Hey, I know the headline isn’t grammatical!  It was to get your attention regarding this post by Bob Cesca on Huffpo.   Cesca makes the point that “Bring em on!” cost who-knows-how-many deaths, while Kerry’s recent gaffe was but a gaffe.  It must be surreal to be criticized by a speaker as bad as W for one’s rhetorical mishaps.

This annoys me.

In 1971, Dick Van Dyke starred in a movie called  Cold Turkey.  It was a comedy about a dying town attempting to win a prize sponsored by a tobacco company that was betting against any town remaining “smoke free” for a certain length of time.  Van Dyke played the local minister who pushed the town into going “cold turkey” to win the prize.  He himself had to start smoking to make it fair.

It was funny and sad and filled with many truths about tobacco and habits and addictions that everyone understood to be true!

I grew up in the 50s and 60s and no one around me was unaware that smoking was bad for you.  No one around me was unaware that it was addictive.  Maybe they didn’t use that specific word for it, but they knew.

Comes the 80s and 90s and now the 21st century, and you would think that the tobacco industry had successfully kept people for a century in the dark about the ills of smoking.  As if their word on the subject could ever be trusted.  As if no one had ever realized–through the power of logic and reason–that smoking was a Bad Thing and that people could “trust” a company like Philip Morris to be honest about their product.

I’m being partly disingenuous, but not a lot.  My point is, people pretty much realized without having to be told that smoking was both addictive and bad for your health long before the current spasm of public outcry over what the tobacco company knew or didn’t.

So a jury in the state of Oregon awarded a widow eighty million dollars in punitive damages against a tobacco company for her husband’s death.  It’s going to the supreme court, not to argue whether she should receive some compensation, but to argue about the reasonable size of said compensation.

I have a problem letting people off the hook for personal responsibility in this.  People lie to themselves all the time about their personal proclivities, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us should abet such dishonesty.  And just because smoking is a nasty habit doesn’t mean it is any more representative of the tug of war between personal choice and public custom.

The question to be asked is whether or not individuals would smoke had, say, Philip Morris or any of the others come out and said, up front, “if you use this product it will eventually kill you.  It is habit forming.”  At a time when it was “cool” to smoke, I rather doubt that would have had much impact, but I could be wrong–it’s difficult to determine psychological tendencies hypothetically.  (Although Ralph Nader successfully demonstrated that convertible automobiles are far more deadly than hardtops, so much so they were taken from the market, but people don’t care! So now they’re back.)  You may fault–and expect damages to the community–from tobacco companies for hiding research about how dangerous their product is, but if people would have done it anyway I think we have to stop kidding ourselves about how responsible these companies are for individual deaths.

I repeat–everyone knew, in the way people generally know, from common sense and observation.  It was, we may say, an “open secret” for a long, long time.  The culture itself lied about it, lied to itself, joked and made light of it, because people wanted to do it anyway.

I don’t smoke.  Never did.  In the boy scouts, a few of us stole the scoutmaster’s cigarettes on a camp out and snuck into the woods to light up.  The first kid who did it turned green in a minute or so and puked.  I’ve never been a fan of physical discomfort, so I left.  The idiot kept trying it until he learned to like it.

Whose fault is that?  I recognized that this was a dumb thing.  I never tried it.  But for reasons other than taking a cigarette company’s word for it, others went through the ritual of overcoming the body’s normal rejection of smoking to develop the habit.  It’s harder to develop a smoking habit than a cocaine habit–you have to force your body to accept the smoke; with cocaine, one snort (that doesn’t hurt at all) and you’re there.  But people do it anyway.

I’m not a fan of smoking.  But I think slapping the cigarette companies with these ridiculous damages for individual deaths is a bad idea.  For one, that’s not what is currently reducing popular consumption of smoking–the culture has changed and cultural pressure is doing it, regardless of the law.  For another, it’s one more way of letting people believe–teaching them to believe–that the ills which befall them are not their fault.  That they have less responsibility to think and decide and act on reason.  That if they do certain things and the results are bad, then they can blame someone else.  I think this is a bad way to achieve any kind of a goal.

But it’s hard to take a culture to court.  Next best thing, I suppose, is a cultural institution.

But if we’re going to hammer the tobacco industry into the dirt, let us be honest to ourselves about it.  As I said, we all knew, for decades.  If we chose to accept the obvious nonsense in tobacco ads rather than do the hard work of making a reasonable decision, that’s on us.  If we wish now to absolve ourselves and make a whole industry a sacrificial lamb to a new public piety, then let us be openly venal and admit our hypocrisy–we want someone else to pay for our stupidity.

We should also take a lesson from Prohibition.  Everyone knows drinking too much is a bad thing.  Always have known it.  People do it anyway.  Making the alcohol industry pay for it turned into a pretty ugly thing.

Let me say in advance that all the bad things that can be said about smoking, the tobacco industry, and so forth I more or less agree with.  My issue here is with self-deception and the metrics of liability.

One of the many miscommunications between people of science and Creationists is the assumption that the universe was created for man. If so, the engineer behind this place was wa-ay off the mark. The universe is nowhere near human scale, and the vast majority of it has nothing to do with Man.

We only began to understand the heavens when some very careful measurements were made using precision instruments. Copernicus had to note the precise movements of dots in the heavenly sphere for a long time to be sure enough that they were centered on the Sun, not the Earth. It was easier for Galileo, who polished some chunks of glass to see that even these dots had smaller dots in orbit around them. Dots that couldn’t possibly be seen by, nor affect, the average human.

