Sum: a short story by David Eagleman

One of my favourite books of the last few years has to be David Eagleman’s Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives. Eagleman a neuroscientist by day has produced a fascinating collection of speculative fiction,  forty short stories which explore a wide variety of possible afterlives.  The title of the book, Sum comes from the Latin for “I am,” as in “Cogito ergo sum.” Here is the first story, which is also called Sum:

________

In the afterlife you relive all your experiences, but this time with the events reshuffled into a new order: all the moments that share a quality are grouped together.

You spend two months driving the street in front of your house, seven months having sex. You sleep for thirty years without opening your eyes. For five months straight you flip through magazines while sitting on a toilet.

You take all your pain at once, all twenty-seven intense hours of it. Bones break, cars crash, skin is cut, babies are born. Once you make it through, it’s agony-free for the rest of your afterlife.

But that doesn’t mean it’s always pleasant. You spend six days clipping your nails. Fifteen months looking for lost items. Eighteen months waiting in line. Two years of boredom: staring out a bus window, sitting in an airport terminal. One year reading books. Your eyes hurt, and you itch, because you can’t take a shower until it’s your time to take your marathon two-hundred-day shower. Two weeks wondering what happens when you die. One minute realizing your body is falling. Seventy-seven hours of confusion. One hour realizing you’ve forgotten someone’s name. Three weeks realizing you are wrong. Two days lying. Six weeks waiting for a green light. Seven hours vomiting. Fourteen minutes experiencing pure joy. Three months doing laundry. Fifteen hours writing your signature. Two days tying shoelaces. Sixty-seven days of heartbreak. Five weeks driving lost. Three days calculating restaurant tips. Fifty-one days deciding what to wear. Nine days pretending you know what is being talked about. Two weeks counting money. Eighteen days staring into the refrigerator. Thirty-four days longing. Six months watching commercials. Four weeks sitting in thought, wondering if there is something better you could be doing with your time. Three years swallowing food. Five days working buttons and zippers. Four minutes wondering what your life would be like if you reshuffled the order of events. In this part of the afterlife, you imagine something analogous to your Earthly life, and the thought is blissful: a life where episodes are split into tiny swallowable pieces, where moments do not endure, where one experiences the joy of jumping from one event to the next like a child hopping from spot to spot on the burning sand.

The economics of religion

It may seem perverse to look for God in supply-and-demand curves, endogenous growth theory and circular-flow diagrams, but that isn’t stopping economists from bringing their own particular way of thinking to religion. I can hear your objections already – they haven’t exactly covered themselves in glory in our current financial meltdown. But I feel that the dismal science can offer some interesting insights. There are now economists like Larry Iaconne who have specialised in investigating the economics of religion. These economists start from a couple of assumptions. They treat religion as a market in which the religions are like firms.  The producers of religion, be they churches mosques, temples or synagogues, have to compete for by seeking followers. Their other premise is that believers are rational actors – people choose which religion they want to belong to at some level.

One of the lessons taught by economics is the beneficial effects of competition. And in the United States there has been a wonderful experiment in a laissez-faire approach to religion.  It is the ultimate religious marketplace in which faiths compete for followers. The United States is of course an anomaly. In general economic development tends to lead to less religiosity. At least that’s the theory.

Economists also like to examine the role of religion in fostering or hindering economic growth. The seminal work about religion and its role in economic growth is Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism which first came out in 1905. Weber was definitely on to something. The Calvinist mentality about making money was very different to official Catholic doctrine. The Franciscans in particular seemed to abhor money:

A legend from the Franciscan tradition speaks of a person who, when he entered the church of Saint Mary of the Portiuncula to pray, left some money near the cross as an offering. After he had left, one of the Franciscan brothers simply picked it up and threw it on the windowsill. St. Francis found out what the brother had done. The brother seeing that he was found out, hurried to ask .pardon. He cast himself on the ground and asked to be beaten. St Francis rebuked him most severely and commanded him to lift the money with his mouth and place it with his mouth on the ass’ dung that lay outside the walls of the church.

