Gerry Dantone

Democracy and Ignorance

2010-03-27T16:45:00.000-07:00

A Harris Interactive Poll just released is frightening and sobering, which is truly an understatement. The Poll reveals that large portions of the American voting public have little grasp of some pretty unchallenged facts while holding some delusional opinions, to put it mildly.

The Poll asked some hot-wire questions: "... here are some things people have said about President Obama. Please indicate for each whether you believe it is true or false." You can find all the questions and a breakdown of the responses by political affiliation and education here: http://news.harrisinteractive.com/profiles/investor/ResLibraryView.asp?BzID=1963&ResLibraryID=37050&Category=1777

It apparently is pointless to prove how nuts some of these beliefs are since they have been proven false many times over, but since these beliefs are easily disputed, here we go again.

The Obama is a foreigner, Muslim, not legally president stuff which can be shown to be objectively false has been well covered at Snopes.com: http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/citizen.asp and http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/muslim.asp.

The other items in the poll are, more or less, opinions. Is Obama a racist, Wall Street catering socialist(!) who wants to take our guns and who wants the terrorists to win?

Take the craziest of the above ideas: let's say that Obama "wants the terrorists to win" is the craziest idea; why on earth would he want this? What possible motive could a US president have in wanting terrorists to win against his own country?

Could it be that Obama is a Muslim and, of course, all Muslims want the terrorists to win? This is simply another certifiably nutty idea besides being totally untrue in its depiction of Obama as a Muslim. In fact, I would bet that the majority of those who believe that Obama is a Muslim think that being a Muslim means being a member of a race, such as Caucasian, or that it's a nationality, such as Canadian. It is just ignorance, stupidity and arrogance.

Add to this nonsense the impossible to ignore real world escalation of American efforts by the Obama administration in Afghanistan to FIGHT THE TERRORISTS, then it becomes simply undeniable that this opinion is just crazy.

Yet 23% of Republicans believe that Obama wants the terrorists to win! 57% of Republicans, versus 15% of Democrats think Obama is a Muslim! In my humble opinion, it is obviously fine to take issue with many of Obama's policies. However to believe that Barack Obama (or George W Bush before him) wants bad things to happen to the country is idiotic. It is possible that presidential policies can lead to American misery, and they have, but even W did not ruin our country on purpose!

But the cherry on top of American and particularly right-wing insanity is the belief of 24% of Republicans and conservatives that Obama may be the anti-Christ. This indicates a belief that there actually could be an anti-Christ, which is crazy enough, but it also supports a belief that, conveniently, their current political opponent is equivalent to the greatest evil of all time. What could be more evil than the anti-Christ?

I'm sure that this kind of idiocy is not confined to the right wing; many left wingers shared extreme beliefs about President Bush and his administration, including the nonsense that he somehow allowed or planned the 9/11 attacks as opposed to merely being incompetent or ignorant. But it would seem that the left wing nuttiness was truly confined to the extremes. 24% of Republicans believe that Obama is the anti-Christ and 57% think he's a Muslim and 45% think he's not legally the president. This is no fringe movement - if this Harris Poll is accurate (it would be good to review their methodology which was not perfect but may not have affected the results) insanity is now a component of mainstream Republicanism.

Where is this all coming from? What is the cause of the outright rejection of obvious facts or the formulation of ridiculous and illogical conclusions?

Could it be the mainstream and acceptable indoctrination of the average person into believing the planet is about 6,000 years old, that the universe is governed by an invisible man somewhere up in the sky and that death is not the end for us.

Maybe this indoctrination works not only to get us to believe the impossible, but to disbelieve the obvious.

The Pope and Child Abuse

2010-03-20T09:04:00.000-07:00

It may appear that I have some special animus towards the Catholic Church but I have no particular grudge with them. I was raised a Catholic but never experienced any abuse. My experience with them was ordinary and mundane. They are simply the biggest religious institution in the world and therefore the biggest and easiest target. And irrationality is a staple of any faith-held system of belief or dogma which often leads to human misery. Hence the numerous comments.

Right now the Church is experiencing in various European countries the same scandal that has rocked the US - that of pedophile priests and the inevitable coverup by the Church hierarchy.

The Pope apologized in that special papal manner: The Pope said Irish bishops "failed, at times, grievously," and "serious mistakes were made" when confronted with clerical sexual abuse. He called the abuse, which was outlined in devastating detail in two investigations released last year in Ireland, "sinful and criminal." (Go to http://www.aolnews.com/world/article/pope-apologizes-to-irish-catholics-and-orders-vatican-probe/19407682 .)

But the Pope did not admit that the Church hierarchy had any culpability; the organized and papally directed obfuscation remained off limits and not apologized for. What else did anyone expect?

But the Pope went further; The Pope cited the country's long history of "persecution" and "recent decades of secularization" as some of the many cultural and societal factors that left Irish Catholics more vulnerable to "the disturbing problem of child sexual abuse."

So it was "secularization" that caused priests to rape children and for their superiors to cover it up!

It could not have been Church policy, could it?

From the Guardian: "Pope Benedict XVI faced claims last night he had 'obstructed justice' after it emerged he issued an order ensuring the church's investigations into child sex abuse claims be carried out in secret.

The order was made in a confidential letter, obtained by The Observer, which was sent to every Catholic bishop in May 2001.

It asserted the church's right to hold its inquiries behind closed doors and keep the evidence confidential for up to 10 years after the victims reached adulthood. The letter was signed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who was elected as John Paul II's successor last week." (Go to http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/apr/24/children.childprotection .)

The Pope is, in my opinion, a liar and, in my opinion, has been an active enabler of the sexual abuse of children.

ADDENDUM: 3 27 2010: (From AOL News)-- "Just days after Pope Benedict XVI chastised Irish bishops for covering up clerical sexual abuse in Ireland, new documents suggest he did nothing to discipline a Wisconsin priest he knew had molested scores of deaf boys -- and may have blocked a church trial in the case." (Go to
http://www.aolnews.com/article/pope-allegedly-knew-about-wisc-pedophile-priest/19414010 .)

While the media struggles to admit the obvious, which is the Pope has covered up child rape in the past, these stories just seem to keep multiplying.

I'm shocked.

The Pope's Silence: Fundamentalists Running Wild

2010-03-08T18:17:00.000-08:00

You know, I really wish that it wasn't necessary to write stuff like this. It is not a pleasant task to dwell on how immoral the world's largest religious denomination's hierarchy is, while at the same time noticing that other denominations and religions are, well, even worse!

Here's how the Catholic News Agency described a recent meeting of Pope Benedict and Ugandan Bishops at the Vatican in early March 2010: "Pope Benedict XVI met with the bishops of Uganda this morning in the Vatican on the occasion of their “ad Limina” visit to the Holy See. He urged them to be strong in renewing evangelization in the east African country and resisting "the seduction of a materialistic culture of individualism.'"

By "materialistic" culture, the Pope does NOT actually mean money or a possession-centered culture; as we all can see, the religious love money as much or more than the rest of us. How much money does the Vatican have, anyway? What the Pope actually means by a materialistic culture is one that is reality-based and not supernaturalism-based.

Great advice, huh? Who needs reality? Who needs a morality based on whether a behavior makes the world a better place? Not the Pope, apparently. He thinks we should just obey him since he has the direct line to God, like so many others.

And no, this is not the specific point of this little article. There is quite a miserable thing going on right now in Uganda that the Pope made no mention of in his meeting with the Ugandans.

From the AFP: Hundreds of anti-AIDS campaigners on Monday urged Ugandan lawmakers to reject a proposed anti-gay law calling for tough penalties against homosexuality, including the death penalty.

Around 400 activists presented parliament speaker Edward Ssekandi with a petition, criticising the bill as a violation of Uganda's constitution... But the parliament speaker said the bill had to undergo the due process...

The bill, which has sparked widespread international condemnation, would criminalise public discussion of homosexuality and could penalise an individual who knowingly rents property to a homosexual. It also calls for the death penalty for "aggravated homosexuality", in cases of rape of a minor by a person of the same sex, or where one partner carries the virus that can cause AIDS (Ed.'s note: The law does not equally apply to heterosexuals). Homosexuality is already illegal in Uganda, punishable by life imprisonment in some instances.

So while the bill to seriously criminalize homosexuality is working its way through the Ugandan government, the Pope chose to say nothing about it during his visit with the Ugandan Bishops.

Why?

Could it be that the Pope thought that opposing the law might somehow lose the Church some followers in Uganda or lessen the Church's influence with the government? We know from past actions that he is not afraid to interfere with the legislative process in various counties. In the past he's called gay parenting "child abuse." He opposes efforts to legalize gay marriage around the world. He's not usually reticent on such important matters.

Actually, the reason does not matter. What matters is that the Pope had a chance to do something good in the "materialistic" real world but chose instead to only address irrelevant spiritual concerns.

And here is the kicker: The Pope's crime is only silence; by speaking out, he might actually have helped some poor soul.

Other religious denominations however, such as fundamentalist Protestants and Muslims, are actually promoting the law that could imprison or kill gays. They are not fringe believers; they are in the Ugandan mainstream politically and are supported by a number of American Christian fundamentalist preachers and politicians too. While the American supporters are not directly promoting the "kill the gays" law, they are also not denouncing and disowning their protege's from Uganda.

Once upon a time, the US supported religious fanatics in Afghanistan who opposed the USSR. That turned out badly. Now we are supporting Christian fanatics in Uganda and the ugliness has already begun.

We never learn.

The Pope's silence is bad; and that's religion's best face on the subject. What a disgrace.

What is Love?

2010-01-12T14:00:00.000-08:00

"You say you're supposed to be nice to the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians and the Methodists and this, that, and the other thing. Nonsense. I don't have to be nice to the spirit of the Antichrist. I can love the people who hold false opinions but I don't have to be nice to them." Pat Robertson, The 700 Club, January 14, 1991

The above statement by Pat Robertson is perhaps the most illuminating statement I have ever heard or read. Seriously! This insipid statement by Mr. Robertson really got me thinking, and ultimately enlightened me!

Now in my humble opinion, Mr. Robertson, despite being a self-made billionaire and a former "credible" presidential candidate, is unbelievably stupid. As an aside, and before I get to the point, these two factoids about Mr. Robertson do not in any way shatter my understanding of the way the world works; idiots can become rich, either by luck or excessive risk taking which (luckily) then pays off; and in certain political situations and political parties, it's not what you know and what you can do that matters, it's what you say you believe. Pat Robertson fits nicely into such an understanding of the world.

But to the point; Mr Robertson's above utterance has profound implications even if he is unaware of them. What is love to someone like Pat Robertson? What is love to all of his millions of followers who have, basically, made him impossibly wealthy and powerful? Can you love someone and NOT be nice to them? Can you forgive someone while wanting them punished or harmed? Can you repent without making things right?

Can God love a person he has condemned to an eternity of misery?

The majority of persons on Earth are probably in the Pat Robertson camp on this and related questions, which is to say that they either haven't given this any thought or that their thoughts are incoherent.

Consider the Religious Right's typical support for the death penalty; whether it should or should not be instituted is not the question here. The real question is whether those religious persons who are "sinners" themselves (so they say) and who claim to follow a God who supposedly loves all of us should support killing a fellow sinner who happened to break a law. What about the condemned opportunity to repent and hence, be forgiven and avoid eternal damnation? Being executed could deprive a person of the chance to "be saved." Who needs this kind of "love"? Executions that could deprive a person of a chance to repent should not happen at the hands of a loving God or his followers, should it?

It does happen, however, and with a vengeance. The Religious Right are typically the staunchest supporters in society of the death penalty. And at the same time, many Religious Right types (such as ex-Governor Huckabee) seem to love those criminals who have repented and "found" God - even though these "saved" criminals are just as apt as to return to crime as those who remained "unsaved". This endless set of contradictions makes no sense, of course.

Alright: the Religious Right is both eager to kill sinners depriving them of their chance to be saved and at the same time loves sinners who did get saved before they died or were executed. Is this nuttiness confined to the death penalty? Do religious zealots believe in harming others generally in the name of God while doing so in the name of love?

How many religions promote harm to sinners, unbelievers and heretics and how many of the followers then actually do so?

From the Koran:
Sura 33: 65.
ALLAH has, surely, cursed the disbelievers, and has prepared for them a blazing fire,
33: 66. Wherein they will abide forever. They will find therein no friend, nor helper.
33: 67. On the day when their faces are turned over into the fire they will say, `O, would that we had obeyed ALLAH and obeyed the Messenger
33: 68. And they will say, `Our Lord, we obeyed our chiefs and our great ones and they led us astray from the way,
33: 69. `Our Lord, give them double punishment and curse them with a mighty curse.

Sura 5: 52.
O ye who believe ! take not the Jews and the Christians for friends. They are friends of each other. And whoso among you takes them for friends is indeed one of them. Verily ALLAH guides not the unjust people.

Now the above Koranic citation should not allow for any smugness on the part of Christian America. It was in California where many Barack Obama supporters helped pass a proposition last year making gay marriage illegal. The Pat Robertson "logic" was in full command of the situation even if Obama voters were in the majority. The problem was that a "loving" God demands that his "loving" followers not be "nice" to a certain class of fellow "sinners": homosexuals.

It is a sad thing to conclude but it's obvious: most people have a worthless definition or concept of love. It would then follow that the concepts of "forgiveness", "repentance" and so on, are also poorly conceived as well. I said that Pat Robertson's idiotic statement had profound implications...

Love should compel a person to be "nice" to the beloved. Love should preclude harming others when no just cause is at stake. A God cannot simultaneously love humans and create a hell for many of them. He certainly is a monster if some persons are pre-destined somehow to their hellish fate or if, as an omniscient being, a God knows, even before they are born, that they will spend an short time alive and the balance of their existence in hell.

Love may indeed be a "feeling" that many persons claim to experience; but so what? If I claim to love someone and then harm them, does it matter if I "loved" them or "hated" them? Answer: NO!

So "What is love?"

To a humanist who judges behaviors by their consequences, a loving behavior is a behavior that leads to the well being of those to whom this behavior is directed. This definition does not preclude the idea of "justice" which requires that those persons who have caused harm must answer for their transgressions in a way that most benefits the society that was harmed.

A loving behavior is not mere romance or the mere appearance or claims of love. Love requires loving actions. Love is being honest while diplomatic and courteous; love is being responsible and courageous; love is being kind, reliable and loyal.

Love is not a mere gesture; it is a commitment to a way of living. Yes, a good, useful love is difficult to express!

The idea that love is a mode of behavior is very humanistic since it is consequentialist. It is not religious or dogmatic since the facts now matter; it now matters whether a person's love made the world a better place or not. Whether a God was "pleased" or not is irrelevant. With humanist love, one MUST be "nice" to the beloved.

When Judges Give Religion "Respect"

2010-01-12T10:56:00.001-08:00

News Item: 1/12/2010 A Kansas judge's decision to allow a confessed killer (Scott Roeder) to argue that he believes the slaying of one of the nation's few late-term abortion providers was a justified act aimed at saving unborn children has upended what most expected to be an open-and-shut first-degree murder case.

Prosecutors have challenged the ruling that allows Scott Roeder to tell a jury that the fatal shooting of Wichita doctor George Tiller was voluntary manslaughter. A Tuesday hearing is scheduled to allow Roeder's defense attorneys to respond.

Some abortion opponents were pleasantly stunned and eager to watch Roeder plead his case. Tiller's colleagues and abortion rights advocates were outraged and feared the court's actions give a more than tacit approval to further acts of violence.

"This judge has basically announced a death sentence for all of us who help women," said Dr. Warren Hern of Boulder, Colo., a longtime friend of Tiller who also performs late-term abortions. "That is the effect of the ruling." Go to http://www.optimum.net/News/AP/Article?fmId=1702694 .

Think about the implications of this ruling: murder can be a life sentence while voluntary manslaughter can be 5 years in prison. And it all depends on "belief".

According to reports, "Kansas law defines voluntary manslaughter as "an unreasonable but honest belief that circumstances existed that justified deadly force." A conviction could bring a prison sentence closer to five years, instead of a life term for first-degree murder."

If this ruling by the judge is sustained, then every politically or religiously motivated murder in Kansas can then be argued as "voluntary manslaughter." If a terrorist kills an infidel, didn't he have an unreasonable but honest belief that circumstances existed that justified deadly force?

What if a citizen unreasonably but sincerely believed that the judge in this case should be killed? Would the judge say that was only voluntary manslaughter?

Make no mistake: the judge did not make a ruling based on precedence; he made a ruling based on his respect for religious belief. I'd bet that this defense has never been allowed when self-defense was not remotely involved (the murdered doctor was in his church at the time of the killing). What else could motivate the judge to declare open season on anyone as long as someone else has an unreasonable yet "sincere" belief that their murder is justified!

Here's my advice; don't make anyone mad in Kansas; it's only 5 years in prison if they shoot you.

UPDATE: Scott Roeder was convicted by the jury of first degree murder and in only 37 minutes no less. The judge, after hearing Mr Roeder on the witness stand decided to disallow the possibility of a voluntary manslaughter defense since abortion is legal and Dr. Tiller was not an imminent threat to anyone.

Huh? Wasn't this always and obviously known to be true all along?

Then why did the judge decide to allow the possibility of this defense at first?

The suspicion is the judge was just correcting an earlier error. Thankfully, murder remains illegal in Kansas.

Norman Borlaug

2009-11-27T19:16:00.000-08:00

One of the greatest men of the last century has passed away: Norman Borlaug.

Although his was not a household name, he deserved everyone's respect, thanks and admiration. All he did was save untold millions of lives.

"Norman E. Borlaug saved more lives than any man in human history," said Josette Sheeran, executive director of the UN's World Food Program.

As the population of the world exploded, food production was lagging; that is, until Norman Borlaug created the "green revolution," vastly improving crop yields and staving off starvation for so many in the last half of the 20th century.

Of course, nit-pickers existed; he was criticized for his use of fertilizers and chemcicals but the proof was in the pudding; people that were expected to die, survived. His genius in increasing yields was a gift; the population explosion that necessitated his innovations was not his fault. The alternative was mass famine.

It could truly be said that Norman Borlaug did the best he could possibly do. He will be missed but not forgotten.

Now if an atheist did this...

2009-11-27T18:43:00.000-08:00

It's just one of those stories that just seems too cut and dry; a perpetrator commits an unethical act and then explains why in unambiguous terms. Does this change anything for anyone? Probably not.

According to Newsday a couple of weeks ago a trio of men in Lakeview, Nassau County, NY, approached a man in a convenience store dressed in drag; the cross-dressing may have been in connection with Halloween, although this doesn't really matter.

The three men began to harass the cross-dresser both physically and verbally. Later on the trio encountered the same man now with walking a friend. They again abused them both physically and verbally, punching and kicking them, giving them bruises, black eyes and bloody lips.

Fortunately the police were able to arrest one alleged attacker.

So what could possibly have motivated such a pointless attack?

The arrested alleged attacker offered a complete explanation: "God made me hate gay people" was the answer recorded in the court records.

Here is the clear explanation for the obvious which most persons will completely deny: religious belief does not lead to moral behavior - it leads to obedience and obedience can lead ANYWHERE. If scripture calls for hating gays, pigs, dogs, shrimp, women, sex or asking questions, followers are expected to hate all of those things. And they often do.

Those that rise above their scripturally mandated hatreds risk ostracism or heresy. What they typically do, however, is reside in a state of denial; while scripture obviously calls for enmity against gays (and shrimp, pigs, etc.) many believers find a way to ignore the Word of God and continue to believe that gods are great even though the gods are simultaneously repugnant in their actual attitudes.

Imagine if an atheist were arrested and explained their attack on gays by claiming that a "lack of belief in god made them hate gays." Non-believers would never hear the end of it.

But since a believer said it was (belief in) god that made him hate gays, no one will notice it. Gods remain great and their hate mongering is ignored.

Separation of Church and State (only for Muslims?)

2009-11-19T15:26:00.000-08:00

On November 18, 2009, Newsday had an interesting story about a Mosque expansion which was drawing the "ire" of neighbors in a Westbury, Long Island, NY community. Why shouldn't it be controversial? The building that was proposed would be huge and the parking would be about 130 cars short of what the code requires. Many cars would therefore have to park in and around the residential neighborhood. A deal to allow some cars to park at a local church was being arranged, but such a deal is not "forever." There would indeed be inconvenience to the neighborhood.

Plus the building will be totally out of character for the area; original plans with an 80 foot minaret on top have been scrapped, but the building is still quite unique.

But this is not unusual. Churches and temples do this all the time to residential neighborhoods. They often lack parking; they're often out of place aesthetically. But you don't often hear about objections. The reason is obvious; no one wants to be seen as anti-religion.

Unless the religion is Islam.

Now it is the opinion of most, if not all supporters of church-state separation, that no special privileges should be given to religious institutions when building their facilities. They should have no special rights other than whatever other non-profit organizations have. If the Center for Inquiry must obey building codes, so should a church, temple or mosque. Most religious persons probably disagree; they prefer privilege for religious institutions.

Unfortunately, Congress, in its infinite lack of wisdom, egged on by an equally un-wise electorate, passed a law in 1993 that is plainly un-Constitutional, called the Religious Freedom Restoration Act which allows religious institutions to run roughshod over many zoning laws. It takes quite a court case to disallow something like this Westbury mosque to be built.

The residents of Westbury can thank those zealous anti-separationists for the cars that often flood their neighborhood. And perhaps it serves some of them right; I wonder how many of them would have supported this structure if it had been of their own denomination?

The Common Vices vs. the Common Virtues in Public Policy

2009-11-19T15:20:00.000-08:00

The Common Decencies and Virtues that humanists claim to promote and encourage include the general categories of integrity/honesty, fairness/justice, responsibility/courage and benevolence/kindness. These virtues seem so universally accepted and admired that they appear to be internalized in most persons – we need no god to tell us that it is good to be honest, kind, courageous and fair. Natural Selection has placed our appreciation of these virtues in our minds naturally. From these decencies and virtues we build a moral system and code of behavior. None of this is a denial that experience, culture and society modify our innate tendencies; it is simply an explanation of the universality of many moral values. It also is not a denial that we innately can also be jealous, territorial, selfish and lazy; most cultures and societies recognize the universal existence of these human attributes but almost always frown on these “common vices,” at least towards those within the society. However, it is from these in-born common decencies (if not totally modified/destroyed by our cultural experiences) that we tend to build our most admirable political views.

We should therefore form political policies, in other words, to realize and express our honest intentions, our good will towards others, our courage and our sense of fairness. Although we can honestly disagree on the ultimate policies due to the incredible complexity of human nature, economics and the uncertainty of the outcomes, we should agree on the following: the use of reason to solve our problems that the Common Decencies and Virtues have uncovered and have made us care about.

Yet it would seem that anything but reason is the instrument of policy making in our country (and elsewhere) and instead, dogma (which depends on dishonesty), ideology and blind faith are the cornerstones of most policy-making.

Consider the major life-changing decisions in the United States that have been made over the last decade:

The Supreme Court’s 100% partisan-line decision to not count allow a count of all of the votes in Florida in 2000’s Presidential Election resulting in the selection a Republican president. Numerous so-called “over-votes” were never counted.

The ideological decision in 2001 to give a tax break to the wealthiest Americans, wiping out the Federal budget surplus, while doing little or nothing to improve the economy over the long run, and more likely, harming the economy.

Medicare Part D, passed in 2003 and effective in 2006, which disallowed the Government from negotiating with drug companies to reduce costs, widening the Federal deficit. This was not a “courageous” decision.

The Neo-Con influenced war in Iraq and Neo-Con influenced abandonment of the War in Afghanistan, again leading to ballooning deficits, and a decade of pointless wars and the attendant misery with negative returns on the so-called “War on Terror”.

The push to outlaw gay marriage and even civil unions as an election ploy in 2004, even though the lives of homosexuals, who are American citizens, would be negatively impacted, and no one’s life would be made better.

The ideologically inspired lax or non-regulation of financial markets which have been notorious for serial failures and serial reckless risk-taking, leading to the recent near financial meltdown.

