Vampires and Goblins and Demons, Oh My!
Davidson Loehr
28 October 2007

PRAYER:

Let us seek to overcome evil.  Evil isn’t as powerful as it seems.  Both the evil around us and the evil within us don’t get their force from a moral power, but from an unholy hunger, using us for its own selfish ends.

Let us remember that we can overpower most evil by staying grounded in life, in love, and in an unshakable sense of our own sacred worth.  For we are children of the universe, the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself, the sons and daughters of God.  Living out of that identity is living in the light, and evil hates the light.

Let us not be tricked into feeling unworthy of the great gift of life and love that connect us with our core and the core of all other living things.

One of evil’s worst tricks is making us doubt our own worth.  So let us never forget that we are as worthy as everyone else, that we are beloved of this place, and beloved by God, by all the gods of life, truth and light.  Let us remember this, remember this.

Amen.

SERMON: Vampires and Goblins and Demons, Oh My!

It’s Halloween and I want to talk about vampires.  Not those unimaginative literalist suckers who just want to drink blood.  I mean the far more numerous, and far more dangerous kind known as psychic vampires, who can suck the life out of you.

These people, in their more extreme forms, are also called sociopaths by psychologists.  They’re people who can do immense psychological and sometimes physical harm to others without ever feeling any guilt, which is what makes them so dangerous.  We need to recognize them, and know how to protect ourselves from the psychic vampires both around us and also within us.  For while only a few have a truly sociopathic character, we can all slip into this behavior, and it never serves us or others well.

It’s about the lack of a conscience, the lack of a capacity for feeling guilty when we demean or harm someone, and that’s a bad thing.  The very first personality disorder recognized by psychiatry – that means a permanent, untreatable character disorder – was guiltlessness (The Sociopath Next Door, p. 6)

Sociopaths are now estimated to be 4% of our U.S. population.  That’s one in twenty-five people, an incredibly high number.  It means that within the roughly 2.5 million people here in and around Travis Country, there are about 100,000 sociopaths.  Or that right here in this church of about 600 voting members and over 900 in the whole community, there would be two or three dozen here.  Well actually, there aren’t any here.  We have these invisible filters across all the doors, so that only completely pure and selfless people can get in.  Good thing, too – or this church would just be a representative cross-section of the world around us…..  These people are dangerous, but they are not rare.

Not all life-draining vampires are sociopaths, though all are destructive.  They’re dangerous because these are extreme, sometimes unalterable, forms of selfishness.  And selfishness is the cardinal sin of every religion in the world of which I’m aware.  You really don’t matter to them, except as you serve them and do it their way.  Your wishes, needs, spirit, soul — they don’t matter.  You’re a piece in a game they have played – played perhaps all of their lives.  And if they’ve played it all their lives, you’re not going to change them.

Stories of psychic vampires go back into our prehistory, probably six thousand years and more.  So people who live by draining the life out of others have existed in all cultures throughout history.  They can be immensely charismatic and seductive, and we seem fascinated by them in that disguise.

As part of my homework for this sermon, besides reading or re-reading two books, I watched seven movies about this character.  One was George Cukor’s 1944 classic “Gaslight” about a pure sociopathic character (an excellent and powerful movie in which a young Ingrid Bergman won her first Academy Award for Best Actress and Charles Boyer played her sociopathic husband chillingly).

The other six were all vampire movies.  As far as I know, there have only been six well-known vampire movies in the past 85 years.  In two of them, both named “Nosferatu,” the monster is presented without any charm at all: just grotesque, hungry evil.  Not surprisingly, both these movies, in 1922 and 1979, were commercial failures.  We like to see our evil sugar-coated. (If you want to see one of these, I think the 1922 silent film is the better one.)

The four commercially successful films were the four in which the vampire is very charming and seductive.  These include Bela Lugosi’s 1931 film “Dracula”, the 1979 version where Frank Langella plays a wonderfully seductive Dracula, and Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 version called “Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” where charisma and seduction are everywhere.  The most recent one, the 1994 movie “Interview with the Vampire,” carries sexy charisma to the extreme of casting Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt and Antonio Bandera as the male vampires, and an 11-year-old Kirsten Dunst is cast as a beguiling child vampire who will say “I’m hungry, and the city awaits.”  Yes, children can be vampires too, from very early ages. It can start early in life, and is found in all professions including psychotherapy, ministry, law enforcement, teaching and parenting; they walk among us and look like us.

If you’re interested in this, I’d recommend the 2005 book The Sociopath Next Door: The Ruthless Versus the Rest of Us, by psychologist Martha Stout, and Unholy Hungers: Encountering the Psychic Vampire in Ourselves & Others, by Barbara E. Hort (1996).

We now have quite a bit of empirical data on sociopaths.  By inserting a series of questions to measure along the Psychopathic Deviate Scale into the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI – it’s Scale 4 in the MMPI), psychologists have collected data from hundreds of thousands of people.  That’s where the data come from that say about 4% of our society are sociopaths.

The author relates stories of an eight-year-old son of very wealthy parents who used to blow up frogs for sport — I don’t know whether this was meant as a reference to George W. Bush, who did the same thing, or is just an innocent coincidence.   She also told the story of a psychologist who used her power to do great psychological harm to patients who seemed too smart or too pretty – and got away with it for over a decade.  Both these authors, psychologists themselves, make a point of warning that there are many sociopaths acting as psychotherapists.

When you suddenly realize that someone in your life is sociopathic, it can be a terrible jolt.  The scene that comes to mind for me about this comes from another movie that I saw when I was fourteen: the original version of “Invasion of the Body-Snatchers.”  It was the most powerful movie of my teen years, and for me even then, it was a movie about the difference between “real” and “unreal” people.  The scene that stuck with me – one of the most frightening scenes I’ve ever seen in a movie – comes when the couple (who know of this alien scheme for body-snatchers taking over the earth) are walking down the sidewalk with, I think, one of their uncles, or at least a friend who has known them all their lives.  They’re trying to convince him of this unlikely story, and he looks understandably unconvinced.  Then as they’re talking, you hear off-camera the sound of a car’s screeching tires, a “thump” and the cry of a dog, and you realize that a car has just killed a dog a few feet to the right.  The couple turn immediately to look.  But their friend just keeps walking straight ahead, unaffected.  That’s when I understood the difference between what I would call “real” and “unreal” people, and it was chilling.