Having said that, the causes of economic growth are complex, and should not be reduced to one factor. Many of the institutions of capitalism were created in renaissance Italy, a Catholic country. Within Europe, Protestant areas did not necessarily grow faster than other areas.Scotland, a centre of Calvinism did less well than England, which had a more moderate brand of Protestantism.

Now the debate is about Islam. According to Wikipedia in 2008, at least $500 billion in assets around the world were managed in accordance with Sharia law, with the sector growing at more than 10% per year. Islamic finance seeks to promote social justice by banning what they call exploitative practices. This results in a set of prohibitions on:

• charging interest
• derivatives and options,
• investments in firms that make pornography or pork

There are some elements of Islam that do not seem conducive to economic growth. The discrimination against women has important economic costs. These were described by David Landes in his book The Wealth and Poverty of Nations:

“To deny women is to deprive a country of labour and talent, but even worse – to undermine the drive to achievement of boys and men. One cannot rear young people in such ways that half of them think themselves superior by biology, without dulling ambition and devaluing accomplishment. …But it cannot compete with other societies that ask performance from the pool of talent.”

And there is the famous prohibition on charging interest. However it should be pointed out that there are ways round it. The Islamic economic record is mixed. There has been lots of economic populism.Iranhas been heavily statist with a large public sector. I think these policies are bad in themselves, but I wouldn’t want to put all the blame on religion.Turkey,Malaysia and Indonesia seem to have done much better.

Economists analyse the sacrifices that religions place on their adherents in terms of dress code, eating habits etc. Religious groups face a free-rider problem. They want followers who are committed to the cause. What may seem extreme to an outsider is exactly what promotes commitment. The Hare Krishna movement demands that its followers shave their heads, wear those rather garish orange robes and chant in the streets. This will weed out those who are not serious. What’s more it is easy to check compliance. The strict rules that church members have to follow actually help and strengthen the ties within the group. This conclusion is a bit depressing as it suggests that religions will tend to extremism. Doubt and uncertainty don’t seem to do well in the religious marketplace.

My final topic is sainthood. This has been the subject of an economic study by Robert J. Barro and Rachel M. McCleary of Harvard. It’s called Saints Marching In, 1590-2009. The Catholic Church has been making saints for centuries. I should make a clarification here. The church would argue that they don’t “make” saints and neither does the pope. The Church, through the ministry of the Bishop of Rome, recognizes the saints that God has made. Anyway the process typically involves two stages:  beatification and canonization. The academics have produced an extensive data set of the “beatifieds” and saints chosen since 1590. Their conclusion is that the last two popes, John Paul II and Benedict XVI are outliers, creating blessed persons at a much higher rate than that of their predecessors. Barro and McCleary see it as a response to competition from Protestantism. And this competition has escalated in recent years. They claim Pope John Paul II beatified as many individuals as all of his predecessors combined.

In 1984 the process was speeded up. Under the old system you had to perform two miracles in order to be beatified. And a further two miracles had to be performed in order to qualify for sainthood. These miracles had to be posthumous. In addition you had to wait 50 years before you could nominate somebody to even be considered as venerable, the first stage in this arduous process. That’s been shortened; it’s now only one miracle for each stage and you have to wait just five years after the death of the individual before you can promote them to be venerable and then beatified. Benedict has continued the streamlining process. This may be due to a huge backlog of “beatifieds” created by his predecessor.

This has been my brief survey of the economics of religion. I realise that the economic study of religion doesn’t provide any insights into the transcendent aspects of religion, but I feel it can shed light on the behavioural aspects.

A sceptic’s look at Scientology

The Church of Scientology, which is now almost sixty years old, has always been controversial. To its critics it is an evil cult that abuses its members and is only interested in making money. It is famed for its litigiousness and for hounding anyone who dares to criticise it. This ruthlessness and an ability to evolve have allowed it to become a powerful force in the USA.  I have found it impossible to find any reliable figures for the number of practicing Scientologists in the world today, with estimates ranging from 250,000 to 15 million. These numbers may seem inconsequential, but with a fortune in real estate and a host of influential celebrity defenders, they are able to punch well above their weight. I have recently been reading Inside Scientology by Janet Reitman. While the book contains no earth-shattering revelations, I found I learned a lot about the history, doctrines and workings of The Church of Scientology.

