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The War Prayer

Mark Twain saw the pernicious sproutings of American imperialism during the Spanish-American War. He recognized the ways in which militarism was sanctified and peacemakers were vilified, and in 1904 he wrote a prose poem called "The War Prayer." Kevin Drum (to whom my hat is tipped) picks up the story:

[Twain's] family begged him not to publish it, his friends advised him to bury it, and his publisher rejected it, thinking it too inflammatory for the times. Twain agreed, but instructed that it be published after his death, saying famously:

None but the dead are permitted to tell the truth.

"The War Prayer" was eventually published after World War I, when its message was more in tune with the times.  Now, Washington Monthly's publisher, Markos Kounalakis, who was affected by Twain's words when he covered the war in Yugoslavia in the early 90s, has made "The War Prayer" into a short video for release this Memorial Day weekend. It features stunning illustrations by Akis Dimitrakopoulos and is narrated by Peter Coyote, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Erik Bauersfeld.

Here it is, 14 minutes of scathing realism, more relevant than ever after 103 years:

The prayer ends with these chilling words:

O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it -- for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.

How Would Jesus Vote?

One week until the midterm elections, and at least a quarter of American voters are asking themselves, "How would Jesus vote?" It's a question with many answers, since each person tends to create a savior in his or her own image. (What a surprise—Jesus agrees with my electoral choices!)

More disturbingly, to pose the question at all is to undermine the historical wall that divides church and state, thereby weakening both. If a particular brand of religion is favored by the state this year, there is nothing to bar its disfavor when another brand gains power next year. (How would Vishnu vote?) As for the state, since a functioning democracy depends on the rule of law, open debate, compromise, majority rule, and minority rights, it is likely to founder if certain citizens demand privileged status for their ideas because they are divinely ordained. (Jesus has commanded me to kill Zoroastrians!)

Even if the question were benign, there remains the impossibility of establishing exactly who Jesus was. Albert Schweitzer, writing about the subject a century ago, concluded that the historical person Jesus ben Joseph was a rabbi with an eschatological message (The end is near!), who created an ethical system intended to function for the brief period that remained from the reign of Augustus until the end of time. Not long, just a few years. For such a teacher, it logically followed that one should not waste time making long-term plans for life on earth, "where moth and rust consume."

In fact, however, voting is essentially a means of planning; I choose those candidates who, once in office, will make my life better by governing the state as I prefer over the next few years. I do not expect an imminent apocalypse, therefore I vote. The historical Jesus, if he were here today, would probably not be writing a blog about the 2006 elections or planning to cast a ballot. He would abstain, since he would have more important things to do.

But the question is not benign, and Schweitzer also discovered the reason for that. Each person who thought about the identity of Jesus, he realized, ended up describing a different Jesus, and each incarnation of Jesus strikingly resembled the person who made it up. The quest for a historical man-god was finally only a game of mirrors.

Take George Bush, for example. His Jesus is a warrior against evildoers who breaks rules in order to achieve victory, and he's in a rush because there's not much time until Armageddon and Judgment Day. Bush once said, "I trust God speaks through me. Without that, I couldn't do my job." Therefore, he requires no debate, no law, and no plans. In fact, elections are a nuisance, since God has already spoken, and George has heard and obeyed—in his own hall of mirrors.

Writing in the New York Review of Books, Gary Wills describes the theocracy that Bush and his zealous minority are now creating in the United States. The story is not a comforting one, except for those who have heard the same Jesus speak the same words. Bush is actively transforming American government by using methods based on his idiosyncratic conception of faith, rather than on the laws and traditions of American democracy. His approach is subjective and ahistorical, both politically and religiously:

The right wing in America likes to think that the United States government was, at its inception, highly religious, specifically highly Christian, and even more specifically highly biblical. That was not true of that government or any later government—until 2000, when the fiction of the past became the reality of the present.…

Bush promised his evangelical followers faith-based social services, which he called "compassionate conservatism." He went beyond that to give them a faith-based war, faith-based law enforcement, faith-based education, faith-based medicine, and faith-based science. He could deliver on his promises because he stocked the agencies handling all these problems, in large degree, with born-again Christians of his own variety. The evangelicals had complained for years that they were not able to affect policy because liberals left over from previous administrations were in all the health and education and social service bureaus, at the operational level. They had specific people they objected to, and they had specific people with whom to replace them, and Karl Rove helped them do just that.