These vampires or sociopaths are people for whom the life force – or even the life – of others simply does not matter.  It’s about control, persuasion, winning, manipulating, and the game never ends until they are stopped. And in all the mythic lore, there are no stories of vampires ever committing suicide.  Once they start feeding, they will continue until they’re stopped.

Why do they do it?  It looks like it may be about half genetic and half cultural.

The Texas Adoption Project (which followed adopted children for 35 years) reports that, where scores on the Psychopathic Deviate scale are concerned, individuals resemble their birth mothers, whom they have never met, much more than they do the adoptive parents who raised them (The Sociopath Next Door, p. 123).  So a person’s tendency to possess certain sociopathic characteristics is partially born in the blood, perhaps as much as 50% (The Sociopath Next Door, pp. 123-4).

Where does the other half or more come from?  It’s curious.  There are no data linking sociopathy with childhood abuse or attachment disorders. (The Sociopath Next Door, p. 134)  But it does look like our culture helps create sociopaths.

In America, the guiltless manipulation of other people blends in with social expectations a lot more than it would in Asian countries, for instance. Asian nations have traditionally taught that we are interconnected, and that we owe something to others, both through their religions of Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism, and through their secular cultures.  And in Asian nations, the percentage of sociopaths are between .04% and .13%, or one-thirtieth to one-one-hundredth of ours (The Sociopath Next Door, p. 136).  That’s a big difference, and a frightening one.  A growing number of our citizens’ bodies and souls are being claimed by the body-snatchers.

A lot of charismatic leaders are such vampires, and they’re easy to spot, though people don’t seem to spot them until it’s too late.  You have a charismatic vampire any time a leader or teacher sets himself up to be a conduit of wisdom, truth, or divinity that is not directly available to lesser mortals – like us. This applies to religious or political leaders, for instance, who believe God has spoken directly to them – but not to those who disagree with them (Unholy Hungers, p. 52).

Most of the vampires that we meet, though, aren’t this dramatic or large.  They’re kind of ordinary, though psychologists who work with their victims will tell you they do immense and lifelong harm. I knew a young woman who was a very bright girl, brighter than her sociopathic boyfriend.  When she graduated from college at the top of her class, her C-average boyfriend said, “Well, Sweetie, it’s a good thing that you’re pretty smart, because you’ll never be very pretty.”  That’s a vampire, sucking the life out of his own girlfriend.  When I heard this story, I wished it had ended with her telling him, “Look, Bucky Beaver, beauty is only skin deep – like you!”  But it didn’t end that way.  His remark took life from her, that she didn’t get back for many years.

Then there are the more passive-aggressive vampires – probably my least favorite type – who make others serve their desires by hanging around like bats, poisoning the air, making the place toxic until people finally decide to give in so they can have some peace.  These people aren’t just passive-aggressive selfish pests; they are vampires, because they don’t care at all – or even notice – the wishes, needs or values of anyone else.  Others exist only to serve their wishes.  This has to begin sounding more familiar, doesn’t it?   They’re just not rare.

Some of these vampires, goblins and demons do it through outright power and charisma.  Others do it through evoking pity, which makes people let them get away with murder.  Pitying someone can blind us to the fact that they use that pity to paralyze us while they behave badly again and again.  Pity is like the anesthetic that lets the operation happen.

One author says that the combination of consistently bad, selfish or demeaning behavior with frequent plays for your pity is as close to a warning mark on a sociopath’s forehead as you will ever be given (The Sociopath Next Door, p. 109).

The best-known example is the battering husband who sits at the table crying, head in hands after beating her again, apologizing, saying it will never happen again.  But it will  (The Sociopath Next Door, p. 108).

The pity play is used to wipe the slate clean so they can begin the cycle of hurting and repenting again.  The crocodile tears come not from deep feeling but from a deep kind of scheming.

How do you spot Vampires?  What can you do?
The clearest way to know that you have been in the presence of a vampire or a sociopath is a feeling of shameful insufficiency.  We should look around for a psychic vampire whenever we feel that we are somehow flawed – not because of what we’ve done, but because of who we inherently are (or are not).  We feel we are not good enough, or thin or smart or sexy enough:  “Well, Sweetie, it’s a good thing you’re pretty smart because you’ll never be very pretty.” (Unholy Hungers, p. 15)   Whenever we experience this feeling of shameful insufficiency, we have probably been the victim of a psychic vampire (Unholy Hungers, p. 16).  They can be parents, relatives, friends, teachers, ministers, psychotherapists, spouses, children – anyone.

For a long time, I’ve had a mental image of a sociopath that has helped me understand them, and might be useful to you.  I learned it from a psychologist I knew when I was 21.  We were talking about a very pretty woman we both knew who was a striking example of this style – very quick, witty, seductive, and manipulative.  At one point, I said, “You’re a psychologist.  Can’t you people fix her?”  He said, “You have the wrong picture.  You’re picturing people like this as a very nice house which has a big gap in its foundation, and you wonder if the gap can’t just be bricked up.  But no.  Instead, imagine a building – several stories tall – that is very strong and attractive, with a foundation that goes fairly deep, but which is built at a twenty-degree angle.  It’s stronger than most of the buildings around it, but dangerous for anyone who runs into it the wrong way.”

So you have probably been around a psychic vampire or sociopath if you leave feeling deeply unworthy, insufficient, flawed.  Or if they have this cycle of demeaning or vicious behavior, followed by dramatic apologies that let you feel sorry for them so they can begin the cycle again – which they will.  Or if they’re the passive kind that hang around like bats, making the psychic atmosphere toxic until they get their way.

Now the question that’s in every vampire movie: how do you kill a vampire?  Understand I am not talking about physically killing something or someone – just ending their ability to drain your life and the life of others.  And I don’t just mean other people who are vampires.  We can also fall into this drive for power over others at all costs.

One psychiatrist I’ve read has said, “I am convinced that we enter the world seeking love, and when we don’t find love, we settle for power.” (Jean Shinoda Bolen, quoted in Unholy Hungers, p. 17).