I am going to define Scientology as a religion because I feel that words like cult and sect are emotive conjugations. Scientology’s beliefs may appear to be wacky, but wackiness is in the eye of the beholder. Reincarnation, exorcism, rising from the dead, refusal of blood transfusions, the Hindu caste system, the niqab, Tibetan sky burial and food taboos could also be considered strange. So, scientology may be weird. I don’t think that means it should be banned. I think the German attitude to Scientology should be censured. On the other hand, being a religion does not exempt you from criticism. Such criticism should not be considered persecution.

The Church’s founder, Lafayette Ron Hubbard, was a science fiction writer. He certainly had a colourful life, although he did seem to have a certain talent for self-aggrandisement. He also spent much of his life travelling including years at sea as the Commodore of his own private navy.

In 1950 Hubbard published Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. Two years later Dianetics was transformed into a religion. Hubbard would lead the Church until his death in 1986.  His successor and the church’s current leader David Miscavige, has been able to give the church somewhat more mainstream appeal. Miscavige, who rose to power when he was just 25, has put a lot of effort into expanding the Church’s physical presence. However, he has also made scientology more rigid and his critics accuse him of creating a climate of fear within the organisation. A number of high-ranking members have left the church. Of course, this is typical in many religions – the Catholic/Protestant/Orthodox split in Christianity or the Sunni/Shia divide in Islam are two obvious examples.

I’m going to look at Scientology’s belief system. This is not easy because of the obsessive secrecy of the church. What’s more Hubbard invented a way of describing the world that is filled with concepts and jargon that are alien to me.  I hope I don’t make too many mistakes. Scientology doesn’t help its case by maintaining many of its beliefs as secrets. They have spent millions of dollars trying to stop former members publishing their secret scriptures on the internet. This seems to be like the Catholic Church having the Virgin Birth of Jesus as a secret known only to a powerful elite.

Scientologists believe that they have lived and will live forever. They apparently sign billion-year contracts in which they commit themselves to the organisation. Scientology has its own creation myth. It involves a galactic ruler named Xenu, who controlled part of the galaxy including our own planet Earth, in those days known as Teegeeack. Faced by massive overpopulation, Xenu decided on a drastic plan. With the help of psychiatrists he called in billions of people for income tax inspections where they were instead given injections of alcohol and glycol that left them paralysed. They were put into space planes that looked exactly like DC8s (except they had rocket motors instead of propellers), and they were sent to Earth. On arrival these paralysed people were dropped into volcanoes. Hydrogen bombs were then detonated and everyone was killed. But that was not the end of the story. Billions of souls, known as thetans, were being blown around by the nuclear winds. They were captured by Xenu’s forces using an electronic ribbon and sucked into vacuum zones around the world. These souls were then packed into boxes and taken to a few huge cinemas, where they were forced to spend 36 days watching special 3D movies. These films implanted what Hubbard called “various misleading data“‘ into the memories of the defenceless thetans. This included all world religions, and Hubbard specifically attributed Roman Catholicism and the image of the Crucifixion to Xenu’s malevolent plan. The thetans were also deprived of their sense of personal identity. They clustered in groups of a few thousand. Now because there were only a few living bodies left they inhabited these bodies. Xenu was eventually overthrown and he is now a prisoner in a mountain and on one of the planets. He is kept in by a force-field powered by an eternal battery.

These body thetans are still around today. Each of us has our own thetan, causing us spiritual and mental harm. Scientologists believe we have a reactive and an analytical mind. The engram (painful memory) is stored in the reactive mind. As a result of the build-up of thousands of these engrams, we experience problems throughout our lives. The purpose of Dianetics is to rid a thetan (person) of their reactive minds. The means to do this is auditing, scientology’s form of spiritual counselling. The auditor’s basic tool is the E-meter, a skin galvanometer, that they claim helps ascertain the problems of the subject. In the sessions the auditor asks questions and takes notes about the participant’s responses. The idea is to consciously re-experience painful or traumatic events from their past in order to free themselves of their negative effects. Sessions are sold in 12-and-a-half-hour blocks, which vary in cost depending on what level you’re working on.