The torture and un-Constitutional detaining of persons, including American citizens, based solely on the orders of the president.

Not included in the above was the horror of 9-11 itself which was not a choice made by us, but instead a completely ideological and dogmatic action made by religious fanatics, and perpetrated on us.

I am sure the reader could add numerous other policies and actions that in no way reflected integrity, kindness, courage or fairness, but instead only ideology and dogma, inspired by the Common Vices. And now, with a new administration, the trend remains difficult to alter.

The bailouts to major financial (made just before the election) and automotive corporations have again increased the deficit, and although financial meltdown has been averted for now, financial corporations are still “too big to fail” and little or no reform has been instituted to change this fact or the excessive risk taking which is encouraged and rewarded by huge bonuses to executives. Unfortunately big business is able to funnel big money to campaigns which inevitably influences elected officials. Elected officials, who have made being elected a “career” instead of the “public service” it was meant to be, are all too obedient to their benefactors. (Public financing of elections, term limits and a more parliamentary system of legislation anyone?)

Health care reform is another area where the problem is obvious; our nation has the most expensive health care “system” in the world, but it is far from the best. Although one can have legitimate objection to the plans being proposed, what cannot be justified, except dogmatically, are the lies and hyperbole used to defeat all such proposals. A health care system even as socialistic as Great Britain’s has not resulted in their citizens loss of freedoms; yet some opponents of US healthcare reform claim that reform is a threat to freedom; do these opponents of health reform propose to repeal Medicare while they’re fighting for America’s “freedom”? (Never mind paradoxically that one of their arguments against health care reform is that it actually “threatens” Medicare.)

Somehow opponents of reform depict the efforts as both socialistic and Nazistic; yes images of the holocaust and Obama as Hitler are in full view at many protests, as well as the weapons on persons who hold signs that proclaim that it is time to water the “tree of liberty” with blood. Are they promoting the assassination of public officials?

It is also appalling to see how many Americans, spurred on by some of their most dogmatic, ideological and partisan leaders claim it is an abomination to try the terrorists who perpetrated the 9-11 attacks according to the US Constitution! They seem to prefer kangaroo courts also known as “military tribunals” which command no respect internationally and whose decisions have a good chance of being overturned if appealed in a real court. They would be more comfortable with the Iranian system of law than our own.

Lest we forget, on June 30, 2006, “In a landmark decision restricting the president's powers during wartime, the US Supreme Court has dealt the Bush administration a severe blow in its push to prosecute terrorists in military tribunals.

The court ruled 5-to-3 Thursday that Mr. Bush acted outside his authority when he ordered Al Qaeda suspects to stand trial before these specially organized military commissions. The ruling said that the commission process at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, could not proceed without violating US military law and provisions of the Geneva Conventions. "The commission lacks power to proceed," writes Justice John Paul Stevens for the court majority.

President Bush said he would honor the decision in the case called Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, but do it in a way that did not jeopardize the safety of Americans.
"I want to find a way forward," Bush told reporters. "I would like there to be a way to return people from Guantánamo to their home countries, but some of these people need to be tried" in court.” (CSM, 6/30/06, go to http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0630/p01s01-usju.html .)

In other words, there is no other way than to do it Constitutionally. Partisan Republicans impeached President Clinton for far less of a transgression.
And then there’s simple dollars and sense. Now that we are in a deep fiscal hole as a nation, angry citizens are holding “Tea Parties” to protest the mess we are in. The one problem is; where have they been for all these years? President Obama has been in office for about 10+ months and has passed but one budget in a time of the worst economy since the depression. Spending cuts in that budget would have been universally deplored and opposed. Increasing taxes to pay for the spending? Forget it!

Of course, the budget can be criticized for pork and wasteful spending; but of course, as atrocious as it was, it was nothing unusual. Why the “Tea Parties” now, when the party now in power had left the other party a budget surplus which it squandered over the 8 years it was in power?

Where were the “Tea Parties” when we actually needed them? How do they think we got into the situation we are now in? Did it just happen in the last 9 months?
Going forward, it is hard to see how the Common Decencies of honesty, courage, responsibility and kindness will prevail in our public policies over the Common Vices of dishonesty, timidity, willful ignorance, irresponsibility and meanness. The solutions that many citizens are demanding involve impossibilities: spending more while taxing less, fighting wars without any inconvenience, instituting privilege over justice and having the rule of the jungle prevail over the rule of law.

Although the Common Vices may lead to some form of satisfaction in the very short term, in the long term we will pay for it; we have already. We will continue to pay for it.

In the long run, the Common Virtues are what they are because they promote our well being. If humanity is to thrive, we must reject the Common Vices in favor of the Common Virtues, remembering that there is no guarantee whatsoever that we will do what is best for ourselves. Ignorance and dishonesty don’t need no stinkin’ facts after all, and real courage in our leaders in a rare thing.

Can you picture a leader with Presidential aspirations telling the country that it will be necessary to reduce health care spending per capita if we are to offer health care to all (probably leading to a single-payer system) and meaning that profit margins may have to decrease in the health care industry unless it becomes vastly more efficient? Yet, if one looks around the developed world for evidence, this may be the probable truth.

Can you imagine a leader with Presidential aspirations stating that an increase in taxation and cuts to the defense budget and entitlements are inevitable if the deficit is to be tamed? Exactly where else is the money going to be found?

Can you imagine a leader with Presidential aspirations coming clean on any number of issues, from torture, the deficit, to the economy, etc.? Once again, I’m sure the reader can list numerous items where the voting public prefers to be lied to. Real debate? Forget it; someone might have to say something thoughtful! So lies are what we will get, until there is no choice. This does happen; that is, the situation gets to the point where there is no choice, such as with the end of the Viet Nam War, after Pearl Harbor, or during the Depression.

Unfortunately, if health care reform is passed in its current proposed forms, this issue and the issue of the deficit will not soon go away; it will need revisiting very soon when Baby Boomers age and need more medical care and Social Security payments, and US Treasury interest rates increase, inflation rears its ugly head and we can no longer afford our denial of the facts. Then we will have no choice but to embrace the Common Virtues (such as integrity and honesty) in our policy making and we will have to do the right thing just to survive.

Easy Targets Obscure Culturally Acceptable Bigotry

2009-11-19T15:15:00.000-08:00

In September 2009, Long Island was visited was again by members of the Westboro Baptist Church, which is headquartered in Wichita, Kansas. Members of the church staged “protests” at various locations in Brooklyn, Nassau and Suffolk (including at the Temple of God Squad rabbi Marc Gellman.)

What were they protesting? They were protesting the fact that the United States does not execute gays (as suggested in Leviticus) and that in the U.S., gentiles marry Jews among other things. By extension they indict the whole of the US, including the military and its soldiers, who they claim are being killed in wars as divine retribution for the country’s “permissiveness.”

Oh.

Of course, the visit of this so-called “hate group” is an opportunity for one and all to get righteous and universally condemn the Westboro Baptist Church for its beliefs.
Yet the Westboro is spectacularly ineffective in getting anything done. If anything, their appearances evoke sympathy for their targets, thank goodness.

But there’s more!

Many of those who join in on the condemnations of this Church agree, in part, with the beliefs of the Westboro Baptist Church and in fact have actually done things to harm the Church’s favorite target: gays.

Who among those who condemn the Westboro Church also oppose equal rights for gays, including gay marriage and/or adoption?

Well, for example, that would probably include Rabbi Marc Gellman, who, before resigning because of the presence of alleged radical Islamists within the organization, was a member of the Alliance for Marriage Foundation (AFM), a group that actively opposes gay marriage and adoption.

Here is snippet from a recent press release from the AFM:
"Americans believe that gays and lesbians are free to live as they choose, but they don't believe they have a right to redefine marriage for our entire society," said Daniels. “But the common-sense definition of marriage – and the values of most Americans – cannot be protected apart from AFM’s Marriage Protection Amendment.” (Go to http://www.afmus.org .)

Although this press release post dates Rabbi Gellman’s tenure in the organization, the opinion expressed in it has remained consistent.
Now the AFM with its ability to lobby Congress and excite its membership to oppose equal rights for gays probably has done more to harm gays in a practical sense than has the Westboro Baptist Church.

And of course, Rabbi Gellman and the AFM are by no means alone in acceptable bigotry.
In fact, any religion (or secular dogma for that matter) that has a concept of a “chosen” people, or the “select” or the “saved” or the “damned” or the “infidel” is guilty of promoting enmity and divisiveness if not the outright hatred that typically flows from such beliefs.

This group would therefore include most versions of Christianity, Judaism, Islam and others.

How do those who profess to believe in the same scripture that inspires the Westboro Baptist Church and who agree, in part, that gays should be persecuted, then have the gall to then condemn the Westboro Baptist Church who have the consistency to invoke the biblical remedy for this biblical sin that so many agree is indeed a sin, and that the bible is the authority on its sinfulness?

Dogma requires such denial and that is why dogma endures – denial seems to be a component of human nature.

In the meantime, the Westboro Baptist Church, in their unabashed adherence to scripture and their religion, serves to obscure the more culturally acceptable biases that religion and dogma typically propagate. This safe cover for socially acceptable bigots might be their most dangerous attribute.

Al Qaeda, Terrorism, Long Island & Rep. Peter King

2009-07-25T14:33:00.000-07:00

News Item: (NY Daily News, July 22, 2009) A Long Island man confessed to feeding Al Qaeda information about New York's subways and LIRR trains, triggering last year's Thanksgiving Eve terror alert, the feds say.

Bryant Neal Vinas, 26, the son of South American immigrants and a convert to Islam, was captured in November in Pakistan after he joined in a rocket attack on U.S. troops in Afghanistan, according to court papers unsealed Wednesday.

He confessed his treason almost immediately and began cooperating, offering information of potentially great value because he had met with high-level operational leaders, sources said.

Vinas is one of a handful of Americans charged with joining the terror network that took down the World Trade Center and has sworn to destroy America. A former truck driver who grew up Catholic in Patchogue, he converted to radical Islam and became a fighter known variously as "Ibrahim" or "Bashir el Ameriki" - Bashir the American…

Vinas began attending a mosque in Selden, L.I., and dressing in Islamic garb, but never explained his conversion to his Peruvian-born father, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2009/07/22/2009-07-22_feds_long_island_man_gave_al_qaeda_info.html#ixzz0MIzysoOv.

Is there any lesson or meaning to be gleaned from this sad episode? Do we assume that the Selden Mosque that Mr. Vinas attended is the cause of his radicalization?

“Rep. Peter King (R-Seaford), a member of the House Homeland Security Committee, said the Vinas case illustrates why mosques must monitor radicalism in their midst, one of his long-standing political talking points.

"There are a number of mosques under surveillance by law enforcement on Long Island and they've had radical speakers," said King. "I'm not saying they [the mosques] are involved in criminal activities, but they are not cooperating with law enforcement."
At the Islamic Association of Long Island mosque in Selden Wednesday its imam rejected him. "If he is al-Qaida, he should be arrested. He's a terrorist," said Imam Aziz. "Islam is a peaceful religion." (See http://www.newsday.com/long-island/feds-li-man-plotted-terror-attack-on-mass-transit-1.1318020 .)

Rep. King has often taken on “radical” Islam and depicted most mosques as being run by radicals.

In the past, “Rep. Peter T. King, R-N.Y., told radio talk host Sean Hannity in an interview no American Muslim leaders are cooperating in the war on terror.

"I would say, you could say that 80-85 percent of mosques in this country are controlled by Islamic fundamentalists," he said. "Those who are in control. The average Muslim, no, they are loyal, but they don't work, they don't come forward, they don't tell the police …"

King was promoting his new novel, "Vale of Tears," which he described as a "half truth and half fiction" story about future terrorist attacks by Muslim extremists in Nassau County, N.Y.

In the interview with Hannity, King criticized a mosque in Westbury, N.Y., which he accused of failing to adequately condemn terrorism.

Hannity asked King to confirm he was saying 85 percent of mosques in America are "ruled by the extremists."

"Yes," he replied, "and I can get you the documentation on that from experts in the field. Talk to a Steve Emerson, talk to a [Daniel] Pipes, talk to any of those. They will tell you. It's a real issue … I'll stand by that number of 85 percent. This is an enemy living amongst us..."

King said while most American Muslims are loyal to this country, "They won't turn in their own. They won't tell what's going on in the mosques. They won't come forward and cooperate with the police."

Go to http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=37099 and http://thinkprogress.org/2007/09/19/king-mosques .

Is Rep. Peter King correct? Are 85% of American Mosques run by “radicals”?

It would help if someone, preferably Rep. King, stopped to define the word “radical.”

Is a radical someone who voiced support for a violent or terrorist organization (not to mention actually committing violence)?

Oops!

“Like British Muslim support for Muslim extremist terrorism, Irish American support for Irish terrorism came in many forms. There were Irish Americans who waved the Irish flag once a year on St. Patrick's Day and admired the IRA's cause but felt queasy about the methods. There were Irish Americans who collected money for Catholic charities in Northern Ireland without condoning the IRA at all. There were also Irish Americans who, while claiming to be "aiding the families of political prisoners," were in fact helping to arm IRA terrorists. Throughout the 1970s, until Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher asked President Ronald Reagan to stop them, they were the IRA's primary source of funding. And even after that they were widely tolerated.

I concede there is one major difference: The Irish terrorists were setting off their bombs across the ocean and not in New York or Boston, which somehow made the whole thing seem less real. But in Britain the explosions were real enough. In 1982 -- the year an IRA bomb killed eight people in Hyde Park -- four IRA men were arrested in New York after trying to buy surface-to-air missiles from an FBI agent. In 1984 -- the year the IRA tried to kill the whole British cabinet in Brighton -- an IRA plot to smuggle seven tons of explosives was foiled, an action that led to the arrests of several Americans. As recently as 1999, long after the IRA had declared its cease-fire, members of an IRA group connected to an American organization, the Irish Northern Aid Committee (Noraid), were arrested for gun-running in Florida.

The range of Americans who were unbothered by this sort of thing was surprisingly wide. Some were members of Congress, such as Republican Rep. Peter King of Long Island, who stayed with IRA supporters on visits to Northern Ireland and drank at a Belfast club called the Felons, whose members were all IRA ex-cons.” (Go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/02/AR2005080201943.html .)

Here is what the Irish Echo, an Irish-American newspaper, writes about Rep. King:

“He was for years dogged by charges that he was soft on terrorism because he would not join the chorus of condemnation of the IRA.

He was once accused of having blood on his hands by a British ambassador to Washington because of his refusal to disown the IRA's campaign…

Never stepping back from his support of Sinn Féin, King engaged in a dialogue with loyalist leaders such as Andy Tyrie and John McMichael.

"When pressed he acknowledged support for the IRA," Mulvaney said of King.
King toured Protestant neighborhoods that were very bit as economically blighted than their Catholic counterparts.

"With the exception of Paul O'Dwyer, no one had more meetings with the Unionist extreme than Peter King. Make no mistake, that was a dangerous undertaking in the 1980s," said Mulvaney…

"I don't believe King's personal stances changed at all, but he proved that he was willing to listen and to see both sides of a complicated issue. I still believe that King's meetings in the mid 1980s were pivotal in the peace process. When King, and others, cajoled President Clinton into action, King was the one who could speak first hand of the suffering of both sides."

Attorney and Democratic party activist Frank Durkan agrees.

"Pete has been an effective voice. It took a lot of courage to speak out in defense of the IRA when everyone else was killing them. And remember, his constituency was not particularly Irish," said Durkan.

But though he stuck his neck out for Irish Republicans when it was distinctly unfashionable to do so, the post-Sept. 11 Pete King would have found it far more difficult to defend the IRA's campaign had it stretched into this century, and up as far as that fateful day.

The Sept. 11 attacks were a turning point for King. The son of a New York City detective, he lost friends and constituents in the attack on the World Trade Center and his now-unequivocal hostility towards anything that even remotely smacks of terrorism can be clearly traced to that attack on America.”

(Go to http://www.irishecho.com/newspaper/story.cfm?id=17249 .)

To be fair, Rep. Peter King later became instrumental in bringing peace to Northern Ireland during the Clinton Administration; in other words, his views and opinions and actions evolved to the point that he may have actually fully redeemed himself in this matter.

But shouldn’t he be more judicious in his condemnation of others, specifically American Muslims? Isn’t Rep. King in a perfect position to demonstrate an understanding of human nature and the tendency towards religious and nationalistic chauvinism that he once shared with the people he now chastises? After all, what percentage of Irish-American Catholics may have supported the IRA during those dark years? Could it be 80% to 85% or something approximate?

There is no doubt that ALL religions and dogmas open the door to radicalism; Catholicism, Protestantism, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Fascism, Communism and so on are all easy examples of ideologies that have turned to unjustified violence at one time or another. When you hold a belief on faith or above question, you expose yourself to the possibility that you will hold dangerous beliefs. If you use reason, evidence and logic to guide you to a goal of improving the human condition, you may still make mistakes, but your chances of being a helpful person should be greatly improved! The alternatives of faith and dogmatism could lead to literally anything.

Rep. Peter King would be better served by denouncing faith and dogma – the real enemy. Although it is true that Islam can lead to radicalism and ultimately war, murder and terrorism, so has almost every other dogmatic religion and ideology including Rep. King’s own Irish Catholicism.

The real enemy within us is unreason and a lack of caring about others.

A Skeptical Look at the Economy

2009-07-25T13:08:00.000-07:00

The last decade or so has been one giant roller coaster, economically speaking. It may seem like a long time ago, but in the late 20th Century, the United States actually had a balanced Federal budget. The head of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, actually had a moment of worry about the US having too large a Federal budget surplus! As we now know, he needn’t have worried about the surplus.

The stock market was booming and reached an inflation adjusted peak in the year 2000. Unemployment during the Clinton presidency fell to levels of about 3% - does anyone remember that? It seems to be just a dream to us now.

One of the reasons for the good economic fortune back then was absence of wars bleeding our treasury and distracting the US economy away from more prosperous endeavors as well as a balanced budget. Peace is good for the economy, war inevitably is destructive. Why?

The quick answer is that when a country is at peace, human effort and labor is more directed toward products that make life better; confidence is high among producers and consumers and the cycle of productivity grows, leading to an actual improvement in people’s lives and an increase in the wealth of a nation.

During a war effort, the end products are more often destructive and lead to misery for someone, somewhere. The wealth of nations is decreased by war because of the destruction inherent in wars. Wars may serve to preserve our freedom which is worthwhile of course; but war only serves at best to maintain a status quo economically and socially. At worst, wars destroy freedoms and liberty if they are unjustified. The righteousness of a war is everything; an unjust war is doom to a country, both morally and economically.

After 2000 the stock market experienced a “bubble”; the prices of stocks related to the Internet were valued beyond all reasonable expectation and the NASDAQ index reached the 5000 level. The bubble burst when many companies failed to turn profitable and could not justify such prices. Easy monetary policy from the Federal Reserve enabled the speculators who inflated the bubble – and much wealth was destroyed when the bubble burst. The NASDAQ still is over 60% lower today than it was then, which is almost 9 years ago.

With a new president in place, an ill-designed tax cut following the recession caused by the bursting Internet stock bubble was implemented; the major beneficiaries were the wealthiest taxpayers. That was the end of the surplus. Although the stock market partially rebounded, the bang for the buck was poor; employment and income for the non-wealthy lagged.

Then came 9-11 and we were on our way to a non-righteous war – in Iraq - that not only wiped away any semblance of fiscal sanity, but completely replaced it with economic delusion.

Ridiculously easy credit and lax regulation led to a housing bubble that peaked in 2007. When foreclosures started to become a big problem, banks and mortgage backed securities began to tank. Soon, literally no one could find a lender willing to lend and business and consumer spending came to a screeching halt.

The enormous deficits that have resulted from the ineffective tax cuts of the Bush Administration and the Iraq War, not to mention the Plan D Medicare giveaway to the major drug companies, have left us ill-prepared for the banking and housing crises that we are still suffering through. Ten percent unemployment is now a near certainty and the future looks grim.

Have we learned anything? Is the Obama Administration any better than the previous one?

There is no doubt that this administration is going after the problems more directly but unfortunately, for reasons of politics and popular sentiment, good solutions to difficult problems may elude us.

It must be admitted that the banking crisis which, if left unsolved would have led directly and swiftly into a depression, has been averted for now. The crisis is now just a lingering problem which will slowly return to “normal” unless a descent into a true depression occurs. Whether laws will be passed that will avoid future crises and banking abuses is unknown; if politicians were not involved, our chances would be better. Ideology is the enemy here as usual.

Similar comments could be made about all our other economic problems; health care, unemployment, the stimulus program, the federal deficit, and so on. In every case it seems that President Obama has the right idea; it also seems that in every case, Congress, to which the President has delegated the task of creating legislation addressing these issues, is not up to the task. Although the President highly values consensus and bi-partisanship, it may be that his preferences and ideas are better than consensus, the results of bi-partisanship or the ideas of the rest of his own party. His penchant for cooperation and delegation may not result in good health care reform.

This country desperately needs to reduce the cost of health care as a % of GDP while increasing the access of all Americans to healthcare (please note that it does not matter whether the solution is private or public). This may mean lower profit margins for the health care industry as they serve more people at a lower cost per person. Who has the nerve to publicly promote this kind of necessary policy?

The deficit MUST be reduced (please note that the amount of government spending is not the key issue, it’s the deficit). The government must stimulate the economy and increase employment while avoiding pork (please note that the stimulus must lead to productive labor, particularly involving infrastructure). This may mean higher taxes but if the budget is balanced and jobs created, and we are getting value for our taxes, ideology should not derail this solution. Are there elected officials who can balance all of these attainable goals?

It is hard to believe that most of our leaders are capable of putting ideology aside and doing what is most necessary. It is more likely that we will bounce from one emergency to another.
What do you think?

Macro Humanism and Micro Humanism

2009-06-10T14:29:00.000-07:00

One of the things that religion pretends to be able to do is make its adherents “better” persons. How many times have you heard politicians or religious leaders bemoan the prospect of “godless” societies? How often has it pointed out that Hitler was an atheist (he wasn’t according to Hitler himself) and that the greatest wars of the last century were begun by non-believers (they weren’t.)

In fact it would be shocking indeed to hear a public official claim that religion wasn’t at the source of all morality, as if human concern for others could not have been the result of something like “natural selection” (it was.)

CFI-LI friend, Rabbi Marc Gellman often depicts non-believers as less likely to moral than believers; he’s implied that non-believers are more likely to run others over in a parking lot! There is no data to support this contention.

The lack of supporting is at long last being addressed, sort of. An article in Slate magazine noted that “In Gross National Happiness, author Arthur Brooks notes that atheists are less charitable than their God-fearing counterparts: They donate less blood, for example, and are less likely to offer change to homeless people on the street.” (Go to http://www.slate.com/id/2203614/pagenum/all.) I’m sure the experiments that led to this conclusion were very “scientific”.

On this issue, the Slate article cited a strong rebuttal argument:

“In his new book, Society Without God, Phil Zuckerman looks at the Danes and the Swedes—probably the most godless people on Earth. They don't go to church or pray in the privacy of their own homes; they don't believe in God or heaven or hell. But, by any reasonable standard, they're nice to one another. They have a famously expansive welfare and health care service. They have a strong commitment to social equality. And—even without belief in a God looming over them—they murder and rape one another significantly less frequently than Americans do.

Denmark and Sweden aren't exceptions. A 2005 study by Gregory Paul looking at 18 democracies found that the more atheist societies tended to have relatively low murder and suicide rates and relatively low incidence of abortion and teen pregnancy.”

What could be the explanation, other than the very possible explanation of falsified data, for this difference in American godless and foreign godless behavior? (Note: the possibility that American atheists are more generous after all is very real – Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, George Soros, James Simons, and Ted Turner are among the biggest philanthropists in the world – non-believers all.)