That seems right to me too.  So killing an inner vampire means we need to go back to the moment when we couldn’t find love and settled for exploitation (Unholy Hungers, pp. 215-216).

The vampire myths are helpful in telling us how to kill psychic vampires.  They say that the most desirable woods from which to fashion the stake to kill a vampire are hawthorn and ash.  Hawthorn blooms early in the spring, and its bloom signals the beginning of spring’s rebirth from winter’s death – a regenerative moment that would be odious to a vampire.  Ash is the wood of Yggdrasil, the tree of Norse mythology from which all life was created (Unholy Hungers, p. 60).  So the enemy of the destroyer of life is life itself, renewed and refocused around a living center inside of us.

And that brings us back to church.

This is where honest religion can help, because its job is to help us find and reconnect with healthy life, to be filled by it.  And religion is part of almost all the vampire stories, where they say a cross or a consecrated wafer is something vampires can’t stand.  The reason the cross and the consecrated host worked against vampires was because those were seen as the symbols of the sacred.  But the most recent vampire movies (since 1979) make it clear that these things don’t really have any power.  In “Interview with the Vampire” they acknowledge that those are myths made up by Bram Stoker a century ago.  That’s really a measure of religion’s loss of respect over the past fifty years or so.  But what’s right about this is that when we are connected to what is holy and gives us life, or when we are serving our calling, doing what we are meant to do, we are nearly immune to the power of a vampire because he or she has nothing important to offer us: we already have life, which is what they don’t have.  The myths call vampires “the undead,” but they’re also “the non-living.”

So: do the sociopaths win?  Is life really stacked in favor of those who can take advantage of it?  Are the rest of us – as sociopaths believe – just fools for valuing feelings and love, which make us so easy for them to take advantage of?  Do they win?  No, they don’t win.   Martha Stout, the author of The Sociopath Next Door, sums it up in a way worth repeating:

   “One study found 75% of sociopaths were dependent on alcohol, and 50% on other drugs, to dilute the boredom (The Sociopath Next Door, p. 187).“Sociopaths cannot love, by definition they do hot have higher values, and they almost never feel comfortable in their own skins.  They are loveless, amoral, and chronically bored, even the few who become rich and powerful (The Sociopath Next Door, p. 188).“A person without conscience, even a smart one, tends to be a shortsighted and surprisingly naïve individual who eventually expires of boredom, financial ruin, or a bullet (The Sociopath Next Door, p. 191).“At the other extreme, interviewers talked with 23 people with super-conscience and selflessness and found they shared three traits.  (1) “certainty,” about what is right and what they must do; (2) “positivity”, an optimistic outlook; (3) “unity of self and moral goals.” integrating their moral stance with their concept of their own identity, and the perceived sameness of their moral and personal goals (The Sociopath Next Door, p. 194).“So my best psychological advice is, do not wish to have less conscience.  Wish for more (The Sociopath Next Door, p. 195).“Conscience is the still small voice that has been trying since the infancy of our species to tell us that we are evolutionarily, emotionally, and spiritually One, and that if we seek peace and happiness, we must behave that way (The Sociopath Next Door, p. 216).”If we can connect with our life force – our psychological immune system – we are far more invulnerable to psychic predators because what they offer is trumped by the life we have within us.  Some of you have experienced this when you were in a toxic relationship and finally came to your senses or stood up to one of these predators.  It takes some courage and heroism to defeat a vampire, but not the action-hero kind.  Even the vampire myths say it’s feminine energy that destroys a vampire.

There’s a great story Martha Stout tells about this.  There was a bully on a bus of middle-schoolers who was sitting next to a retarded boy, picking on him, making fun of him – something he had done often.  But this day, there was a young girl sitting in the seat behind him.  She leaned forward and said, “That’s mean.  Quit it!”  He sneered at her and called her some names, but she held her ground and he got up and moved.  Confronting a predator is like exposing them to the sunlight, and vampires hate sunlight.  Why, as we grow up, do we so often lose the courage to confront the predators in our lives, our relationships, our institutions, our government?  The people who habitually put others down and demean people or whole classes of people — why do we lose the courage to stand up and say, “That’s mean.  Quit it!”  To say it and mean it and not back down? (The Sociopath Next Door, p. 98)

Here was a girl on the school bus who knew she was worth something, that her friend was worth something, and she wouldn’t let a big bully pretend otherwise.

And humor has a lot of power to dispel the vampire’s strength – because it’s hard to be intimidated when you’re laughing (“Look, Bucky Beaver….”).  And there is something tragicomic about a person trying to live in a non-human way; they would have to be, and live among, an entirely different species of Snatched Bodies for it to work.

If we can remember a few basic facts, we can be protected from vampires.  First, when you identify a psychic vampire or sociopath, get them out of your emotional life immediately.  You may still have to work with them or see them at family or professional gatherings.  But never again give them any emotional opening, because they will use it only to manipulate you, and you are not likely ever to beat them at this game they play so well.

Just remember that you are a child of the universe, a child of God, and that it really doesn’t get any better than that.  You are not inadequate, not broken, not in need of someone else’s special redemption.  You are loved.  And love, fired full bore, will blow away the nastiest vampire, like a blast of sunlight.

It’s not too hard to make most monsters vanish.  Sunlight kills mildew, and it does a good job on our demons and goblins too.  But first, it takes being aware of them, and it takes the courage to confront them, like saying “That’s mean. Quit it!”

In the movie “The Wizard of Oz,” the monster is dissolved in an unusual way.  The wicked witch of the West is finally destroyed when a determined girl throws water on her, and she melts.  It must never have rained in the land of Oz, though I don’t think it was the water that did it.  I think the water was just stage business.  What dissolved the witch was a girl having the courage to confront her face to face, without blinking or backing down.  It took a girl who was not afraid.  The trick looks like magic, but it isn’t magic.

Ambrose Bierce, in his Devil’s Dictionary, defines a ghost as “The outward and visible sign of an inward fear.”  One lesson of Halloween is that most of our ghosts are outward and visible signs of our inward fears.  Other lessons of Halloween are that ghosts vanish when enough light is shined upon them, and that fears, once faced, can be transformed into possibilities.  On second thought, maybe that’s magic after all.

Happy Halloween, precious people.

