year. The group lobbies politicians in Washington, rallies grassroots support for Israel and aims to educate Christians on what it calls the "biblical imperative" of supporting the Jewish state.

Mr. Hagee is a leading figure in the so-called Christian-Zionist movement. This evangelical political philosophy is rooted in biblical prophecies and a belief that Israel's struggles signal a prelude to Armageddon. Its followers staunchly support the Bush administration's unequivocal backing of Israel in its current battle with Hezbollah in Lebanon.

President Bush sent a message to the gathering praising Mr. Hagee and his supporters for "spreading the hope of God's love and the universal gift of freedom." The Israeli prime minister also sent words of thanks. Israel's ambassador, its former military chief and a host of U.S. political heavyweights, mostly Republican, attended.

At a time when Islamist groups are displacing secular nationalists as the main vehicle for political revolt across the Middle East, Mr. Hagee and like-minded evangelicals are injecting greater religious fervor into American attitudes and policy toward the region. They see, and even sometimes seem to embrace, the notion of a global conflict between Islam and the Judeo-Christian West, just as do many zealous Muslims.

"This is a religious war that Islam cannot -- and must not -- win," Mr. Hagee wrote in a recent book, "Jerusalem Countdown," which focuses on what he says is a coming nuclear showdown with Iran. "The end of the world as we know it is rapidly approaching.... Rejoice and be exceeding glad -- the best is yet to be." The book has sold nearly 700,000 copies since it was released in January, according to his Florida-based religious publisher, Strang Communications.

Christian Zionism has been around for years but is now gaining greater prominence as it gets turbocharged by the marketing flair of Mr. Hagee and other religious entrepreneurs. Mr. Hagee has deployed massive resources to galvanize support for Israel. He heads a San Antonio megachurch, which claims 19,000 members, runs a television company and has close ties to Republican Party power brokers. His Washington banquet last week cost about $500,000, according to an organizer. A big Christian broadcasting network, Daystar, carried the event live.

The following day, he mobilized evangelicals representing all 50 states in a lobbying blitz through the Capitol. Armed with talking points scripted by Mr. Hagee and his staff, they peppered senators and congressmen with arguments for Israel and against its enemies, particularly Iran.

While Mr. Bush is clearly close to evangelicals, he has never fully embraced their agenda or rhetoric. But their views are generally in sync with the aims of his national-security strategists, who reach similar conclusions through a different logic. They have long blasted what they've termed the "false stability" of a region mostly ruled by autocrats and that has tolerated terrorist organizations committed to Israel's destruction. The influential "neo-conservative" school of foreign-policy advisers has also buttressed this line, arguing that the U.S. must push more aggressively for democracy in the Middle East.

Bedrock for Bush

Christian evangelicals, who first found political traction under President Reagan in the 1980s, now number about 50 million and form a bedrock constituency for President Bush. Best known for their lobbying against abortion, same-sex marriage and on other domestic issues, they have also taken a keen interest in foreign policy, especially since the attacks of 9/11.

"Leave Israel alone. Let them do the job," Mr. Hagee told his supporters last week at the banquet. Israel's enemies, said New York Congressman Eliot Engel, one of the few Democratic speakers, "do the work of Satan."

This melding of realpolitik and religion, say former and current U.S. officials, has produced a potent force. Israel's evangelical supporters "were out there before, but didn't really appear on the radar screen," says Dennis Ross, a Middle East envoy in the administrations of both George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. "Now they are an important part of the landscape." More than any prior White House, the Bush administration has established formal, regular contacts with American evangelical leaders.

The White House says it isn't overly influenced by any one group. "The president makes decisions about policies for our country based on what is right for our citizens," says Dana Perino, deputy press secretary. "The United States has been an ally of Israel since its founding, and President Bush has worked to strengthen that alliance."

The main vehicle for Mr. Hagee's pro-Israel activities over the years has been San Antonio's Cornerstone Church, which he first joined as pastor back in 1975 when it was called Church of Castle Hill, a moribund parish with only a few dozen worshippers and heavy debts. He had quit his previous church the same year during a messy divorce that was quickly followed by his remarriage to a young churchgoer. Attracted by Mr. Hagee's mix of thundering oratory and folksy humor, the congregation mushroomed.

The son of a puritanical preacher, Mr. Hagee first visited Israel in 1978. He says he went there "as a tourist and came back home a Zionist." While in Israel, Mr. Hagee visited Jerusalem's Western Wall and says he felt a "nearness to God like no other place on Earth." At that moment, he recalls, "The Lord required of me to do everything I could to bring Christians and Jews together."