Then Leeuwenhoek ground some smaller lenses and noticed that there were complete creatures too small to see, and that they were everywhere! He opened up the microscopic revolution in which it turned out that humans (and other creatures) are not made of continuous stuff, but rather each organ is composed of colonies of lesser lifeforms, cells. In fact, each organ is an ecosystem. Our skin (our largest organ after birth) is host to an abundance of microbes, mites, bacteria, and fungi that ideally coexist peacefully to maintain the health of our skin. These “parasites” are essential to our well-being, but they do not share our DNA.

When Mendeleev worked out the periodic arrangement of basic chemicals into a table, he noticed large blank areas. Chemists eagerly worked to fill these in. But what about the huge category called the Lanthanides? These hard-to-isolate chemicals occupy more slots than all of the basic elements essential to life, but have no detectable purpose for or against life. We have found a few uses for some of them in the last 100 years, such as phosphors in CRT’s. But why would a good engineer invent so many basic building blocks that have no purpose to his ostensible client?

(more…)

An evangelical acquaintance recently wrote me a letter arguing that the pro-stem cell research proposal (Missouri Amendment 2) A) is geared to financially enrich its sponsors, B) that it will invite reproductive cloning and C) that poor women will result in poor women selling their eggs.  She urged me to oppose the Amendment and oppose various promising forms of stem cell research. 

For information on the proposed amendment, see here. 

Even before receiving this letter, I knew that my acquaintance believed that a one-minute old fertilized human egg in a Petri dish is a baby that deserved full legal protection and priority over the children with horrible illnesses who occupy hospital beds. My acquaintance indicated that she was part of an organized effort to defeat Missouri Amendment 2. 

I am not thrilled with my response (see below), but I couldn’t think of anything better.  If anyone has any ideas as to a more effective way to deal with those who oppose stem cell research on religious grounds, I’m all ears.

—

Dear [Acquaintance]

I realize that you feel hurt and attacked by my previous email.  In this e-mail, I will attempt to put our recent exchange of e-mail in perspective.

The technology for making insulin is currently based on recombinant DNA techniques; the human gene which codes for the insulin protein is cloned and then inserted in bacteria.  I want you to assume for a moment, though, that my religion holds that both the cloning of genes and recombinant DNA techniques are morally and spiritually repugnant.

Let’s assume further that one of your daughters has diabetes and she needs insulin in order to live (assume that insulin obtained through older methods—derived from pigs and cows–causes a dangerous reaction in your daughter and is the thus un-usable). 

Assume further that one fine day I proudly send you an e-mail announcing that I am sponsoring legislation across the entire state, legislation that will make artificial insulin illegal.  The legislation I am pushing will put your daughter’s health at great risk, but I have nonetheless inserted myself into your family’s most personal medical decision-making process. The legislation I am pushing will deny you medical treatment that has been saving your daughter’s life.  I forge ahead, though, because I am certain that God has sent me on this mission.  In other words, I am doing the equivalent of forcing my way into your house, raiding your medicine cabinet and throwing away your daughter’s insulin.  How would you feel if I did that under those circumstances?

Assume some additional background.  Assume that I have long claimed to be absolutely certain that I am correct regarding numerous aspects of morality based on my reading of my version of the Bible, which I repeatedly declare to be inerrant (that is, absolutely literally true), despite the fact that my Bible contains hundreds of statements that conflict with common sense and reality (for instance, the Bible claims that the mustard seed is the smallest seed when it is actually not the smallest seed).  Assume further that you know from talking with me that I refuse to question the highly-questionable origins of the Bible.  Further assume that I refuse to consider overwhelming evidence that several key stories in my English translation Bible conflict with the earliest known reliable manuscripts. (more…)

Here they are, as published in evilbible.com.   This list succinctly describes many of my concerns with fundamentalist Christianity.

Here are my three favorites of this list of ten.  You are a fundamentalist Christian if:

#9 - You feel insulted and “dehumanized” when scientists say that people evolved from other life forms, but you have no problem with the Biblical claim that we were created from dirt.

#7 - Your face turns purple when you hear of the “atrocities” attributed to Allah, but you don’t even flinch when hearing about how God/Jehovah slaughtered all the babies of Egypt in “Exodus” and ordered the elimination of entire ethnic groups in “Joshua” including women, children, and trees!

#3 - While modern science, history, geology, biology, and physics have failed to convince you otherwise, some idiot rolling around on the floor speaking in “tongues” may be all the evidence you need to “prove” Christianity.

Two of these points focus on the consciously manipulated skepticism used by so many fundies.  For instance, Darwin’s thorough and meticulous analysis of physical evidence (concerning evidence that is available for anyone who questions Darwin’s claims) is rejected out of hand while the claim by an unknown writer that an Omnipotent sentient being made a woman out of Adam’s rib is considered true beyond question.  In fact, those who dare to publicly doubt that a being named “God” created woman  out of a man’s rib are haughtily and publicly skewered as immoral and hell-bound.  They certainly can’t hold any public office in this country.

And they further assert that the United States is based on assumptions like this, that the United States is a “Christian nation.”  Literal beliefs such as these constitute a horrible basis for any sort of government, if you ask me.

Check out these identical twins:

They are really identical twins.  This photo is from the November 2006 issue of Discover Magazine.  See the related article: “DNA Is Not Destiny The new science of epigenetics rewrites the rules of disease, heredity, and identity.”