Honest Health Care
Davidson Loehr
21 October 2007

(Confession: Health care is a huge subject and I don’t know a lot about it. In order to get enough data to find some of the larger patterns in the U.S. healthcare system, I’ve mostly trusted just one book, in addition to whatever I already knew about it. That book is the 2005 book by Maggie Mahar, Money-Driven Medicine. The book was recommended by another author I trust, and her earlier book Bull! on the stock market received strong positive reviews from the likes of the Wall Street Journal and Warren Buffet, so I decided to trust her research. All page numbers refer to her book.)

SERMON: Honest Health Care

This morning, I want to engage in the unlikely activity of theological reflection on our country’s health care system and the gods we’re serving with it.

What that means is that when we’re serving worthwhile gods – by which I mean high ideals – they help us create more whole and integrated lives and a more compassionate so-ciety. And there’s hardly anywhere this is more pertinent than in healthcare.

Taking medicine seriously as an art and a science in Western civilization goes back to Hippocrates, the ancient Greek doctor who was a contemporary of Socrates. He was also thought of as a descendant of Asclepius, the Greek god of medicine.

When you find the Greeks tracing something back to the gods like that, it usually means they’re talking about some aspects of character, or a quality of ideals, that tran-scends and often commands us in the same way that ideas like truth, beauty, justice and goodness transcend and need to command us — or the way that anger, envy and power can command us. The Greeks were clear that not all gods are good – they’re just powerful and always with us. And you can find this in the ancient Hippocratic Oath, where he talks about living and working for the benefit of the sick, and he says, “I will keep them from harm and injustice. I will keep them from harm and injustice.” Those are high ideals. And when you are around a physician who serves the idea of keeping you from harm and injus-tice, you’re probably in much better hands than you are in with Allstate.

In the 1960s, a modern version of the Hippocratic oath was written, which is still used in many medical schools today. Here are some lines from it. Listen to how high it is aim-ing, and you’ll hear what gods, what ideals, are being served in this:

I will remember that there is art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon’s knife or the chemist’s drug.

I will remember that I do not treat a fever chart, a cancerous growth, but a sick hu-man being, whose illness may affect the person’s family and economic stability. My re-sponsibility includes these related problems, if I am to care adequately for the sick.

I will prevent disease whenever I can, for prevention is preferable to cure.

I will remember that I remain a member of society, with special obligations to all my fellow human beings, those sound of mind and body as well as the infirm.

(Written in 1964 by Louis Lasagna, Academic Dean of the School of Medicine at Tufts University.)

This is a very moving oath. It is a religious oath, in the spirit of Hippocrates, making a vow to protect the sick from harm and injustice. I suspect that nearly every physician who took this oath at their medical school was both moved and inspired by it.

Now many of us may not think the current state of health care reflects these high ide-als, and many physicians don’t either. But I want to see why. I want to see what happened to the gods once served, and see what took their place, what is being served now, and how it has changed even the way we think and talk about health care in the U.S. Only a fool would try to do this in 20 minutes, so let’s get started.

Up until the 1930s, most patients paid for almost all health care services out of their own pockets. (Maggie Mahar, Money-Driven Medicine, p. 7) Doctors completely con-trolled which treatments and medications were given to patients, and at their best they were guided by the kind of ideals embodied in the spirit of Hippocrates. Hospitals were never – and were not meant to be – profitable, any more than libraries or public schools are meant to be profitable. We paid for them through our taxes, as places where our physi-cians could work, care for us, and help keep us from harm and injustice.

After WWII, employers began paying health coverage for their workers, and things be-gan to change. Insurance companies got into the game in a big way, and this expanded health care.

But once insurance companies paid most of the bills in the late 1960s, few patients, doctors or hospitals cared as much about what it cost. (p. 16)

Costs soared. From 1960 to 1970 the nation’s health care bill rose from $27 billion to $73 billion (p. 17). By 1980, it had more than tripled, to $257 billion (p. 22). In the next ten years it nearly tripled again, to $700 billion. And by 2006 it had tripled again, to over $2 trillion (p. 46), almost 75 times the cost in 1960.

The costs are now out of reach for about fifty million Americans, and not just the poor. About a third of the uninsured families in our country earn over $50,000 a year (p. xiv).

In a 2002 report Care Without Coverage the Institute of Medicine says overall, unin-sured adults face a “25% greater risk of dying.” That translates into about 18,000 extra deaths among Americans under the age of 65 each year – about the same number as die of diabetes or stroke. (pp. 201-202)

How did it happen? The short answer is that for our healthcare system, the Hippo-cratic oath was replaced by the business model, which began to take over in 1982. From then on, the goal was no longer better health, but “the rate of return on investments.” (p. 25)

The contradiction that lies at the heart of the idea of “corporate medicine” is that as health care has become a growth industry, “the pressure is to increase total health-care ex-penditures, not to reduce them.” (NEJM editor Marcia Angell). Like all business, health care businesses want more customers, not fewer – but only if they can pay. (p. 28) This is not about making us a healthier nation, or doing much preventive health care, because preventive health care doesn’t return a profit in the short run.

The business model is about profit, not protecting the sick from harm or injustice – in spite of the best efforts of our best doctors. In 2002 drugmakers spent over $91 million to hire a legion of lobbyists – more than one for every congressperson. The next year law-makers passed Medicare legislation pledging that the government would never attempt to negotiate lower drug prices. By 2005, the drug industry had spent $800 million on lobby-ing in just seven years (p. 52). Of course, we end up paying for this through obscene drug prices. They don’t do this for our health, but for their profit. The dynamics are those of a vampire.

Is the business model working?

No. As hospitals merge and are acquired, a lot of people make a lot of money on the rise in their stock prices. But as they get larger, hospitals don’t lower their prices to us con-sumers; they raise them. Consolidating makes them more powerful, not more charitable. Why do they charge more and more? Because they can. And under the rules of corpora-tions in America, if they can increase profit, they must (p. 289). There are legal cases going back to at least 1916 showing corporations being successfully sued by their stockholders for failing to maximize profit. Healthcare corporations operate under the same constraints.