The Slate article points out, “The Danes and the Swedes, despite being godless, have strong communities. In fact, Zuckerman points out that most Danes and Swedes identify themselves as Christian. They get married in church, have their babies baptized, give some of their income to the church, and feel attached to their religious community—they just don't believe in God. Zuckerman suggests that Scandinavian Christians are a lot like American Jews, who are also highly secularized in belief and practice, have strong communal feelings, and tend to be well-behaved.

American atheists, by contrast, are often left out of community life. The studies that Brooks cites in Gross National Happiness, which find that the religious are happier and more generous then the secular, do not define religious and secular in terms of belief. They define it in terms of religious attendance. It is not hard to see how being left out of one of the dominant modes of American togetherness can have a corrosive effect on morality. As P.Z. Myers, the biologist and prominent atheist, puts it, "[S]cattered individuals who are excluded from communities do not receive the benefits of community, nor do they feel willing to contribute to the communities that exclude them."

This is an obvious explanation that makes a lot of sense. In countries where secularism is the rule, it is often religious minorities that feel most alienated, fairly or unfairly. In the US, atheists, who are seen as the ultimate “outsiders”, could understandably be reluctant to donate money to, for example, the Boy Scouts, which excludes them, or the United Way, which gives to the Boy Scouts. It may be simply too much to ask for the despised to be generous to the despisers.

Humanism and secularism would seem to have much to offer on the macro level involving public moral policy; what could be a better philosophy for public policy than a non-dogmatic approach that uses reason, science and free inquiry with a goal of making the world a better place?

Humanists have consistently advocated for freedom, justice, and peaceful means for achieving these social aims. Humanism does not necessarily imply specific solutions to specific problems but it certainly is well equipped to frame problems properly and lead to asking the right questions. Secular humanism has little to apologize for as a basis for formulating a public, national, international and/or planetary or macro morality.

But this leads to the subject at hand which was inspired by the very compelling talk given by former Baptist minister Kevin Cordle at a CFI-LI forum earlier this year and an article in Free Inquiry by Paul Kurtz noting the shortcomings of many humanists on the personal level.

Mr. Cordle was a committed minister but his scientific orientation led to his questioning of his religious beliefs. However, the clincher was the lack of success that religious belief had in making his congregants better persons. In-fighting, politics and petty arguments that were the antithesis of “love thy neighbor,” soured the sincere minister on the necessity of religion.

But while it is obvious that religious beliefs do not make the religious better persons, neither does non-theism. Yes, on the personal level, humanists can act like jerks just as easily as the next person. Some humanists cheat, lie, hurt and behave poorly – is there any doubt? They profess humanism but cannot live its principles.

Hopefully this realization should make Mr. Cordle feel a little better; in no way should he feel that he failed because his congregants continued to behave poorly or indifferently despite all his efforts. Good character on a very personal level does not depend on belief, non-belief, zealotry or apathy; neither does good character depend on interest about god, religion or science.

So exactly how are we to nurture better behavior from fellow humanists and non-theists? Surely demonstrating that belief in god is unreasonable will not directly teach or inspire a person to treat others better.

The best approach must be setting a proper example. While humanism will definitely influence a person to denounce primitive and destructive religious practices, including FGM, sexism, many forms of bigotry and racism, religious war, religious intolerance and much more, it is much more difficult to make a person behave honestly, kindly, responsibly and courageously towards others on the personal level. But by showing others how to behave, we can practice our professed humanism on the more difficult micro level.

So what can we do to behave more humanistically? If I knew the answer to this question I would surely apply it to myself! I would figure out how to modify my own behavior so that I don’t yell at the kids, be more understanding of my wife and generally be more patient with everyone.
We are all works in progress; hopefully we’re getting better at applying the common decencies and virtues in our daily lives.

Perhaps working on an issue at a time would be a good approach to applying humanism on the micro level. Perhaps our character is too hard wired to be modified greatly, perhaps not. But we can take solace in a couple of facts; humanism is an approach that has been used to make great progress in civilizing humanity on the macro level to great benefit. Perhaps we need to discover the principles of a quantum humanism so that we can behave more humanistically toward each other every day on the micro level.

Any suggestions?

Why We’re Secular, part 240

2009-04-01T15:40:00.000-07:00

The dogmatic just don’t get it, do they? If they did, then they wouldn’t be dogmatic! Of course, the circular logic of a dogmatic belief system is successful in preserving itself precisely because a central tenet of an enduring system of dogma is that its assertions are beyond question; or, cleverly, beyond our ability to question; or even more cleverly, that belief in that dogma is a “gift” of some sort, hence the inability of dogmatic believers and followers to break free of whatever arbitrary and capricious system of dogma that entraps them.

Dogma need not be the full foaming-at-the-mouth kind that motivates terrorists and other zealots. Dogma can, in fact be totally mainstream and socially acceptable in polite company, but its acceptability renders the acceptor incapable of arguing against competing dogma even if it is indeed full foaming-at-the-mouth style dogma. A baseless and faith-held belief system has as much reason to support it as the next one.

Take for example our old friend, the God Squad’s Rabbi Marc Gellman. Considered a “moderate” by many, he seems unable to recognize the pointlessness of even bothering to use reason or logic (even poorly) when answering religious questions. Check out this exchange which appeared in Newsday on Saturday, March 07, 2009:

Question from a reader: I'm sorry that as a Jew you cannot accept the biblical fact, but Jesus Christ is the Messiah, and He came to save the world from sin and give us eternal life. If you accept this, you are saved; if you don't, then you're not. The scripture is clear that we are told these things so we may know that we have eternal life. Can't you acknowledge this truth? – B. via email

Answer: Not.

Does Rabbi Gellman realize that his answer to this reader’s question would suffice as an answer to his own question posed to an atheist on whether they could accept that God exists? Duh, I guess not!

The implications of faith-inspired tunnel vision and dogmatism encapsulated in this little exchange are mind-boggling and apparently totally lost on Rabbi Gellman. If he did see the implications he’d immediately become agnostic and understand he has no answers worth offering on the question of the existence of God.

Consequently, the need to continually justify his dogma often leads him into vicious and slanderous territory. Readers of the INQUIRER are well aware of his past attacks on non-believers (and his left-handed apologies). In the same column as his dogmatic rejection of salvation from a concerned dogmatic Christian letter writer comes the following piece of nuttiness:

Question from a reader: Considering, over many centuries, events like the Inquisition, countless and unceasing religious wars, the Crusades, 9/11 and the recent Mumbai killings, can you say that, on balance, religion has caused more good than bad things to happen? -- A., Melville, N.Y. via email.

A: Group A: (Mother Teresa, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Pope John XXIII, Pope John Paul II, Billy Graham, and Father Tom Hartman)

Group B: (Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Idi Amin)

My conclusion: Group A wins over Group B.

(Go to http://daily-journal.com/archives/dj/display.php?id=436492.)

What is implied by these two groups and by what random process did he select the groups? Group A has two genuine heroes, Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi, two homophobic Popes who believe that condom users deserve eternal damnation, a religious fanatic who believes that any woman who uses a contraceptive is incapable of love, an anti-Semite and a close friend of the Rabbi. You could ask yourself however, where are noted theists bin Laden and David Koresh?
Group B does indeed have all villains but includes Communists, a Muslim and a Catholic.

Oh yeah, I get it – in Group B they’re all really atheists because they are evil no matter whether they actually believe in God or not. The actual facts are irrelevant. I did notice that noted non-theists Christopher Reed, Pat Tillman. Albert Einstein, Mark Twain, Robert Ingersoll, Carl Sagan, Bertrand Russell, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Kurt Vonnegut and John Lennon were omitted from Group B; it must have been an oversight!

But in the same newspaper edition that Gellman is attempting to claim that Group A (the “religious”) are better than Group B (the “atheists”) we have the following reality checks:
Senior leaders of Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah offered international support Friday to Sudan's president after he was charged with war crimes in Darfur, a sign that the bid to prosecute him could sharply radicalize his regime.

For a third straight day, President Omar al-Bashir's supporters marched and vowed to defend him against what his government called a "colonial" conspiracy to overthrow him. Hundreds emerged from mosques after Friday prayers, chanting "jihad," or holy war, and shouting, "With our souls and blood, we will sacrifice ourselves for you, al-Bashir."

After the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant Wednesday for al-Bashir, Sudan's government responded by expelling 13 of the largest aid organizations in Darfur.
The U.N. human rights office said in Geneva that it was examining whether the expulsion could itself constitute a war crime.

The order opened a giant hole in the safety net that has kept many Darfur civilians alive during six years of war in the vast, arid region of western Sudan. Without the groups, 1.1 million people will be without food, 1.5 million without health care, and more than 1 million without drinking water — and outbreaks of infectious disease are a greater danger, the U.N. said.

"To knowingly and deliberately deprive such a huge group of civilians of means to survive is a deplorable act," said its spokesman, Rupert Colville. "To punish civilians because of a decision by the ICC is a grievous dereliction of the government's duty to protect its own people…"

Jennifer Cooke, head of the Africa program at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the Western reaction "may drive al-Bashir further to the hard-line radicals."

"He is framing the ICC's decision as yet another Western attempt to undermine the sovereignty of a Muslim developing state," she said. "And realizing he can rally support, whether from the Arab League or more radical elements, and possibly the (African Union), it gives him less incentive to move back on his decisions." (Go to http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iZQb2negfyNKgNesbro4mnMW1AHAD96OPMUO0 .)
Yes, support is lining up behind al-Bashir on a religious basis with supporters of al-Bashir depicting the “secular West” as colonialists when their only true motivation is mere religious chauvinism. (This is not to say that the religious elements in the “West” do not at times exhibit the religious chauvinism as well.)

If a religious “moderate” takes exception to the above story as non-representative, we offer another story regarding the supposedly non-extremist Catholic Church, the largest church on earth:

“The Vatican has defended the excommunication of those involved in helping a nine-year-old girl get an abortion in Brazil after she was allegedly raped by her stepfather.

Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, the head of the Roman Catholic Church's Congregation for Bishops, told the Italian daily La Stampa over the weekend that the unborn twins the girl was carrying had the right to live.

"It is a sad case but the real problem is that the twins conceived were two innocent persons, who had the right to live and could not be eliminated," he said.

The senior cleric's comments come after Brazil's president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, criticised Jose Cardoso Sobrinho, the Brazilian archbishop who excommunicated the girl's mother and the doctors involved in aborting the baby, but not the stepfather who allegedly raped the girl.
Lula said that as a Catholic, he deeply regretted the archbishop's "conservative attitude".

"It is not possible to allow a little girl raped by her stepfather to have that child because it could put her life at risk," he said.

"I believe that in this sense, medicine is more correct than the church."

But the cardinal said "life must always be protected, the attack on the Brazilian church is unjustified".

The nine-year-old from the northeastern state of Pernambuco in the world's largest Roman Catholic nation, was found to be four months pregnant last week after allegedly being raped by her stepfather.

Abortion is a crime under Brazilian laws except in cases of rape, if the woman's life is in danger or if the foetus has no chance of survival

Doctors said they decided to terminate the pregnancy because the girl's life was in danger due to her young age, and because she was carrying twins.

But Sobrinho, the archbishop of Olinda and Recife, in declaring the excommunication, said the abortion went against "the law of God".

The stepfather was not excommunicated because the church said that his action, although deplorable, was not as bad as ending the life of an unborn child.

"It is clear that he committed a very serious sin, but worse than this is the abortion," Sobrinho said.

Under church law, excommunication is automatic for followers who have, perform or help procure an abortion.” (Go to http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2009/03/20093911932836487.html .)

Let’s summarize: the Roman Catholic Church position is that the raped 9 year old child should risk death so that the product of her rape not be terminated – not that they have a good chance of surviving this pregnancy anyway! In other words, a form of involuntary human sacrifice to an angry God! Yes the girl and her doctors would go to hell, but her rapist just needs to turn to Christ and he’ll be welcome in heaven!

To the reader; ask yourself what is the cruelest thing that a person could do to another person? The easy answer by definition would be to consign another person to an eternity of the ultimate in torment, misery and suffering. The Roman Catholic Church, believing in the reality of hell, has purposely and willfully committed the cruelest act possible; this is the horror of what they think they have done via ex-communication! And they have no remorse! They’re, in fact, righteous about their infinite punishment to a finite “crime.”

But wait! You might argue that an abortion, even to save the life of a child, is somehow immoral. Let’s go with another example of the “moderation” of the moderate and non-radical or extreme Roman Catholic Church, the world’s largest church.

While visiting Cameroon, where AIDS is a huge problem, the Pope said about the battle against AIDS, “You can’t solve it with the distribution of condoms. On the contrary, it increases the problem.” (Go to http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iLJ2gzRRfTYc_YuS7r1yuwnmne-gD970K3CG0 .)

France’s health minister, Roselyne Bachelot said that the Pope “proffered a monstrous scientific untruth.” In other words, the Pope lied.

Rebecca Hodes, head of policy, communication and research for Treatment Action Campaign in South Africa said the Pope should be promoting condom use if he wants to help fight AIDS. “Instead,” she said, “his opposition to condoms conveys that religious dogma is more important to him than the lives of Africans.”

While the Pope lies, people die.

In the meantime, back in the US, one of the leading activists on behalf of the suffering people of Darfur is actor George Clooney.

Here is a quote from Mr. Clooney: "I don't believe in Heaven and Hell," he says. "I don't know if I believe in God. All I know is that as an individual, I won't allow this life -- the only thing I know to exist -- to be wasted."

Rabbi Gellman, where does Mr. Clooney go: Group A or B and where does the pious al-Bashir and all his sanctimonious supporters belong?

To give you a clue, in recorded history, probably no war has been fought in the name of a non-belief (not counting self-defense) such as atheism or a failure to believe in capitalism. Wars are motivated by a strong positive belief in an economic system or religion or a form of nationalism; by something that compels many to give up their lives for an idea – in other words, a dogma.

Doubt leads to introspection and consideration of all the possibilities; it is certainty that can lead to fanaticism.

Advice to Rabbi Gellman: he should begin to appreciate the non-dogmatism of secular humanism.
At least we don’t think he deserves to rot in hell forever for his failure to accept the alleged “Truth” as some of his “fans” do.

The End of Faith and Denial

2009-04-01T15:38:00.000-07:00

A few years ago Sam Harris wrote a scathing book about faith titled “The End of Faith”; it touched a nerve in many persons. Those of us who had their doubts that faith was a virtue easily related to the themes contained in this book. At the same time it presented a visceral challenge to persons of faith. After all, exactly why should anyone believe in something for which there is no evidence or poor evidence? In this book, words were not minced, feelings not spared.

The book had its faults, of course. While Sam Harris has amazing powers of observation and can effectively dramatize in writing the points he is making, his conclusions can be hit or miss, and his vision of the future can be unnecessarily inflammatory. Additionally, he could have made even more of the point that irrational faith is not restricted to religious matters; all beliefs held on faith, even those pertaining to secular matters, are not justified and can prove to be dangerous.

Surprisingly there has since been some progress in the battle against faith in this society. Thanks to Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens and others, faith, religion, irrationality and unreason are no longer off-limits for criticism in the media. A flame has been lit. The youth in our society have shown some indications that they may prefer to “know” rather than simply to “believe”.

This modest progress is all good but of course, it is not enough. Faith is now occasionally questioned in public and although that is a welcome change, we have many more challenges to becoming a freethinking society.

Even if we were to vanquish the concept of “faith”, there is a related concept that although it does not necessarily lead to beliefs being held without evidence, it does lead to even not asking questions that could have unpleasant or inconvenient answers and it can lead to refusing to acknowledge what one actually believes; it’s called “denial.”

Denial is not just refusing to think about something; it almost certainly leads to not doing anything about things that can become a matter of life and death!

Consider all of the things that the average person may be in denial about; their health, their marriage, their job, their future, the future of their country and all things about all the persons they care about!

What could be more important than having a good handle on one’s life and the lives of those they care about? Yet many, if not most of us, refuse to deal with the most basic issues in life!

How many of us ignore health concerns and do not do what we know we need to do to stay healthy and not become a burden to others. Everyone must plead guilty to either not exercising enough, overeating, smoking drinking in excess or some other obvious form of abusing one’s own health. Yet this is still “small potatoes” for us as a society. In a sense, if we want to abuse ourselves, we should be allowed to do so although in most cases even self-abuse leads to pain for others.

As a nation, however, we have spent too much, borrowed too much and paid too little of it back – for at least the current decade if not for many decades. This harms generations not responsible for our current and past stupidity.

We have neglected our infrastructure, our schools and our energy self-sufficiency. We have no plan for the impending crush of baby boomers on social security or our health care system. We KNOW all this, yet we are in denial at one and the same time!

We absolutely already KNOW it is too expensive for most parents to send their children to private colleges without incurring too much debt on the student or the parents.

We already KNOW that our healthcare system is the most expensive system in the world even though many persons are not covered in any organized manner and that our outcomes are below average in the industrialized West.

We KNOW that we are sending our wealth out of the country, quite often to dictatorships, to pay for fuels that are contributing to a future environmental crisis. We’ve probably even started a war because we have not dealt with the well-known fact that we are not energy self-sufficient!
Denial almost makes faith look good! And denial crosses all boundaries of the secular and religious.

How many more matters of utter importance on a society-wide level can you name that we are and/or have been in denial about?

How about the fact that we cannot eliminate “pork” from the Federal budget as long as politicians are re-elected for delivering the pork?

Aren’t many in denial about our economic system being best left free from government regulation? Aren’t others in similar denial that government planning would solve all the problems?

How obvious is it that all vehicles should be fueled by renewable fuels (if not now, then eventually) and should be hybrids that also plug in? We KNOW that all cars could be designed & built thusly – why aren’t they?

It has become clear to me as time goes by that freethinking is little more than not being in denial. It is asking the tough questions and accepting the tough answers. It is acknowledging the obvious. It is not simply accepting authority or tradition as an answer.

Now we have the legal right to be in denial on any subject we choose as long as it does not lead to a crime against others.

But we no have no moral right to either belief in things for which there is no good evidence nor to ignore the things for which we know and accept that the evidence is overwhelming.

We no longer have a moral right to demand lower taxes, AND a expect a lower deficit; we no longer have the right to ask for universal health care and expect that everyone’s health care will be as extensive as before; we no longer have a right to buy SUV’s and complain about pollution and money being sent to Al Qaeda; we cannot expect to buy too much house, borrow too much money based on income that is not verified and then have other homeowners who are also suffering but more prudent pay more taxes to bail you out when you fall behind.

We, as a nation, have no moral right to attack a nation, kill tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of their citizens based on mistaken or false premises and ever expect them to be your “ally”. Again, I’m sure the reader can supply many more examples.

In other words, we do not have the moral right to ask for what we KNOW is the impossible. War, suffering and poverty are the cost of denial. We need the end of denial.

There is No Place for the Supernatural in the Public Square

2009-04-01T15:35:00.000-07:00

News item: (AFP, 3/5/09) An Iranian woman living in Spain who was disfigured and blinded by a man in Iran said Thursday she welcomed a Tehran court ruling that awards her eye-for-eye justice against her assailant...

"My intention is to ask for the application of the law not just for revenge but also so that no other woman will have to go through this. It is to set an example," the 30-year-old added.

In November an Iranian court ruled that the man -- identified only as Majid -- who admitted blinding Bahrami in 2004 by throwing acid in her face because she rejected his marriage request should also be blinded with acid based on the Islamic law system of "eye-for-an-eye" retribution.
Iran's Supreme Court confirmed the sentence at the beginning of February.

Bahrami, who moved to Barcelona after the attack to get medical treatment, said the court had originally ruled that she was entitled to have the man blinded in only one eye in Iran because "each man is worth two women".

"But I explained to the judge that with one eye one can still live," she told top-selling newspaper El Pais in another interview.

The court then ruled that the man would be blinded in both eyes if in exchange Bahrami agreed to give up the 20,000 euros (25,000 dollars) which she was set to receive from her assailant's family.

"He will be anesthetized and will not suffer pain. His face will not be disfigured because only a few drops (of acid) will be needed, he will not have the internal injuries which I had," she told ABC when asked if she felt she was less cruel than her aggressor…

She says she survives on a rent subsidy of 400 euros per month which she receives from the (secular) Spanish government and charity from friends. (End story.)

Some may suggest that incessant religion-bashing serves only to alienate religious moderates from the advancement of secularism and humanism. It would be suggested by those critics that, for example, the above monstrosity is not “typical” of religion or Islam or anything in particular. I maintain that such criticisms directed at the exposing of the excesses of religious belief are simply wrong; not enough persons are exposed to where irrational beliefs can lead, even if all such beliefs do not lead to disaster.

It is Iran’s Supreme Court’s claim that "each man is worth two women". It is the moral right (and duty) of anyone to denounce this ruling and beyond the utter misogyny of it, this ruling serves to show how laws and rulings based on supernaturally supported beliefs bring nothing to the table in the real world.

Is this a radical and exceptional ruling by an irrelevant body of fanatics? Although it is a ruling by a body of fanatics, a ruling by the worlds most populous Shiite nation’s actual Supreme Court is hardly irrelevant; and if this Court’s decision is exceptional, exactly where do we turn to understand what the orthodox ruling should have been?

Addressing religious moderates, is the religious attitude of the Iranian Supreme Court confined only to “radicalized” societies?

Please take note of the following; From Pew Research: “For example, six-in-ten white evangelical Protestants say that the Bible should be the guiding principle in making laws when it conflicts with the will of the people, a view rejected by an equally large majority of Americans, including most Catholics and white mainline Protestants.”

The last time I checked, evangelical Protestants had their run of the White House for the last 8 years and had a Vice-presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, on the last national ticket of the Republican Party. An early favorite for the 2012 nomination is Rev. Mike Huckabee!

The ruling by Iran’s Supreme Court can be contested on grounds that it is un-Islamic; but if one is honest, one would have to admit that most conservative and literal Islamic fundamentalists would agree with the proposition that "each man is worth two women" and that a more “moderate” view has less claim to orthodoxy.

One can make the claim that “their religion” or “their God” would never endorse such a ruling but if one is honest, one would have to admit that many average Americans would agree “the Bible should be the guiding principle in making laws when it conflicts with the will of the people…”, a principle that entirely supports the ruling of the Iranian Supreme Court.

As a study in logic and law, is the passing of Proposition 8 in California destroying the right of gay couples to marry that much different that the Iranian Supreme Court’s ruling? Just substitute the concept that “homosexuality is immoral because it offends God” for "each man is worth two women" and the shared concept that “the Bible (or Koran) should be the guiding principle in making laws when it conflicts with the will of the people…” and let the results speak for themselves.

Religious moderates of all kinds must face up to the impossibility of governing fairly and reasonably if supernaturally supported beliefs guide law. There is no way to categorize a belief as “moderate” as opposed to a “radical” – certainly the fact that a belief is widely held is not assurance of its “moderation”!

From Iran to the US, the common thread is impossible to deny; human well being simply is not the goal of faith-held beliefs; faith-held beliefs have no goal – they are arbitrary and capricious. They can claim anything from “homosexuality is immoral because it offends God” to "each man is worth two women" to “all non-believers are damned and deserving of it.” What is sure to follow from these propositions is human misery.

There is no place for the supernatural in the public square.

How Does a Humanist Approach Economics?

2009-04-01T15:31:00.000-07:00

Exactly what should a humanist think regarding the economic woes that we are suffering through in the US and around the world? What economic approach should a humanist embrace or are there a number of approaches that can be embraced?

There have been volumes written on the subject, of course, with points of view that are literally diametrically opposed to each other and everything in between. Ayn Rand, a non-theist, advocated unfettered capitalism; Karl Marx, another non-theist, advocated a communistic approach. Closer to the mainstream, Adam Smith, Milton Friedman and John Maynard Keynes have all exerted differing influences on economic thinkers and policies that have followed.

Indeed, if you enjoy contradiction and opposing opinions, listen to a number of different economists and economic forecasters explain what has happened and what is about to happen and you will undoubtedly hear everything ranging from a prediction of the next great depression to the next economic boom being just around the corner.