It is common knowledge that the Republican White House and Congress let "K Street" lobbyists have a say in the drafting of economic legislation, and on the personnel assigned to carry it out, in matters like oil production, pharmaceutical regulation, medical insurance, and corporate taxes. It is less known that for social services, evangelical organizations were given the same right to draft bills and install the officials who implement them. Karl Rove had cultivated the extensive network of religious right organizations, and they were consulted at every step of the way as the administration set up its policies on gays, AIDS, condoms, abstinence programs, creationism, and other matters that concerned the evangelicals. All the evangelicals' resentments under previous presidents, including Republicans like Reagan and the first Bush, were now being addressed.…

There is a particular danger with a war that God commands. What if God should lose? That is unthinkable to the evangelicals. They cannot accept the idea of second-guessing God, and he was the one who led them into war. Thus, in 2006, when two thirds of the American people told pollsters that the war in Iraq was a mistake, the third of those still standing behind it were mainly evangelicals (who make up about one third of the population). It was a faith-based certitude.

I am certain of one thing: that we must strip these dangerous zealots of power.

Messiahs and Mechanical Bunnies

It may be that the best way to understand George Bush is as a superstitious, pre-Enlightenment literalist. He believes that we are in the "end times" and that the apocalypse is coming soon, whatever anyone may choose to do. Under the circumstances, the best that a human being can do is to play his predestined part in the unfolding disasters. Bush, according to this analysis, sees his role as God's chosen vessel to prepare humanity for Judgment Day. He exercises little free will, but within his capability he will do all he can to pave the way for Armageddon.

If this is what Bush has been trying to accomplish, he has been doing an excellent job. We are much closer to myriad disasters than we were on September 10, 2001—much closer to terrorist attacks,  environmental degradation, and nuclear war than before Bush exercised his limited, irrational choices. 

For Bush, rationality and pragmatic self-interest seem to be trumped by a millenarian certainty that the Messiah is coming soon. Understanding this fundamentalist mindset is essential, and Louis Sahagun has an excellent Los Angeles Times article on the Christianist movement, members of which breed red heifers and aid Israeli settlers in order to hasten the coming of a sword-wielding Christ. John Hagee, for example, is the minister of a 19,000-member church in San Antonio. Sahagun writes that, in order to do the will of his wrathful God, Hagee

has helped 12,000 Russian Jews move to Israel, and donated several million dollars to Israeli hospitals and orphanages.

"We are the generation that will probably see the rapture of the church," Hagee said, referring to a moment in advance of Jesus' return when the world's true believers will be airlifted into heaven.…

"I truly believe John Hagee is at once a daring, beautiful person — and quite dangerous," said Orthodox Rabbi Brad Hirschfield, vice president of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership in New York.

"I sincerely recognize him as a hero for bringing planeloads of people to Israel at a time when people there were getting blown up by the busloads," Hirschfield said. "But he also believes that the only path to the father is through Jesus. That leaves me out."

Meanwhile, in what has become a spectacular annual routine, Jews — hoping to rebuild the Holy Temple destroyed by the Romans in AD 70 — attempt to haul the 6 1/2 -ton cornerstones by truck up to the Temple Mount, the site now occupied by the Dome of the Rock shrine. Each year, they are turned back by police.

Among those turned away is Gershon Solomon, spokesman for Jerusalem's Temple Institute. When the temple is built, he said, "Islam is over."

"I'm grateful for all the wonderful Christian angels wanting to help us," Solomon added, acknowledging the political support from "Christians who are now Israel's best lobbyists in the United States."

However, when asked to comment on the fate of non-Christians upon the Second Coming of Jesus, he said, "That's a very embarrassing question. What can I tell you? That's a very terrible Christian idea.

"What kind of religion is it that expects another religion will be destroyed?"

But are all of these efforts to hasten the end of the world a bit like, well, playing God?

Some Christians, such as Roman Catholics and some Protestant denominations, believe in the Second Coming but don't try to advance it. It's important to be ready for the Second Coming, they say, though its timetable cannot be manipulated.

Hirschfield said he prays every day for the coming of the Jewish messiah, but he too believes that God can't be hurried.