Though these two men are genetically identical, they were separated at birth.  The man on the left was malnourished for years.   Bone structure changes brought about by environmental factors is thus one of many ways (physical and behavioral) in which the environment can dramatically affect the way in which the genes express themselves

As the Discover article points out, the 25,000 genes of our human DNA are widely considered to be an instruction book for our bodies.  However, “genes themselves need instructions for what to do, and where and when to do it.”  These additional instructions are not in DNA, but

on it, in an array of chemical markers and switches, known collectively as the epigenome, that lie along the length of the double helix.  These epigenetic switches and markers in turn help switch on or off the expression of particular genes.

It has long been known that epigenetic switches are critical to the healthy development of organisms.  These can be dramatically tweaked by exposure to a vitamin, a toxin or even mothering, altering “the software of our genes in ways that affect an individual’s body and brain for life.”  Green tea, for example, has been shown to prevent the growth of cancers. 

New research has even suggested that epigenetic signals “can be passed on from one generation to the next, sometimes for several generations, without changing a single gene sequence.”  How can this be?  (more…)

OMG! I just installed the FireFox 2 browser and noticed something. It spell checks form entries as you type! Just as Word and its ilk do in their documents.

Since its inception, I’d been using FireFox just because of speed, safety and security advantages. I added the Google toolbar only a month ago for spell checking in form entry fields. Then MSIE 7.0 came out, and had almost all the features of FireFox 1, and was nearly as secure. So this week FireFox riposted with its version 2, to stay a step ahead in both features and security.

As I was typing a response this morning, I noticed the Word-like squiggly red underline. Puzzled (because I hadn’t manually started the Google spell check) I rt-clicked, and it suggested the word I meant to type.

Yay! FireFox 2 is the Bloggers’ bee’s knees. No, I’m not actually that old.

I’m not sure if version 2 requires separate installation of the Google toolbar because I already had it. Maybe all you need is FireFox 2. Someone try it and let me know.

Recently on Huffpo,George Lakoff has written an important piece on the ongoing political battle to define words.

I’m keenly aware of this battle.  Here’s one way it affects me.  I do not believe in a sentient Creator.  Some would label me an atheist, but that would be horrible unfair.  Why?  Because that term has been successfully loaded with far more than lack of a belief in a traditional God.  The conservative movement has successfully defined “atheists” as strident, immoral, untrustworthy and threatening to America’s families. 

This ugly baggage is why I have embraced the term Bright. I am a “bright.”  I have a naturalistic worldview free of supernatural and mystical elements.  Does that make me threatening?  I don’t think so.  Does it make me prone to mob violence like members of many religious groups?  I would think the opposite—I have to cut my own philosophic path thorough life.  I doubtless have different politics and beliefs than many other Brights.  Narrowly construed, I’m an organization of one.  But there are certain people are perturbed with me, I’m sure, because I refuse to claim allegiance to the insecure God of the Bible and we just can’t have that.

The word battles, however, are taking place on many other fronts.

As Lakoff writes, such word battles comprise “the struggle to define our democratic principles and values. The right wing has worked for decades to alter the meanings of concepts that define our way of life.”  For instance, consider the word “liberal.” According to Lakoff, conservatives have turned the meaning of “liberal” upside down.  Lakoff invites us to consider the differences between the conservative use of “liberal” and a traditional meaning:

Conservatives: Tax-and-spend liberals want to take your hard-earned money and give it to lazy no-accounts. Latte-sipping liberals are elitists who look down their noses at you. Hollywood liberals have no family values. The liberal media twist the facts. Leftist liberals want to end the free market. Antiwar liberals are unpatriotic wimps who can’t defend our country. Secular liberals want to end religion.

Liberals: Liberty-loving liberals founded our country and enshrined its freedoms. Dedicated, fair-minded liberals ended slavery and brought women the vote. (more…)

My earlier post regarding Bart Ehrman was not meant to provoke in an outrageous way, although I suspected that it might distress some people.  That post drew much more traffic than we are used to at the site, approximately 25,000 unique visitors in three days.  It also pulled in more than 200 comments.  I was intrigued by the nature of the comments, especially those comments written by people who ostensibly disapproved of Ehrman’s work or his conclusions.  In fact, I did a small informal analysis based upon the comments posted by last night (I believe there were about 150 comments posted at that time).

I need to state at the outset that there were more than a few Believers among the commenters who appreciated and even applauded Ehrman’s work.  Some of these Believers specifically stated that even if Ehrman was correct, they could still believe in God and Jesus, they could still be good Christians and they found that Ehrman’s work had enriched their understanding of the Bible. My criticism of the distressed commenters is not directed toward these people.

Approximately 35 of the comments were written by people who appeared to be distressed or dismayed by Ehrman’s work.  Notably, only three of those commenters acknowledged the basic points made by Ehrman. 

What were Ehrman’s basic points?  That earlier manuscripts did not contain some information that was contained in some of the later manuscripts that were ultimately adopted part of “the Bible.” Therefore, the new material found in later writings was not written by the original authors of current Bible passages.  Therefore, many current versions of the Bible contain errors in the sense that they contain information that was added to (not originally part of) the writings of the original authors, as far as we can discern those writings.  Ehrman adds an important asterisk to the whole process.  We don’t have the original writings.  We only have copies of copies of copies of what might have been the original writings.  Therefore, those who claim that the Bible is inerrant are ignoring powerful evidence to the contrary, as well as numerous red flags.

It was clear to me that Ehrman was not arguing that people shouldn’t or couldn’t believe in God or Jesus as a result of the Bible being an imperfect work of human beings.  His target was the inerrancy crowd.  Bible thumpers. (more…)

Here is a video of the latest bit of fundie propoganda, airing in Missouri, where voters will soon have the opportunity to vote “yes” to allow the full range of stem cell research. 