And this is the problem for the freethinking humanist; economics is most certainly still an inexact “science.” There are simply too many factors involved, not the least of which is almost completely factor of unpredictable human nature at play in the economies of an increasingly complex world. “Random” stimulus such as weather, war, corruption and good and bad luck conspire to make the future nearly totally unpredictable. Add human emotions such as fear and euphoria and it becomes clear that forecasting the economy requires more than complex math; it requires complex psychological analyses of masses of human beings as well!

That is why it is unwise, in this writer’s opinion, to have an unswerving approach to economics. The guidelines that we should respect in the economic field involve those common decencies that we revere in all areas of human endeavor, such as not causing unnecessary harm, enabling individual freedom to the degree that others are not harmed, honesty, responsibility, fairness and reasonableness.

This approach does not rule out many moderate economic approaches; it would rule out, for example, communism which promotes a dictatorship of a particular class and may disallow the individual right to be enterprising. A humanistic approach would also rule out a fascistic alliance of large businesses with government. These two approaches are not compatible with fairness or individual freedom, not to mention the fact that fanatical followers often will accept human suffering rather than sacrifice any aspect of their economic belief system.

What is left for us to decide as rational agents is to figure out in each economic situation, what approach harmonizes with the common decencies; what approach allows for individual freedom and, in addition, works well to raise our standard of living and mitigate human suffering! What may work for auto-making or banking may not be the right approach to a utility or other business involved with common areas of a nation, such as roads, police, the army or schools.

Should the goal be as little government taxing as possible, with its concordant fewer government services; or should we band to together via higher taxes to create a social safety net for those who may fall into need?

Would the low tax approach allow for more human suffering? Would the higher tax approach lead to sloth and “gaming the system” lowering everyone’s standard of living?

Should the market determine the price of a product; should a government or a bureaucrat?

Once again, we know that both approaches have problems and limitations. The market approach gave us Enron, Lehman Bros., AIG, Bear Stearns, the health care system we now have and the US auto industry. And, of course, the Great Depression and our current woes.

The Command Economy approach gave the world the disastrous economies of Russia and China for much of the last century. It has only been when both those countries abandoned those failed economic policies for freer markets that their economies grew tangibly improving the lives of many citizens. Even though their new economies have brought other problems to the fore, lives have improved. It is clear already that even in Russia and China, despite capitalism’s success in improving lives, this success is not unqualified.

Admittedly this is a frustrating and not totally satisfying way of approaching the topic of economics; it’s so uncertain and non-committal. It is much easier for those who crave certainty to be total and unblinking capitalists, libertarians, socialists or communists.

But no one said freethinking and humanism would lead to simplistic answers. In the category of economics there are none.

So when you read about the next “bailout” or “rescue” or “financial stimulus” plan, do not make up your mind so quickly; there is no guarantee that this idea is not either the best or worst idea to come down the pike. Each idea should be looked at in a non-dogmatic manner and assessed in as scientifically a manner as is possible. If our economy is anything, it is complex.

We do know that the previous administration proudly took the certain dogmatic approach: pure ideology ruled until disaster stared the administration in the face.

We can safely say that the dogmatic and ideological approach has failed.

Good riddance.

On a note of hope, the approach of the new administration of President Obama, has been, on the surface, open-minded. It remains to be seen if they can truly think “outside the box,” and govern in that manner as well, but that is the image they are trying to convey. We hope that they succeed in being innovative, creative and freethinking in their economic approach and do not succumb to political pressures, from the right or left that would promote an unthinking ideology.

We shall soon find out.

With all this said I can now offer my opinion on what the approach should be going forward, in the full knowledge that even the best of all possible plans has only a certain percentage change of succeeding as intended, and that even a bad plan might work - with luck.

It is obvious that the current problem has its roots in the abuse of credit by both business and consumers. Businesses borrowed too much, relying on continued growth in the economy to enable them to pay back their loans as they expanded. Consumers borrowed heavily on both the housing front and the credit card front in the expectation that their home’s value would always rise and if they were unable to pay the exorbitant mortgage, they could simply sell their house – at a profit.

The disaster began when so many persons could not pay their mortgages at the same time that home values started to decline because of the glut of homes for sale by distressed sellers.

The situation began to snowball – if sellers could not pay their mortgages and home prices dropped, banks that lent them money had to repossess home that were now worth less than the loans that were owed. It did not help that many mortgages were fraudulently issued without proper credit checks or home appraisals – many of these are the “sub-prime loans” that were the first to go bad.

As more and more persons defaulted, and banks lost more and more money on those loans, and houses became less and less valuable, those financial entities that had bought securities based on home mortgages came to realize that those securities were becoming less valuable. In fact, the value of securities backed by mortgages declined so badly that financial institutions soon had less overall capital or value in relation to deposits and other liabilities as required by both law and common sense.

So some stopped lending, especially to each other, and others went bankrupt.

When banks stop lending, it becomes difficult to buy a house, further driving down home prices, or even buy a car.

If you’re a business, it becomes hard to refinance as you had previously. Good luck to the firm that has a loan due to be paid or refinanced!

When consumers began to realize that their homes were declining in value, and they could no longer be used to finance other purchases they did in fact do the logical thing: they stopped making purchases.

Businesses started to realize that consumers had reached their credit limits and were not buying their products anymore – so they began to lay off workers and lessen inventories.
So this is what you get when consumers have little available credit, and banks have little to lend; a huge and sudden recession.

This is a negative feedback loop if there ever was one and there are many contributing factors. Last year, crude oil soared to $147 per barrel in price; at that moment the credit related bubble began to burst in earnest. Since then practically ALL commodities declined in value, including oil, metals, real estate and even gold. With billions and trillions of dollars in “paper” wealth gone, primarily due to the decline in real estate values, stocks and mutual funds, there was less cash in existence to chase commodities and who needs commodities when you’re not making stuff anyway?

This is called “deflation” and it is deadly to the economy. Why buy something now when it will cost less later? Another negative feedback loop!

Obviously, it’s not as if people do not want to buy stuff and banks do not want to lend their money. Both borrowers and lenders are afraid to do their thing.

Businesses know this and retreat to a protective position.

But consider this; the recession is essentially the result of future expectations which right now are extremely bad. In other words, there is great fear and it is fear that prevents consumers from buying, lenders from lending and businesses from expanding.

Remove or reverse or moderate the fear and the recession can be ended.

What would reduce the level of fear?

The key items must be jobs and job security and the banking system’s viability. If you are secure in your existing job, you will spend normally. Obviously if you are now unemployed and then find a job, your spending should only increase. When businesses see this happening, they will expand further.

If banks are not worried about being paid back because people will not be losing their jobs, they will lend - that is unless they are too bankrupt or deficient in reserves to lend.

So it would seem the task at hand for our government is to foster jobs creation and ensure bank viability.

A stimulus package not focused on job creation may be worthless. Simply sending out tax rebates, for example, will NOT ELIMINATE FEAR! Only a secure job will do this, in my opinion, and to avoid wasting taxpayer money, the job created should be a useful and necessary endeavor, not a time waster such as digging and filling in ditches.

“Fortunately,” over the decades, we have neglected many necessary tasks, such as improving our infrastructure and making our nation energy independent. Building schools, hospitals, repairing crumbling bridges or creating an improved electrical grid or funding advanced technological research would lead to further economic expansion, keeping the economy growing even after the stimulus has run its course. Our quality of life would improve.

Fixing the financial system may be the tougher task. The Federal Government has some choices; buying preferred stock, common stock or nationalizing certain banks. Or, if a price can be calculated, perhaps purchasing the non-liquid assets (e.g.: bad loans) of banks would be the right move; or facilitating a market or exchange where this junk could be sold in an orderly and transparent manner. The choice is complex but the goals are ensuring viability while keeping the expense to taxpayers to a minimum. Letting them go bankrupt is really not a choice – see the mess the bankruptcy of Lehman Bros. has caused. It could take years to sort it all out! Imagine the mess if a Citibank were to fail!

Allowing banks to remain “too big to fail” in the future should not be a choice either. Going back to their core business of lending to consumers for more than they pay out for deposits may be boring but it has worked for centuries. Exotic financial instruments such as derivatives, credit default swaps and triple short ETFs should be regulated if not eliminated. There is much to do.
But why did banks (and other companies) get in the position they are in? They were not required to make bad loans or bad business decisions, were they? After all, not all companies made those bad decisions!

As the system now works, the CEOs of banks (and other corporations) do not necessarily have their company’s interest in mind as they drive them to bankruptcy – why should they? If a policy is likely to benefit the CEO and other higher officers of the corporation, rather than the bank or corporation, what do you think will happen – or has happened?

A $100,000,000 bonus is a difficult thing to forsake for the good of a corporation!

Here is the conflict – a corporation, if it was a sentient entity, would have a goal of surviving well, like any other sentient entity. Unfortunately, running a corporation are numerous other sentient entities – officers, directors, and laborers, all with conflicting goals. The corporation thus suffers – you wind up with Enron, Citibank and General Motors.

Therefore corporate governance, in order to protect stockholders and employees in particular, must be codified and made into enforceable law or otherwise a company is at the mercy of sentient beings with conflicting goals. Simply requiring an officer to have a fiduciary responsibility has not worked particularly when corporate boards who oversee the executives consist of the corporate officer’s “pals” who are corporate officers elsewhere. (Note: I’m available for Board of Director work.) This is simply not working in too many situations.

Ethical and responsible captaincy of a corporation has long been neglected and too many in the corporate world accept the myth that humongous corporate bonuses are “necessary” to preserve “talent” within a company.

I don’t think so. In fact it may be that the larger the bonus, the worse a corporation is run.

Limiting bonuses to executives to stock in the company, with the size of the bonus tied to size of the executive’s salary, and then not redeemable for at least 5 to 7 years so that the current stock price cannot be manipulated is a simple solution.

Consider that Major League Baseball, an industry where performance can easily be measured, mostly bans bonuses – even based on performance. Why should they do this; wouldn’t it motivate players? Their answer is actually logical.

Major League Baseball limits bonuses because they do not want players to “game” the system and go for homeruns, strikeouts and other milestones that do not 100% correlate to winning baseball. Corporations similarly should NOT want executives that game the system in order to achieve bonuses in ways that could hurt the company.

What is the most an employee/executive should be paid? If Alex Rodriguez can get by on about 30,000,000 per year, and is obviously good (though not perfect) at his job, that should be about enough for most anyone else. But of course, I could be wrong or unlucky about all of this.

We would love to hear from readers how their humanism informs their take on the current economic crisis.

(Gerry Dantone has an M.B.A. in finance from St. John’s Univ. and was elected to their chapter of the International Honor Society for Economics - http://www.omicrondeltaepsilon.org )

Does Democracy Still Matter

2009-01-06T12:35:00.000-08:00

Many Americans are still basking in the glow of Barack Obama’s victory in the Presidential election. It’s hard to blame them – after 8 years of an administration that has made a mess of two wars, oversaw the ruination of the economy, threatened our civil liberties, allowed 9-11 on their watch, reduced our stature in the eyes of the world, neglected the Mid-East peace process, and failed its citizens after hurricane Katrina, change is something that many Americans are eagerly anticipating.

But before we congratulate ourselves too heartily, we should look at some details. The electoral process itself has changed little since the debacle of 2000. We still have the ridiculous electoral college. “Black box” voting machines still exist and the fact that you may have liked the results this time around does not mean you should be happy with a voting system that is difficult if not impossible to verify.

Money still makes the major difference in elections and just because the winning candidate is hopefully a champion of the less affluent, it does not change the regrettable fact that the ability to spend in a campaign is too all-important. Obama supporters should instead realize that this year’s election was an anomaly in fundraising.

Even worse is the fact that the voting public remains ignorant and irrational. We are the same voting public that believed Saddam Hussein was behind 9-11 and collaborated with Al Qaeda and that WMDs were found in Iraq. Many voters, this time around, believed Obama was a Muslim, for example.

Although America now seems to be pleased with the election results, we should not be happy with the electoral process and the attitudes of many voters:

News Item: (9/20/08 Associated Press) (Excerpts) Deep-seated racial misgivings could cost Barack Obama the White House if the election is close, according to an AP-Yahoo News poll that found one-third of white Democrats harbor negative views toward blacks — many calling them "lazy," "violent" or responsible for their own troubles...

Statistical models derived from the poll suggest that Obama's support would be as much as 6 percentage points higher if there were no white racial prejudice…

The AP-Yahoo poll used the unique methodology of Knowledge Networks, a Menlo Park, Calif., firm that interviews people online after randomly selecting and screening them over telephone…
Given a choice of several positive and negative adjectives that might describe blacks, 20 percent of all whites said the word "violent" strongly applied. Among other words, 22 percent agreed with "boastful," 29 percent "complaining," 13 percent "lazy" and 11 percent "irresponsible." When asked about positive adjectives, whites were more likely to stay on the fence than give a strongly positive assessment.

Among white Democrats, one-third cited a negative adjective and, of those, 58 percent said they planned to back Obama.

The poll sought to measure latent prejudices among whites by asking about factors contributing to the state of black America. One finding: More than a quarter of white Democrats agree that "if blacks would only try harder, they could be just as well off as whites." Those who agreed with that statement were much less likely to back Obama than those who didn't…

Researchers used mathematical modeling to sort out the relative impact of a huge swath of variables that might have an impact on people's votes — including race, ideology, party identification, the hunger for change and the sentiments of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's backers.

Just 59 percent of her white Democratic supporters said they wanted Obama to be president. Nearly 17 percent of Clinton's white backers plan to vote for McCain.

Among white Democrats, Clinton supporters were nearly twice as likely as Obama backers to say at least one negative adjective described blacks well, a finding that suggests many of her supporters in the primaries — particularly whites with high school education or less — were motivated in part by racial attitudes. (Go to http://news.aol.com/article/racial-views-may-cost-obama-election/181935?icid=200100397x1209949002x1200587996 .)

Polls after the election indirectly confirmed much of the above. A majority of white voters voted for McCain (55%); the only segment of white voters (other than white Democrats) to go for Obama were those under 29 years of age. Wealth and education did not matter for overall white voters. (Go to http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/results/polls/#val=USP00p1.)

For those who read the INQUIRER, the poll’s conclusions are not surprising. The September 2008 INQUIRER suggested that Obama would indeed have a disadvantage on account of prejudice.

At the same time, ignorance, superstition and an aversion to reason and logic are also at work in the election; all of these handicaps to good decision making will be at play.

For example, it was many of Obama’s African–American supporters as well as organized religious institutions that helped to pass California’s Proposition 8 which eliminated the right of that state’s gay couples to marry. It would be hard to argue that these Obama supporters were informed freedom lovers who were interested in social justice.

All of this is not to say that those who vote irrationally were not voting in a manner that will be best for our country. Maybe they are. But it is safe to say that voting irrationally is probably not the best way to go to obtain the best results in the long run!

This is also not to say that a President Obama will not serve to “educate” many American voters. It may be that President Obama’s presidency will deal a severe blow to racism, particularly if it’s a successful presidency. In January 2009, Obama’s positive rating was over 75% which would seem to guarantee that a majority of white voters supported him now.

A recent Free Inquiry magazine asked the question “Does Democracy Still Matter?” The simple answer is, “no, not if the voting public is irrational or uninformed; yes, of course, if the voting public is rational and informed.”

What attributes do you think describes various voters? Does Democracy still matter? Just because your preferred candidate won does not mean that the way we pick our leaders is not severely compromised.

Democracy requires reason, free inquiry, concern for others, responsibility and fairness – in other words, a humanistic outlook; for tyranny you need faith, certainty, greed, and ignorance. Not surprisingly, faith, certainty, self-interest (to the exclusion of interest in others) and a rejection of the scientific enterprise are often seen as virtues by many in this society.

Until the American voting public becomes well versed in civics, becomes less bigoted, less ignorant and less dogmatic in all matters relevant to governance, and we improve the actual system of elections, our democracy remains in peril, current results aside.

Courting the Stupid Vote: The Latest Issues

2008-08-01T11:33:00.000-07:00

What issues currently interest stupid voters? Or more precisely, what issues do the variouscampaigns believe interest or could interest stupid voters?

Here’s a recap of recent items:

1) WashingtonPost, July 30, 2008:Obama “Snubs” Troops: “For four days, Sen. John McCainand his allies have accused Sen. Barack Obamaof snubbing wounded soldiers by canceling a visit to a military hospitalbecause he could not take reporters with him, despite no evidence that the charge is true… McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds saidagain yesterday that the Republican's version of events is correct, and thatObama canceled the visit because he was not allowed to take reporters andcameras into the hospital. "It is safe to say that, according to pressreports, Barack Obama avoided, skipped, canceled the visit because of thosereasons," he said. "We're not making a leap here." Asked repeatedly for the "reports,"Bounds provided three examples, none ofwhich alleged that Obama had wanted to take members of the media to thehospital.” (Go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/29/AR2008072902286.html?sid=ST2008072902360&pos=.)

It has been documented that Obama hasoften visited troops in the course of his European and Asian trip. In this case, since bringing the media wasnever a consideration, cancellation could have nothing to due with the media’sabsence. It may have been a snafu ofsome sort, but nothing to be insulted over.

It is guaranteed, of course, that thecomplete lack of evidence is irrelevant to the McCain campaign or many stupidvoters. This is a big win for McCain inthe war for the stupid vote.

2) Part A: Joe Conason, Salon, July 25, 2008: TheSurge is “Working”: “The rebuttalsof McCain's embarrassing assertion that the Sunni insurgency's turn toward the U.S. and awayfrom al-Qaida came because of the surge have been ample and devastating. His badly skewed sense of time and events hasraised fresh doubts about his fitness for the presidency, since he was eitherincapable of comprehending contemporary facts or intentionally misleading thepublic when he told CBS anchor KatieCouric (which was edited in a manner to make McCain seem lessignorant) that the Anbar awakening "began" during the surge (and thattroop escalation enabled the U.S. to protect a Sunni sheik who was actuallyassassinated during that period).

But asidefrom that moment of untruth, there are deeper problems in all the airyassertions about the triumph of the surge.

First thereis the matter of that shift by the Sunni insurgents, which had nothing to do with the escalation. What changed the minds of the Sunni rebels inAnbar province and elsewhere was a revamped counterinsurgency doctrine thatemphasized careful bribery over indiscriminate reprisals -- and that seizedupon the growing alienation of the Sunnis from the bullying, murderousleadership of al-Qaida in Iraq. The American military officers who oversawand implemented that strategy, including Gen. David Petraeus, deserve fullcredit. Even Petraeus, a strongsupporter of the surge, makes very limited claims about its role in bolsteringthe Sunni turn, however.

In fact, it was the prospect of an early U.S. withdrawal, not the surge that prompted the Sunniinsurgents to change sides, according to the American officers who worked withtheir leaders. A fascinating article in the current issue of Foreign Affairs byGeorgetown professor Colin Kahl and retired Gen. William Odom quotes MarineMaj. Gen. John Allen, who ran the tribal engagement operations in Anbar during2007, saying that the Democratic sweepin the 2006 midterm elections and the increasing demand for withdrawal by theAmerican public "did not go unnoticed" among the province's Sunnisheiks. ‘They talked about it all thetime.’

… perhaps themost plausible reason is that there are many fewer Iraqis to kill in the placeswhere the worst violence occurred, because so many of them have abandoned theirhomes or left the country altogether. TheUnited Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that roughly 5 millionIraqis have fled, with nearly half of them now living in Syria, Jordan or otherneighboring states. Others belong to thecohort known as the "internally displaced," who have sought refugefrom the militias "cleansing" Baghdad in eitherthe northern or southern provinces. Whenthere isn't anybody left to kill, the murder statistics tend to improve.” (Go to http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2008/07/25/mccain_and_iraq/.)

In hisinterview with Katie Couric, McCain said, "Colonel MacFarland wascontacted by one of the major Sunni sheiks," said the Senator. "Because of the surge we were able to goout and protect that sheik and others. And it began the Anbar awakening."

TheArizonaRepublican's campaign went further the next day, claiming that the majorfigures that turned around Anbar province would have been killed had the surge policynot been in place. "IfBarack Obama had had his way, the Sheiks who started the Awakening would havebeen murdered at the hands of al Qaeda," said spokesman Tucker Bounds.

As it turns out, the major Sunni sheik responsible forcoordinating the Sunni Awakening to turn against al Qaeda in western Iraq,Abdul Sattar Abu Risha, was assasinated in Anbar province by an al Qaedagroup in September 2007 - the midst of the U.S. surge.” (Go to http://www.examiner.com/x-243-Progressive-Politics-Examiner~y2008m7d23-Anbar-Sheik-cited-by-McCain-was-assasinated-last-year.)

McCain’s “Surge is Working” strategynonetheless is probably a huge success in winning the hearts and minds – well,at least the hearts – of stupid voters. Thetimid Mainstream Media does little to correct the impression. Facts mean little, and many, if not mostvoters will not know the history of the surge, the “Anbar Awakening” and thefact that the completion of “ethnic cleansing” which has left many persons asrefugees in their own country, has led to a lessening of violence because it hasleft fewer persons to kill and persecute as neighborhoods in Iraq becomeincreasingly homogenous and segregated.

It also does not matter that McCainclaimed that it was “The Surge” that protectedthe founder of the Anbar Awakening” when in fact SheikhSattar, the founder and leader of thetribes that initiated the movement wasassassinated in September 2007, at the height of “The Surge.”

And, oh yeah: what was the actual purpose of “TheSurge”?

From Wikipedia: Accordingto the "Fact Sheet: The New Way Forward in Iraq " issued by the White House, "thePresident's New Iraq Strategy Is Rooted In Six Fundamental Elements" asfollow:

1. Let the Iraqis lead;

2. Help Iraqis protect the population;

3. Isolate extremists;

4. Create space for political progress;

5. Diversify political and economicefforts; and

6. Situate the strategy in a regionalapproach.” (Go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War_troop_surge_of_2007.)

Which of the above items has “The Surge” beeninstrumental in accomplishing? Element 1is doubtful though not ridiculous. Iraqitroops are still not as independent as needed. Element 2 has certainly not been accomplished – ethnic cleansing hasbeen carried out. Item 3 was probably accomplishedvia the “Anbar Awakening” and the threat of US troops leaving and not via “The Surge”. Items 4, 5 & 6 are probably the mostdoubtful of all the elements. “TheSurge” is no slam-dunk, though it seems to have done no harm in Iraq and may have indeed succeeded, in a sense, in closingthe barn door after all the horses ran out. But “The Surge” almost inarguably has harmed US interest overall by depriving the US of the ability to divert more effort to Afghanistan and Pakistan, where Al Qaeda and the Taliban actually exist andthreaten us and the US-backed government of Afghanistan.

Part B: Barack Obama: “Ihad no doubt… we would see an improvement”: An appeal to ignorance is notconfined to one political party however. In January 2007, candidate Barack Obama said, "We cannot impose a military solution on what has effectivelybecome a civil war. And until weacknowledge that reality -- we can send 15,000 more troops, 20,000 more troops,30,000 more troops, I don't know anyexpert on the region or any military officer that I've spoken to privately thatbelieves that that is going to make a substantial difference on the situationon the ground." (CBS' "Face The Nation," 1/14/07.)

The above quote may have indeed been true and sensibleat the time it was originally made. However, it is fair to say that it is possible that “The Surge” has indeed made a “substantial differenceon the ground” even if, in the long run, this difference is irrelevant becauseof political failures of the Iraqi government or if, taken as a whole, USinterests were harmed. However, it would be an appeal to ignorance to say “Now,I had no doubt, and I said at the time when I opposed the surge, that givenhow wonderfully our troops perform, if we place 30,000 more troops in there,then we would see an improvement in thesecurity situation and we would see a reduction in the violence." (Sen. Barack Obama, Democrat Presidential CandidateDebate, Manchester, NH, 1/5/08) (Go to http://www.speroforum.com/site/article.asp?id=15779.)

The above contradictory statements rely on ignoranceand yet are easily discovered – if one wants to make the effort to find thefacts.