But it isn’t working, for them or for us. In 2004, the Wall Street Journal reported that General Motors was paying out $5 billion a year for employee health care benefits – or roughly $1,400 for each vehicle that it manufactured. This is a major reason why GM’s profit per vehicle made in North America came to just $178. Chrysler and Ford both lost money on every vehicle that they turned out that year. By contrast, Japanese auto maker Nissan showed a profit of $2,402 per vehicle, while Toyota made $1,742. (p. xv)

“Japan, like most industrialized nations, has national health insurance,” the Wall Street Journal said in 2004. And while providing coverage for all of its citizens, Japan “spends about half as much on health care as a percentage of GDP, yet has a higher life ex-pectancy at birth and a lower infant mortality rate.” (p. xv)

A 2003 study published in Annals of Internal Medicine says “Higher spending did not result in higher quality care, lower mortality, better function outcomes, or greater patient satisfaction.” (p. 162) “At the top level, outcomes are worse. This is a frightening finding.” (Dr. Donald Berwisk, cofounder of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, 2003 – p. 162) So we’ll look into the dark side of our health care for a few minutes.

Medicare claims data from 1998-2001, for example, shows Texas to be the state spend-ing the second-highest amount per capita (just under an average of $8,000, second only to Louisiana), and having the 3rd lowest quality of health care in the US (Mississippi and Lou-isiana) (p. 166) When you’re only ahead of Mississippi and Louisiana, that’s not good.

The best available evidence suggests that up to one out of every three health care dol-lars is squandered on unnecessary tests, unproven procedures, and overpriced drugs and devices that too often are no better than the less expensive products that they have re-placed. (p. xviii) That means that the best available evidence says that last year we squan-dered about $650 billion dollars – money that we’re all paying for, through higher taxes and insurance premiums.

Let’s ask some more blunt, rude questions. We have billions of dollars of very high-tech diagnostic machines. Have they made a significant difference? This is one of the more upsetting things I’ve read. When patients die in the hospital, autopsies reveal major misdiagnoses were made about 40 percent of the time, according to three studies done in 1998 and 1999. And in about one-third of those cases the patient would have been ex-pected to live if proper treatment had been administered. So in spite of all our expensive modern diagnostic imaging techniques, autopsy studies say that medical misdiagnosis of terminally ill patients has not improved since at least 1938. (p. 189)

So we not only get the diagnosis wrong in two out of five of our patients who die, but we have also failed to improve over time. This sounds preposterous, so to test it, a group of Harvard doctors did a major study to see if it could possibly be true. They went back into their hospital records to see how often autopsies picked up missed diagnoses in 1960 and 1970, before the advent of CT ultrasound nuclear scanning and other technologies, and then they checked the records for 1980, after those technologies became popular. To their dismay, “the researchers found no improvement. Regardless of the decade, physicians missed a quarter of fatal infections, a third of heart attacks and almost two-thirds of pul-monary emboli in their patients who died” (p. 190). Some of this is just saying that medi-cine is as flawed as any other human endeavor. But it’s not the picture we’re used to.

Data from the National Cancer Institute talk about what they call PSA blood testing in men for prostate cancer. While screening has led to a dramatic rise in the number of new cases of prostate cancer that are detected, as of the fall of 2005 there was still no evidence that the screening has led to fewer deaths. (p. 230) People just know they have prostate cancer longer.

Several years ago, (2001) the Institute of Medicine shocked the medical world by show-ing that it can take 15 to 20 years for new scientific knowledge to percolate down into eve-ryday medical practice. (243)

Why don’t doctors know everything? One reason is that there are now about 23,000 medical journals published each year. Nobody can be entirely current (p. 243). Without a comprehensive, shared online database of best practices and patients’ records – like sev-eral other countries have had for years – our doctors can’t be as well informed as they want and need to be.

So we pay too much, see a third of it squandered, and don’t get world-class health care anyway. The business model for running health care is failing miserably, no matter how much profit some people made from it for awhile.

What do the spokespeople for the business model of health care say to this? Do they talk about the money squandered on far more tests and procedures than are needed? No. Do they talk about the stunningly high prices of drugs in this country – far higher than anywhere else in the world – or the fact that drug companies have spent nearly a billion dollars buying congresspeople to make sure we won’t control their greed? No, they don’t talk about that. Or that a huge part of the squandered money each year comes from too many hospitals duplicating expensive equipment, ordering money-making tests that aren’t needed, and spending tens or hundreds of millions of dollars competing against each other?

No, they don’t talk about that. What they tend to talk about is how it’s our fault. It’s the fault of people who want all kinds of medical care done for them, especially when they’re old. In fact, this is the bias that looks like it will be behind nearly all of the ques-tions that I and three other ministers will be asked in a few hours, in the panel discussion on end-of-life care, which they have titled “When is enough enough?” The draft questions we saw at a lunch meeting on Thursday were asking us to find theological arguments to convince people they shouldn’t be so greedy for so much health care, and remind them of the biblical injunction to humility. I think the arrogance of this is almost as repulsive as the pathological greed behind it.

(The panel discussion actually went very well. Though the questions were often com-ing from a profit motive and trying to blame patients, the four panelists all got to point it out – to the satisfaction or delight of the audience of about 250.)

Sure, the system is broken, but you don’t try to fix it on the backs of the most vulnerable patients. (p. 204)

In 2006, meanwhile, drugmakers and device makers took in well over $300 billion – or about 15% of the nation’s health care dollars (p. 285). And another 18,000 people died because they were uninsured.

What do we need to do? Well, far more than I am aware of. It’s a discussion that will have to involve a lot of people from a lot of areas. But I feel pretty sure about two things we need to do.

The first is once more to empower the doctors to determine what care patients need, rather than hospitals or insurance companies. Neither insurance companies nor healthcare corporations have either the expertise or the right allegiance to make health care decisions. We need to control drug prices and regulate drug company advertising di-rectly to customers. Famous cases like Phen-Fen, Vioxx and pacemakers the manufactur-ers knew to be faulty and deadly, as well as spending nearly a billion dollars to buy con-gresspeople have shown they will eagerly do us harm and injustice if there’s enough money to be made.

What does honest religion say about this today? The same thing its best voices have said for a couple thousand years. The prophet Amos lived three hundred years before Hip-pocrates. Here’s some of what he said about the ideals being served by the priests and poli-ticians of his time:

“They sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of shoes; they trample the head of the poor into the dust and push the afflicted out of the way.” (Amos 2:6-7)

Or as Hippocrates might have said, they do harm and injustice to them because they can turn a profit.