"For me," he said, "the messiah is like the mechanical bunny at a racetrack: It always stays a little ahead of the runners but keeps the pace toward a redeemed world.

"Trouble is, there are many people who want to bring a messiah who looks just like them. For me, that kind of messianism is spiritual narcissism."

If we are approaching the last days, it is in large part due to Bush's policies and actions. His political narcissism is fed by his spiritual narcissism, his sense that God has chosen him for this apocalyptic task. Quite dangerous, indeed.

Fish Gotta Walk, Birds Gotta Fly

Another link has been found in the continuous (though punctuated) evolution of multicellular life over the last 600 million years. It's the fish that first walked, or more precisely the tetrapod that first struggled out of the water to make a life on land. Rex Dalton reports the amazing discovery in Nature:

A crucial fossil that shows how animals crawled out from the water, evolving from fish into land-loving animals, has been found in Canada.

The creature, described today in Nature [here and here], lived some 375 million years ago. Palaeontologists are calling the specimen from the Devonian a true 'missing link', as it helps to fill in a gap in our understanding of how fish developed legs for land mobility, before eventually evolving into modern animals including mankind.

Several samples of the fish-like tetrapod, named Tiktaalik roseae, were discovered by Edward Daeschler of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Neil Shubin of the University of Chicago in Illinois, Farish Jenkins of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts and colleagues.

The crew found the samples in a river delta on Ellesmere Island in Arctic Canada; these included a near-complete front half of a fossilized skeleton of a crocodile-like creature, whose skull is some 20 centimetres long.

The beast has bony scales and fins, but the front fins are on their way to becoming limbs; they have the internal skeletal structure of an arm, including elbows and wrists, but with fins instead of clear fingers. The team is still looking for more complete specimens to get a better picture of hind part of the animal.

Creatures with features of both fish and land-living animals have been found before. Fish that may have been beginning to 'walk' in shallow water have been found from about 385 million years ago, and fish with limbs that bear digits have been seen from more than 365 million years ago.

Specimens that fall into the gap, such as Tiktaalik, help researchers to work out the details of this transition. The newly found animal has a structure on its head that looks like a small gill slit that is on its way to becoming an ear, for example, and a long snout that would have been suited to catching prey on land.

"Tiktaalik substantially narrows the gap in the fossil record of the fish-tetrapod transition," says Per Ahlberg of Uppsala University in Sweden.

"Tiktaalik was probably an unwieldy swimmer," says John Maisey, a palaeontologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. It probably lived in shallow waters, says Maisey, only hauling itself on to land temporarily to escape predators. "Tetrapods did not so much conquer the land, as escape from the water," he says.

Many creationists and enthusiasts of "intelligent design" have found grist for their irrational mill in the fact that some fossils of intermediate species—"missing links"—have not yet been discovered.  But as Donald Rumsfeld once pointed out in a different context, "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." Now one important link has surfaced in the silt of Arctic Canada, and the already firmly established theory of evolution is buttressed with another significant piece of evidence.

The tetrapod fossil and the science that place it in a larger context do not, however, constitute an attack on the existence of God, whatever Christian fundamentalists may say. All the evidence now available indicates that Charles Darwin was essentially right, that life forms evolved over many hundreds of millennia. If fundamentalists think that their God was unable to create life in that way—that he could only have created organisms with plodding specificity, fish by fish and bird by bird—they are imagining a God limited by their own circumscribed understanding and by the proud notion that they know the mind of God.

It's time for creationists to struggle ashore and engage their own minds. Whatever one may think about the existence of God, the footing is more secure here on rational ground.

Quote of the Week: Jamie Raskin

A sharp riposte to bigotry, reported by Wayne Besen, author of Anything But Straight: Unmasking the Scandals and Lies Behind the Ex-Gay Myth (via Andrew Sullivan):

In Annapolis, (Capital of) Maryland, at a hearing on the proposed Constitutional Amendment to prohibit gay marriage, Jamie Raskin, professor of law at AU, was requested to testify and he did so.

At the conclusion of his testimony, a right-wing senator rose to say, "Mr. Raskin, my Bible says that marriage shall occur only between a man and a woman. What do you have to say about that?"

Raskin: "Senator, when you took your oath of office, you placed your hand on the Bible and swore to uphold the Constitution. You did not place your hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible."