The facts do not matter, however, to Stupid Voters andcertainly a Stupid Voter is stupid precisely because they won’t make the effortto find anything out. In the battle of “The Surge is Working” vs. “I had no doubt… we would see animprovement” we most likely have a HUGE advantage to McCain in the race forthe Stupid Vote.

The Reasoning Voter (and Reasoning News Media member)should not be swayed either way; instead the Reasoning Person might ask, “Why did we need a surge, whether it wouldwork or not, in the first place? Who orwhat line of thinking put us in this position in the first place? Are we better off overall with this war, orwould we have been better off with a continuation of the UN weapons inspectionsand where did the candidates stand on that when that all important decision hadto be made?

When was the last time you heard that series ofquestions asked of the candidates by the Mainstream Media?

Answer: Stupid Voters probably don’t care, but onecould certainly wish that the Mainstream Media were up to the challenge so thatwe could give the opportunity to Stupid Voters to prove that they’re not sostupid.

Tags: obama, mccain, election, stupid, surge, iraq, anbar

The Insanity that is the War on Iraq

2008-06-06T14:11:00.000-07:00

(NY Times, 4/11/08) A senior aide of Moktada al-Sadr, the radical anti-American cleric, was killed in Najaf, the Shiite holy city south of Baghdad, as he returned home from prayers on Friday in what Sadrists officials said was an assassination carried out by unknown gunmen.

The aide, Sayyed Riyadh al-Nuri, who was a senior official in the Sadr office in Najaf, was also related to Mr. Sadr by marriage. His sister is married to Mr. Sadr’s brother.

The killing is certain to increase tensions between Mr. Sadr’s Mahdi Army and government security forces, who fought a huge battle in Basra last month and have been engaged in heavy fighting in Mr. Sadr’s eastern Baghdad stronghold, Sadr City.

Hassan al-Rubaie, a Sadrist member of Parliament, said: "We condemn this attack against Sayyed Nuri and we call on the Iraqi government to set up an investigative committee to stop the security situation deteriorating." (End excerpt.)

This episode, one of uncountable similar episodes that have already occurred and will again in the future, serves to display the insanity of the War in Iraq, as if we needed another lesson in its insanity.

As the situation stands right now, the United States is in the position of supporting an Iraqi government that is headed by Prime Minister Nouri Miliki, a Shiite who is closely aligned with Iran. Gunmen, probably associated with the government, and acting as a “death squad” have just killed an aide of the radical anti-American, but more independent cleric, Moktada al-Sadr, who may be in hiding – in Iran!

Meanwhile, on the campaign trail, the candidates try to avoid dealing with the realities on the ground; one side (guess which one) paints an upbeat picture and dreams about the day of “victory” to come, while the other side simply talks about getting the hell out without revealing how to avoid an internecine conflagration.

To further make one’s head spin, a tentative cease-fire is in place (at least for a moment) even as Sadr City, a Mahdi Army stronghold, is occasionally bombed by US pilots at the direction of the government forces! Keep in mind that Sadr City is densely populated with civilians.

Questions: What would we prefer happen? Who would we prefer to prevail? Is it good that Iran’s man in Iraq, Maliki, might benefit from the assassination by a death squad of an American hating cleric’s assistant who is not as aligned with Iran as Maliki?

Answer: Who could possibly answer this?

What is clear is that there is no positive aspect of this for our country. We have the choice of supporting a government that may be sending out death squads against an enemy who hates us even more but who is somewhat less aligned withIran, our country’s most dangerous enemy.

Some choice… Some war…

Tags: Iraq, Bush, Maliki, al-Sadr, Sadr City

What to do About Creationism Course in Long Island, New York

2008-06-06T14:04:00.000-07:00

In the February 2008 issue of the INQUIRER, we reported on the Creationism course being offered in the Northport-East Northport Union Free School District’s adult education program. (Go to http://www.centerforinquiry.net/uploads/attachments/feb2008newsletter.pdf).

This course was a blatantly un-scientific course in religious instruction being offered at a public school, partly funded, according to information provided by the district, by tax dollars.

CFI Community of Long Island, as per a request by a parent in the district, beginning in October 2007, wrote a number of letters to the district (copying the media) regarding the course offering. We requested information on the process of offering courses at the school.

The letters and complaints went unanswered for a long time until a letter from the school district’s attorneys was received by CFI Community of LI in early March 2008. The response consisted of a cover letter from the law firm of Ingerman Smith L.L.P. by Warren H. Richmond, dated February 27, 2008, and an opinion letter that was issued by the law firm on March 14, 2007, a year earlier! The opinion was issued after the initial offering of the course to the public in fall of 2006.

Here are some excerpts from the legal opinion issued on 3/14/07 from the law firm to Ms. Arlene Munson, President of the Board of Education of this school district:

I am writing in response to the Board’s request for a written opinion regarding various issues related to courses offered in the District’s Continuing Education Program. These issues have come to the fore as a result of the objection of a member of the community, Dr. Frederic Lipfert, to a course entitled “What is Creation Science” which was offered in the fall of 2006.

Specifically, two concerns were raised by Dr. Lipfert. First, that the offering of this course as a part of the District’s Continuing Education Program constitutes religious advocacy in violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Second, that the description contained in the Continuing Education brochure had the effect of suggesting that the District supported the proposition that there is no scientific basis for the theory of evolution…

Freedom of Expression

Identifying the forum

As noted by the US Court of Appeals for the 2nd District in Bronx, Household of Faith vs. Board of Education of the City of NY, 331 F.3d 342 (2nd Cir. 2003), the right to exercise free speech on government property depends on the type of forum where the speechoccurs. The US Supreme Court has identified the categories of fora: (1) the traditional public forum; (2) the non-public forum (3) the designated public forum, which includes a subcategory known as the “limited public forum…”

Restrictions governing access to a limited public forum, including content-based restraints, are permitted as long as two criteria are met: (1) they are reasonable in light of the purpose served by the forum; and (2) they are viewpoint neutral…

Restrictions must be reasonable

In considering what is reasonable, courts will focus on whether a limitation is consistent with preserving the property for the purpose to which it is dedicated…

The court noted that in its previous decision of Planned Parenthood v. Clark County School District, 941 F.2d 817 (9th Cir. 1991) (en banc):

We recognized that a public secondary school has legitimate concerns “such as respecting audience maturity, disassociating itself from speech inconsistent with its educational mission, and avoiding the appearance of endorsing views” that render a school’s restriction on advertising reasonable.

Restrictions must be viewpoint neutral

Even if a governmental entity’s restriction of access to a limited public forum is reasonable, it will not pass constitution muster unless it meets a second requirement – that of being viewpoint neutral. Viewpoint discrimination occurs when a government discriminates against particular views taken by speakers on a subject that is generally allowed, rather than excluding the subject altogether as a topic for discussion. Thus, in viewpoint discrimination, a governmental entity impermissibly regulates speech on the basis of the speaker’s ideology or opinion or perspective. Permissible content discrimination, on the other hand, excludes an entire category of speech.

The Establishment Clause

In applying these principles to the Creation Science offering, it becomes apparent that rejection of the course would run afoul of the First Amendment. This is so for several reasons. First, the District has never, by policy or practice, placed any limitation on the subject matter to be offered in adult education courses. Indeed, the administration is not aware of any other instance in which a course has been rejected, nor has there ever been any attempt to review or monitor the adult education curriculum. In this light, rejection of the Creation Science course because of the religious or scientific view presented would clearly be deemed unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination. Second, unlike the course offered as part of the school curriculum, this course is presented to adults, outside the regular school day and only to those who elect to take it. As such, the coercive effect of presenting religious materials to a captive audience of students, which various courts have found objectionable, is plainly absent. Finally, any claim of unconstitutional endorsement of religion by the district is removed by the disclaimer which appears in the Adult Education brochure to the effect that the views presented in the classes are those of the individual instructor and should not be interpreted as endorsed by the School District.

Dr. Lipfert’s second point, i.e. that the brochure’s description of the Creation Science course might be interpreted by some as indicating the District’s support for the proposition that there is no scientific basis for the theory of evolution is not without merit. The course description could have more clearly indicated that this was the view of the instructor. There is no legal impediment to the District reviewing and where appropriate editing course description, to this end, and it is recommended that it do so…

As an intermediate step, the Board could limit the content areas to be offered in the Adult Education Program, precluding course in certain areas such as religion, politics or other areas as it may deem appropriate, provided that it does not preclude courses based on viewpoint… The Creation Science course provides an excellent example in that a question exists as to whether this course can suitably be categorized as a course in religion…

In view of the above, the Board must address the threshold question of whether it wishes to continue the Adult Education Program in the same manner as in the past or whether it wishes to modify it so as to restrict the content or subject matter of the courses offered…

Very truly yours, Warren H. Richmond.

Some more background:

The Continuing Education brochure offered by the district does have disclaimers in it, such as “none of the views presented in the classes should be interpreted as endorsed by the district.”

But the information sent along with the legal opinion also notes that “The Community Services Program’s activities shall be supported by a combination of registration and material’s fees, local taxation, and/or Federal Aid as is currently available for that purpose…”

There’s more!

In researching the story, a letter dated April 6, 2008, to the editor of the Times of Northport was discovered who was responding to Dr. Stephen Uzzo, the Northport resident who first alerted CFI Community of Long Island. Here is an excerpt:

“In response to Mr. Uzzo's September 27 letter condemning Creationism as an adult continuing education elective course offering, I find it fascinating that a certified teacher would espouse censorship instead of debate.

I do not know if Creationism is a pseudoscience or not but, far from being the scientific certainty that Mr. Uzzo represents, there are serious and unexplained gaps in evolutionary theory (which is why it is called "theory"), including an almost total lack of fossil records on "transitional" evolutionary life forms.

There is a dynamic and rigorous debate regarding on the one hand a theory that remains, to a large extent, unproven, and on the other a theory that is essentially unprovable. Mr. Uzzo's intent appears to be to stifle this debate, rather than, as a good and experienced educator, offer rebuttal.

In the larger context, Mr. Uzzo's letter provides an important example of a phenomenon that appears to be spreading in the world of higher education — intolerance for free speech...

Perhaps Mr. Uzzo's intentions are benign but I don't think we as a community or society need protection from ideas. The antidote for ignorance is exactly what Mr. Uzzo opposes — freedom of speech. Greg Munson, October 03, 2007. (The writer is married to local Board of Education President Arlene Munson.)” (Go to http://www.timesofnorthport.com/Letters-3551.112114_Antidote_for_ignorance.html.)

One could probably assume that Mr. Munson wrote the above letter with the approval of the B. of E. President who happens to be his wife!

So, in a nutshell, the Northport-East Northport School District has decided that they will have no standards regarding what will be offered to the public in their Adult Educational program! ANYTHING GOES!

In addition, it seems clear that at least the husband of the President of the Board of Education seems to think that issues such as “Creationism vs. Evolution,” or “Global Warming,” or “gender-based” biological distinctions are simply “free speech” matters not subject to scientific inquiry; and other (I’m sure coincidentally) right wing hot button issues such as “affirmative action” and “illegal immigration” are similarly only tangentially amenable to scientific inquiry. In fact, it would seem that scientific inquiry is just another form of mere opinion, on an equal footing with religious or political dogma; is this reading a bit too much into the above letter? It would seem that Public Schools do not stand for anything, and especially not science and reason and, as a consequence, quality education.

What will happen when the School District is confronted with a course on “Does Science Give Evidence Against the Existence of God?” which actually is a totally legitimate area of inquiry?

How about a course on “Does Southern Baptism Have Racist Origins?” again, a totally legitimate area of inquiry?

What would happen if the school district is confronted with an obviously odious course such as “Why the Holocaust Never Happened.”

What would happen if the Creationism Course is expanded into an explanation of the nature of the human races as explained by Dr. Henry Morris who wrote the textbook actually used in the Creationism course? Would a course entitled “Why Africans are Destined to be the Servants of Humanity” be an acceptable course offering?

How about a course in “2 + 2 = 5”?

The School Board is probably simply praying that no one offers such courses. (And of course, nothing fails like prayer.)

The Northport-East Northport School District should make a principled stand for quality education and prevent their schools and taxes from being used to promote harmful superstition and other non-scientific dogma. They should decide that unscientific dogma is “inconsistent with its educational mission” and that the school will not allow religious or secular political dogma or superstition of any kind in the classrooms. The key words are “dogma” and “superstition” which imply beliefs that are by definition un-testable and beyond debate. What Free Speech issue is at stake when the course is state-funded religious instruction? Isn’t this actually an establishment of a particular religion?

If taxpayer dollars are behind a course in any amount, religious or political dogma does not belong in its offerings; keep in mind that Federal Courts have found ID to be a religious belief. Let those persons who want to preach dogma rent the space outright if they want to offer a course, and remove them from the district produced brochures.

This is all unlikely to occur. And indeed, there is a measure of sympathy with the plight of, we’re sure, many of the members of the Board of Education who are probably extremely uncomfortable with offering courses based on superstition in their school building and funded in part with tax dollars; at the same time they have concern about lawsuits from the religious fundamentalists that would be sure to follow a banning of religious courses disguised as science.

There is no time like the present to take a stand for quality education; the School Board is urged to create guidelines that separate course offerings that are evidence-based versus those based on the supernatural or the unquestioned assumptions of their promoters. What a concept: Schools that proudly offer knowledge, reason, evidence, understanding and real free inquiry!

Tags: Creationism, evolution, natural selection, Northport, New York

Where Do the Candidates Stand on Gay Rights/Marriage?

2008-06-06T13:55:00.000-07:00

At the time this article is being written, the likely major party candidates for President are Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. John McCain. Rather than generalize about each candidate, here are some actual statements, quotes and votes by each on the topic at hand. Then we’ll generalize about and analyze the candidates!

John McCain: On a recent appearance on the Ellen DeGeneres Show, McCain politely noted his opposition to treating homosexuals as if they were entitled to equal rights, if one can do such a thing politely. Without explaining why, he said he opposes gay marriage and believes in "the unique status of marriage between and man and a woman... and I know that we have a respectful disagreement on that issue.”

McCain, who, somewhat surprisingly for a conservative Republican, also opposes an amendment to the Constitution to ban same-sex unions, and voted against such an amendment, and claims that this issue should be left in the hands of states, told the DeGeneres audience that people should be encouraged to enter into legal agreements, particularly for insurance and other areas where decisions need to be made. Note that such agreements would do nothing to help gay couples gain the rights that married couples possess due to Federal Law.

The Human Rights Campaign, which advocates for equality for homosexuals, gave a 33% rating to McCain in 2006.

Here is a quick summary of the McCain position from his website:

“The family represents the foundation of Western Civilization and civil society and John McCain believes the institution of marriage is a union between one man and one woman. It is only this definition that sufficiently recognizes the vital and unique role played by mothers and fathers in the raising of children, and the role of the family in shaping, stabilizing, and strengthening communities and our nation.

As with most issues vital to the preservation and health of civil society, the basic responsibility for preserving and strengthening the family should reside at the level of government closest to the people. In their wisdom, the Founding Fathers reserved for the States the authority and responsibility to protect and strengthen the vital institutions of our civil society. They did so to ensure that the voices of America's families could not be ignored by an indifferent national government or suffocated through filibusters and clever legislative maneuvering in Congress.” (Go to http://www.johnmccain.com/Informing/Issues/95b18512-d5b6-456e-90a2-12028d71df58.htm)

Analysis: Although McCain did not say as much, his non-explanation for his oppositionto same-sex marriage speaks volumes. It is undeniable that not all children will be raised by a mother and a father; divorce, as John McCain knows, is rampant, and all too often one parent or the other is absent; yet he is not demanding an end to divorce! Far more children are affected by heterosexual divorce than would ever be affected by gay marriage.

McCain’s real motivation, other than appeasing the Religious Right, lies in religious taboo; like many (not all) religious persons, he believes that God would prefer that gays not lead happy lives and denying them equal marriage rights would add to their unhappiness. If his God wanted gays to have happier and better lives, wouldn’t he support equal rights for them even as gays continue to sin? They’d sin either way, no? Why not have some legal benefits in the meantime?

This one issue displays all that is wrong with religious morality; numerous people are convinced to behave in a manner that makes life WORSE for others with no benefit to anyone; and all because of a religious taboo.

Barack Obama: (From About.com) Barack Obama supported gay rights during his Illinois Senate tenure. He sponsored legislation in Illinois that would ban discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

In the United States Senate: Every two years the Human Rights Campaign, the largest national gay and lesbian organization, issues a scorecard for members of the Senate based on their sponsorship and voting on key issues of importance to gay and lesbian citizens. Barack Obama scored 89 out of 100% in the 2006 scorecard.

Here's how HRC rated Barack Obama:

Hate Crimes: Barack Obama co-sponsored legislation to expand federal hate crimes laws to include crimes perpetrated because of sexual orientation and gender identity.

Employment Non-Discrimination: Barack Obama supports the Employment Non-Discrimination Act and believes it should be expanded to include sexual orientation and gender identity.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell - Gays in the Military: Barack Obama believes we need to repeal the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy and allow gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military. His campaign literature says, "The key test for military service should be patriotism, a sense of duty, and a willingness to serve."

Gay & Lesbian Adoption: Barack Obama believes gays and lesbians should have the same rights to adopt children as heterosexuals.

Gay Marriage/ Civil Unions: Although Barack Obama has said that he supports civil unions, he is against gay marriage. In an interview with the Chicago Daily Tribune, Obama said, "I'm a Christian. And so, although I try not to have my religious beliefs dominate or determine my political views on this issue, I do believe that tradition, and my religious beliefs say that marriage is something sanctified between a man and a woman."

Barack Obama did vote against a Federal Marriage Amendment and opposed the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996 both of which opposed gay marriage.

He said he would support civil unions between gay and lesbian couples, as well as letting individual states determine if marriage between gay and lesbian couples should be legalized.

"Giving them a set of basic rights would allow them to experience their relationship and live their lives in a way that doesn't cause discrimination," Obama said. "I think it is the right balance to strike in this society." Sources: Chicago Daily Tribune, National Gay and Lesbian Task Force” (Go to http://lesbianlife.about.com/od/lesbianactivism/p/BarackObama.htm)

Analysis: Obama certainly has dealt with more detail on the issues than has Senator McCain and iscompletely supportive of gay rights with one exception. Once again, however, this candidate, for religious reasons (supposedly) and a belief that God wants gays to suffer or be stigmatized, has not been able to bring himself to support gay marriage, although as John McCain also did, he voted against a Constitutional Amendment that would have banned it.

It may seem harsh to accuse the religious who oppose equal rights for gays of desiring misery for them. But how else can it be explained? Can it be described as the “collateral damage” of not wanting to legitimize stable and committed homosexual relationships? What would be the difference? Wouldn’t opposition of gay marriage be an encouragement of unstable and uncommitted homosexual relationships?

Once again, if God existed and truly cared about the homosexuals he supposedly created in his image, then why would he promote lesser treatment of gays among his followers, since we’re all “sinners” anyway? There is no escape; making the lives of homosexuals worse seems to be the mandate from God to his followers. That’s what BELIEVERS are saying.

There is one other possibility regarding Obama’s position on gay marriage; his opposition to gay marriage may be entirely political; it may still be too toxic to openly support equal rights for everyone in a country as religious as theUS and have any chance of becoming president.

Tags: gays, McCain, Obama, gay marriage

Macy's Window

2008-04-02T09:25:00.000-07:00

There is a saying of some sort that goes along the lines of “no one will notice you doing the obvious if you do it Macy’s window”. Indeed, how often have you looked for something that ultimately was right in front of you?

In an article in the San Francisco Chronicle, “Attorney General Michael Mukasey defended the Bush administration's wiretapping program Thursday to a San Francisco audience and suggested the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks could have been prevented if the government had been able to monitor an overseas phone call to the United States.

The government "shouldn't need a warrant when somebody picks up a phone in Iraq and calls the United States," Mukasey said in a question-and-answer session after a speech to the Commonwealth Club.

Before the 2001 terrorist attacks, he said, "we knew that there had been a call from someplace that was known to be a safe house in Afghanistan and we knew that it came to the United States. We didn't know precisely where it went. You've got 3,000 people who went to work that day, and didn't come home, to show for that."

Mukasey did not specify the call to which he referred. He also did not explain why the government, if it knew of telephone calls from suspected foreign terrorists, hadn't sought a wiretapping warrant from a court established by Congress to authorize terrorist surveillance, or hadn't monitored all such calls without a warrant for 72 hours as allowed by law. The Justice Department did not respond to a request for more information.

A congressional investigation found in 2003 that the National Security Agency had intercepted messages between one of the Sept. 11 hijackers and an al Qaeda safe house in the Middle East as early as 1999, but had not shared the information with other agencies.” (Go to http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/03/28/BA69VROE9.DTL .)

On the surface, this was a plea by Mukasey to give US phone companies immunity for breaking the law in assisting the Federal Government in their unwarranted spying on Americans by appealing to our fears. By brazenly disclosing the “existence” of this phone call, Mukasey must think that manywill not see either the obvious untruth or incompetence of the whole situation.

It is legal for the government to intercept foreign phone calls. As far as anyone can tell, there is no legal reason why they could not have done so in this case. Authorization can come up to 72 hours after the call is intercepted. What, exactly, is the problem that giving immunity to phone companies would solve? The FISA Court is right now almost a rubberstamp for the Federal Government when it makes requests.

If one, therefore, can see beyond their nose, and perceive the obvious, either Attorney General Mukasey was lying about the whole “al Qaeda phone call” episode, or he is saying that the Bush Administration was so incompetent and secretive, that they could not perform a legal surveillance properly.

Except that when he does it in “Macy’s Window,” many simply will not see the obvious at all.

Don’t believe it? Here’s what the Wall Street Journal wrote:

“Mr. Mukasey said, ‘We (Americans) face the prospect of disclosure in open court of what they (the phone companies) did, which is tosay the means and the methods by which we collect foreign intelligence against foreign targets." Al Qaeda would love that. The cynics will call this "fear-mongering, ‘but most Americans will want to make sure we don't miss the next terror call.’”

Tags: mukasey, bush, wiretap, FISA, Al Qaeda, 9-11

Almost EVERYONE Should Leave Their Church!

2008-03-28T09:50:00.000-07:00

Much has been made lately of comments made by a pastor at Barack Obama’s church. Among Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s quotes (which are on video) are:

"We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye... We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant. Because the stuff we have done overseas has now brought right back into our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost." (Sept. 2001, after 9-11)

In 2003 Wright also said, “The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' No, no, no, God damn America, that's in the Bible for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme." In a sense, these are the least of Wright’s misstatements since there are elements of credibility interspersed among the criticisms of America.

For example it has been reported that an article appeared in a November/December 2007 edition of Trumpet, a magazine run by Wright's daughters where Wright described Italians as "garlic noses" and saying Jesus' crucifixion was "a public lynching Italian-style. Wright has also been reported to have said publicly that the AIDS virus was engineered by the US government to harm Africans and under something called “The Pastor’s Page” in his daughter’s newsletter was printed an open letter to Oprah (Winfrey) from Ali Baghdadi, a person who has who said “Mr. al-Bashir (the President of Sudan) is known to be gentle, kind, and pleasant. His smile is genuine. One can easily connect with al-Bashir for his humility, warmth, and frankness. He doesn’t play dirty games. He doesn’t speak in double tongues.”

This is what Time Magazine says about al-Bashir:

“A top-100 list gives Omar al-Bashir too much company. In a number of ignominious post-World War II categories, Sudan's dictator ranks in the top five: most deaths as a result of war strategies (2.5 million in Darfur and southern Sudan), most people rendered homeless by scorched-earth policies (7 million), most villages burned to the ground (at least 1,500 in Darfur alone). Bashir's one goal is to maintain power. He has sown discord in Darfur with a classic divide-and-conquer strategy. As a result, interethnic conflict is tearing the region apart, and attacks on aid agencies by government and rebel militias have left a million people beyond the reach of humanitarian aid. Bashir, 63, has blocked the deployment of a larger U.N.-led peacekeeping operation that would protect Darfur's civilians.” (Go to http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/time100/article/0,28804,1595326_1615513_1614671,00.html .)