Once you become free of the reactive mind, you have reached Clear, but you still have the secret levels, known as the Bridge to Total Freedom, where you learn the theology and creation myth of the church and understand what it’s all about. You have advanced to a higher state of being, Operating Thetan. It is defined as “knowing and willing cause over life, thought, matter, energy, space and time.”

Scientology is famous for its celebrities. Tom Cruise, John Travolta Isaac Hayes and Kirstie Alley are names that immediately spring to mind. Jerry Seinfeld also dabbled with scientology and Charles Manson took over 150 hours of Scientology courses. The celebrities are part of the strategy of both Hubbard and Miscavige to recruit this kind of high-profile opinion shapers. This has enabled them to gain some respectability. The self-help aspect of the faith seems to go down well with the stars. John Travolta asserted that stars such as Elvis Presley and James Dean wouldn’t have died so young if they had been scientologists.  In fact, one of Elvis’s girlfriends tried to persuade him o join and he went to a scientology centre on Sunset Boulevard. Elvis was not impressed:

“Fuck those people! There’s no way I’ll ever get involved with that son-of-a-bitchin’ group. All they want is my money.’”  However, they did recruit both his wife and daughter.

The jewel in the Scientology crown is of course Tom Cruise. He originally kept his religious views to himself, but in recent years he has become vocal in his advocacy. This has helped the church but there have been downsides such as the famous sofa incident on the Oprah Winfrey show.

Another famous Cruise moment was his attack on psychiatry and criticism of Brooke Shields for her use of drugs for postpartum depression. Cruise was very much on message. Scientology’s hatred of psychiatry is long-standing and particularly vitriolic, reflecting the views of Hubbard. They even have a museum on Sunset Boulevard – Psychiatry: an Industry of Death. They certainly make some outlandish claims:

There is no such thing as chemical imbalances in the brain and that the very notion of mental illness is a fraud.

 

Between 10 and 25 percent of psychiatrists sexually assault their patients, some of them children.

 

Psychiatrists kill up to 10,000 people a year with their use of electroshock treatment 

Regular readers of my blog will know that I have been critical of such things as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The DSM IV documented 374 mental disorders and they see to treat life itself as human life is a form of mental illness. But the scientologists go way beyond that and deny the existence of mental illness. Their own record on mental health leaves a lot to be desired. The e-meter has never been subjected to clinical trials.

And they have their own dark history. Elli Perkins was a professional glass artist a senior auditor at the Church of Scientology in Buffalo, New York. Her son Jeremy was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 2001. Following church policy, she rejected psychiatric care preferring to treat him with vitamins. The condition worsened to the point where Jeremy felt that his mother was poisoning him. After a failed suicide attempt, Jeremy eventually murdered her in 2003. Jeremy Perkins was found not responsible by reason of mental disease, but he was assessed as dangerously mentally ill and was committed to a secure facility.  In March 2006, an advertisement in LA Weekly blamed Tom Cruise and the Church of Scientology for the murder of Elli Perkins. The ad stated: “Thanks, Tom Cruise and the Church of Scientology, for your expert advice on mental health.”

What does the future hold for scientology? There are now third-generation Scientologists. I don’t find their beliefs very convincing. They seem to be a product of time and place. But I have no problem with people holding those beliefs.  However, there are serious questions about the way the Church behaves. They seem to have a strong authoritarian bent. This can be seen in the way Miscavige seems to intimidate the people around him. If you dare to leave the Church, you can expect severe problems. The Scientologists love to sue and harass their critics. They had a term, Fair Game, to describe policies and practices carried out by the Church of Scientology towards its enemies. Basically any tactics could be justified. Hubbard scrapped this policy because of the bad PR, but the Church still seems to be very aggressive in the gives defectors a forum in which to attack it. In the age of Wikileaks they have also been unable to protect their secrets. They face an uncertain future. In their sixty-year history they have proved adept at adapting to meet new demands. It will be fascinating how they cope in the next sixty years.

