Lewis Black on Creationism

Lewis Black explains why Christians get the “Old Testament” wrong. I explain how Black gets George W. Bush wrong—to some degree.

Here is another comedy clip, from Red, White, and Screwed, a video of Lewis Black in performance in Washington, D.C., in 2006. Once again, I have provided a transcript, so that those who like to remind themselves of the best bits, as I do, can have the words in print before them. And as in my previous posting of a clip of a comic in performance, of course, I advise all readers to watch the video before reading the transcript.

This performance took place during that dark age of recent American history known as the presidency of George W. Bush. The clip begins at a somewhat awkward point, in mid-sentence, omitting context that would allow the viewer to understand immediately what Black is talking about. I have therefore supplied, in the transcript that follows, the sentence and a half preceding the words with which the clip begins. (The complete version can be heard at 3:50 in this clip.)

I should have known earlier about President Bush, but I gave him some rope—a lot of rope, and then—he hung all of us with it. I should have known it when I heard him say, “When it comes to evolution, the jury is still out.” What jury, where? The Scopes trial is over.

I never thought that during the course of my life, a president would be elected who didn’t believe in evolution, or at least kind of in the ball park of it, or thought m-m-m-maybe it’s got some MERIT! But NO! He believes that the earth was created in seven days. Whew! Takes my breath away. And why does he believe that? Because he read it in the Old Testament, which is the book of my people—the Jewish people. And that book wasn’t good enough for you Christians, was it? You went, “No, we’ve got a better book, with a better character, you’re going to LOVE him!” And you called your book NEW, and said our book was OLD!

And yet every Sunday I turn on the television set, and there’s a priest or a pastor reading from my book, and interpreting it, and their interpretations, I have to tell you, are usually wrong. It’s not their fault, because it’s not their book. You never see a rabbi on the TV interpreting the New Testament, do you? If you want to truly understand the Old Testament, if there is something you don’t quite get, there are Jews who walk among you, and THEY—I promise you this—will take TIME out of their VERY JEWY, JEWY DAY, and interpret for you anything that you’re having trouble understanding. And we will do that, if, of course, the price is right.

Was the earth created in seven days? No. For those of you who believe it was, for you Christians, let me tell you that you do not understand the Jewish people. We Jews understand that it did not take place in seven days, and that’s because we know what we’re good at; and what we’re really good at is bullshit. This is a wonderful story that was told to the people in the desert in order to distract them from the fact that they did not have air conditioning. I would LOVE to have the FAITH to believe that it took place in seven days, but—I have thoughts. And that can really fuck up the faith thing. Just ask any Catholic priest.

And then, there are fossils. Whenever anybody tries to tell me that they believe it took place in seven days, I reach for a fossil and go, “Fossil!” And if they keep talking I throw it just over their head.

There are people who believe that dinosaurs and men lived together, that they roamed the earth at the same time. There are museums that children go to in which they build dioramas to show them this. And what this is, purely and simply, is a clinical psychotic reaction. They are crazy. They are stone cold fuck nuts. I can’t be kind about this, because these people are watching The Flintstones as if it were a documentary.

For me, the last paragraph, especially its last sentence, makes the whole speech worthwhile. But if the words preceding that line contain a serious error, does the worth of the speech as humor excuse it? I think not. Lewis Black is one of those comics whose performances largely owe their power to their truth. Of course, he often employs overstatement and fantasy, as around the middle of this excerpt; but he never, so far as I know, tries to pass them off as fact. So, as much as I relish making fun of the follies of Christian Biblical literalists and of former President Bush, I feel bound to correct Black’s lumping of the latter with the former.

Let us be clear that Black’s mention of the then-president at the beginning of the excerpt is mainly a transitional device, reflecting what he was saying just beforehand. He was talking about politics; now he wants to talk about the interpretation of Jewish scriptures by Christians, especially by those Christians who are Biblical literalists. Nonetheless, the excerpt begins with a misrepresentation of what President Bush, or rather, as he was at the time of uttering the words, presidential candidate Bush, said and meant. The utterance that Lewis Black approximately quotes was reported as follows in an article in The New York Times in October of 2000:

“From Scripture you can gain a lot of strength and solace and learn life’s lessons. That’s what I believe, and I don’t necessarily believe every single word is literally true. I think that, for example, on the issue of evolution, the verdict is still out on how God created the earth. . . . I don’t use the Bible as necessarily a way to predict the findings of science.” ¹

Black’s version incorporates a correction, probably made unwittingly, of the future president’s characteristic confusion of idiom. Bush seems to have conflated the idiomatic phrases “the jury is still out” and “a verdict has not yet been reached” into the mixed-up phrase “the verdict is still out.” This detail does not, however, affect the substance of the words quoted.