These anti-stem-cell actors and athletes should be made to walk through hospitals and hospices.  They should be made to stop and talk with each child or adult patient dying of a presently incurable disease.  They should be made to say something like this to each of these patients: 

God would rather save a blastocyst than you.   You, and all others with your disease, must die.  I get to choose your destiny.  I am pro-life.  By depriving you of potential life-saving cures, I have improved my chances of getting to heaven.

The comments to the post are well worth a visit too.

For more on the politics and religion of stem cell research, see here and here and here.

Mark Johnson and George Lakoff have written several compelling books based on the premise that humans must use conceptual metaphors to understand abstract concepts.  For example, we say “Things are looking up” to express optimism (i.e., good is up).

Lakoff and Johnson actually go further. They argue that without metaphors, we would have no meaningful understanding of most abstract concepts.  One of those otherwise elusive abstract concepts is morality.

In Philosophy in the Flesh (1999), Lakoff and Johnson write about many of the metaphors we use to understand moral goodness (we often use more than one metaphor to express an abstract concept).  One of the metaphors we often use for talking and thinking about moral purity is cleanliness.

Purity is . . . contrasted with being soiled, tainted, blemished and stained.  For the most part, in the metaphor of moral purity, it is the body that is the source of impurity.  In more extreme versions of the metaphor the body is seen as disgusting and even evil . . . Being pure . . . means being rational, following only the commands of reason, and not letting [ourselves] be tainted by anything of the body, such as desires, emotions or passions.

(Page 306).  Lakoff and Johnson point out that moral purity is the opposite of immorality, thus giving rise to expressions like the following:

• She’s pure as the driven snow.
• He’s a dirty old man. 
• She has a pure heart.
• Let me be without a spot of sin.
• That was a disgusting thing to do!
• They need to clean up their act.

As Lakoff and Johnson point out, the doctrine of original sin holds that humans are inherently tainted and impure, and that they therefore “act immorally when left to their own devices.”

But can this sensory-motor basis for morality be tested? In the September 8, 2006 edition of Science, Chen-Bo Zhong and Katie Liljenquist describe several experiments in an article titled “Washing Away Your Sins: Threatened Morality and Physical Cleansing.”  [The article is only available online to subscribers].  The authors focused on exploring the well-known psychological association between bodily purity and moral purity.

As a preliminary matter, the authors noted that physical cleansing such as bathing and washing hands is at the core of the religious rituals of Christians, Mandaeanists, Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus.  The authors recognized the work of Lakoff and Johnson in suggesting that humans are “predisposed to use categories that are based on bodily experience (such as clean versus dirty) to construct complex social categories (such as moral versus immoral).”

Sure enough, the three psychological studies conducted by the authors provided evidence for the “MacBeth Effect”: Exposure to one’s own and even to others’ moral indiscretions “poses a moral threat and stimulates a need for a physical cleansing.”  Further, physical cleansing resulted in a reduction of “moral emotions” (but did not influence nonmoral emotions).  The details are in the article, but the authors sumarize it as follows:

This effect revealed itself through an increased mental acessibility of cleansing-related concepts, a greater desire for cleansing products, and  a greater likelihood of taking antiseptic wipes.

There you have it. These experiments constitute additional examples of the connection between sensory motor experiences and systematic high-level abstract thought. 

For more on the theory of Lakoff and Johnson, I heartily recommend Metaphors We Live By, Philosophy in the Flesh and Moral Imagination.

Erika Price’s article about the soul, “Soul Searching,” intrigued me.  I’ve always assumed that people believed in the soul because they were terrified at the thought of being permanently deprived of the companionship of those they love.

I think, though, that there is a often-unnoticed prerequisite to believing in souls.  One first needs to make an intellectual move that is so commonplace and subtle that it is easily missed.  This early profound move, that of presuming that the soul is a thing, is a critical move with profound ramifications.

Subtle early changes often play out profoundly in the long run.  Consider, for instance, the sensitive dependence on initial conditions within chaotic systems popularly known as the butterfly effect. Small variations of the initial condition of a dynamical system may produce large variations in the long-term behavior of the system. 

Here’s another example of a subtle early adjustment paying off in a big way.  In 1970, when it was still 321,860 km from earth, the Apollo 13 spacecraft was damaged by an explosion, causing the Service Module to lose its oxygen and electrical power.  The astronauts were required to carefully fire the engines briefly and manually to correct their course to achieve a re-entry angle of 6.49 degrees. That short burst of the engine thus effected a tiny course correction that was a matter of life and death by the time Apollo 13 hit Earth’s atmosphere. 

We also make subtle language moves that eventually make huge differences in how we understand and interact with the world. 

In their classic book on philosophy/linguistics, Metaphors We Live By (1980), George Lakoff and Mark Johnson described the use of “ontological metaphors,” the (usually unconscious) technique we use to understand unwieldy processes as though they were “objects.” To the extent that we are able to understand our experiences as objects and substances, we can identify and use these aspects of our experience as “discrete entities or substances of the uniform kind.”  (more…)

Remember the extended family –  the living arrangement in which several generations and/or distant relatives all live together in close proximity, so that there is strong bonding and support among them?  Older generations help raise the young, and the younger generations care for the old.  Each person has a large investment of time and energy in everyone else’s lives.

That living arrangement has largely disappeared in America, and has been replaced by the so-called “nuclear” family:  parents live together only with their children, and only while raising their children, and then the generations go their separate ways, often living far away from each other.  In many cases, children are raised without close contact with their grandparents and, likewise, grandparents grow old in retirement homes without close contact with their grandchildren, or even their own children.  People who are more than one generation apart have relatively small investments of time and energy in each others’ lives.

