I’m pondering an idea which is certainly not original, though it is an idea powerful enough to make a mockery of any moral system that looks to the consequences of actions to characterize the moral quality of those actions. 

Here’s the thought:  Every so often something really bad happens to me.  I’m in an auto accident.  I lose my job.  My marriage fails.  My children ignore me.   Something expensive breaks.  Someone I care about dies. My attempts to impress someone important go completely unnoticed.  I spend endless hours on a project and it does not turn out the way I had hoped.

Each of these things are the types of things we would easily categorized as “bad.”  They are so obviously bad that we can predict that our friends, upon hearing of these things, will console us.  But are “bad” things really bad?

After all, while I’m healing from that auto accident, an incredibly important thought occurs to me and I change my life for the “better.”  Even though I’ve lost a job I cherished, I then find another job which I like even better.  After my marriage fails, I make some changes in my life and I encounter a new love.  When my children ignore me, I learned to pay more attention to them and then I benefit from an improved parent-child relationship.  That thing that broke is something I didn’t need in my life anyway.  The death of my close friend inspires me to be a better person.  When that person I was trying to impress ignores me, I realize that I should have been spending my time doing other sorts of things anyway.

On countless occasions, a “disaster” turns out to be a great excuse to do something we should have done anyway. When one door closes shut, three other doors open wide.  And I’m not talking only about tiny disappointments.  I’m talking about major disasters.  The sorts of things that you are absolutely certain are horrible. But in the long run, they often aren’t. Fifteen years later (far enough removed that you don’t feel the intense mental or physical pain that you felt in the past), you realize that that “bad” thing was perhaps the best thing that ever happened to you, even though you hated it at the time and you were certain that it was ruining your life.  You did something really stupid, for instance, but you learned a big lesson and never again screwed up in that way again.

Someone might object that natural disasters, all genocides and at least some wars are absolutely bad, given the horror, the permanency of death and the lasting pain. That is certainly true from the perspective of many individuals. Such events, however, are often catalysts for widespread change that prevents future events of even greater magnitude. Perhaps a hurricane provokes officials to implement a new warning and rescue system. Perhaps the horror of a genocide causes society to reevaluate bigotted attitudes and helps stave off future genocides of even greater magnitude. Wars always provoke episodes of heroism within the insanity of the violence and they do sometimes cause the defeat of a malignant regime (e.g., the defeat of Hitler in WWII). There is the possibility that even a senseless war will teach long term lessons that might avoid future senseless wars (though this often doesn’t happen). 

The other side of the coin consists of acts which seem “good,” that result in widespread horror.  I would put rampant consumerism in that category.  (more…)

While doing the research for my previous post, A Slaughterhouse of One’s Own: A community confronts Santeria, I came across several explanations of exactly how animal sacrifice works in this religion, physically and metaphorically speaking.

The animal is bound and its throat is cut. The carotid artery is sliced with a ceremonial knife and the blood of the animal is drained from its body in the belief that,

…the energy contained in blood of an animal sacrifice opens a channel of direct communication with the Orishas.
http://www.religioustolerance.org/santeri1.htm

(Orishas are the multitude of gods that represent various aspects of life, much as in the Hindu pantheon or the Christian saints.)

The question that first occurred to me when I read this was “Who figured this out?”

I mean, there is no Santeria “bible”, it’s an oral tradition. Someone somewhere in Africa got it in her head that the blood of animals somehow “speaks” to her God and she was persuasive enough to convince others that it was true. So persuasive in fact, that people are still doing it to this day just because a teacher tells them to, even though there is no “written word of God” to back her up.

The original priestess of Santeria must have been wishing really hard for something big and when she killed a goat her wish came true. She deduced that it was the killing that caused the good thing to happen and I can only assume she followed that up with more killing and more good luck.

The second thought that occurred to me was, “How do they know it still works?”

For that matter, how does anyone who prays know that their message is reaching God and that God will act on their request? In a recent scientific study it was proven that prayer is usless from a medical standpoint.