After returning to Texas, Mr. Hagee says he plunged into a "three-year study binge to discover the Jewish roots of Christianity." This coincided with a surge of contacts between American evangelicals and the then Israeli government of Menachem Begin, a devout biblical scholar and hardline defender of Israel's right to territories won in 1967. Mr. Begin worked hard to cultivate American evangelicals, with whom he shared a belief that Israel's birth in 1948 and subsequent struggles were a fulfillment of biblical prophecy.

Mr. Hagee says he met with Mr. Begin three times.

When Mr. Begin ordered Israel's air force to bomb Saddam Hussein's Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981, Mr. Hagee was horrified by widespread criticism that followed. After reading a San Antonio newspaper that described the attack as an act of "gunboat diplomacy," he decided to organize a pro-Israel gathering.

Local Christians initially showed little enthusiasm for the idea. San Antonio's Jewish community was even more wary. "There was a lot of skepticism," recalls Aryeh Scheinberg, an Orthodox rabbi who took part in meetings among Jewish leaders to decide how to respond to Mr. Hagee's proposal. "Everyone wanted to know: 'What does he really want?' I said, 'Let's give the man a chance and take the risk.' "

The pro-Israel gathering went ahead with both Jews and Christians present. As Mr. Scheinberg mounted the podium to deliver a final prayer, security told Mr. Hagee of a bomb threat. Mr. Hagee, a stocky man who got to college on a football scholarship, says he asked God to make the rabbi pray "not like Moses but like a Presbyterian late for lunch." The threat was a hoax.

The event has been held every year since, though some Jewish leaders refuse to attend and reject any alliance with Mr. Hagee. "Many of his views are hateful," says Barry Block, a prominent reform rabbi in San Antonio, who accuses Mr. Hagee of demonizing Muslims and propounding a divisive right-wing agenda that erodes the barrier between church and state.

When addressing Jewish audiences, Mr. Hagee generally avoids talking about Armageddon. But his books, whose titles include "Beginning of the End" and "From Daniel to Doomsday," are filled with death and mayhem. "The battlefield will cover the nation of Israel!" he writes in "Jerusalem Countdown," his recent work, describing a "sea of human blood drained from the veins of those who have followed Satan."

Some fellow evangelicals accuse Mr. Hagee of ignoring Arab Christians. Donald Wagner of North Park University, an evangelical Christian college in Chicago, first traveled to Israel at around the same time as Mr. Hagee but reached the opposite conclusion. "I was very pro-Israel until I went there," says Mr. Wagner, who heads a research group that challenges the theology of Christian Zionists.

A Turn to Television

Little known outside of Texas when he first embraced Zionism, Mr. Hagee turned to television to promote Jesus, Israel and his own name. His main platform for this was Global Evangelism Television Inc., a nonprofit organization. First set up in 1978, GETV initially relayed the programming of others to local cable operators. In the 1980s it began pumping out its own shows featuring Mr. Hagee for broadcast on national Christian networks. His sermons and chat shows now appear on 120 stations and, he says, reach more than 90 million homes.

By the mid-1980s his flock had outgrown his church in central San Antonio. In 1987, Cornerstone moved to a 35-acre suburban campus with a 5,000-person assembly hall and a new television and radio studio.

As his exposure grew, so did controversy. He ran into flak for inviting former White House aide Oliver North, a pardoned felon, and disgraced televangelist Jimmy Swaggart to speak at Cornerstone. He also feuded with the U.S. Postal Service over nonprofit rates for church mailings that contained ads for his books and videos. (He sued and, he says, got a refund of around $40,000.)

Mr. Hagee also upset black leaders. To help students seeking odd jobs, his church newsletter, The Cluster, advertised a "slave" sale. "Slavery in America is returning to Cornerstone," it said. "Make plans to come and go home with a slave." Mr. Hagee apologized but, in a radio interview, protested about pressure to be "politically correct" and joked that perhaps his pet dog should be called a "canine American."

The quarrels didn't stop the steady growth of his congregation, which is multiracial. His "nights to honor Israel" got bigger, too, as did his clout as a fund-raiser for Israeli causes. He says he has raised over $12 million so far.

Increasingly prominent, the preacher attracted the eye and, initially, the ire of Jerry Falwell, the dean of the Christian right and another enthusiastic supporter of Israel.