Why does this matter?  For most Americans, family ties are greatly attenuated compared to those of people who live in extended families.  When grandparents, and even parents, live far away, their lives and deaths can mean relatively little.  The loss is still felt, but the emotional impact is much less than if the generations lived closer together and spent more time together.  When you see people every day, they matter more to you than if you see them infrequently.

Now, let’s consider families in the Third World.  Most people in Third World countries — in Iraq, for example — live in extended families.  Their economic realities simply do not enable them to live far away from their relatives.  Accordingly, we can expect people in Third World countries — in Iraq, for example — to feel their family ties much more strongly do most Americans.

Now, let us consider the massive and disastrous carnage that George Bush has created in Iraq.  With each Iraqi death, likely there is a large, extended family of people who feel personally devastated by the loss — devastated in a way that most Americans would never feel and never understand, because Americans do not live in extended families.  To many Americans, the death of a distant relative — say, a grandparent or cousin — might mean relatively little compared to the impact such a death might have on an Iraqi.  Now let us consider some possible ramifications of this cultural difference:

1)  If Americans feel relatively little pain from the death of their own distant relatives — grandparents, cousins, aunts, uncles, etc. — then Americans might be more willing to support a president who calls for bombing a foreign city and killing the distant relatives of people living there.

2)  If Americans bomb a foreign city and kill the distant relatives of people living there, then the survivors might get much more upset about it than American would understand.  Americans might underestimate the pain and hatred that their bombs create.  They might find themselves asking, “Why do they hate us so much?”

Now, to answer the rhetorical question I posed at the beginning of this post:  no, I do not believe that America’s nuclear families will cause America to be more likely to use nuclear bombs, but I do believe that America’s nuclear families make Americans much less conscious of the pain they cause when they kill people in countries where extended families are the norm.  One reason why a large majority of Iraqis now say they support killing Americans, and why Americans cannot understand this, might be that Americans are blind to the pain that is felt by people living in extended families, because Americans don’t, themselves, feel this pain.  This is not to suggest that Americans should return to living in extended families, but it does suggest that Americans should recognize the limits of their perceptions concerning the death of other peoples’ family members.  People in other countries might hate Americans for very good reasons that Americans do not recognize.

Since we’re on the subject of Bible contradictions, did you know that there are at least three different versions of the Ten Commandments?  The Jews have one, the Catholics have one and the Protestants have one.  This is one reason why posting the Ten Commandments in public buildings violates the U.S. Constitution — because posting one of the three versions of the Ten Commandments would indicate that the U.S. government favors one of those three Judeo-Christian religions above the other two (and, indeed, favors it also above all the other religions on our planet).  This would be a direct violation of the Establishment Clause of the Constitution.

Okay, ladies too. But I was going for a “Sunday, Sun-nday Sunda-ay” feel with the headline.

I’ve always liked this Watterson throwaway reply to Karl Marx from 1987-ish.

But, after reading some of the firestorm of responses to Erich’s post about Misquoting Jesus, maybe religion hasn’t really lost any ground.

Why is the economy showing signs of both recession and inflation? Which 3 young Americans will be today’s (averaged) fatalities in Iraq? Whatever became of Osama Bin Laden? Why can’t we carry drinking water or letter openers when we fly? Which form of proposed required national ID card will become our travelling papers, and who besides hackers will then have access to all our personal information? Will conservative religious groups continue to succeed in repressing medical research as well as medical procedures?

Let’s just fret about the latest reality show contestants, or whose opinion about ancient religious texts is more believable. Bread and circuses.

Debate goes on, seeming forever, about the issue of religious belief in a secular society.  The validity of sacred texts becomes grist for the mill and sides line up over What Would Jesus Do bumper stickers.  We see competing fish on cars–Darwin fish with feet in answer to the unembellished christian fish symbol, then a bigger fish labeled Truth swallowing the diminutive Darwin fish, and on and on.

What is really at issue here hasn’t got one thing to do with who believes in god or evolution.  Belief is a self-contained, private matter.  The issue that gets lost in all the polemic is very simple: behavior.

Those who would sap the poison from the “inerrant word” crowd are defending their assumed right to live the way they want.  One might argue that belief in god doesn’t really limit people, and as far as it goes, that is true.  If you, as an individual, choose to believe in god, then you have elected to reform your life according to the tenets of your new faith.  You may adopt whatever modest or byzantine traditions and habits you wish.  After all, you have chosen this, you get to do it.

What you don’t get to do is tell everyone else to behave accordingly, and that’s where the meat of the issue lies.

Because fundamentalists–and we’re talking about fundamentalists here for the most part, of any stripe–do not adopt such an extreme view of faith out of intellectual curiosity or even spiritual need.  They do so to join a Program.  They want to be part of an army, marching in the cause of righteousness.  And for an army on the march to make any sense at all, there must be enemies to fight and victories to win.

None of which has anything to do with getting to heaven or living your own life according to a select set of principles.  It has to do with making changes in everything around you.  What would be the point of going to war, metaphorically or otherwise, if after you win you leave everything as it was before you marched?

We who disagree with these programs are defending ourselves in the most civilized way we can–by arguing over the justifications, the framework, and the legitimacy of the governing creeds.  We dissect Scripture and demonstrate that it is riddled with inconsistency, error, contradiction, and, by the way, a  lot  of bad advice in order to assert that those marching to change our lives do not  have the authority, much less the responsibility, to enact those changes.