So here is an excerpt from that article that Ali Baghdadi wrote and was placed on Rev. Wright’s Pastor’s Page:

“I must tell you that Israel was the closest ally to the White Supremacists of South Africa. In fact, South Africa allowed Israel to test its nuclear weapons in the ocean off South Africa. The Israelis were given a blank check: they could test whenever they desired and did not even have to ask permission. Both worked on an ethnic bomb that kills Blacks and Arabs.” (Go to http://tucc.org/upload/tuccbulletin_june10.pdf.)

Interestingly, a number of other pastors have defended Rev. Wright, for a number of personally unintelligible reasons. Few have thrown Rev. Wright under the bus. Why? More on this later.

Obama has said he was not present when these quotes were made. We assume he would say that he had not read the newsletters either.

In a March 25, 2008 column in Newsday, and typical of opportunistic critics of Barack Obama, Charles Krauthammer wrote, “The question is why didn't he (Obama) leave that church? Why didn't he leave -- why doesn't he leave even today -- a pastor who thundered not once but three times from the pulpit (on a DVD the church proudly sells) "God damn America"? Obama's 5,000-word speech, fawned over as a great meditation on race, is little more than an elegantly crafted, brilliantly sophistic justification of that scandalous dereliction.”

There is no doubt that Rev. Wright is off the wall factually and morally. And as a non-religious person, I believe that many religions, churches and religious institutions are worth leaving and rejecting, definitely including Sen. Obama’s church; but it is hypocritical for others to single out Obama’s church for an errant pastor whose angst and hysteria is probably the result of having lived through the era of Jim Crow, the Tuskegee Airmen, segregationand lynchings - while staying silent on the deep moral failings of numerous other religious institutions. Why shouldn’t the focus on the sins of religions and churches be more broad and meaningful?

What about members of mainstream religious institutions that have up until the recent past, as policy, covered up child sexual abuse, made treaties with the Nazis, opposed inter-racial marriage, supported slavery, Jim Crow, segregation and even Apartheid? Shouldn’t it be demanded that their members leave their churches also? Oh yes, these are not small congregational institutions we’re talking about – we’re talking about the largest two denominations in the country, Roman Catholicism and much of Southern Baptism!

What about members of churches whose founders were notorious anti-Semites (e.g.: Martin Luther), or who married their followers’ wives and daughters (e.g.: Joseph Smith); or were racists preaching that blacks had the “Mark of Cain” and could not be church elders (e.g.: Brigham Young), or had segregated churches (e.g.: United Methodists); or taught that Jews were “perfidious” (e.g.: Roman Catholic); thanked God they were “chosen” (e.g.: Judaism); subjugated women (e.g.: too many to list); or that one should not be friends with unbelievers, that to die a martyr for one’s religion would guarantee paradise (e.g.: Islam) and that all those outside the chosen faith were doomed to eternal punishment (e.g.: Islam, Christianity)?

Could this collective guilt be the reason why other pastors are loathe to criticize Rev. Wright – is it because their own institutions have too many skeletons in the closet?

Obviously these are all egregious and ethically unacceptable beliefs and behaviors. And yes, all their members should reject the beliefs, religions and institutions and leave their churches.

But of course, it is mere political cynicism to single out one congregant of one church on account of one pastor when almost all have much to account for. I wonder where, in the mainstream media, you might hear that story?

Tags: , jeremiah wright, barack obama, trumpet, al-bashir, Italians, Jews, Jesus, presidential politics, 2008 election

Working to Corner the “Stupid” Vote

2008-02-27T15:27:00.000-08:00

Everyone understands that there are more or less identifiable blocks of voters who act somewhat monolithically based on their pet issues: pro or anti-abortion voters, racial bigots or chauvinists, superstition-based voters and so on. Little is said, however, about a most likely larger block that does not necessarily have one pet issue, but many fast-changing easily manufactured issues, but is still identifiable; I’m talking about the Stupid Voters.

In past years Stupid Voters have voted on the basis of their belief that Iraqis or Saddam Hussein was behind 9-11; or that tax cuts for the rich without corresponding spending cuts would never come back to haunt them in their middle class lives; that gay marriage somehow poses a threat to heterosexual marriage; and many other totally unsupported beliefs. Flag burning, adultery, teaching evolution instead of Creationism in classrooms, and the nominal religious beliefs of a candidate are stupid issues that Stupid Voters do take seriously; the justifications for war, reducing poverty, eliminating government sanctioned torture and civil rights are the kinds of issues that do not interest Stupid Voters.

Stupid Voters want to believe the worst about someone who does not seem to be as stupid as they are. In the 2000 campaign for the nomination, Stupid Voters were told just before the South Carolina primary that John McCain had had an illegitimate black child; this is just the kind of thing that Stupid Voters really care about; the result was that George W. Bush won that state and changed the momentum of the whole nominating process. In 2004 the stupid election story to voters was that John Kerry’s heroics in Viet Nam were bogus. The rest is stupid history, all courtesy of Stupid Voters.

Stupid Voters also are eager to denounce any verbal slip-up by a candidate or candidate’s spouse (e.g.: Michelle Obama’s statement, "For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country.") who opposes their dogmatic position, while totally overlooking far more stupid statements by those with no such leanings (e.g.: GW Bush saying, “Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and so do we.")

Another thing that Stupid Voters are prone to is belief in conspiracies. In the past Stupid Voters have believed in a UN takeover of the US at the end of the last millennia; that the Clintons killed Vince Foster; that the Jews and/or the Bush Administration planned 9-11 with a cooperating bin Laden; and that “everything happens for a reason.”

So what are this election cycle’s most important stupid issues that will be used to attract the Stupid Voter?

Unsurprisingly, extreme dogmatism, often religious in nature, seems to always be front and center in pursuit of the Stupid Voter.

Religious opposition to gay marriage is a stupid issue that has still not run its course. It is undoubted that this stupid issue will be used to galvanize those opposed to this improvement in the life of gay Americans even though no quantifiable harm would result to anyone else. Many Stupid Voters cannot bring themselves to support an elected official who might show some display of kindness toward gays.

Dogmatic Stupid Voters are also desperately concerned about the authenticity of the supernatural beliefs of candidates. Is Mitt Romney a real Christian? This is, of course, more important to Stupid Voters than Mr. Romney’s ability to balance a budget or successfully negotiate the end game in Iraq.

But it is clear that the most important stupid story and issue of the upcoming campaign, if Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee, is the stupid expose of his past; “Is Barack Hussein Obama” a stealth Muslim?”

As almost everyone knows, an email claiming that Obama is a radical Muslim has been making the rounds of many inboxes. Here is a sample of this email:

“Probable U. S. presidential candidate, Barack Hussein Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, to Barack Hussein Obama, Sr., a black MUSLIM from Nyangoma-Kogel, Kenya and Ann Dunham, a white ATHEIST from Wichita, Kansas. Obama's parents met at the University of Hawaii.

When Obama was two years old, his parents divorced. His father returned to Kenya. His mother then married Lolo Soetoro, a RADICAL Muslim from Indonesia.

When Obama was 6 years old, the family relocated to Indonesia.

Obama attended a MUSLIM school in Jakarta. He also spent two years in a Catholic school.

Obama takes great care to conceal the fact that he is a Muslim. He is quick to point out that, "He was once a Muslim, but that he also attended Catholic school." Obama's political handlers are attempting to make it appear that he is not a radical.

Obama's introduction to Islam came via his father, and this influence was temporary at best. In reality, the senior Obama returned to Kenya soon after the divorce, and never again had any direct influence over his son's education.

Lolo Soetoro, the second husband of Obama's mother, Ann Dunham, introduced his stepson to Islam. Obama was enrolled in a Wahabi school in Jakarta. Wahabism is the RADICAL teaching that is followed by the Muslim terrorists who are now waging Jihad against the western world. Since it is politically expedient to be a CHRISTIAN when seeking major public office in the United States, Barack Hussein Obama has joined the United Church of Christ in an attemptto downplay his Muslim background. ALSO, keep in mind that when he was sworn into office he DID NOT use the Holy Bible, but instead the Koran.

Barack Hussein Obama will NOT recite the Pledge of Allegiance nor will he show any reverence for our flag. While others place their hands over their hearts, Obama turns his back to the flag and slouches.

Let us all remain alert concerning Obama's expected presidential candidacy.

The Muslims have said they plan on destroying the US from the inside out, what better way to start than at the highest level - through the President of the United States, one of their own!!!! (End email.)

The perpetrators of this email even include the internet address of Snopes.com (http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/muslim.asp), the famous debunking site, which in fact entirely debunks this email, based on the smart assumption that Stupid Voters will not actually bother to go to Snopes.com and check it out!

But this is not the stupidest of the stupid!

The right-wing Drudge Report, as is typical, printed a photo of Barack Obama dressed, well, sort of, like a Muslim; their “cherry on top” was their most likely bogus attribution to the Clinton Campaign for the “anonymous leak” of this picture.

But not all of those who seek to woo the Stupid Vote choose to remain anonymous.

In late February, 2008, Conservative Cincinnati radio host Bill Cunningham was asked to warm up the crowd for John McCain at a rally, and that he did. According to the LA Times, the radio host told the crowd he'd had a dream about "Barack Hussein Obama's wonderful life a year from today." In the dream, he said, Obama was president and had just met with Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and was set to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. Then, Cunningham said, Obama was going to "saddle up next to Hezbollah."

"All's going to be right with the world when the great prophet from Chicago takes the stand, and the world leaders who want to kill us will simply be singing [Kumbaya] together around the table with Barack Obama," Cunningham continued.

To his credit, Republican candidate John McCain repudiated these remarks immediately. Apparently since McCain has not been the favorite of Stupid Voters in the past, he has some courage in this regard.

But McCain’s call for a respectful campaign did not sit well with the Stupid Voters and their leaders. Here is some repartee between Alan Colmes and Bill Cunningham on FoxNews just after the incident:

Colmes: Let me point out that on your radio — what you're ignoring, Bill, is on your radio show didn't you call him Barack Hussein Mohammed Obama?

Cunningham: Well, I did call him that once, because Mohammed is the greatest prophet of God according to...

Colmes: I see. So why did you add a name that wasn't his name? Now you're acting like, "I just said his name." You didn't do that. You actually inserted the name "Mohammed" to his name. Why did you do that?

Cunningham: I believed at the time that his confirmation and one of his names was Mohammed, and I rescinded the statement. I said Barack Hussein Obama.

COLMES: I see…

Mohammed a confirmation name? Only stupid person would believe that! In other words, GREAT IDEA!

Bill Cunningham then indicated that he intended to support – Hillary Clinton!

So here is where we are in the 2008 race for the Stupid Vote: there are actually those who seriously are going to attempt to sway voters based on the middle name of one of the candidates.

And it is guaranteed that this will work to a stupidly amazing degree.

Tags: Cunningham, McCain, Barack Hussein Obama, Hannity, Colmes

Will Huckabee’s Religiously Extremist Views be Recognized… by Others?

2008-01-17T08:50:00.000-08:00

In last month’s CFI Community of Long Island's INQUIRER, we noted presidential candidate Mike Huckabee’s association with the most extreme elements of the Christian Religious right. As usual, the Mainstream Media (MSM) is behind the curve, when truly it is their DUTY to be at the forefront of presenting actual relevant news and information to the public.

Since that INQUIRER was published, a new Mike Huckabee quote has been making the rounds, and it’s not pretty. Will the MSM notice? Will they make this incredible extremism an issue or will they instead write another story regarding Barack Obama’s “Muslim upbringing” or Hillary Clinton’s “un-likeability”?

So what did Huckabee say? According to CNN’s Political Ticker, in a Warren, Michigan campaign rally, he said “…the biggest momentum out of Michigan may not go to the winner, but to the story of an election eve comment from third-place Mike Huckabee, still resonating as the contest moves south.

"[Some of my opponents] do not want to change the Constitution, but I believe it's a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God,” Huckabee told a Warren, Michigan audience Monday night, “and that's what we need to do, is to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards, rather than try to change God's standards." (Go to http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/01/16/ticker-morning-edition-wednesday-january-16-2008.)

Now Huckabee will make the excuse, even though it’s no excuse, that he was only referring to was gay marriage and abortion, as if this makes it all OK.

Briefly, the First Amendment to the Constitution prohibits Congress from establishing religion, or in other words, from passing laws formulated for religious reasons only. Huckabee recognizes this fact and therefore understands that the Constitution must be amended to allow religiously-based laws. He did say, after all, “what we need to do, is to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards…” He did not even give lip service to the real basis of making law: the Common Good.

The fact is that changing the Constitution so that our laws conform to Mike Huckabee’s version of “God’s Law” to any degree is to change the very nature of what our country was meant to be all about. To overtly make laws to conform to “God’s Laws” is the stuff of the Taliban, Al Qaeda, Islamists, Christian Reconstructionists and theocrats of all stripes. It is religious totalitarianism, period. This is how it begins.

Will the Mainstream Media report that a presidential candidate, Mike Huckabee wants to make the US afundamentalist Christian nation? Will they report that he is opposed to the principles of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Paine, Ben Franklin and the Constitution itself?

Here is CNN’s take on the subject in the original article in which this story appeared: “That comment may have been music to the ears of the state’s Christian conservatives, but despite the jump in evangelical turnout, Huckabee failed to attract the same level of support he received from this voting bloc in Iowa. Evangelicals showed up – but despite a huge push by pro-Huckabee organizers, they were just as likely to support Romney as they were the former Baptist minister.”

Mike Huckabee states he wants to change the Constitution so it conforms with “God’s standards,” and all CNN has to say is that Huckabee failed to attract the same level of support he found in Iowa; they state nothing about the extremist and theocratic nature of his comments.

We must give Dan Abrams and Keith Olbermann of MSNBC some credit; they reported on this story on their TV shows on January 17, 2008; it remains to be seen whether the story will grow further.

What will it take for the Mainstream Media to objectively report on religion in America?

Tags: , Mainstream Media, Huckabee, Christian, extremist, Constitution

The Double Standard of Religious Criticism

2008-01-08T11:44:00.000-08:00

Many persons criticize Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, Vic Stenger and others for their blunt treatment of religious belief and religion itself. Indeed, the criticism comes from not only the religious, but from other non-theists as well.

Take regular CFI Community of Long Island INQUIRER contributor Dr. Massimo Pigliucci, for example. He has criticized Dr. Dawkins in print, and the following could be found on Massimo’s blog: “Skeptical Inquirer has just published the third and last entry of my unofficial “Dawkins trilogy,” three short pieces where I take Richard to task about his views on science and religion, his idea of memetics, and, of course, the selfish gene stuff…” (For the whole blog go to http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2007_10_01_archive.html .)

The memetics and selfish gene issues, while important, are not crucial issues when debating God’s existence, or the truth or usefulness of religious beliefs. These are issues that are of secondary interest to the topic at hand.

Even the portion of theabove noted critique of Dawkins on “Science & Religion” deals with a point that one can argue that Dawkins doesn’t really make (at least as much as Vic Stenger does); that science can “disprove” the existence of God. In any case, whether Dawkins really argues this or not, as Dr. Pigliucci notes disproof of “God” is more of a philosophical question than a scientific one; Dawkins may be overstating the ability of science to disprove God (or maybe not) but he is not being dishonest; at the worst he has made some mistake in logic. So note that non-theists, often being fanatics for good reasoning, healthily and securely will take exception to the shortcomings of even their heroes, like Richard Dawkins.

So here’s a contrasting question: Are religious moderates being hypocritical when they criticize atheists for religion bashing when in fact they do far worse?

It would be hard to defend, in this argument, religious fundamentalists who see things simply and clearly in black and white and who begin at a point that is in contradiction to reality: they assume a conclusion on complete faith, which in this context means a firm belief without evidence. How does one rationally defend that? One does not.

But what about non-fundamentalists? What about the largest Christian denomination in existence, the Roman Catholic Church? What about the Pope himself?

For all the flack that Dawkins, Hitchens, et al, receive for their attacks on religion, is the Pope more inflammatory, hypocritical, dishonest and hateful toward atheists and atheism, yet is seen as a symbol of peace, unity and acceptance by many?

The Pope is easy to dispose of in this argument. In an encyclical issued 11/30/07 and entitled “SPE SALVI,” the Pope claims that “According to the Christian faith, “redemption”—salvation—is not simply a given. Redemption is offered to us in the sense that we have been given hope, trustworthy hope, by virtue of which we can face our present: the present, even if it is arduous, can be lived and accepted if it leads towards a goal, if we can be sure of this goal, and if this goal is great enough to justify the effort of the journey.”

Yes, the Pope is saying that salvation gives us hope even if we are living a miserable life. Unfortunately he does not mention that it is the Christian religion that invented the idea of original sin in the first place which then requires the above noted redemption (and the hope/faith that one will indeed be unworthily chosen to receive this redemption) and contrarily, eternal misery if one does not “accept” this gift of salvation through an evidence-free faith; and, by the way, this faith will not make one’s actual life any better. Thanks for almost nothing!

Is this overstating the case? Is the Pope really saying that hoping something is true is the same as having faith that something is true? Is he really saying that life is that bleak unless you blindly believe in something that gives you hope?

The Pope continues, “Likewise, when the First Letter of Peter exhorts Christians to be always ready to give an answer concerning the logos—the meaning and the reason—of their hope (cf. 3:15),“hope” is equivalent to “faith”.”

Well, yes, he is sort of saying that life sucks except for the possession of the hope/faith that one will be “saved.” Well sort of, however, but not quite…

The Pope continues writing, “We see how decisively the self-understanding of the early Christians was shaped by their having received the gift of a trustworthy hope, when we compare the Christian life with life prior to faith, or with the situation of the followers of other religions. Paul reminds the Ephesians that before their encounter with Christ they were “without hope and without God in the world” (Eph 2:12). Of course he knew they had had gods, he knew they had had a religion, but their gods had proved questionable, and no hope emerged from their contradictory myths.”

Well shut my mouth!!!

Could Richard Dawkins have uttered a more atheistic and dismissive sentence than “Of course he knew they had had gods, he knew they had had a religion, but their gods had proved questionable, and no hope emerged from their contradictory myths.”

The Pope does not stop here; he cannot stop here. Since the Pope has an interest in promoting the Roman Catholic religion, and no other, he cannot simply defend the concept of faith in general; he must attack all those and all religions that do not share the Pope’s faith and defend the concept of believe without evidence in his belief only! He must remove all hope and all happiness from everything in the world except for the Roman Catholic faith in God. Pope Benedict XVI must turn to attacking atheism, which in the Pope’s mind, is everything but Roman Catholicism!

He writes, “The atheism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is—in its origins and aims—a type of moralism: a protest against the injustices of the world and of world history. A world marked by so much injustice, innocent suffering, and cynicism of power cannot be the work of a good God. A God with responsibility for such a world would not be a just God, much less a good God. It is for the sake of morality that this God has to be contested. Since there is no God to create justice (Ed.’s note: The Pope cannot seem to decide if non-believers don’t believe in God or think God exists but is not good. Here’s a clue–non-believers don’t believe in God.), it seems man himself is now called to establish justice. If in the face of this world's suffering, protest against God (Ed.’s note: He’s doing it again.) is understandable, the claim that humanity can and must do what no God actually does or is able to do is both presumptuous and intrinsically false. It is no accident that this idea has led to the greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice; rather, it is grounded in the intrinsic falsity of the claim. A world which has to create its own justice is a world without hope.”

For thosewho cannot believe their eyes, the Pope is arguing that humanity’s quest for a just world is doomed not only to failure, but destined to create misery and remove all hope from the world!

How can one debate or have a reasoned conversation with someone who claims, “To protest against God in the name of justice is not helpful. A world without God is a world without hope (cf. Eph 2:12). Only God can create justice. And faith gives us the certainty that he does so.” (For the whole encyclical go to http://www.catholic.org/printer_friendly.php?id=26060&section=Cathcom.)

What religious charlatan could NOT make the above claim? Bin Laden could endorse the above statement!

All godless lovers of justice take note: you are the cause of all human misery, according to the Pope.

Now you might say, “That’s the Pope. Most religious persons are far more moderate in their opinions of the godless. Most people never get as nasty about atheists as Richard Dawkins gets about religion!” Or do they?

So what does an average person in the US, a so-called “religious moderate” say about atheists?

From the American Mosaic Project out of the University of Minnesota is the research paper “Atheists as “Other”: Moral Boundaries and Cultural Membership in American Society”:

“(Researchers) conclude that widespread political rejection of atheists and others who profess no religion provides a “glaring exception” to the general rule of increasing social tolerance over the last thirty years of the twentieth century...”

“Respondents had various interpretations of what atheists are like and what that label means. Those whom we interviewed view atheists in two different ways. Some people view atheists as problematic because they associate them with illegality, such as drug use and prostitution—that is, with immoral people who threaten respectable community from the lower end of the status hierarchy. Others saw atheists as rampant materialists and cultural elitists that threaten common values from above—the ostentatiously wealthy who make a lifestyle out of consumption or the cultural elites who think they know better than everyone else. Both of these themes rest on a view of atheists as self-interested individualists who are not concerned with the common good…” (Go to http://www.soc.umn.edu/hartmann/files/atheist%20as%20the%20other.pdf.)

Please note that the above unfounded critiques are of atheists as persons, not simply atheism! Yes, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens bluntly attack religious belief but “average” or “moderate” Americans impugn atheists themselves and ascribe to them all sorts of specific-to-them-only attributes that have no relation to reality. No one bothers with evidence or facts.

Even religious moderates make the argument that “without God, all is permitted,” implying that those who do not believe have no reason for morality. By extension they come to believe that the jails are filled with non-believers or that non-believers are selfish hedonists who care about no one else.

In contrast, from a godless standpoint, all persons, theist and non-theist alike have the same opportunity and motivation for good behavior; their innate concern for others. Although many theists will make the magical and free-will killing assertion that God placed love and concern in our human hearts, Natural Selection offers a perfectly good alternative and well-evidenced explanation in its place. Either way, non-theists do not see themselves as superior but only see dogma as an obstacle to human kindness prevailing.

Ultimately it is hard to see how anything that Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, Dennett or Stenger have ever said that comes even close to hatefulness and dishonesty that religious fundamentalists, the Pope, and yes, the even the average religious person commonly believes about atheists.

For it is written, “The fool says in his heart, "There is no God." They are corrupt, their deeds are vile; there is no one who does good.” (Psalms 14:1.)

Tags: Pope, Benedict, Dawkins, Hitchens, Stenger, Sam Harris, Natural Selection, dogma

Pharmacists and Supernatural Taboos

2008-01-08T11:36:00.000-08:00

Recently Pope Benedict XVI told Catholic pharmacists NOT to dispense products that contradict Catholic teachings, including products that prevent pregnancy, and also, ironically, products that could end the pregnancies that could have been prevented in the first place.

In his address to the 25th International Congress of Catholic Pharmacists, the pope said, "We cannot anesthetize consciences as regards, for example, the effect of certain molecules that have the goal of preventing the implantation of the embryo or shortening a person's life.” (Go to http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jw4DfRJJM5LHehUvvOG8BRS1VtuwD8SJ6PC82. )

Although the Pope paints this as a matter of “conscience,” the word “conscience” as the Pope uses it means almost the exact opposite as it does for most other persons. In the Roman Catholic religion, you have a clear “conscience” when you know that what you believe coincides with what the Church/Pope demands. If you follow your own sense of reason, compassion, logic and morals, you are NOT following your conscience, according to what my pocket Catholic Catechism says. The Church/Pope IS the conscience of a Roman Catholic, supposedly. The kind of restrictions being dealt with here are not moral rules but instead supernatural taboos.

So persons of reason then must consider the situation in a different light than the Pope would prefer. Is it immoral (which is defined as whether something helps or harms well being) to dispense legal contraceptive devices or products to be used in euthanasia?