How far we have fallen, it seems, from the oath to help keep the sick from harm and injustice!

We could and should talk at long length about this, but not this morning. We will be showing a special screening of Michael Moore’s movie “Sicko” on Friday November 2nd in our social hall, which I recommend if you haven’t seen it.

But for now, I want to close with an adaptation of part of the modern Hippocratic oath I read at the start:

We will remember that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon’s knife or the chemist’s drug.

We will remember that we do not treat a fever chart, a cancerous growth, but a sick human being, whose illness may affect the person’s family and economic stability. Our responsibility includes these related problems, if we are to care adequately for the sick.

We will prevent disease whenever we can, for prevention is preferable to cure.

We will remember that we are members of society, with special obligations to all our fellow human beings, those sound of mind and body as well as the infirm.

Above all, we will help protect the sick from harm and injustice. This we swear by all the gods worth serving.

14 October 2007
Davidson Loehr

PRAYER:
Let us give thanks for the beliefs that can unite people rather than dividing them.

Almost everywhere religion shouts today, its shouts fan the flames of exclusion, bigotry, hatred and violence. The hateful actions drown out the pious talk.

We shudder as we hear the shouts of self-righteous judgment and see the actions of bigotry, and our hearts shiver. Let us go inside our own minds and hearts for the more hopeful and peaceful messages we carry there.

Let us give thanks for beliefs and actions that can make us more whole, and let us be grateful that those beliefs have such deep roots into our very own souls. These are the “still, small voices” that can still offer us comfort and courage. Here are some of the timeless and universal words that come from that place. These were adapted from the prayer of St. Francis of Assisi, but our own hearts could have written them, if we but had his poetic gifts:

Lord of life and love, or all that is holy and good,
make me an instrument of your peace
Where there is hatred sow love
Where there is injury pardon
Where there is doubt give faith
Where despair give hope
Where there is darkness shed light
Where there is sadness, joy…
Let me not look for help so much as to help
To be understood as to understand
To be loved as to LOVE…
For it is in giving that we receive
In pardoning that we are pardoned
And in dying to small ways, we are born into greater ways:
The paths of peace, hope and love.

Let us give thanks that the words find such a natural home deep within our own souls, so that we may have them with us always. Amen.

SERMON: Religion – Bad and Good

You know, we meet here in this liberal church, along with about 1/10th of one percent of Austin’s population, and we can do honest religion, can talk about high ideals like character, can attack selfish behavior as the cardinal sin of all great religions. We can insist that all beliefs should be open to questioning, because honest religion is one of the highest callings we can have. It’s one of the best hopes we have of evolving beyond the “chimpanzee politics” of power that is sought for selfish ends, and the rest of it. And it’s all true.

But it can also be pretty naïve. Because outside the walls of this place, across our country and around the world, what the vast majority of people associate with the word “religion” has been and continues to be responsible for immense harm to millions upon millions of humans and other species. And if we just do our liberal thing and remain silent about the horrific abuses of religion, we become silent accomplices to the things done in the name of religion and its gods the world over.

While the worst forms of religion have owned the news headlines for the past several years, some new authors have arisen to attack the very idea of religion as a dishonest and evil thing. And at least five of these books have become best-sellers, read and discussed by millions of people. I can’t think of another time when so many books attacking the very idea of religion became best-sellers.

These authors are Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), Daniel Dennett (Breaking the Spell), Sam Harris (The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation) and Christopher Hitchens (God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything). This morning, I want to share some of their criticisms with you, because I think they are mostly very good criticisms. And even if you find some of them disillusioning, honest religion has always claimed that it’s better to be disillusioned than to be illusioned, because the worst kind of faithlessness is the fear that the truth will be bad.

There’s another reason for taking these angry critics seriously. These are the voices of some of our modern prophets, doing what prophets have always done. They come in from outside the polite little games of religion, saying, “This is nonsense! You people are hypocrites! You claim to serve high ideals, but you’re not! And we come to criticize your silly religions in the name of those higher ideals sacred to us and which, we insist, should also be sacred to you!” These are bright men whose values and beliefs are very close to those of most of us here. We ignore good angry critics at our peril – especially when so much of what they say is clearly right.

As Sam Harris says, “That so much of [human suffering] can be directly attributed to religion – to religious hatreds, wars, taboos, and religious diversions of scarce resources – is what makes the honest criticism of religious faith a moral and intellectual necessity.” (Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation, p. 57) I agree with him there.

All these authors are angry about the harm done by the kind of religion that gets all the headlines, and about the moderate and liberal religious spokespeople who stand silently by, acting pious.

Richard Dawkins ridicules the Islamic reactions to the 12 cartoonists whose anti-Islam cartoons appeared in Danish papers with banners including “Slay those who insult Islam,” and “Behead those who say Islam is a violent religion.” (Dawkins, p. 25) Let’s be honest: carrying a banner that says, “Behead those who say Islam is a violent religion” is both absurd and obscene. And for the record, it does not do any honor to Allah.

Another author lists a few examples of the warring due directly to religion today: The fighting that has plagued Palestine, the Balkans, Northern Ireland, Kashmir, Sudan, Niberia, Ethiopia and Eritrea, the Ivory Coast, Sri Lanka, Philippines, Iran and Iraq are merely a few recent cases. (Harris, pp. 81-82)

Another says Northern Ireland’s problems would probably disappear in a generation if religiously segregated schooling were abolished. (Hitchens, p. 261) And in Ireland alone, it is now estimated that the unmolested children of religious schools were very probably the minority. (Hitchens, p. 51) For far too many priests, the culture of systemic child abuse became the eighth sacrament. It is inexcusable for people in religion not to speak out about it under some misguided sense of banal sweetness.

The angriest of these books is the one by Christopher Hitchens (God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything). While he can be a brilliant bully, he has traveled and lived all over the world, done very impressive research, and seems as well-informed as he is angry.