What changes am I talking about?

Women, to put it as plainly as possible, are not chattel.  (more…)

Check out this article and video posted on Think Progress.  Don’t forget to read the citations to “stay the course” and the comments.  

Hey!  Somehow, this man is still in charge of our country.   Really, time kick this fratboy out of the oval office before he accidentally (or intentionally) launches a nuke.

How often do we hear people “explaining” religious beliefs by stating ”The Bible says so,” as if the Bible fell out of the sky, pre-translated to English by God Himself?  It’s not that simple, according to an impressive and clearly-written book that should be required reading for anyone who claims to know “what the Bible says.” 

The 2005 bestseller, Misquoting Jesus, was not written by a raving atheist.  Rather, it was written by a fellow who had a born-again experience in high school, then went on to attend the ultraconservative Moody Bible Institute in Chicago.  Bart Ehrman didn’t stop there, however.  He wanted to become an evangelical voice with credentials that would enable him to teach in secular settings.  It was for this reason that he continued his education at Wheaton and, eventually, Princeton, picking up the ability to read the New Testament in its original Greek in the process.

As a result of his disciplined study, Ehrman increasingly questioned the fundamentalist approach that the “Bible is the inerrant Word of God.  It contains no mistakes.”  Through his studies, Ehrman determined that the Bible was not free of mistakes:

We have only error ridden copies, and the vast majority of these are centuries removed from the originals and different from them, evidently, in thousands of ways.

(Page 7).  At Princeton, Ehrman learned that mistakes had been made in the copying of the New Testament over the centuries.  Upon realizing this, “the floodgates opened.”  In Mark 4, for example, Jesus allegedly stated that the mustard seed is “the smallest of all seeds on the earth.”  Ehrman knew that this simply was not true.  The more he studied the early manuscripts, the more he realized that the Bible was full of contradictions.  For instance, Mark writes that Jesus was crucified the day after the Passover meal (Mark 14:12; 15:25) while John says Jesus died the day before the Passover meal (John 19:14).

Ehrman often heard that the words of the Bible were inspired.  Obviously, the Bible was not originally written in English.  Perhaps, suggests Ehrman, the full meaning and nuance of the New Testament could only be grasped when it was read in its original Greek (and the Old Testament could be fully appreciated only when studied in its original Hebrew) (page 6).

Because of these language barriers and the undeniable mistakes and contradictions, Ehrman realized that the Bible could not be the “fully inspired, inerrant Word of God.”  Instead, it appeared to him to be a “very human book.”  Human authors had originally written the text at different times and in different places to address different needs.  Certainly, the Bible does not provide an an “errant guide as to how we should live. This is the shift in my own thinking that I ended up making, and to which I am now fully committed.”

How pervasive is the belief that the Bible is inerrant, that every word of the Bible is precise and true?

Occasionally I see a bumper sticker that reads: “God said it, I believe it, and that settles it.”  My response is always, what if God didn’t say it?  What if the book you take as giving you God’s words instead contains human words.  What if the Bible doesn’t give a foolproof answer to the questions of the modern age-abortion, women’s rights, gay rights, religious and supremacy, western style democracy and the like?  What if we have to figure out how to live and what to believe on our own, without setting up the Bible as a false idol–or an oracle that gives us a direct line of communication with the Almighty.

(Page 14).  Ehrman continues to appreciate the Bible as an important collection of writings, but urges that it needs to be read and understood in the context of textual criticism, “a compelling and intriguing field of study of real importance not just to scholars but to everyone with an interest in the Bible.”  Ehrman finds it striking that most readers of the Bible know almost nothing about textual criticism.  (more…)

In Eastern cultures (Chinese, Navajo, Sri-Lanka, etc) they respect and even worship their direct and distant ancestors as a part of everyday life. The religions all embrace this basic respect for your elders.

However, in the West, what’s done is done, and the past buries its own dead. Except when it comes to religion. Somehow, there is a feeling in faith and literature that the ancient word trumps modern discovery.

I suspect this has to do with our individual upbringing. When we are small, all wisdom comes from our elders and the books they read. We developed a respect for this, even in adolescence when most of us felt (or feigned to feel) that our parents were incredibly stupid. As we mature, we realized that our parents had been mostly right.

We are all imprinted with this idea that the basic roots of wisdom come from the past. And we absorbed that our parents got it from their parents, and so on down the line.

Lost ancient wisdom is a compelling theme in literature, both traditional and modern. From “Beowulf” through Shakespeare and “The Lord of the Rings” to Harry Potter you can see this thread of feeling that all deep knowledge of the universe was once known, and needs only be discovered or recovered. There are even some significant current religions that believe that all one needs to do is unlearn everything earthly to attain the perfect wisdom, the oneness with the universe, that one possessed at birth by osmosis from ones earliest ancestors.

I think that this is the root of the dangerous fallacy that any particular ancient book is inherently more valid — truer — than any recent discovery. There will always be cases where the first blush of a new discovery that conflicts with accepted wisdom then turns out to be false. Especially when the discovery is made by a young and eager individual (or small group) working in isolation. But in a community of learned folk, where new and conflicting idea keep getting challenged and tested and reinforced, and it continues to prevail, one might consider that the elders who wrote the original text may have either been exercising poetic license. Or maybe they were just plain ignorant about the subject. Whoever it may be that they claim as their original source, they may well be mistaken.
To the root of it: Science is not about the authority of who came up with a theory, or how revered the source of the information was. Relativity is not right because Einstein was a brilliant man who came up with it. It’s right because thousands of others tried (and continue to test) every way they could think of to show that it was wrong, and had to agree with the original idea as the best explanation for all the facts gathered. Likewise, gravity doesn’t work because of Newton, or evolution because of Darwin.