The room erupted into applause.

Note that the Bible is "my Bible."

Primate Education

If a fourth-grade teacher is enjoined to "teach the controversy" about the theory of evolution, it's important to determine what exactly the controversy is. Among those who know something about evolution—scientists, for example—there is no controversy about its validity. Evolution is the rock-solid basis for the study of biology, and like any scientific endeavor it is always in development—or, as one might say, it is evolving.

Breakthrough of the Year

How important is evolution? The journal Science has just named the breakthrough of the year for 2005, and the winner is (fanfare, drumroll, pause): Evolution in Action. For 146 years, Darwin's brilliant insights and the theory he developed from them have continued to provide scientists with fruitful material for understanding the biosphere—and this year some particularly extraordinary advances occurred. Elizabeth Culotta and Elizabeth Pennisi explain:

The big breakthrough, of course, was the one Charles Darwin made a century and a half ago. By recognizing how natural selection shapes the diversity of life, he transformed how biologists view the world. But like all pivotal discoveries, Darwin's was a beginning. In the years since the 1859 publication of The Origin of Species, thousands of researchers have sketched life's transitions and explored aspects of evolution Darwin never knew.

Today evolution is the foundation of all biology, so basic and all-pervasive that scientists sometimes take its importance for granted. At some level every discovery in biology and medicine rests on it, in much the same way that all terrestrial vertebrates can trace their ancestry back to the first bold fishes to explore land. Each year, researchers worldwide discover enough extraordinary findings tied to evolutionary thinking to fill a book many times as thick as all of Darwin's works put together. This year's volume might start with a proposed rearrangement of the microbes at the base of the tree of life and end with the discovery of 190-million-year-old dinosaur embryos.

Standing Up for God

George Bush talks to God regularly, it would appear, and he seems to be pretty sure God's been talking to him too. Thanks to this close communication, he is certain that God has anointed him to be in charge of doing His will on earth, a huge task which includes smiting evildoers in Iraq and turning the United States into a fundamentalist Christian theocracy. As Seymour Hersh reports in the New Yorker, Bush is comfortable with the task he has been assigned:

In recent interviews, one former senior official, who served in Bush’s first term, spoke extensively about the connection between the President’s religious faith and his view of the war in Iraq. After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the former official said, he was told that Bush felt that “God put me here” to deal with the war on terror. The President’s belief was fortified by the Republican sweep in the 2002 congressional elections; Bush saw the victory as a purposeful message from God that “he’s the man,” the former official said. Publicly, Bush depicted his reëlection as a referendum on the war; privately, he spoke of it as another manifestation of divine purpose.

Bush's sense of being God's instrument allows him to label any criticism as the voice of Satan. He demands loyalty from his followers, because disloyalty to him is disloyalty to God. Since everything that happens is God's plan, any problems or apparent setbacks are mere milestones on the road to fulfillment of the divine intention. A few deaths in Iraq—ten more dead Marines in Fallujah on Friday, for example—do not cause him to reconsider. Hersh quotes a former defense official: "The President is more determined than ever to stay the course. He doesn't feel any pain. Bush is a believer in the adage 'People may suffer and die, but the Church advances.' "

In this context, it is entirely believable that Bush proposed to Tony Blair the bombing of Al-Jazeera's main offices in Qatar—after all, the TV network was not telling the story Bush (and God) wanted to hear. The governments of the US and the UK have refused to answer questions about this report, and that reluctance makes it more credible. Wadah Khanfar, the director general of Al-Jazeera, wrote an open letter to Bush and Blair in the Guardian. He laid out the disturbing history:

Faith without Works

George Bush surrounded himself with African Americans and Christian symbols again this week. He does it every time the "compassion" he brags about begins to wear thin. And it's mighty thin-looking now, Lord knows. Hurricane Katrina and the rot it uncovered have made his compassion look worse than pure hatred from anyone else.

But Bush says he doesn't have a racist bone in his body. He loves all God's children. And Condoleezza Rice, tireless champion of African Americans everywhere, agrees; she knows that he doesn't discriminate against her because of her race. On Friday, reading words at the Washington National Cathedral, Bush said:

Americans of every race and religion were touched by this storm; yet some of the greatest hardship fell upon citizens already facing lives of struggle -- the elderly, the vulnerable, and the poor. And this poverty has roots in generations of segregation and discrimination that closed many doors of opportunity. As we clear away the debris of a hurricane, let us also clear away the legacy of inequality. Let us deliver new hope to communities that were suffering before the storm. As we rebuild homes and businesses, we will renew our promise as a land of equality and decency.