Distant prayer and the bedside use of music, imagery and touch (MIT therapy) did not have a significant effect upon the primary clinical outcome observed in patients undergoing certain heart procedures, researchers at Duke Clinical Research Institute (DCRI), Duke University Medical Center, the Durham Veterans Affairs Medical Center (VAMC) and seven other leading academic medical institutions across the U.S. have found.

“Prayers for the sick and healing-touch are among the most widely practiced healing traditions around the world,” said Mitchell Krucoff, MD, interventional cardiologist at Duke and lead author of the study. “As widespread as these practices are, few rigorous studies exist to explain any mechanism of action or reliable measures of safety or effectiveness. While many of us are fascinated culturally or philosophically with the mystery of healing and prayer, for the practice of medicine we need to understand these phenomena with data-driven insight.”

I’m sure this is old news for regular readers of DI, but I decided to conduct a personal (i.e. anecdotal, unscientific) experiment of my own. So that I couldn’t be accused of persecuting anyone’s religion, I decided to put my own family’s faith in the spotlight. (I was raised Roman Catholic.)

I thought back over the years to the many times that members of my family were in major medical distress and we prayed for help. Did it work? Let’s see…

Great Aunt Mary: Cancer.

Her sisters, my grandmother included, were avid churchgoers all their lives. They prayed for Mary for many months as she suffered with her disease.

Result: Aunt Mary died.

Cousin Jeremy: Because he was born with a heart defect Josh needed periodic surgeries to expand his chest cavity to accommodate the growing organ. At 12 years of age during one such operation his body became wracked with infection. Our family prayed for him.

Result: Jeremy died.

Baby Jake: My sister’s son became feverish and was diagnosed with meningitis. We were all asked to pray for him.

Result: Jake got better.

Lynne: My cousin’s wife was 37 years old with three small children when she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. We prayed like we’d never prayed before.

Result: Lynne died.

Rose: The 38 year old sister of a close friend discovered a tumor on her spine. She was a single mother of a small daughter. His family and my family both prayed for her.

Result: Rose died.

That’s 1 out of 5. Pretty lousy track record if you ask me.

What did we do wrong? Are we a bad family whose members deserve to die painful tragic deaths? As far as I can tell we are no better or worse than anyone else.

I wonder if the practitioners of Santeria fare better statistically than Catholics. Even the proverbial flip of the coin, 50/50, would be a big improvement! I’d like to know because if draining the blood from a screaming animal can increase my odds of getting what I want and save my family from untimely death…I’m joining!

Four familiar words. Four words not even found in this form in the bible, at that. Why should we even pay attention to this ancient and revered phrase?

Actually, it dates back to a Christian political activist in the 19th century pushing the treasury to make sure that future archaeologists (on finding no evidence of our civilization but our coins) know that we were a Christian nation. It was thus briefly seen on the U.S. 2-cent piece at the end of the civil war. And then retired, not to be seen again for over a generation.

Then came the morality movement backlash from “The Gay 90’s”. Picture a disco era for your great-great-grandparents. This post-Victorian backlash eventually led to the 18^th and 21^st amendments (prohibition and its repeal). Meanwhile, this slogan started appearing on coins in 1908. There is nothing like the fear of pleasure to get politicians who need to appear churchy to move on a moral issue.

I just read an article “IN GOD WE TRUST” — STAMPING OUT RELIGION ON NATIONAL CURRENCY that suggests protest in the form of marking out the offending theist sentiment on any folding money that passes through our hands. Although it is petty vandalism, it is not a federal offense. As long as an alteration you make to money does not change its value in any way, it isn’t illegal.

(more…)

Listening to a talk show at work yesterday, I heard some fall-out from the recent suicide of the young girl who had been “duped” on MySpace.  When I first learned of this tragedy, I ran through a series of thoughts about the dangers posed by the interfaces we use these days, which put us often too early and unprepared into contact with things in another era we would simply have had no opportunity to encounter.  This girl was a casualty of the wavefront of experience that comes now in new forms and through media that never before existed.  

I never once thought it was her fault.

How could you?  She’d been deceived.  Inexperienced, unwitting, she invested a bit too much, and it put her over the edge to discover that what she thought was “real” was in fact a deception.