We should respect what went before, and understand the culture that produced their conclusions. We must also recognize the perfectly human fallibility of our forebears, however strongly they believed in what they wrote.

Would you like to know how socially responsible your favorite corporation is?   Check out this Responsible Shopper, a site that conducts global research regarding the conduct of corporations.  They offer a wealth of information Here’s a bit from the Responsible Shopper ”About” page:

Responsible Shopper reports on global research and campaign information regarding the impact of major corporations on human rights, social justice, environmental sustainability and more.

The purpose of Responsible Shopper is to alert consumers and investors to problems with companies that they may shop with or invest in, and encourage individuals to use their economic clout to demand greater corporate responsibility.

Here’s an audio track of Richard Dawkins discussing his new book, The God Delusion, on the Alan Colmes show on FOX.  I thought that Colmes did a good job allowing Dawkins to bring out his points.  Some of the call-in comments are amusing, especially toward the end of this 24 minute show.

You’ve probably noticed that Christian activists — members of the so-called “Religious Right” — have been trying to dominate American politics, with the goal of ramming their religious beliefs down every possible throat they can find and overpower.  But, in addition to being disturbed by this phenomenon, have you thought about *why* this is happening, and why now?  Here is my theory.

For the past thirty years or so, America has seemingly been characterized by rapidly declining moral behavior.  School shootings, suicide bombings, sex scandals (including pedophilia cover-ups by both the Catholic church and the U.S. Congress), gigantic corporate financial swindles, movie stars hooked on booze, sports stars hooked on steroids, presidents impeached for corruption (Nixon) and for lying (Clinton), and another president (Bush) who tortures prisoners and ignores the Constitution…the list goes on.  Virtually every institution in America that has ever been admired or respected has been tarnished by immoral behavior.

Christian activists, understandably, are deeply concerned about this problem and want to do something about it.  Unfortunately, their prayers are failing:  America seems to be spinning toward self-destruction and the churches cannot seem to stop it.  What is a concerned Believer to do?

Answer:  use the power of the state to mandate Bible-based moral behavior.  Kids don’t spend enough time in church, so let’s mandate school prayer.  Women have recreational sex and occasionally get pregnant, so let’s ban birth control and abortions.  Crime remains a problem, so let’s post the Ten Commandments in our courtrooms.  Homosexuals have come out of the closet, so let’s ban same-sex unions.  And on and on.

But here’s the important part:  all of these examples are symptoms of the same underlying disease; namely, the failure of Christian leaders to secure moral behavior via “the power of the Holy Spirit.”  They push for political power because their prayers, their religion and their God have conspicuously failed to achieve their desired results.  Political power is their strongest remaining weapon against what they see as a widespread failure of American society:  rather than admit that their religion and their God have been impotent, they try to use the sheer weight of their numbers to achieve through brute political force what they are unable to achieve through prayer and faith.

Thus, the recent upsurge in Christian activism is a resounding hypocrisy.  It is a tacit acknowledgment by these very same Christian activists that their religion is, in fact, failing, and that their prayers, worship, faith, Holy Spirit, etc., are not powerful enough to fix today’s problems.  If Christianity were effective at changing peoples’ hearts and minds, and at producing the moral behavior that Believers so desperately desire, then Christian activism — i.e., political activism — would be unnecessary.  The fact that they think it is necessary demonstrates the collapse of their own faith and a collapse of their claim of being guided by the one and only true, absolute moral compass.  Without faith, they are merely another run-of-the-mill special interest group grasping for political power.

If Christian activists cannot secure moral behavior on their own terms — through faith –  then there is no good reason for America to try to mandate Christian behavior by fiat.  To the contrary, by turning to brute force political power to solve moral problems, Christian activists concede that their moral authority is no more valid than anyone else’s.

The Bible version of God doesn’t ring true to me. I don’t believe in any traditional sort of God.  I am not that sort of person who finds any purpose in worshipping or asking favors from invisible Beings.  I don’t ascribe any emotions or sentience (certainly, no vindictiveness) to any Person or Thing that might have created our universe.  How the universe came into being is beyond what I can know. 

I do cherish my universe, though, and I realize that I am an incredibly tiny and incredibly ignorant part of it. Many fervent believers (though not all) would characterize my beliefs as “atheism” although that word, as commonly construed, would characterize me in a misleadingly cartoonish way.  

Given my beliefs, most people would be surprised to hear that I sometimes go to church to be inspired and energized. What’s my secret?  I go to church when no one else is there—I like to go to empty churches.  When nothing else is going on other than one’s own breathing, meditating, thinking and writing, going to church can even be exhilarating.

With a pad of paper and a pen in my hands, in search of solitude, I walked to church twice this week.  I had previously noticed a huge church a few blocks from a courthouse where I sometimes work.  Only after walking to this church on Monday did I learn that it was called “Saint Peter’s Roman Catholic Cathedral” in Belleville, Illinois.  Here’s a photo I took on Wednesday (yes, a dreary looking day), just prior to my second “visit.”

The majestic interior of the church is also a treat to the eyes.  The thick stone walls morph into the peak of the ceiling as they rise to meet each other 70 feet in the air. 

               
Even on a dreary day, the natural light works its way into every pew.  Every tiny noise launches up into that vast inner-space like a dissipating butterfly. This incredible space, and the solitude it allows, more than make up for the musty church smell and the uncomfortable pews.  We mustn’t complain about uncomfortable pews, we were told as children.  After all, Jesus had nails driven through his hands for us.