Benedict in Britain

How times have changed. In 1982 Pope John Paul II received a hero’s welcome on his visit to the UK. The previous Pope, whose doctrinal opinions were in fact very similar to Benedict XVI’s, was an international superstar. The current Pope on the other hand seems to court controversy wherever he goes. Of course the world has changed a lot since 1982; September 11th brought the role of religion under suspicion.  The Vatican has not been immune from this trend. In his five-year stint as Pontiff Benedict has managed to offend Muslims, Jews and Anglicans amongst others. His recent visit to the UK was a case in point. Things started badly in April when there was a leak of a spoof Foreign Office memo suggesting that the Pope bless a gay marriage and open an abortion clinic as part of his official program. There were threats of a citizen’s arrest.  For former agony aunt Clare Rayner Benedict was public enemy number one:

“In all my years as a campaigner I have never felt such animus against any individual as I do against this creature“

Richard Dawkins also gave a warm welcome:

“Go home to your tinpot Mussolini-concocted principality, and don’t come back.” 

Even Germaine Greer got in on the act:

“Catholic art was once the domain of Titian. Now, we get Susan Boyle”

Of course the Vatican came out with its own take-no-prisoners strategy. Just before the visit Cardinal Walter Kasper called Britain a third-world country. Not to be outdone the Pope compared extreme atheism to Nazism. (This is so intellectually lazy. I hate when people try to settle an argument by bringing the Nazis into it. The idea I suppose is to try to spread guilt by association. The Nazis were in favour of smoking bans, building motorways, and keeping fit. The fact that the Nazis supported these policies does not make them either right or wrong.)

When you analyse an organisation, I think that you need to look at the good and the bad. The Catholic Church can boast many positive aspects. There is a real sense of community, which is now missing from much of society.  They do a lot of amazing charity work and the religion gives many of its believers’ lives a powerful sense of meaning. Let me give you some personal background here. I was raised a Catholic but at the age of 15 I stopped believing. I consider myself an agnostic and have never felt the slightest inclination to go back to Catholicism or become a follower of any other religion. I felt a certain hostility in those days but now I have a more balanced perspective. Dawkins seems to lack this sense of balance:

“Odious as the physical abuse of children by priests undoubtedly is, I suspect that it may do them less lasting damage than the mental abuse of bringing them up Catholic in the first place.”  It is wrong to mix up these two things makes no sense to me. Child abuse is an abomination. But to be exposed to ideas is not in any way comparable. We are bombarded with a lot of opinions ideologies etc as we grow up. Many of them are illogical but ultimately we have to decide for ourselves what we believe. I was by no stretch of the imagination abused in any way growing up as a Catholic. We are not empty vessels who simply absorb propaganda. We often reject those ideas as I was able to do.

Having said that does not mean that Catholics are above criticism because they are a religion. There is a worrying tendency for people to portray themselves as victims. I have never been a fan of the word Islamophobia and I get the impression that we will soon have the term Catholicophobia. I do feel that the tone of the criticism used against Pope Benedict would not be used against an Islamic religious figure. But religions must also be subject to scrutiny. However, I would rather engage in specific criticisms than come out with blanket denunciations.  I gave my opinion about gay rights in a previous post; so now I want to look at two other divisive issues.

The child abuse scandal has been a disaster for the Holy See. Maybe some statistics we see in the media are exaggerated - this is an inevitable fact of life. But this abuse has wrecked far too many lives. These scandals were known about in the 1960s. One solution was suggested by the Rev Gerald Fitzgerald, the head of the Servants of the Holy Paraclete, an order based in New Mexico; he proposed buying an island where priests attracted to men and boys could be segregated. He even made a $5,000 down payment on a Caribbean island. Two priests were sent to check out the island of Tortola, is the largest and most populated of the British Virgin Islands. However this plan was vetoed by the Archbishop of Santa Fe. What I cannot accept is the use of the arcane canon law to deal with priests. These were criminal acts. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was the man in charge of parallel system of justice for nearly 25 years.  There were cover-ups and many whistleblowers were treated shamefully. It’s a bad sign when you put the blame on homosexuals, Jewish conspiracies etc. The impression one gets is that the Vatican has been more interested in the reputation of the Church than the suffering of the victims. Now finally we are getting heartfelt apologies but the Pope will ultimately be judged by his actions.