Bush refuses to recognize that the tragedy had three distinct parts: the storm, the flood, and the governmental response. He speaks only of the storm, that Act of God that he pretends caused all the suffering by itself. He ignores the flood, which was worsened by his racist budgeting policies and his irresponsible hiring policies. He ignores the incompetent governmental response, which was caused by his cavalier unconcern for those who could not protect themselves. It was God's fault, not mine, he says:

Through prayer we look for ways to understand the arbitrary harm left by this storm, and the mystery of undeserved suffering. And in our search we're reminded that God's purposes are sometimes impossible to know here on Earth. Yet even as we're humbled by forces we cannot explain, we take comfort in the knowledge that no one is ever stranded beyond God's care.

In fact, the harm was not arbitrary, and the suffering was not mysterious. It was not impossible to know certain facts: that hurricanes often hit the Gulf Coast, that they are becoming stronger due to global warming, that New Orleans is mostly below sea level and protected by inadequate levees, that many of those most vulnerable were poor and African American. Prayer was not required to discover those facts, just curiosity and rational thought. Relying on prayer alone meant that many vulnerable people were stranded beyond man's care and God's care. George Bush's shallow piety killed them. Cold comfort. Empty words.

Bush's words about poverty, segregation, discrimination, and inequality ring equally hollow. He finds these societal wounds just as mysterious as everything else, as though they too were incomprehensible Acts of God. But his policies have done nothing to heal them; under a regimen of reduced taxes, starved government services, reduced government protections, and carelessness, in fact, they have festered uncontrollably. And now, among his first acts in rebuilding the afflicted area, Bush has issued an edict reducing the wages of most workers who will be involved (see Josh Marshall for more details).

It doesn't matter how many black extras Bush includes in his cinematic photo ops, the effect of his policies is uniformly racist. It doesn't matter how many comfortable words and pious sentiments he reads, what Bush does every day as president makes life progressively more difficult for African Americans, particularly those who are poor. As Bishop John Chane said at that same Washington service, "Our Lord Jesus reminds us that faith without works is nothing."

Cornel West, writing in the Observer, has thought about works—and how they translate into accountability:

In the end George Bush has to take responsibility. When Kanye West said the President does not care about black people, he was right, although the effects of his policies are different from what goes on in his soul. You have to distinguish between a racist intent and the racist consequences of his policies. Bush is still a 'frat boy', making jokes and trying to please everyone while the Neanderthals behind him push him more to the right.

Poverty has increased for the last four or five years. A million more Americans became poor last year, even as the super-wealthy became much richer. So where is the trickle-down, the equality of opportunity? Healthcare and education and the social safety net being ripped away - and that flawed structure was nowhere more evident than in a place such as New Orleans, 68 per cent black. The average adult income in some parishes of the city is under $8,000 a year. The average national income is $33,000, though for African-Americans it is about $24,000. It has one of the highest city murder rates in the US. From slave ships to the Superdome was not that big a journey.

Whatever good George Bush may intend, whatever love may be in his heart, his acts are discriminatory. He can pray all day, but his works are the works of a racist.

Writing in Salon, Amy Sullivan distinguishes Acts of God from acts of human beings:

We can ask why God allows disasters like hurricanes to happen.… It is, after all, one of the oldest theological questions, one that has tested faith and tormented believers for centuries. The more pertinent question in this case, however, is not why God allowed bad things to happen but why the government did.

Jesus had something to say on the subject of human responsibility too: "Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me."

Robertson, Bush, and the Backlash

As the sign says, the sign carried by the bearded guy in the robe: "THE END IS NEAR!" Not the end of the world—as the bearded guy and Pat Robertson believe—but the end of our current attack of religious dementia in America.

I suggest this hopeful development because I think most Americans are essentially sane, and there have been so many insane things going on recently in the name of religion that I feel sure we are due for a backlash.