What does affect the substance is the remainder of the quotation, which makes Bush out to be less clearly on the side of Biblical literalism than Black would put him. In fact, it puts him on the other side entirely. Then-candidate Bush says explicitly that he does not take the Bible to be literally true in every particular, especially as an anticipation of “the findings of science.” He praises the Bible as a source of “strength and solace” and instruction in “life’s lessons,” and contrasts this with regarding it as a source of scientific knowledge.

One might go further in trying to separate Bush from Biblical literalists and creationists. For Bush does not exactly say that the jury (or the “verdict”) is still out on evolution itself but on “how God created the earth.” One might suggest that the “verdict” that he means is a theological conclusion on how God makes things happen from behind the scenes rather than a scientific one on how the earth and the living things on it came into being.

This, however, is exceedingly unlikely. Creationists have a notorious tendency to conflate questions of the origin of species with questions of the origin of the life, of the earth, and of the universe as a whole: “theory of evolution,” in their usage, often stands for all of these things. The construction of the quoted sentence shows the same confusion, or at least indicates that Bush is only concerned with the theory of evolution so far as it conflicts with the Biblical account of how the earth and what lives on it came into being. It is plainly on this conflict that he takes the jury to be “still out.” Finally, his words to a group of reporters five years later leave no room for doubt as to where he thought that there was room for doubt:

During a press conference with a group of Texas reporters on August 1, 2005, President George W. Bush responded to a question about teaching “intelligent design” in the public schools. The reporter referred to “what seems to be a growing debate over evolution versus ‘intelligent design’” and asked, “What are your personal views on that, and do you think both should be taught in public schools?” In response, Bush referred to his days as governor of Texas, when “I said that, first of all, that decision should be made to local school districts, but I felt like both sides ought to be properly taught . . . so people can understand what the debate is about.” . . . Pressing the issue, the reporter asked, “So the answer accepts the validity of ‘intelligent design’ as an alternative to evolution?” Bush avoided a direct answer, construing the question instead as a fairness issue: “You’re asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, and the answer is yes.”²

President Bush makes clear on this occasion that in his view the supposed “debate” concerning the theory of evolution and the so-called theory of intelligent design belongs within the curricula of public schools. It has to be presumed that he means that it belongs within the curricula of science classes, and therefore that he considers it to be a debate within science rather than a debate about science.

In sum, what George W. Bush said publicly does not indicate that he believes, following the Bible, that the earth was created in six days. In fact, it indicates clearly that he is not a Biblical literalist at all, and that he does not think that the Bible should be used as a basis for drawing conclusions in matters of science. However, his utterances also make clear that he considers the theory of evolution—meaning, in this instance, the whole enterprise of explaining speciation by reference to natural causes—to be a matter on which no scientific verdict has been reached.

REFERENCES

¹ Laurie Goodman, “The 2000 Campaign: Matters of Faith; Bush Uses Religion as Personal and Political Guide,” New York Times, October 22, 2000. Bold type added. A scan of the pertinent passage as it appeared in print can be seen here.

² Glenn Branch, “President Bush Addresses ‘Intelligent Design,’” Reports of the National Center for Science Education, 25 (2005): 13–14. For equivalent reportage see Peter Baker and Peter Slevin, “Bush Remarks On ‘Intelligent Design’ Theory Fuel Debate,” Washington Post, August 3, 2005, or Elisabeth Bumiller, “Bush Remarks Roil Debate on Teaching of Evolution,” New York Times, August 3, 2005.

Jewish Education in America: A Historical Note

Given the conditions of Jewish education in the United States, it is not surprising that so many children behave badly and learn little in Hebrew school. What is surprising is that this situation has existed for at least 140 years.

In a piece published on the Web in January of this year under the title “Stop Blaming Hebrew School,” Rabbi Benjamin Weiner responds to comments reportedly made by a prominent Jewish philanthropist in an interview on cable television. These comments included a characterization of the American institution of Hebrew school as “a shandah—an abysmal failure. . . . Can there be a worse term in the American Jewish lexicon than ‘Hebrew School’? There were six kids in the 20th century who liked it!”

Weiner contests the claim that Hebrew school has been a failure: “Anyone who has jockeyed disaffection with the Jewish establishment into a successful career of personal expression on the American mass-media stage . . . should reflect on the debt of gratitude he or she owes to this half-assed system of religio-ethno-cultural indoctrination,” he writes. But his main point is that “such talk, to paraphrase Tevye, blames the cart for the inherent lameness of the horse.” Weiner likens “the oft repeated claim that synagogue Hebrew schools are responsible for the decline of the Jewish people” to “stripping your parents’ house of all viable woodwork, plumbing, and appliances and then wondering why they live in such a dump.” He writes further:

What created the supposition that two to six hours a week of after-school guttarality could foment a firm commitment to the Jewish people? I don’t think this paradigm was determined deliberately from the outset, by committee. At the turn of the last century, there were viable models of Jewish education, and there was a critical mass of Jewish community prepared to embody them. And then there was mass immigration, and genocide, and breakneck assimilation—from a flummoxed traditional culture into a post-War America that was primed with petroleum to give Jewish people the greatest thrill ride they had ever experienced in a Gentile world. And, at the end of the day, Hebrew School emerged because it was the best we were allowed to do. Speaking, gloves off, as a working rabbi and education director, trying hard to find ways to reflect the “verbiage” of the Jewish religion “realistically upon our lives,” it is frustrating that, by consensus of the parents of my community, I can only educate their children for two hours a week with no homework, and that those hours come well after regular school hours, and that the expectations for behavior and attendance sometimes fall somewhere between a railway station and a monkey house—despite the fact that they are all, without exception, great kids. But this is roughly the extent of the concession that many American Jewish families are willing to make these days to their Jewish identities, and there should be a category of Nobel prize for whoever figures out how to put these parameters to the best use.