The other area controversial area is birth control. I do find it hard to understand the church’s position here. I have never really understood why the rhythm method is good and condoms are bad. I have no problem with abstinence but with the universal human desire to copulate condoms are essential in the fight against AIDS. The policy of the Vatican is wrong but Africa is a complex continent. It is not just a question of Africans blindly obeying Rome’s diktats. (Nor indeed do European Catholics.) There are also Muslim and indigenous traditions that play an important role. Some of the Vatican critics seem to have a view of Africans as blank slates incapable of thinking for themselves. Moreover, the African countries most affected by AIDS have minority Catholic populations.

I think it is really great that we debate these fundamental questions but I feel that the new atheists’ reaction has just become too militant and too aggressive. What is wrong with live and let live?  The reaction to the visit seems a strange way to promote the idea of tolerance. I believe in free speech – I just think there are better ways of expressing disagreement. I don’t think we need this verbal violence – it is counterproductive.

I fear that with this article I will have alienated both atheists and Catholics. But it’s how I see things. I would also like to passionately defend a secular society. It is the glory of such a system that it permits everyone to practise whatever religion they want – or indeed no religion at all. We do not have a Thomas More burning Christians at the stake because they happen to have a bible in English or Catholic priests having to hide in holes because if they are discovered they will be executed.  We now have Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs Buddhists and Scientologists free to practise their respective religions.  We may be having very acrimonious debates but we are living in a golden age of religious tolerance.  That is surely a cause to rejoice.

Capitalism and the Jews

The other day I heard a fascinating interview with Jerry Muller, author of a new book called Capitalism and the Jews. I find myself drawn to this subject for two reasons. Firstly, you have the paradoxical love-hate relationship between Jews and capitalism. There is little doubt that Jews have often done very well when they have been allowed to compete under equal conditions in capitalist economies. But they have also been its most virulent critics – Karl Marx and Leon Trotsky immediately spring to mind. We forget it now but Israel was once a darling of the left. The Kibbutz movement is the archetypal example of a collective community, based on agriculture not commerce. The other element that intrigues me is the radioactive nature of the question. The success of Jews in markets has been a blessing for them but it has also been a curse. The idea of Jewish economic power had tragic consequences in the twentieth century and these ideas still remain important even today. Just listen to the words of Bin Laden and Ahmadinejad:

“You are the nation that permits Usury, which has been forbidden by all the religions. Yet you build your economy and investments on Usury. As a result of this…the Jews have taken control of your economy…and now control all aspects of your life.” (Osama bin Laden’s Letter to America in November 2002)

The image of the Jew as an avaricious loan shark has persisted for many years, with its most famous example being Shylock in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. In The Divine Comedy Dante had moneylenders with blasphemers and sodomites in the seventh circle of hell. They were to be stranded forever on the Plain of Burning Sand where it would constantly rain great burning flakes of fire which would vanish when they hit the ground, but not when they hit the flesh of sinners.

The starting point of my analysis of Jewish economic activity has to be the middle ages and the idea of usury. Nowadays we use this word to refer to charging excessive interest, whatever that means. But in the medieval world, usury referred to lending money per se. In medieval Western Christendom, as in Islamic banking today, money lending was verboten. This was partly for biblical reasons and partly due to the influence of Aristotle. The Greek philosopher believed that money could not create productivity and that it was wrong to charge interest:

The most hated sort [of moneymaking], and with the greatest reason, is usury, which makes a gain out of money itself, and not from the natural use of it. For money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase at interest. And this term Usury which means the birth of money from money, is applied to the breeding of money, because the offspring resembles the parent. Wherefore of all modes of making money this is the most unnatural.

 In fact,  Jews weren’t supposed to lend money either but there was a get-out clause in Deuteronomy. They weren’t allowed to lend to other Jews bit they were permitted to lend to gentiles. So just when the European economy was starting to get on its feet, in came the Jews. They filled the void that was left by the prohibition on Christian money lending. They would play a vital role in the rise of Europe but this role did not endear them to the general population or the rulers, who found them the perfect scapegoats when there were economic problems or they didn’t feel like paying back what they owed. Thus they were often expelled (or worse).