He notes that both Protestantism and Catholicism – though mostly Catholicism – have been eager allies of fascism. Benito Mussolini had barely seized power in Italy before the Vatican made an official treaty with him, known as the Lateran Pact of 1929. (Hitchens, p. 235)

And the very first diplomatic accord undertaken by Hitler’s government was a treaty with the Vatican. In return for the concession of some privileges to the church, the Holy See ordered Catholics to abstain from any political activity on any subject. At the first meeting of his cabinet after this capitulation was signed, Hitler announced that these new circumstances would be “especially significant in the struggle against [Jews].”

German Protestants followed suit by publishing their own accommodation with the führer, and establishing what became known as the German Christian Church to support the Nazis. None of the Protestant churches, however, went as far as the Catholic hierarchy did in ordering an annual celebration for Hitler’s birthday on April 20th. On this date, on papal instructions, the cardinal of Berlin regularly transmitted “warmest congratulations to the führer in the name of the bishops and dioceses in Germany,” these congratulations were to be accompanied by “the fervent prayers which the Catholics of Germany are sending to heaven on their altars.” The order was obeyed, and faithfully carried out. (Hitchens, p. 239). These were immoral and ungodly acts of institutional cowardice, and you need to expect those of us in the religion racket to speak up, to police our own discipline.

The Catholic Church was equally involved in Franco’s bloody dictatorship in Spain – and is now paying for it, as the Spanish government is cutting funding to the church, permitting gay marriages, and saying publicly that it will establish a secular Spain. Throughout Europe, organized religion has largely died out since WWII, perhaps from a widespread reaction against the sins of the churches when they were offered political power.

Perhaps Voltaire got it right long ago, when he said, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities,” for the atrocities do seem to grow directly from the absurdities.

Short of the big-screen drama of war and fascism, religion can be linked to other forms of deep and lasting harm. In 2005, a survey was conducted in thirty-four countries measuring the percentage of adults who accept evolution. The United States ranked thirty-third, just above Turkey. Meanwhile, high school students in the United States test below those of every European and Asian nation in their understanding of science and math. These data seem unequivocal: we are building a civilization of ignorance that will disadvantage our children, and it looks like it is linked to the influence of religion. (Harris, p. 70)

Besides cataloging some of the physical harm done by religions, all these authors also attack the teachings of the religions as ignorant, hateful, and destructive of both human character and human society. They could have in mind, as an example, the creationist teaching that Noah had a pet brontosaurus. Daniel Dennett offered a very interesting metaphor for understanding how ideas – at least bad ideas – work.

You watch an ant in a meadow, he says, laboriously climbing up a blade of grass, higher and higher until it falls, then climbs again, and again, like Sisyphus rolling his rock, always striving to reach the top. Why is the ant doing this? What benefit is it seeking for itself in this strenuous and unlikely activity? Wrong question, as it turns out. No biological benefit accrues to the ant…. Its brain has been commandeered by a tiny parasite, a lancet fluke (Dicrocelium dendriticum) that needs to get itself into the stomach of a sheep or a cow in order to complete its reproductive cycle. This little brain worm is driving the ant into a position to benefit its progeny, not the ant’s.

This is not an isolated phenomenon. Similarly manipulative parasites infect fish, and mice, among other species. These hitchhikers cause their hosts to behave in unlikely – even suicidal – ways, all for the benefit of the guest, not the host. Daniel Dennet asks whether anything like this ever happens with humans, and of course it does. (Dennett, pp. 3-4) What he’s saying is that ideas work like these parasites in humans, driving us to serve the ideas — the ideologies — even at our own expense. And he’s saying that many of the ideas taught by the world’s religions are among the worst offenders, doing the most harm.

One famous religious teaching is that intercessory prayer works. Dr. Herbert Benson (author of the best-seller The Relaxation Response in 1976), a cardiologist at the Mind/Body Medical Institute near Boston, headed a $2.4 million Templeton-funded study on intercessory prayer. (The Templeton outfit, generally not respected by scientists, tries to save face for supernatural interpretations of religion.) They monitored 1,802 patients at six hospitals, all of whom received coronary bypass surgery. The patients were divided into three groups. Group 1 received prayers and didn’t know it. Group 2 (the control group) received no prayers and didn’t know it. Group 3 received prayers and did know it. (Dennett, p. 63)

The results, reported in the American Heart Journal of April 2006, were clear-cut. There was no difference between those patients who were prayed for and those who were not. There was a difference between those who knew they had been prayed for and those who did not know one way or the other, but it went in the wrong direction. Those who knew they had been the beneficiaries of prayer suffered significantly more complications than those who did not. (Dennett, p. 63)

This may sound counter-intuitive, but talk to any hospital chaplain about the number of times a patient reacts to their visit by saying something like “Oh God, I didn’t know I was so bad off they’d send a chaplain!”

All these authors ridicule the idea that the Bible is a perfect guide to morality. While good-hearted people can always find good-hearted teachings, the other kind also abound. If children get out of line, we are to beat them with a rod (Proverbs 13:24, 20:30, and 23:13-14). If they talk back to us, we should kill them (Exodus 21:15, Leviticus 20:9, Deuteronomy 21:18-21, Mark 7:9-13, and Matthew 15:4-7). We must also stone people to death for heresy, adultery, homosexuality, working on the Sabbath, worshipping graven images, practicing sorcery, and a wide variety of other imaginary crimes. (Harris, p.

And Christopher Hitchens asks about what the Ten Commandments do not say. Is it too modern, he asks, to notice that there is nothing about the protection of children from cruelty, nothing about rape, nothing about slavery, and nothing about genocide? Or that some of these very offenses are about to be positively recommended? (100) Is that too modern a criticism?

He says that as far as he is aware, in every country in the world today where slavery is still practiced, the justification of it is derived from the Koran. (Hitchens, p. 181) If this is true, this should not be the first time we’re hearing it. Religious spokespeople and the media should have covered this long ago. Maybe some of you will tell me that they have, but I’m not aware of it. Why should anyone believe religions have any good honest advice for living, if we haven’t the decency to point out the honestly bad advice they also contain?

What is new and different about these critiques is that they are also angry at moderate and liberal religions for their complicity in the harm and bad teachings done in the name of religion.