A difference of opinion is possible here (although I’d like to see the argument against condoms!) And a person may actually come to a conclusion based on their own ability to reason and their own sense of right and wrong that actually coincides with the Pope’s demands. A pharmacist who has reasoned it through then can refuse to do a portion of their job or find some other line of work if they so truly object.

But the pharmacy owner has rights also. Should employers be forced to keep as employees those persons who refuse to completely perform a legal job? If an employee asks to be relieved of certain duties that other employees willingly perform, and other potential employees would willingly perform, why continue to employ the reluctant employee? That is a good question for an employer.

It really is simple: a religious excuse is no better than any other excuse, and in fact, it is much worse. A logical reason is a better excuse; legality/illegality is a better excuse. And yes, the ethics/morality of a behavior is a far better excuse than a supernatural taboo.

Religious persons are entitled to their convictions until they infringe upon the rights of others and cause others harm. They can refuse to dispense condoms, the pill or other forbidden products; however, the employer, who might lose sales and income if he were to hire a store full of such employees, should have the right to fire them.

To put a bow on it, what would happen if other people stopped doing portions of their jobs for various and sundry religious and/or non-religious reasons? Exactly why should this discussion be confined to pharmacists? Why would this discussion be confined to contraceptives?

What about butchers in supermarkets refusing to butcher pork? Or beef? Or meat in general? Must the supermarket continue to employ them?

Would it be ok if police or firemen or those in a retail job refused to work on their Sabbath or some other day of the week? Is there a rule about the length of the Sabbath or holy days – could they be 2 or 3 days long or more? Should private employers or the State accommodate any religious or even non-religious whim? If we accommodate Catholic pharmacists, should we accommodate Christian Identity followers who refuse to serve African Americans? Can the government designate one religion as “ok” and another as “not ok”?

Obviously not, but sometimes the obvious is invisible to the oblivious.

Tags: Pope, Benedict, pharmacists,

Mike Huckabee & Christian Reconstructionists

2008-01-08T11:29:00.000-08:00

For about one moment, a number of usually sensible persons thought Mike Huckabee was different. It was said, for a moment, that Huckabee was a “nice” guy, had some integrity, and was not a panderer.

That moment’s up!

Mike Huckabee is no longer a cute Baptist Minister with a warm demeanor; he has been found to be a religious fanatic, or worse, a bigot, who not only is willfully ignorant, but blinded by his faith even in the commission of his public trust and associates with the darkest and most extreme elements of American religious fanatics.

Where do we begin?

It’s almost trivial, compared to some other issues we’ll explore, to mention that Mike Huckabee is a Creationist. He has said that he is a bible believer, and probably a literalist, so this is not a new revelation. It is sobering, though, to consider that an admitted Creationist and Bible literalist could be soon impacting our children’s schools nationwide. It is also amazing to see how little grief he gets for this willful ignorance from other candidates and the media.

Why is he let off the hook? Answer: because his Creationism is a religious belief and a nutty religious belief is off limits in a way thatnutty non-religious beliefs are not.

For a person like Huckabee, magic and science and reason and faith are one and the same. The mind boggles.

Yet, this is the least of it.

According to CNN, “Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee refused to retract a statement he made in 1992 calling for the isolation of AIDS patients… Responding to an Associated Press questionnaire, Huckabee said steps should be taken to “isolate the carriers of this plague” during his failed run for a U.S. Senate seat from Arkansas 15 years ago.

He said he probably would not make the same statement today because of what is known about how HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, is transmitted.

"I had simply made the point -- and I still believe this today -- that in the late '80s and early '90s, when we didn't know as much as we do now about AIDS, we were acting more out of political correctness than we were about the normal public health protocols that we would have acted," Huckabee told Fox News on Sunday.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concluded in 1985 that AIDS was not transmitted by casual contact…”

Well if that were the end of it, this kind of ignorance would probably be par for the course for a politician. But it’s not.

What about gay marriage?

In February, 2007, when pressed in an interview with the Associated Press, Mike Huckabee said the historic definition of marriage has worked for so long for a reason. “’People have a right to decide how they live their lives. But they have to respect not changing the definition of marriage,’ said Huckabee, who served as a pastor in Baptist churches before becoming governor in 1996.”

In 2004, the year Arkansas approved a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, Huckabee said the ban was needed to quiet activists looking to rewrite the nation's social code. But Huckabee also said it was OK to say a person's sexual preference was nobody's business, "even though it's not consistent with the Biblical norm of male and female." Apparently it’s no one’s business until they want to get married; then it’s Mike Huckabee’s and the Religious Right’s business.

In 2006, when the Arkansas Supreme Court rejected a ban on gay foster parents that had been put in by a state board, Huckabee said through a spokeswoman: "I'm very disappointed that the court seems more interested in what's good for gay couples than what's good for children needing foster care."

Exactly how would eliminating potential foster homes be “good for children needing foster care”? And please note the admission on Huckabee’s part that he does not want to do “good” for gay citizens. Of course, we suspect Huckabee’s answers reside in the bible.

Will these homophobic views come back to haunt Mike Huckabee?

Probably not; in the Republican Party most candidates, though not all, want to be seen as “tough on gays,” in the way that being tough on crime was always seen as an asset. It’s got to be tough being a Log Cabin Republican.

Another area where Huckabee exposed a bigoted side was his passive-aggressive attack on Mitt Romney’s Mormonism.

Huckabee asked this question in a NY Times interview: “Don't Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?”

According to Mormon scripture this is correct; but what was the point of asking? Answer: to point out how Mormons are heretics, meaning Romney is a heretic, and of course, as every Christian fundamentalist knows, heretics are not capable of being President.

Once again, this may help Huckabee with some voters and indeed his poll numbers continued to increase after this little episode. This and other anti-Mormon attacks forced Romney to give a speech where Romney promised not only that he would not take orders from the Mormon Church but that he instead would force a broad form of Christianity down everyone’s throat. Thanks Mitt and Mike!

Unbelievably all of the above will probably mean little in the nomination process to most Republican voters, but there are some issues that may indeed come back to haunt Huckabee.

As governor of Arkansas, Huckabee took interest in the case of a convicted rapist, Wayne Dumond. Huckabee began to believe that Dumond was railroaded and deserving of sympathy and ultimately release before his sentence expired. Why did Huckabee take an interest in this particular convict?

The answer is twofold; one reason was that Dumond had raped a distant relative of President Bill Clinton, and this irrelevant fact had convinced many Religious Right fanatics such as Huckabee’s Baptist minister friend Jay Cole, and the NY Post’s Steve Dunleavy that Dumon was railroaded and innocent!

The other reason was no better: serial rapist Dumond claimed a religious conversion in prison and that he had become a “born-again” Christian.

Instead of commuting his sentence, which would have been an obvious ploy subject to criticism, Huckabee instead pressured the appointees of the Parole Board to release Dumond; Huckabee asked them to do his dirty work. They complied.

Huckabee now denies he applied the pressure; however, ALL of the members of the Parole Board claim he did, including those who voted for and against the parole. In addition, recently disclosed statements and letters from Huckabee at the time exposed his desire to see Dumond go free, indicating Huckabee thought that Dumond got a raw deal, not unlike his radical minister friend Jay Cole believed. Worst of all, publicly disclosed at the time of the decision, Huckabee had meetings with and received letters from multiple rape victims of Wayne Dumond, including the Clinton distant relative whose rape landed Dumond in jail, who warned Huckabee in person not to have Dumond released! Huckabee ignored the personal pleas from these victims and pressured for his release anyway. They had no effect on Huckabee; Huckabee is evidence impervious.

In other words, because of Right-wing paranoia about Bill Clinton and unconscionable favoritism towards “born-again” Christians, Wayne Dumond was indeed paroled, and subsequently raped and murdered one, if not two more women.

Dumond was convicted of one subsequent rape/murder after his release but died in prison before he could be tried for the second murder.

Imagine: releasing a rapist despite warnings from MULTIPLE victims because of truly asinine political partisanship and religious favoritism leading to the rapes and murders of two innocentwomen! So, what else could possibly be even worse with presidential candidate Mike Huckabee?

Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee attended a fundraiser for himself in December 2007, and it was held at the Houston, Texas home of a self-proclaimed Christian Restorationist, Dr. Steven Hotze, a person others would describe as a Christian Reconstructionist.

As an aside, Dr.Hotze has also been cited by Quackwatch as spreading dubious medical information to the public (for his own profit as it turns out.)

Dr. Hotze has long advocated, as do all Christian Reconstructionists, that the government should enforce biblical law. Many Reconstructionists apparently believe this means re-instituting slavery, executing homosexuals, adulterers, practicing Jews, Muslims, Hindus and non-fundamentalist Christians such as Catholics or Episcopalians (go to http://www.religioustolerance.org/reconstr.htm). According to "Talk To Action," Hotze has said, "There is no neutrality. Civil government will either reflect biblical Christianity or it will reflect anti-Christian positions." ( http://www.talk2action.org/story/2005/11/23/85532/138 .)

Hotze also signed a Manifesto that endorsed the following: "We affirm that the laws of man must be based upon the laws of God. We deny that the laws of man have any inherent authority of their own or that their ultimate authority is rightly derived from or created by man."

Doesn't this imply that an endorser does not recognize the laws of the United States? Of course, all of this is the opposite of the American idea that a government derives its authority from the consent of the governed.

Why is Mike Huckabee having a fundraiser at the home of a person such as this? Why would such a person support Huckabee?

Would some other candidate get away with associating with such an extremist—if he were not a religious extremist?

If it has not become apparent already, the active endorsement of a staunch extreme American Taliban-like Christian such as Dr. Steven Hotze should make one wonder; is Minister Mike Huckabee on a mission to make our laws conform to the only authority he and they actually recognize; the God of the Bible?

(More on Christian Reconstructionism; for the “Manifesto” go to http://www.churchcouncil.org/ReformationNet/COR/cordocs/Manifesto.pdf For the “42 Article” got to http://www.churchcouncil.org/ReformationNet/COR/cordocs/42Articles.pdf.

For more on Dr. Steven Hotze and his alternative medical practice go to http://www.drhotze.com/EN/index.html .)

Tags: Huckabee, Christian Reconstructionists, Hotze

Sorry for Beating the Dead Horse: or the War on Hats!

2008-01-08T11:26:00.000-08:00

Believe it or not, this newsletter makes an active effort to not be uniformly negative; in other words, an effort is made to illuminate the positive aspects of a naturalistic, secular and humanistic approach to life and not merely bash superstition. The problem is, it’s too easy and too obvious and too necessary to bash superstition to not do it.

From Adnkronos International comes a story that would make the Onion proud; in fact, the story is so “Onion-like,” full confidence in its veracity must be reserved:

“Women have been banned from wearing boots and hats on the streets of Tehran.

Police chief, General Ahmad Radan, announced the ban on Wednesday saying that boots could only be worn if they were covered by pants.

"If boots are not covered by pants that fall to the ankles, they show the female shape and that is therefore in contradiction with Islamic dress code” said Radan.

Iranian women can no longer leave home with their pants pushed inside their boots and they can no longer wear hats without a veil.

"A hat is not an adequate substitute for a veil or a hijab," he said." If someone really wants to wear a hat, they can put it on the veil." (Go to http://www.adnkronos.com/AKI/English/Religion/?id=1.0.1662888444)

Ridiculous, right? Can’t be true, right?

Well, Reuters subsequently reported the following:

“Iranian police detained 28 young men and women wearing "inappropriate and repulsive" clothing and confiscated alcohol at a party in a northeastern city, an Iranian news agency reported on Monday…

"The police officers arrested 18 girls and 10 boys with inappropriate and repulsive clothing in the house," he said…

Since Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won the presidency in 2005, promising a return to the values of the 1979 Islamic revolution, hardliners have pressed for tighter controls on "immoral behavior".

The authorities this month launched a winter campaign against women wearing tight trousers tucked into long boots and other "improper dress" suchas short overcoats and hats instead of scarves.” (Go to http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSDAH44031020071224.)

Hats instead of scarves! What is Iran coming to? At least the President of Iran is on the case.

Lest anyone think that this kind of fanaticism or hypocrisy or insanity is limited to one stream of religious belief, one only needs to turn the page in a newspaper.

How about a brawl between priests, fighting in and about the legendary birth place of the Lord himself, Jesus Christ?

According to AFP:

“Seven people were injured on Thursday when Greek Orthodox and Armenian priests came to blows in a dispute over how to clean the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.

Following the Christmas celebrations, Greek Orthodox priests set up ladders to clean the walls and ceilings of their part of the church, which is built over the site where Jesus Christ is believed to have been born.

But the ladders encroached on space controlled by Armenian priests, according to photographers who said angry words ensued and blows quickly followed.

For a quarter of an hour bearded and robed priests laid into each other with fists, brooms and iron rods while the photographers who had come to take pictures of the annual cleaning ceremony recorded the whole event.

"As usual the cleaning of the church afer Christmas is a cause of problems," Bethlehem Mayor Victor Batarseh told AFP, adding that he has offered to help ease tensions.

"For the two years that I have been here everything went more or less calmly," he said. "It's all finished now."

The Church of the Nativity, like the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem's Old City, is shared by various branches of Christianity, each of which controls and jealously guards a part of the holy site.

The Church of the Nativity is built on the site where Christians believe Jesus was born in a stable more than 2,000 years ago after Mary and Joseph were turned away by an inn.

A dozen unarmed Palestinian policemen were sent to try to separate the priests, but two of them were also injured in the unholy melee.” (Go to http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5itableVuT2QIr2H6dF1FyV1gXZpQ.)

The BBC added:

“Palestinian police formed a human cordon to separate the battling dark-robed and bearded priests and deacons, said to number about 80, so that cleaning could continue.” (Go to http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7161557.stm.)

Thank goodness the Palestinians were there to restore peace to the legendary place of the birth of the “Prince of Peace,” and Lord to all the combatants, Jesus.

And darn it for it being so easy to bash religion.

Tags: Iran, Jerusalem, Ahmad Radan, The Church of the Nativity

Bush: Faith Is the Key to AIDS Fight

2008-01-08T11:23:00.000-08:00

How oblivious is President Bush to the realities of the world?

On November 30, 2007, the eve of World AIDS Day, at the Calvary United Methodist Church the President stressed the role of faith-based groups in the fight against AIDS.

Bush had just asked Congress for an additional $15 billion to fight AIDS and announced plans to visit the sub-Saharan Africa to see the programs at work.

After meeting with representatives of faith-based religious and community groups at the church he said, “Faith-based groups like these are the foot soldiers in the armies of compassion.”

Is this true?

No doubt there are many religious groups that are helpful and committed to fighting the spread of AIDS but the $15 billion coming from a secular source, the US government, makes most faith-based efforts seem puny in comparison.

But NOT puny are the efforts by the faith-based to actually spread AIDS that make the President seem naïve and uninformed.

Maputo Archbishop Francisco Chimoio in the country of Mozambique was instrumental in ending that country’s 16 year civil war and has earned some respect. Archbishop Chimoio is NOT a fringe extremist – he is in the mainstream of the Roman Catholic Church, the world’s largest Christian denomination. His country’s population which is 17% Catholic, however, is now suffering under the scourge of AIDS, with over 16% infected in this country of 19million.

But this is his advice regarding the use of condoms to prevent the spread of AIDS: “Condoms are not sure because I know that there are two countries in Europe, they are making condoms with the virus on purpose," refusing to name the countries.

"They want to finish with the African people. This is the programme. They want to colonise until up to now. If we are not careful we will finish in one century's time."

Of course, imagine how utterly depraved the Archbishop must assume that Europeans are if he truly believes that they are deliberately spreading AIDS among Africans! This should not be a matter of casual conversation in a BBC interview—it’s a crime against humanity the Bishop is alleging! Why wouldn’t the Bishop name names in such an atrocity as this? Is he a coward or does he know he is lying? Either way, he is certainly not the moral leader he pretends to be.

Of course, it’s all nonsense; the Bishop probably knows this but he is also so out of touch with reality that he believes that this is what one should expect of secularized Europe and that his unsupported claims are reasonable and believable to his flock. He could actually be lying, sincere and crazy at the same time.

(For the BBC story go to http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/7014335.stm.)

And what about the President, and his touting of the role of faith-based groups in the fight against AIDS? If a secular group were trying to discourage people from using condoms knowing people would die because of it, would he be silent? Perhaps, if only to mollify Catholic voters…

So while President Bush is about to spend $15 billion to fight AIDS, at the same time, the Roman Catholic Church is working to undermine the effort.

Maybe these “faith-based foot soldiers” are fighting on the other side.

Tags: Bush, AIDS, Roman Catholic Church

Mitt Romney - the un-Kennedy

2008-01-08T11:19:00.000-08:00

It may be argued that the greatest speech ever given by a presidential candidate in defense of freedom of religion was the speech by John F. Kennedy on September 12, 1960, to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association.

Rather than merely assert this, you can decide for yourself from this excerpt:

“… because I am a Catholic, and no Catholic has ever been elected President, the real issues in this campaign have been obscured--perhaps deliberately, in some quarters less responsible than this. So it is apparently necessary for me to state once again--not what kind of church I believe in, for that should be important only to me--but what kind of America I believe in.

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute--where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote--where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference--and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.

(For the whole speech go to http://www.beliefnet.com/story/40/story_4080_1.html.)

Of course, one could hardly ask a candidate to more clearly define their stand on an issue. This speech may represent the “Gold Standard” for all future candidates on the subject.

Now consider how times have changed: in the past, a religiously incorrect candidate, which a Catholic would be back then on the national scene, sought to reassure voters that their supernatural beliefs or religious leaders would not affect their performance in government.

Nowadays, many “values” voters almost prefer that their elected officials obey their clerics, as long as their clerics are fairly fundamentalist, anti-science and their morals primitive and paternalistic. What voters care about now is whether a candidate is a religious heretic, or worse, a non-believer! They care not whether the candidate’s supernatural beliefs might cause human suffering; they care about whether those beliefs are the “True” beliefs, and if they lead to policies that cause misery, it’s no problem as long as they are not heretical or, worse, skeptical.

It is in this context that Mitt Romney, a Mormon candidate for the Republic presidential nomination gave his speech to a crowd at the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library at Texas A&M University in Texas on December 6, 2007.

Romney at first affirmed that “no authorities of my church… will ever exert influence on presidential decisions.” Ironically, although this is in line with Kennedy’s viewpoint, this is not what the most distrustful Republican primary voters cared to hear; no one was worried about this. Those voters, consisting of Protestant Evangelicals and other fundamentalists, have little issue with Romney on actual policy, if one overlooks his history of flip-flopping to meet electoral needs. If Romney did obey his church on most matters, they’d actually be happy. In other words, Romney put out a fire that had never really started.

But then, instead of addressing those who believe he is not a Christian and who would not vote for him because of that, he attacked common enemies: secularists and secularism.

“In John Adams' words: "We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. … Our Constitution," he said, "was made for a moral and religious people." (Ed.’s note: Adams was a Unitarian and disbelieved in the divinity of Jesus. His definition of morality may not have had a supernatural aspect.)

Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom. Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone.

Given our grand tradition of religious tolerance and liberty,some wonder whether there are any questions regarding an aspiring candidate's religion that are appropriate. I believe there are. And I'll answer them today… If I am fortunate to become your president, I will serve no one religion, no one group, no one cause and no one interest. A president must serve only the common cause of the people of the United States.

There are some for whom these commitments are not enough. They would prefer it if I would simply distance myself from my religion, say that it's more a tradition than my personal conviction, or disavow one or another of its precepts. That I will not do. I believe in my Mormon faith and I endeavor to live by it. My faith is the faith of my fathers. I will be true to them and to my beliefs…

Americans tire of those who would jettison their beliefs, even to gain the world. There is one fundamental question about which I often am asked. What do I believe about Jesus Christ? I believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God and the savior of mankind. Whether it was the cause of abolition, or civil rights, or the right to life itself, no movement of conscience can succeed in America that cannot speak to the convictions of religious people. (Ed.’s note: Wasn’t abolition and integration commonly depicted as anti-Christian in this country? And by the Mormon Church in particular?)

We separate church and state affairs in this country, and for good reason. No religion should dictate to the state nor should the state interfere with the free practice of religion. But in recent years, the notion of the separation of church and state has been taken by some well beyond its original meaning. They seek to remove from the public domain any acknowledgment of God. Religion is seen as merely a private affair with no place in public life. It's as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America — the religion of secularism. They are wrong. (Ed.’s note: Yup, religious neutrality is a religion in and of itself, and in THIS case, apparently, it’s a bad thing. All other religions, except for this new “Religion of Secularism,” are good and included according to Romney.)

The founders proscribed the establishment of a state religion, but they did not countenance the elimination of religion from the public square. We are a nation "under God" and in God, we do indeed trust.

We should acknowledge the Creator as did the Founders in ceremony and word. He should remain on our currency, in our pledge, in the teaching of our history, and during the holiday season, nativity scenes and menorahs should be welcome in our public places. Our greatness would not long endure without judges who respect the foundation of faith upon which our constitution rests. I will take care to separate the affairs of government from any religion, but I will not separate us from 'the God who gave us liberty.'

Nor would I separate us from our religious heritage. Perhaps the most important question to ask a person of faith who seeks a political office, is this: Does he share these American values — the equality of human kind, the obligation to serve one another and a steadfast commitment to liberty…

They're the firm ground on which Americans of different faiths meet and stand as a nation, united…

Americans acknowledge that liberty is a gift of God, not an indulgence of government…(End of excerpt portion.)

At this point, Romney’s strategy is crystal clear: change the issue and scapegoat the secular.

Also, do NOT explain Mormonism to the typical Christian – the less they know about Mormonism, the better. Instead, emphasize Jesus and attack non-believers and secularism. It is truly a brilliant ploy that should fool no one, but probably will fool many, including many in the media.

Romney, ironically, then went on to cite evidence of the pernicious affect of religion and governance:

“Today's generations of Americans have always known religious liberty. Perhaps we forget the long and arduous path our nation's forebears took to achieve it. They came here from England to seek freedom of religion. But upon finding it for themselves, they at first denied it to others. Because of their diverse beliefs, Ann Hutchinson was exiled from Massachusetts Bay, Roger Williams founded Rhode Island, and two centuries later, Brigham Young set out for the West. Americans were unable to accommodate their commitment to their own faith with an appreciation for the convictions of others to different faiths. In this, they were very much like those of the European nations they had left.

It was in Philadelphia that our founding fathers defined a revolutionary vision of liberty, grounded on self evident truths about the equality of all, and the inalienable rights with which each is endowed by his Creator. (Ed.’s note: The Creator referred to in the Declaration of Independence was not Jesus, since Jefferson, the author of the Declaration, did NOT believe in the divinity of Christ.)

We cherish these sacred rights, and secure them in our Constitutional order. (Ed.’s note: The old ‘bait and switch’! First he quoted the Declaration and then he makes it seem as though he is talking about the foundation of our country’s laws, the Constitution!)

Foremost do we protect religious liberty, not as a matter of policy but as a matter of right. There will be no established church, and we are guaranteed the free exercise of our religion.

I'm not sure that we fully appreciate the profound implications of our tradition of religious liberty. I've visited many of the magnificent cathedrals in Europe. They are so inspired, so grand and so empty. Raised up over generations, long ago, so many of the cathedrals now stand as the postcard backdrop to societies just too busy or too 'enlightened' to venture inside and kneel in prayer. The establishment of state religions in Europe did no favor to Europe's churches. And though you will find many people of strong faith there, the churches themselves seem to be withering away.

Infinitely worse is the other extreme, the creed of conversion by conquest: violent jihad, murder as martyrdom, killing Christians, Jews, and Muslims with equal indifference. These radical Islamists do their preaching not by reason or example, but in the coercion of minds and the shedding of blood. We face no greater danger today than theocratic tyranny, and the boundless suffering these states and groups could inflict if given the chance.