Pat Robertson's a good place to start. He's a big supporter of the Ten Commandments, you know. But as Paul Waldman and Jamison Foser write over at Media Matters, he seems to have forgotten a couple of them—most significantly the one that goes "Thou shalt not kill." When Robertson got a little frustrated with Hugo Chavez because the Venezuelan president was insufficiently obsequious to George Bush, Robertson told his faithful evangelical viewers that it was time to smite the infidel:

You know, I don't know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It's a whole lot cheaper than starting a war. And I don't think any oil shipments will stop.… We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability. We don't need another $200 billion war to get rid of one, you know, strong-arm dictator. It's a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with.

Well, maybe Robertson didn't forget the Sixth Commandment. Maybe his God told him that it would be okay to skip it in this one case, because Chavez supports godless Communism and Muslim terrorism (all at once!). He first denied he said it, and then he apologized, though he sounded as though he was merely sorry that anyone had noticed.

The Arrow of Time

The prospect of death drives everybody crazy. Take George Bush, for example. He insists that the best way to honor the 1,874 American soldiers who have died in Iraq is to kill a few more. Or perhaps many, many more—after all, once the next batch is dead, how are we to honor them? Obviously, we'll have to kill yet more on the sacrificial altar of their honor. And then? Jon Stewart may be right: we're not looking at four more years in Iraq, we're looking at forty.

That's why people like Bush are nuts about capital punishment, too. The state murders people to demonstrate that murder is bad. But logic has no place here. Killing the bad guys demonstrates how bad they are, and it rewards the vengeful survivor with a kind of immortality—since I'm still alive, I must be a good person.

But Bush is really feeling the weight of his own mortality, the speed of the arrow of time. He fights off death by exercising obsessively and avoiding stress. Nothing but bikes, vacations, yes-men, and adoring crowds—a bubble of incessant activity and steadfast optimism. But no coffins, no funerals. Denying death is like denying mistakes. It strips responsibility from unexamined actions and places him in an imagined state of perpetual youth, the stunted puer aeternus, separated from the reality of life because he cannot imagine its ending. 

Bush is not the only person who is fixated on death without knowing it. Think of the demented responses to Terri Schiavo, the poor woman whose brain-dead husk was maintained for years by machines. Those who fought for her artificial half-life were more fearful for themselves than for her, worried that when their own bodies stop breathing their identity will be snuffed out. They claimed to believe in an immortality that maintains the individual self, but their frantic struggles expressed the deepest doubt.

We are all limited by the ego, of course, and by our own short span of life. To one degree or another, we all think the world begins and ends with us. When I see photographs of the 1940s—the formal people in dark clothing, the cars stately and with just a suggestion of streamlining, FDR with his cigarette holder and Harry Truman with his walking stick—I see a modern world, gone now but familiar to me. Photos of the 1930s, however, are ancient history. In my ego-limited emotional timeline, the Great Depression and the Civil War are squeezed together in that barely differentiated era known as What Happened Before.

We think of ourselves, therefore, as much more important than we are. That narcissism, combined with the temporal myopia, makes it doubly difficult to think about time in astronomical terms or geological terms. The Big Bang was about 14 billion years ago; the earth formed 4.5 billion years ago. Those numbers are almost impossible to imagine from the vantage point of an 85-year life.

Biological time is also too vast for easy comprehension, and that's why so many people are crazy about the subject of evolution.Verlyn Klinkenborg writes in the New York Times of the difficulty:

It's been approximately 3.5 billion years since primeval life first originated on this planet. That is not an unimaginable number in itself, if you're thinking of simple, discrete units like dollars or grains of sand. But 3.5 billion years of biological history is different. All those years have really passed, moment by moment, one by one. They encompass an actual, already lived reality, encompassing all the lives of all the organisms that have come and gone in that time. That expanse of time defines the realm of biological possibility in which life in its extraordinary diversity has evolved. It is time that has allowed the making of us.

The oldest hominid fossils are 6 to 7 million years old. That adds up to 250,000 generations of our ancestors, and yet very few of us have known our great-great-grandparents, only four generations back. Even the short history of homo sapiens is too deep in time to grasp: 160,000 years is equal to some 6,000 generations of our close kin who were born and died, all in the era of What Happened Before.

If we can begin to understand our place in the universe and the brevity of our appearance in it, we may avoid the insanity of narcissism and its fearful consequences. Accepting death allows us to embrace life.