The point is that historical circumstances have made the institution of Hebrew school, with all its limitations, the primary arrangement by which Jewish parents seek to transmit Jewish knowledge to their children. The results are dismal because the hours in the classroom are meager and no homework can be assigned—not that having longer hours or assigning homework is a serious option, given that the sessions are supplemental to the children’s weekday schooling.

My attention was arrested by Weiner’s felicitous observation that “the expectations for behavior and attendance sometimes fall somewhere between a railway station and a monkey house.” The phrase seemed to me exactly to describe my own experience of Jewish religious education, and moved me to post a comment under the heading “I have long wondered why we all hated Hebrew school so much,” in which I wrote:

I am ashamed to recall the way that I and my fellows behaved in religious school. I had Sunday school at one Reform synagogue and evening classes once a week at another, with a different crowd at each, and we were all completely ineducable. As far as I recall, the only teacher who got any respect from us was a tough, sarcastic rabbi from Brooklyn (in Seattle, such a creature was rather exotic) who had a great knack for humorous abuse à la Don Rickles, and who would throw erasers at students whose answers he didn’t like. I can't speak for the other boys (I don’t recall the girls being as troublesome as we boys were, though they may have been just as inattentive), but I was certainly interested in the subjects that I studied in my secular day school, and it would never have occurred to me to misbehave in class there.

The puzzle is that youngsters who, in their daily secular schools, showed at least a reasonable degree of interest in their subjects of study and a reasonable standard of behavior became inattentive and intractable during the measly two hours or so that they were expected to spend in learning about Judaism. Weiner, though he notes this disparity, does not attempt to explain it.

Reader Becca Lish, however, does so in a comment in which she writes that the Jewish philanthropist mentioned earlier “might wish to look to the vast majority of parents who expect our children to embrace beliefs and practices which we ourselves eschew. . . . The degree to which we integrate ‘Jewishness’ into actual family life will always be the prevailing factor in determining both sentiment and practice in the next generation.” I am inclined to agree. In fact, just a few days before her comment appeared, I had written something in a similar vein in a comment on my own blog:

Though I was industrious and well-behaved in my weekday secular school, I and my classmates in religious school were rebellious, inattentive, and virtually unteachable. I think that the underlying cause was simply that Jewish observance played so little role in our everyday lives that any study of it or of the thinking on which it was based literally bored us silly.

As I ruefully concluded my comment on Weiner’s piece: “In my adulthood, I wish that I could have learned much more [about Judaism when I was a child], but I don’t know how anyone could ever have taught it to us.” The ineffectuality of Jewish education outside of day schools and yeshivot reflects the thinness of most American Jewish practice.

But why is so much American Jewish practice—at least, so much American Reform Jewish practice—so thin? I think it is thin because the underlying beliefs are thin; and I think that the beliefs are thin because modern scientific and historical knowledge has made them so. But I know too little about the subject for my historical speculations to be worth publishing here.

Recently, I have been making my way slowly through Michael A. Meyer’s compendious Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). The following passage—and this is really what this whole post has been leading up to—caught my attention:

Limited to a few hours a week, the religious school was unable to undertake the intensive curriculum which had been taught in the day schools. Most met as few as two hours per week. Hebrew especially suffered, students but rarely achieving any real competence in the language. While in the majority of schools some Hebrew was taught, it was often optional and in quite a few not taught at all. Children who behaved well in public school resented the additional burden of weekend classes. As one observer noted, comparing the two: “There attention and quiet, here indifference, often wild noise; there decent respectful behavior toward the teacher, here only the opposite.” (286)

I quote this passage here because, although it almost exactly describes my own experience of Hebrew school, it refers to the situation approximately 140 years ago: the quotation within the quoted passage is taken from a piece published in 1871! Rabbi Weiner, in a passage quoted earlier, claims that “at the turn of the last century”—that is, circa 1901, in contrast to developments in subsequent decades—“there were viable models of Jewish education, and there was a critical mass of Jewish community prepared to embody them.” I don’t know how to square this with Meyers’s historical account. If the passage from that account quoted above is at all reliable, then the ineffectuality of Hebrew school and the refractory behavior of its recipients are not only not recent developments: one could fairly say that they belong to a Reform Jewish tradition.

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