Sam Harris says that even the most progressive faiths lend tacit support to the religious divisions in our world. (Harris, p. ix)

And Richard Dawkins says even mild and moderate religion helps to provide the climate of faith in which religious extremism flourishes. (Dawkins, p. 303)

And there is indeed longstanding and widespread complicity with the worst religious teachings, among those who should know better. It isn’t just those we might consider fundamentalist crazies who support hateful and murderous teachings. St. Augustine thought heretics should be tortured; St. Thomas Aquinas thought they should be killed. Martin Luther and John Calvin both advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, Jews, and witches. (Harris, p. 12) If this is Christian love, nobody needs it.

When the author Salman Rushdie was given a death sentence by the Ayatollah Khomeini, who disliked some of his views on the Koran, the key religious leaders of the world did not condemn Khomeini’s order of murder. Instead, they said the main problem raised by publication of The Satanic Verses was not murder by mercenaries, but blasphemy. These included the Vatican, the archbishop of Canterbury, and the chief Sephardic rabbi of Israel, as well as the cardinal archbishop of New York and many other lesser religious figures. (Hitchens, p. 30) Let’s be clear: the problem was not blasphemy; it was the psychopathic order by a charismatic religious leader to murder someone who disagreed with his religious beliefs. If moderates and liberals want to be regarded as moral and courageous people, why didn’t they speak out? Many secular people did, but very few religious leaders.

More recently, in the wake of the Asian tsunami, liberals and moderates admonished one another to look for God “not in the power that moved the wave, but in the human response to the wave.” I remember reading some of these things, and imagine you did too. On a day when over one hundred thousand children were torn from their mothers’ arms and drowned, there is something very smarmy about moderate or liberal theologians pretending to find God in the actions taken by caring people in response to a destructive act of nature. It is trying to save face for their God, but more importantly it is trying to save face for themselves and their profession, pretending they are really still about something real and important that affects the world. (Harris, p. 48) I agree with the critics who find this abominable.

In the face of this kind of horrid thinking, as Sam Harris says, atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of bad religious beliefs. (Harris, p. 51)

All of these authors think religion should be ended as an unredeemable kind of evil. I don’t agree with them, even if such a thing were possible. But much of the developed world has nearly done away with religion. Norway, Iceland, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, Japan, the Netherlands, Denmark, and the United Kingdom are among the least religious societies on earth. According to the United Nations’ Human Development Report (2005), they are also the healthiest, as indicated by life expectancy, adult literacy, per capita income, educational attainment, gender equality, homicide rate, and infant mortality. (Harris, p. 43)

On the other end, the fifty nations now ranked lowest in terms of the United Nations’ human development index are all quite religious. (Harris, p. 44)

Countries with high levels of atheism, these atheists point out, are also the most charitable both in terms of the percentage of their wealth they devote to social welfare programs and the percentage they give in aid to the developing world. Or consider the ratio of salaries paid to top-tier CEOs and those paid to the same firms’ average employees in godless countries: in Britain it is 24:1; in France, 15:1; in Sweden, 13:1; in the United States, where 80 percent of the population say they expect to be called before God on Judgment Day, it is 475:1. Jesus is credited with saying it will be easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. Apparently, in the fantasies of many American Christians, come Judgment Day there are going to be huge herds of camels galloping through the eyes of needles. (Harris, p. 46)

I agree with all these critics that one of the greatest challenges facing civilization in the twenty-first century is for human beings to learn to speak about our deepest personal concerns – about ethics, spiritual experience, and human suffering – in ways that are not flagrantly irrational. (Harris, p. 87)

I wonder how many of you here agree with the general thrust of these critiques of religion? (About 80-90% of hands went up.)

So do I. Where I disagree with these men is in the matter of the definition of religion, though it isn’t a terribly big quibble. Some of them won’t consider Buddhism or Confucianism as religions because they have no official supernatural gods. And they wouldn’t consider what we do here to be religion either, though I think they’d like it. They don’t want to call anything done in churches that is honest or healthy religion, though some will call it spirituality or philosophy. I call it honest religion, but don’t really care what it’s called, as long as it can be called forth. And I think healthy beliefs are really far more widespread than these authors think, or than polls show.

There are tens of millions of people in this country who don’t believe a tenth of the official dogmas of organized religions, but who do believe in the basic decencies upon which we depend for a civilization. There are tens of thousands of people who believe the same generic things we do, right here in Austin. And these healthy generic beliefs we share also have a lot more healthy and fun humor to them — official religions are horribly humorless. So let me quote from a few people who have spoken from this more wise and witty center, and see if you don’t feel a bit closer to them.

One of my favorite wise quotes about religious belief is from H.L. Mencken, who said: “We must respect the other fellow’s religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children are smart.” (Dawkins, p. 27) In other words, we must respect other people’s religious opinions, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect their opinions about art, music, politics or football. What matter most are their actions, not their words.

And on the subject of death, since the fear of death seems to drive so many religions, I like Mark Twain, who said: “I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.” (Dawkins, p. 354)

And a very sweet thought from Emily Dickenson, who said, “That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.” (Dawkins, p. 361)

When these critical prophets talk about what they believe rather than what they’re so angry about, it’s easy to feel close to them. Here’s Christopher Hitchens, speaking for all who, like him, reject religion: Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake. (Hitchens, p. 5)

We believe with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion. And we know for a fact that the corollary holds true – that religion has caused innumerable people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow. (Hitchens, pp. 5-6)

There are tens of millions of Americans and tens of thousands right here in Austin who would resonate with these sentiments far, far more than with the hateful rantings of an Ann Coulter or Rev. Hagee in San Antonio who wants a Christian holy war to begin with our nuking Iran.

I would love to have all four of these critics in church here, where I could preach to them, invite them into an attitude of prayer, and try to sell them on reclaiming the possibility of honest religion, even while you and I would probably join them in rejecting the many varieties of bad and dishonest religion that most people of good heart and good will would also reject. And I think those four authors would like it here. They might even find a certain kind of good and healthy spirit move within them – and I think they’d like that, too. Honest religion is one of our best hopes for a more humane future.

Bad religion really is a mean and dangerous thing, and we need to say so when the occasion invites it. But honest religion – and it can’t be liberal without being honest – is equally a blessing to theists, polytheists and atheists, because it honors our heart without insulting our head, and knows that while we are indeed a mixture of good and evil, the good will usually win out, if only we will help it, and help one another. That’s good news. It’s also good religion.