When a church is empty, the overly-pious stained-glass images do not antagonize me.  (more…)

My computer is running a fever. The central processor overheats and shuts the system down. After a day of emails with the support center, and then a phone call of which only half the time was on hold, they admitted that the probable causes are under warranty. So I sit and wait for a new power supply and heat sink assembly to arrive, that I then “get to” (oh, joy!) install for myself. If that works, then will be back up and running normally.

Meanwhile, I still have my 3-year-old laptop and 6-year-old desktop computers that I keep around for backups and to keep peace when the niece and nephew are here. I am missing some important files needed to get do my gainful work, and my old machines are pretty well full (maxed out drives and ram, even with careful pruning). But I can carry on.

But I feel hobbled! Poor me. I only have about 1,000 times the computer power of the Apollo program at my fingertips, and instant access to an interconnected public worldwide information network not even described in fiction until Arthur C. Clarke’s “Imperial Earth” written in 1976.

I know people who claim they get along fine without a computer. My Dentist had never computerized in office or home until he retired last year. I know that the majority of citizens of this planet don’t yet have computers. A sizable fraction don’t have electricity or even safe water!

Yet, here I sit in uncharacteristically sub-comfortable ergonomics and whine about my temporary, curable, slight technological deprivation more noisily than I did when we had no power for 5 days this past storm season. But then I was in good company, with 500,000 others in the same boat. Aren’t modern conveniences grand?

     A few months ago I stumbled on a preacher on television.  The reason I stopped to listen was that on the screen he was scrolling through a litany of famous scientists, their fields and contributions, and noting that each was a Great Christian.  Then the preacher–I don’t know who he was, sorry–ended his litany by making the claim that science and religion are inextricably linked, that they must have each other to work, that there is no dispute between them–
     –and that evolution is wrong.
     This was a week after I listened to an NPR interview with Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania in which he made the claim that it is vital to settle this question of where “we” (meaning humans) came from because if evolution is true, then we would have no basis for morality.
     This is one of the most perverse false syllogisms I have ever heard, and it baffles me no end.  Underlying it is the assumption that morality only ever comes from a supernatural source, that without a deity we are too dumb, puerile, self-serving, and just plain hopeless to ever do anything right–for ourselves on anyone else. (The Erik Von Danniken theory of moral provenance.) That atheists are a priori immoral and that evolutionists, who reject special creation, are necessarily atheists, and therefore, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, likewise immoral.  They can’t help it.  They have no god giving them direction.
     A minute of clear thought shows how this is substantively untrue.  A few more minutes and you might begin to see that this is one of the foulest assaults on our civilization ever mounted.  By linking the two things in this way, you automatically create a Sisyphean task for anyone who doesn’t fit the fundamentalist christian mold (or the fundamentalist Islamic mold, etc).  Not only do we have to demonstrate how your argument is false, we must first demonstrate how we have a legitimate basis from which to make our counter argument, a basis automatically designated immoral, godless, groundless…
     Even christians should be afraid of this.  The logical result of this is to set a standard from which one may never deviate without fear of being labeled atheist and moral threat.  It shuts the door on any possibility of examining the universe in new ways, discovering new explanations for existence, and indulging in the wonder of examining life.
     One hesitates to engage the argument because it seems so infantile.  But when someone of Santorum’s stature makes such pronouncements–along with all his other rants about homosexuality, family planning, and the Liberal Agenda–it’s not a crackpot on the corner standing on his soapbox that one can ignore, though ignore him we should.
     What the basic argument comes down to is this: god–in this instance the christian god–supposedly created Everything.  By his will alone the universe exists and all that is in it.  By his will alone we strive to be Good.  That without him, we have no reason to be Good.  That evolution proposes that the universe just Happened and everything in it arose by processes independent of conscious intent.  And therefore, as this is an impersonal process, all the creatures within the universe have de facto no basis for being Good.  Morality, therefore, cannot pertain and we would all be lost.
     So.  The question comes to mind: if tomorrow it was demonstrated beyond any possibility of counter argument that god was gone–dead, left the building, or never existed–would you, Mr. Santorum, embark on a life of debauchery and self-satiation?  Would you rape?  Take drugs?  Go on a drinking binge?  Steal, murder, slander, and otherwise let your barely-suppressed immoral urges have free rein?
     I doubt it.  You’ve grown up living according to certain standards, standards which I’m sure you have found useful simply on the face of them, regardless of their provenance.
     Of course, if I’m wrong, and you would go on a major party rampage, flouting every standard you ever had, I would then ask: Why?  Didn’t you understand the utility of those standards?  Or are you so corrupt to begin with that you require divine muzzling?  (If that’s the case, why would anyone have elected you in the first place?)
     You have to make the argument that morality cannot exist outside a religious context, which is demonstrably untrue, as people leave such contexts all the time and do not cease being as moral as they ever were.  (Whereas many people who remain fervantly within such contexts continue to be whatever they are to begin with–as moral or immoral as ever.)
     But to make the case we have to ask a more fundamental question: what is morality?
     Depends who you ask, but the most common feature of any explanation is that Morality is the impulse to live in accordance with beneficial principles.  Maybe that’s a bit dry, but I think it’s accurate.  Ethics, on the other hand, which is often confused with morality, represents a codified approach to appropriate living within a community, and more often than not entails negotiations about terms of interaction.  These are processes and can vary from place to place, culture to culture, time to time.  What is ethical now was not always and what was ethical once is often quaint or repugnant now. (more…)