In 1994, The National Liberty Journal, a conservative monthly run by Mr. Falwell, labeled Mr. Hagee a "heretic" for championing so-called dual-covenant theory -- a belief that Jews and Christians have separate deals with God that allow each to get into heaven. The traditional Christian view is that Jews and other non-Christians must convert -- or end up on the wrong side of the battle of Armageddon.

Soon after the article appeared, Mr. Falwell arranged to meet the Texan at a Christian pow-wow in Memphis. Mr. Hagee, says Mr. Falwell, convinced him that he didn't believe in the "dual covenant." Mr. Falwell now sits on the board of Christians United for Israel.

Mr. Hagee, citing a New Testament verse, says a "remnant of Jewish people...have favor with God right now" but he is vague on which Jews will get to heaven without conversion, saying that only God knows this. He dismisses the dual-covenant issue as "something to start coffee-table debate."

Closer to Power

Mr. Bush's 2000 election victory and the Republican Party's control of both houses of Congress brought evangelical Christians closer to power than ever before. Mr. Hagee had met Mr. Bush several times while he was Texas governor and solidly supported his push for the White House. Mr. Hagee was closer, though, to another powerful Texan, Congressman Tom DeLay. Soon after becoming majority leader in the House of Representatives, Mr. DeLay gave the keynote speech at Mr. Hagee's 2002 pro-Israel gathering in San Antonio. Mr. DeLay, since embroiled in a corruption scandal, also spoke last week in Washington.

In 2003, The San Antonio Express-News dug into Mr. Hagee's filings with the Internal Revenue Service. The article alleged no wrongdoing, but reported that Mr. Hagee received more than $1.25 million in 2001 for his church and TV work and had a trust that includes a nearly 8,000-acre $2.1 million Texas ranch.

Mr. Hagee says that the bulk of his earnings comes from royalty payments from his 21 books, not from churchgoers' donations. He says he'll earn much the same this year if book sales hold up.

His finances under the spotlight, Mr. Hagee reorganized his holdings in a way that allowed him to avoid having to make public filings. In September 2004, Global Evangelism Television re-registered as a church under the name Grace Church of San Antonio. Churches, unlike religious TV companies and other nonprofit outfits, are exempt from filing detailed returns with the IRS. A further reorganization in recent weeks moved all assets into Cornerstone Church. None of the Church's financial records are publicly available. Mr. Hagee said his lawyers had recommended the changes for "greater clarity."

President Bush abandoned President Clinton's efforts to secure a big-bang peace settlement to the Israel-Palestine conflict but, under prodding from Britain and others, did back a slow-paced plan known as the Roadmap for Peace.

In May 2003, Mr. Hagee and other evangelical leaders sent a letter to President Bush applauding the invasion of Iraq but complaining about the Israel-Palestine peace plan. They said it would be "morally reprehensible" for the U.S. to be "evenhanded" between Israel and "the terrorist-infested Palestinian infrastructure."

Last fall, he took his annual "night to honor Israel," to Israel, holding the event in the hangar of an Israeli air-force base. He spoke at the Israeli Parliament and organized a visit for his U.S. followers to Megiddo, an Israeli hilltop that he believes will be the site of the battle of Armageddon.

Mr. Hagee also started laying plans for Christians United for Israel, hoping to meld a plethora of mostly small pro-Israel Christian groups into a national network. He contacted Mr. Falwell, who says he immediately offered support. He hired David Brog, a lawyer who had worked in both Israel and on Capitol Hill and who is a distant cousin of former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, as the new organization's executive director.

As Mr. Hagee's plans took shape last fall, American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the pro-Israel lobby, set up an "outreach" unit to work with Christians and others. Appointed to head the unit was a San Antonio native who had previously worshipped at the synagogue of Mr. Scheinberg, the Orthodox rabbi who has been one of Mr. Hagee's keenest supporters.

Christians United for Israel held its first meeting in San Antonio in February and immediately began organizing last week's Washington event. To galvanize support and allay suspicions in some quarters of his motives, Mr. Hagee traveled around the country, meeting with Christian and Jewish leaders. Some Jews worry that Christian-Zionists want to convert Jews to Christianity, something Mr. Hagee has always denied.

The current eruption of violence, says Mr. Hagee, shows that Israel should not surrender land in search of peace and that Christians and Jews are on the same side.

"If God opposes giving away the land, if it has never worked, let's come up with another plan," he thundered last week. "Do not give the land away. It belongs to you. It is God's heritage to you."

--Karby Leggett in Jerusalem contributed to this article.

Write to Andrew Higgins at andrew.higgins@wsj.com¹

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War creates life?

Very interesting....