In such a world, we can be deeply thankful that we live in a land where reason and religion are friends and allies in the cause of liberty, joined against the evils and dangers of the day. And you can be — You can be certain of this: Any believer in religious freedom, any person who has knelt in prayer to the Almighty, has a friend and ally in me. And so it is for hundreds of millions of our countrymen: We do not insist on a single strain of religion — rather, we welcome our nation's symphony of faith. (End of excerpts.)

But apparently “we” do NOT welcome even a peep of disbelief.

That a presidential candidate could so blatantly ostracize a whole class of law-abiding and patriotic Americans – non-believers – as a tactic to gain votes is an awful commentary on the candidate, and on the voters.

This final portion of the speech is also a commentary on the total inability to reason on the part of Romney and his target; religious fundamentalists. Here Romney recites the evils of mixing religion and governance in detail while ignoring the proven American solution—separation.

Although he quotes John Adams, he ignores James Madison, the Father of the Constitution and author of the First Amendment who wrote, “Every new and successful example, therefore, of a perfect separation between the ecclesiastical and civil matters, is of importance; and I have no doubt that every new example will succeed,as every past one has done, in showing that religion and Government will both exist in greater purity the less they are mixed together.” (For this quote and more go to http://candst.tripod.com/tnppage/qmadison.htm .)

Yes, Romney knows the consequences of mixing faith and the state and instead of “perfect separation” as counseled by the great James Madison, Romney claims only to be a friend to “any believer in religious freedom, any person who has knelt in prayer to the Almighty.”

Thanks for nothing.

Tags: Romney, Kennedy, Muslims, Church-State separation,

Mitt Romney: "It's the Lack of Integrity, Stupid!"

2007-11-29T12:20:00.000-08:00

Part 2 of "Mitt Romney is Perfect":

Remember Bob Jones III? He is the chancellor of the Christian University that bears his and his father and grandfather’s name (BJU) and has, in the past, caused an uproar with some of his Christian fundamentalist points of view.

In the past he has opposed inter-racial dating, and by extension, marriage. According to Wikipedia, “In May 1975, as it prepared to allow unmarried blacks to enroll, BJU adopted more detailed rules prohibiting interracial dating and marriage—threatening expulsion for any student who dated or married interracially, who advocated interracial marriage, who was "affiliated with any group or organization which holds as one of its goals or advocates interracial marriage," or "who espouse, promote, or encourage others to violate the University's dating rules and regulations (taken from a Court case, go to http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=461&invol=574 ).

To solidify his anti-Catholic credentials, in 1966, BJU awarded an honorary doctorate to the Rev. Ian Paisley, future British MP, leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, and Moderator of the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster, who has referred to the Pope as an Antichrist.

Reportedly he also has even slammed Mormonism, Mitt Romney’s religion: "The diminution of evangelistic enterprise to cults which call themselves Christian, including Catholicism and Mormonism, is frightening." (Associated Press, 3/16/00)

So, is the following a surprise?

USA Today reports in October 2007 that “Dr. Bob Jones III, chancellor of the fundamentalist Christian university in Greenville that bears his name, is looking past his religious differences with Gov. Mitt Romney and endorsing the Mormon for the Republican nomination for president, he told The Greenville News Tuesday…

Asked whether Romney's religion was a stumbling block for him, Jones replied, "What is the alternative, Hillary's lack of religion or an erroneous religion?"

Terry Sullivan, Mitt Romney's South Carolina campaign manager said, "We're proud to have the support of Dr. Jones and look forward to his help in delivering Gov. Romney's conservative message to the voters."

Wait a minute! Aren’t there other candidates whose Christian credentials are beyond doubt? Why not support one of them? Isn’t it surprising that Bob Jones III picks Romney out of the pack? Isn’t it surprising that Romney welcomes this support even though he was Governor of one of the nation’s most liberal states where support from a Bob Jones III would have been unthinkable?

No, of course this is not surprising to readers of the INQUIRER. From the September 2007 issue of the INQUIRER: “Ever wonder why the Religious Right seems to be gravitating towards Mitt Romney, the Mormon candidate for president? I know I have!

Well, I have the answer: It’s because of all the candidates running, Gov. Romney has displayed the LEAST integrity, and it’s a lack of integrity that the Religious Right cherishes above all else.”

He’s perfect.

Part 3 of "Mitt Romney is Perfect":

As noted before in this newsletter, Mitt Romney is the perfect presidential candidate for the Religious Right (RR), even though he is a Mormon. Why? Because he is willing to do and/or say anything that RR might want to hear!

While it should matter that what a candidate believes to be true and accurate is in fact reasonable to believe, supernatural beliefs are generally deemed excluded from this standard, while at the same time, failing to have some supernatural beliefs is not excluded from consideration! Ahhhh!

In other words, it’s ok if Dennis Kucinich is ridiculed for claiming to having seen a UFO (which does not mean he thinks he’s seen an alien spaceship) while Romney’s belief in a North American Jesus is never even mentioned in mainstream media, even by so-called “liberals.”

Romney has learned that these days, it’s not “it’s the economy, stupid”; no, Romney has learned “it’s the lack of integrity, stupid.”

Even Christian minister Mike Huckabee cannot compete with Romney in this regard. Huckabee, on some issues, exhibits compassion where typically the RR prefers dogma. The reason that the RR has not yet anointed Huckabee is their detection of a semblance of conscience in Huckabee’s makeup.

So Romney’s past positions on abortion, gay rights, immigration, sex education, health care and so on are not the disadvantages that one might expect; his flip-flopping on these items are evidence of his malleable character.

The latest display of a vacant conscience ironically has to do with Romney’s opinion of some other religious minority, Muslims.

According to a Muslim businessman, Mansoor Ijaz, Romney said in November 2007 that it was unlikely that he would name a Muslim to his cabinet because they made up such a small part of the American population.

What? Since when have cabinets or other appointed posts been doled out in any regard to religious affiliation? If they were, one might ask, “Where are the non-believing judges and cabinet ministers? They certainly should outnumber Jewish, Muslim and even Mormons in government – but do not.”

So Romney’s alleged answer was ignorant and biased; there is absolutely no reason why a Muslim could not be the top fellow for some cabinet position. To rule them out because they are so few is simply bigotry; have Mormons been ruled out for this reason as well? Oh yes, and such a religious test is un-constitutional.

But it gets worse; Romney, in defending himself from this charge, denied ever making the comment and said instead that he would have no such religious test for his appointees.

So that’s where it was expected to end; Romney simply denying the Muslim’s claim.

Who would Religious Right believe? Answer: It doesn’t matter. They probably would prefer that Romney said it and then deny it!

Well, Mr. Perfect’s record is in tact.

TPM, a news/blog site, found two Republicans in Nevada who reported being present at a meeting where Romney made similar statements as described by Mr. Ijaz. One of them described the statements as “racist.”

Of course, this verification could be dismissed as coming from biased Republicans who are not Romney supporters. After all, a lack of integrity is a common trait.

But wait! In the September 2007 issue of Liberty Watch Magazine is the following account:

“When Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney recently addressed a group of a prominent local conservatives at a Las Vegas fundraiser, (Liberty Watch columnist) George (Harris) lobbed the first question: “If you are elected President,” he asked, “will you include any Muslim members in your cabinet?”

In the seconds beforeformer Massachusetts Governor Romney responded, you could have heard a pin drop.

His (admittedly, very smooth) answer in a nutshell? “Not likely.”

Now, my fellow Nevada conservatives are not stupid. The reason a hush fell over the room was not so much due to the boldness of George’s question. They think the same way he does, and they worry about the consequences of an expanded war in the Middle East, which will inevitably lead to increased taxes, increased fuel prices and an even higher deficit that, sooner or later, American taxpayers will be forced to pay. More significantly, we wonder: “How can we claim to be fighting a war solely against violent Islamofacism and not the entire Arab world if the White House doesn’t contain a single member of the Arab-American or Muslim community?” (Go to http://www.liberty-watch.com/volume03/issue06/fromtheeditor.php.)

This article, which pre-dates the current controversy, pretty much seals the deal: Romney said what he is now denying he said.

The Religious Right is loving it. Romney remains their perfect candidate.

Tags: Mitt Romney, Bob Jones, Mansoor Ijaz, Liberty Watch

Teddy Bears and Religion and Utter Hypocrisy

2007-11-29T12:18:00.000-08:00

By now, most people have heard the story of a British school teacher working in Sudan who was charged with insulting Islam and inciting religious hatred after it was found that she allowed school children to name a teddy bear “Mohammed”.

It came out quickly that the children and teacher did not intentionally mock the Prophet in any way; the toy was actually named after a 7-year-old student in the class named Mohammed, a very common name in Sudan. The boy, Mohammed, has said publicly that the bear was named after him, not the Prophet Mohammed.

Al Jazeera reported him saying, "The teacher asked me what I wanted to call the teddy. I said Mohammed. I named it after my name," he said.

The boy said he was not thinking about the prophet when he made his choice for the toy, but he named it simply after himself.

He described his teacher from Aigburth, Liverpool, as a "very nice" woman who did not mention religion in class.

But that did not prevent her from being arrested, held in jail and charged with the “crime” of insulting Islam and inciting religious hatred.

The teacher, Gillian Gibbons,

is an English citizen and works in a Christian oriented school for children of wealthier Sudanese citizens.

Al Jazeera reported that Abdel Daim Zamrawi, Sudan's deputy justice minister, told the official SUNA news agency that Gillian Gibbons had been charged with the offences on Wednesday. "The punishment for this is jail, a fine and lashes. It is up to the judge to determine the sentence," Zamrawi was quoted as saying. Gibbons faces up to six months in jail, 40 lashes and a fine if she is found guilty of "insulting or degrading any religion, its rites, beliefs and sacred items or humiliating its believers", as stipulated in Sudan's penal code.

Robert Boulos, the school’s director tried to reason with authorities but told Time Magazine that police were under pressure from Islamic courts. “There were men with big beards asking where she was and saying they wanted to kill her” he said. A similar angry crowd also gathered at the Khartoum police station where she is being held according to Time.

Al Jazeera further reportedthat some Islamic leaders in Sudan said on Wednesday that the law should be applied against Gibbons. North Sudan's legal system is based on Sharia, which punishes blasphemy against Prophet Muhammad. "What has happened was not haphazard or carried out of ignorance, but rather a calculated action and another ring in the circles of plotting against Islam… It is part of the campaign of the so-called war against terrorism and the intense media campaign against Islam,” the Sudanese Assembly of the Ulemas said in a statement.

Oh.

Thank goodness the Deputy Justice Minister Zamrawi also said that the authorities were working to ensure that Gibbon would not be exposed to angry mobs should she be released.

Angry mobs?

Kill her?

Over the naming of a Teddy Bear?

The Muslim Council of Britain has also joined those calling for Ms. Gibbons to be freed and to use common sense.

"This is a very unfortunate incident and Ms Gibbonsshould never have been arrested in the first place," said secretary general Dr Muhammad Abdul Bari. "It is obvious that no malice was intended."

Obviously not all Muslims or even most are about to join an angry mob ready to flog some kindly woman over the slightest of indiscretions. But something is still not quite right with almost every statement that defends Ms. Gibbons, coming from Muslim and non-Muslim alike.

Of course it is typically inappropriate for a teacher to insult an icon representing a student’s religion; but in this case the school was a private school, not a public school. Private religious schools even in the US regularly espouse religious hatred – and if it’s private, a private school is constitutionally allowed to spout that hate. (Don’t blame secular humanists for this!) Public schools cannot do this (although the Religious Right would like to either see their hatreds aired in Public Schools or ban Public Schools altogether.)

Now contrast this with the situations in many other countries where governmentally supported religiously-oriented schools, sometimes known as madrassahs, are built upon hatred of the (non-orthodox) non-believer. We need not go into details on this, other than to note that the “West” is not innocent in this practice; government vouchers paid for Catholic and Protestant schools in Northern Ireland with both sides teaching religious hatred for decades. This is just the way it is in religious schools.

Many private religious schools in countries where religion and state are separate and many religious schools elsewhere absolutely often insult the beliefs and icons of non-believers! Inherent in Christianity and Islam is the belief that only “true” believers are saved or destined for paradise and that others have a moral failing for their lack of belief. Other religions preach that followers are chosen or blessed or simply more moral than those who do not profess the “true” belief. It is the rare religion that praises non-believers for their morality!

So the problem in Sudan is not generic insulting of any religion; it’s the insulting of the prevailing version of the prevailing religion ONLY. The prevailing religion can issue insults in schools, public or private, and elsewhere at will. But it cannot countenance a moment of being slighted in the least bit itself.

And here is the problem with many of those who are defending Ms. Gibbons: they are claiming that she “meant no harm”.

It should not matter whether her “insult” was deliberate or not or whether she “meant no harm” or not.

Religious freedom requires that a person (acting in a non-governmental role) must have the right to make the claim, for example, that a religion that would punish a person with a flogging for naming a toy after a religious icon is a bad religion, or at the least, a bad version of that religion. Religious freedom requires even the unreasonable insult of a religion as long as it’s not in a governmental capacity!

If one really wanted to defend Ms. Gibbons and future victims of religious intolerance, one would make it clear that we should not require everyone to just “make nice” about religion. What we need is a defense of real freedom of the mind, a defense of separation of religion and state, and not a defense of the dictatorial rule of the prevailing religious orthodoxy or even acquiescence to the censorship of all religious criticism. Freedom is there to protect not just the popular or orthodox beliefs; indeed, they rarely need protecting. Religious freedom’s greatest value is in protecting the right of those who espouse unpopular beliefs; and of course, proven once again, the first victim of religious intolerance is the religious dissenter.

Tags: Gillian Gibbons, Teddy Bears, Sudan, Islam

Our Democracy in Trouble, Part 2

2007-11-29T12:16:00.000-08:00

It is one thing to be ignorant about the facts that are impacting our lives and values as citizens of the United States; some misinformation is probably unavoidable, although the extent of our lack of understanding of important facts implies some willful ignorance is part of the mix.

And it is also understandable that after a lifetime of being taught that faith (defined as belief without justifying evidence) is a virtue, that many do not value reason as a way of understanding the universe.

But how charitable can one be when assessing the results of a poll by the First Amendment Center, a non-partisan educational group?

Here’s a brief summary of what they found:

· Sixty-five percent of Americans believe that the nation's founders intended the U.S. to be a Christian nation and 55% believe that the Constitution establishes a Christian nation, according to the “State of the First Amendment 2007” national survey released Sept. 11 by the First Amendment Center…

· Just 56% believe that the freedom to worship as one chooses extends to all religious groups, regardless of how extreme — down 16 points from 72% in 2000…

· 34% (lowest since the survey first was done in 1997) think the press “has too much freedom,” but 60% of Americans disagree with the statement that the press tries to report the news without bias, and 62% believe the making up of stories is a widespread problem in the news media — down only slightly from 2006…

· 25% said “the First Amendment goes too far in the rights it guarantees,” well below the 49% recorded in the 2002 survey that followed the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, but up from 18% in 2006…

· Just 74% said it was essential to have “the right to practice the religion of your choice,” down from 81% in 1997 and 83% in 2002. The right to “speak freely about whatever you want” saw a similar drop, to 66% from 72% 10 years ago and 75% five years ago.

· 58% want teacher-led prayers in schools…

· 43% endorse school holiday programs that are entirely Christian and devotional…

· 50% would allow public school teachers to teach the Bible as a “factual text” in history classes…

· The right to practice one’s own religion was deemed “essential” or “important” by nearly all Americans (97%); as was the right to “speak freely about whatever you want” (98%) and to “assemble, march, protest or petition the government (94%).” Still, Americans are hard pressed to name the five freedoms included in the First Amendment… Speech is the only one named by a majority of respondents (64%), followed by religion (19%), press and assembly (each 16%) and petition (3%)… (End of poll results. Go to http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/sofa_reports/index.aspx .)

Can you imagine that 65% of Americans actually believe that (without even a mention of Christianity or Jesus) the Constitution establishes the US as a Christian Nation? If you subtract the non-Christians from the population and assume that they are not quite as deluded, it might be fair to say that 70% or more of the Christians in this country think that the Constitution actually somehow, somewhere, establishes a “Christian” nation, whatever that means and whatever that implies legally.

65% to 70%!

Imagine the other contradictions in the opinions of the American Public: they believe that freedom of speech is important but that the “Press” has “too much freedom.” Exactly how distinct from free speech is a free press? They want “freedom” of religion for themselves (97%), but not so much for others (56%)!

And of course, the most frightening finding of all: 25% think the First Amendment, about which they are clueless, “goes too far in the rights it guarantees.”

This is not a matter of ignorance: in the poll they are given the actual wording of the First Amendment and asked the question, “Based on your own feelings about the First Amendment, please tell me whether you agree or disagree with the following statement: The First Amendment goes too far in the rights it guarantees.”

I guarantee I know what the problem is for this 25%: they have no problems with their own rights of freedom of religion, press, speech, assembly and petition; their problem is with YOUR rights.

Oh yeah, don’t forget that typically our elected officials are chosen by 25% of the voting public since only half of us vote.

Our democracy is in trouble.

Tags: Democracy, United States, religion, separation of church and state

Our Democracy is in Trouble (duh!)

2007-10-06T09:37:00.000-07:00

Al Gore’s recent book, “The Assault on Reason,” could not have been timelier: for a mainstream politician to point not only at his political adversaries for embracing irrationality, but also the voting public for irrational thinking, is amazing. Sadly, though Mr. Gore has become more popular and high profile due to his campaign on global climate change and has been prescient regarding the war on Iraq, his useful book ranks as only #264 on the Amazon.com best sellers list; respectable but not earth-shaking. I guess people are fine with blaming the politicians they vote for but not fine with looking in the mirror for their lousy decision-making in picking them in the first place.

This comes as no surprise to those who have received the INQUIRER newsletter over the years. In 2004 we reported about a PIPA survey (go to http://www.pipa.org/archives/us_opinion.php) showing how voters who had the facts wrong regarding Saddam Hussein, 9-11, world opinion and WMDs in effect re-elected President Bush. If you thought Saddam Hussein took part in the 9-11 plot and that WMDs were found in Iraq, and that the world wanted the US to attack Iraq, you were much more likely to vote for President Bush. Coincidentally, I’m sure, if you watched FoxNews you were worst informed; but if you watched PBS news, you usually had the (three) facts straight.

Now that the average citizen has “seen the light” regarding the Iraq invasion and no longer agrees, on the average, that this was a good idea, have we learned from our mistakes of the past?

Answer: ABSOLUTELY NOT!

Here is what PIPA found in March 2006:

Though their numbers are declining, a majority of Republicans continue to believe that before the war, Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or a major program for developing them and do not think that most experts believe Iraq did not have WMDs. A growing majority of Democrats believe the opposite on both points. Sixty percent of Republicans continue to believe that Iraq had WMD (41%) or a major program for developing them (19%), representing only a modest decrease from the 70 percent who held such beliefs in an October 2004 Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) poll.

A majority of Republicans, though declining, maintains the belief that Iraq was providing substantial support to al-Qaeda and that clear evidence of this support has been found, in contrast to large majorities of Democrats who hold opposing beliefs.

You might argue, based on these reports that the problem is isolated with Republicans; that they are often out of touch with reality for some reason. This would be a bad assumption.

DATE: August 2, 2006

SOURCE: Scripps Howard News Service

HEADLINE: "Anti-government anger spurs 9/11 conspiracy belief"

WRITER/REPORTER(s): Thomas Hargrove and Guido H. Stempel III

BODY: More than a third of the American public suspects that federal officials assisted in the 9/11 terrorist attacks or took no action to stop them so the United States could go to war in the Middle East, according to a new Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll… The poll found that a majority of young adults give at least some credence to a 9/11 conspiracy compared to less than a fourth of people 65 or older. Members of racial and ethnic minorities, people with only a high school education and Democrats were especially likely to suspect federal involvement in 9/11. (Go to http://www.newspolls.org/story.php?story_id=55.)

Last month’s sixth anniversary of the 9-11 attacks brought out many of the conspiracy theorists who somehow are able to overlook bin Laden’s recent commemoration of the event, and his lauding of one of his 19 hijacking martyrs.

It’s as if “merely” flying two jets into the World Trade Center and one into the Pentagon would not have been enough to start the ball rolling on a retaliatory war (it would have been enough, duh!): for some reason conspiracy theorists think it was necessary to make sure they were blown up and completely destroyed!

Why?

The American public has been convinced in the past to support wars for far less reason. In fact, going after bin Laden would have been totally justified even if the WTC towers did not fall. You could have argued about the methodology of going after bin Laden, but all rational persons should have sought justice and security after such an attack.

Let’s go further: what if the FBI had arrested the hijackers BEFORE the flights, making huge heroes out of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Tenet, Ashcroft and every other relevant Administration member for preventing the whole catastrophe. If, after their great deed, they said we needed to go to war against bin Laden, who would have argued? Some, perhaps, but the case for going after bin Laden would STILL had been legitimate even if there were not a scratch on the WTC. There was no good reason for the Federal government to either conspire or allow the World Trade Centers to be destroyed by bin Laden, especially if they wanted to target Saddam Hussein in the long run. In fact, preventing the attack would have secured this Administration’s place in history, particularly if the Iraq adventure subsequently never occurred. I cannot think of any scenario that could have motivated the Administration to even allow or hesitate to act (other than their by now well-documented incompetence) the attack on the World Trade Center. Irrationality inspired or caused by an incompetent administration is still irrational.

So most Republicans have the facts wrong, and many Democrats have their own blind spots. Who is left to vote on a reasoned basis?

That is why the Center for Inquiry exists; to promote reason for humane ends in a non-partisan manner. Still, one can’t help but look at the irrationality around us and wonder if our democracy is in real trouble when so few seem to be able to think straight. Our task ahead is huge.

Tags: , Democracy, United States, Al Gore, PIPA, reason,

The God Squad's Bigotry Against Atheists

2007-10-06T09:27:00.000-07:00

Recently, because of his Parkinson’s disease, Father Tom Hartman was forced to retire from active duty co-writing the God Squad syndicated column with his partner Rabbi Marc Gellman, leaving the rabbi on his own. It did not take the rabbi long to find a way to demean atheists, one of his long-time favorite targets of derision in his typically passive-aggressive manner.

A reader wrote (Newsday, Saturday, October 6, 2007) to the God Squad that she was sending her best thoughts and “vibrations” to the ill Father Tom with whom she often agreed. She added that the “strange thing is, I’m an atheist. I don’t believe in a god… I believe ‘god’ is the sum of all the souls who’ve ever lived, most over and over, until they got it right and entered a state of perfection…”

Of course, Rabbi Gellman responded as expected, with a “nice” sounding insult. He wrote, “Even atheists can find their way to virtue and kindness as long as they have what you have – a belief that there’s something more than dirt and death in our lives and in our world…” Would he have written “Even Muslims” if the writer had been a Muslim? Or “Even Jews” if the writer had been Jewish? You get the idea.

Just as Bill O’Reilly “could not get over the fact” that African-Americans could behave civilly in a restaurant, Rabbi Gellman seems to be amazed when an atheist appears to be moral. But Gellman, in a sense, is worse than O’Reilly, who at least did not require any particular qualifications for the moral fitness of the African-Americans who so impressed him at Sylvia’s. Rabbi Gellman did have such requirements: atheists can be virtuous as long as (and by implication, only as long as) they believe in some supernatural nonsense, such as, in this case, reincarnation.

There is one more thing; are these letters to the editor legitimate? I for one would love to know if the writers of these fastballs-down-the-middle questions truly exist or if they are merely figments of the God Squad’s dogmatic imagination. Is there really a reincarnation-believing atheist, Claudette from Boca Raton, Florida, who loves the God Squad? I think it behooves Newsday to do a quick check on the facts. (For the Newsday column go to http://www.newsday.com/news/columnists/ny-lsgod5402454oct06,0,2428350.column ; for the TMS version, go to http://www.tmsfeatures.com/tmsfeatures/subcategory.jsp?file=20070927ctngs-a.txt&catid=1709&code=ctngs .)

Tags: The God Squad, Marc Gellman, atheists, atheism, Tom Hartman