What happened when these parasites were expelled? If the activity they were engaged in was so bad, then logically things would be much better without these bloodsuckers. The reality was very different- shortages of credit and general economic decline.

The idea that money cannot be productive and that those who engage in lending it are parasitic is so typical of many economic fallacies. There is a tendency to underestimate the value of mental activity in a successful economy. Thomas Sowell sums it up very succinctly:

Because what is immediately visible to the naked eye makes a more lasting impression than past or present factors invisible inside other people’s heads, it is easy to regard the visible factors as the sole or most important factors, even when other businesses with those same visible factors went bankrupt, while an expertly managed enterprise in the same industry flourished and grew. Nor are such misunderstandings inconsequential. Elaborate ideologies and mass movements have been based on the notion that only the workers really create wealth, while others merely skim off profits, without having contributed anything to producing the wealth in which they unjustly share.

I always find it funny when people talk about the real economy. You have to sweat and get your hands dirty. Farmers and labourers are the ones who do the real work and those who earn their money in other ways are leeches. This seems to be the central premise of Marxism. For Marx basically all economic value comes from labour. And when he discusses labour, he doesn’t seem to appreciate the creative input of entrepreneurs. So in Marx’s account, it’s those with capital, living parasitically—and he uses images of vampirism—off the sweat and blood of those who work by the sweat of their brow. And what is interesting is how often there has been a conflation of the typical anti-Jewish stereotypes with what are considered the worst excesses of capitalism. The language, leeches, bloodsuckers parasites and so on, is used to describe both Jews and capitalism.

And of course Jews have been capitalist’s harshest critics. Jesus, who had a run-in with the moneychangers outside the Temple, could be considered the first in a long line of anti-capitalist Jews. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century many Jews were attracted to the communist movement. Well. It wasn’t just communism. In general the right were hostile to them and so they had to go somewhere. A few became communists and because of their literacy and other skills they tended to reach disproportionately high positions. So Jews could now be attacked from both sides. Hitler’s anti-Semitism is well known, but Stalin too harboured these sentiments. And Jews were a handy scapegoat when there were problems in the economy.

Capitalism has been the most important force in shaping the fate of the Jews in the modern world.  It has also had an enormous impact on them and on how they are perceived. Some people may feel uncomfortable with the subject but I think it a perfectly legitimate area of study. We cannot leave to those paranoid conspiracy theorists that have been so prevalent since the middle ages. I am not trying to argue that all anti-capitalism is anti-Semitic, but it is an interesting link. And whatever the connection, I do feel that anti-Semitism and anti-capitalism are both fundamentally wrong-headed. That is what I have tried to show in this article.

Some quotes about religion

 

If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him. Voltaire (1694–1778), French writer and philosopher.

 

A religion true to its natures must also be concerned about man’s social conditions. Religion deals with both earth and heaven, both time and eternity. Religion operates not only on the vertical plane but also on the horizontal. It seeks not only to integrate men with God but to integrate men with men and each man with himself.  Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968), U.S. civil rights leader.

 

As to the supposed “conflict”…between science and religion, no such conflict should exist because each subject has a legitimate magisterium, or domain of teaching authority—and these magisteria do not overlap. Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002), paleontologist.

 

Better to be too credulous than too sceptical. Anonymous. Chinese proverb.

 

Faith will move mountains. Anonymous.

 

Nietzsche   God is dead

God            Nietzsche is dead.  Graffito   

 

Man knows in the end that he is alone in the indifferent immensity of the Universe from which he has emerged by chance. Neither his destiny nor his duty is written down anywhere.  Jacques Lucien Monod (1910–1976), French biochemist.

 

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), French philosopher, and mathematician.

 

Religion is the soul of soulless conditions, the heart of a heartless world, the opium of the people.   Karl Marx (1818–1883), German philosopher.

 

We are survival machines—robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment.
Richard Dawkins (1941– ), British ethologist.

 

Whatever is in motion must be moved by something else. Moreover, this something else…must itself be moved by something else, and that in turn by yet another thing…So we reach a first mover which is not moved by anything. And this all men think of as God. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), Italian theologian and philosopher.

 

When I found out that God was white, and a man, I lost interest. Alice Walker (1944– ), U.S. novelist and poet.