History is full of examples of people committing suicide over things with only marginal reality.  Especially among adolescents.  We’ve learned in the last decade a great deal more about brain development than ever before, and one of those things is that adolescence is the time of some of the most intricate and fragile growth–physically–within the brain.  The hormone storm that is unleashed at the onset of puberty, the growth spurts visible in every other part of the body, the physiological changes of emergent sexuality and secondary sexual characteristics, all have their equivalent in cognitive development.  It makes perfect sense after the fact, but for a long, long time we blithely assumed that adolescents were more or less just like adults.  Instead we find that, because of the rapid and complex changes they are going through, teen-agers who appear out-of-control, impulsive, overly-sensitive, clueless, clumsy–in short, borderline insane–really are all those things and it is the responsibility of the adults around them to set guidelines and provide aid to get them through this period to the other side and (hopefully) “normality” and sanity.  (When this fails, we have all manner of screwed up adult.)

Which is why holding a teenager responsible for not behaving like an adult is absurd on its face.

And consequences of this journey can run the gamut from perpetual clumsiness to neuroses to schizophrenia to manic-depression to suicide.

It is one of the challenges of our new awareness of these things to take actions to mitigate the worst effects and to do what we can to ensure a healthy mind in the emergent adult.

Something like this tragic suicide occurs, though, and when we listen to what comes after we discover how unlikely that is for some people.  Many people emailed this talk show to express their opinion that the dead girl “got what was coming to her.”  It was somehow her fault.

When we tease through this senseless reaction, we come to the bottom line opinion that what she was doing on MySpace was something she shouldn’t have been doing, something that is to some people Bad.  In fact immoral.  Evil.  That she reaped the rewards of an inappropriate indulgence.

This is pathetic.  But rather than condemn it outright, maybe we ought to take a look at this and see where it comes from.  This echoes similar responses to other events, like rape.  “She shouldn’t have been out that late, she shouldn’t have been with Those People, she shouldn’t have been dressed Like That.”  We’ve heard all this.  After enough of it, you’d think the poor rapist had absolutely no choice but to attack That Female.  It was all her fault, she brought it on herself.

Blaming the victim.

This happens to men, too, but in less obvious ways.  (more…)

According to this post at Alternet, there are many forms of rampant self-indulgence.  The GOP specializes in the most pernicious forms:

While the culture at large was adjusting to the idea that families don’t all look the same and that private sexual morality was not the business of the state, the decadent economic elite and right wing ideologues had systematically defined deviancy down to the point where Moynihan’s deviant “altruism” can be illustrated as giving bonuses to workers who denied cancer patients their medicine; his deviant “opportunism” is seen as giving hundreds of millions of dollars to failed business leaders who lost their companies billions; and his deviant “normalizing” can be observed as society tossing aside its taboo against government-sanctioned torture.

Senator Bernie Sanders writes that the American Middle Class is being decimated.  He cites some interesting numbers.  Here’s a couple shockers:

Robert Frank, a Wall Street Journal reporter, has detailed the lives of the rich and famous in the book Richistan. He writes that households with a net worth of between $100 million and $1 billion last year spent an average of $182,000 on watches. Meanwhile, in the real world, 400,000 qualified students were unable to go to college because they lacked the funds.

Frank also details how during this one-year period the economically elite households spent $311,000 on cars, $397,000 on jewelry and $169,000 on spa services. At the same time, President Bush presented a budget in which he proposed cuts that would deny child care to 300,000 families and food stamps for 280,000 families.

Cop-out:  a feebly transparent excuse or explanation for refusing to face up to something. 

We constantly hear that the Ten Commandments are the highest achievement of moral law.  We even hear this claim from public officials who can’t even name the Commandments.  They want to hang the Commandments everywhere, as though their display will cause bad people to stop being so BAD. Despite this barrage of pro-Commandment spin from conservatives, the Ten Commandments are horribly lacking in moral guidance. 

For instance, (I’ll refer to the Catholic version of the Ten Commandments), the first four Commandments have nothing to do with morality.  The vague Commandment against “murder” has lots of problems.    And speaking of vagueness, does the Commandment against adultery prohibit the serial monogamy prevalent in most of the Western world that honors the Commandments?  No stealing?  Tell that to the big banks and financial institutions that own Congress and the rest of America. How could the poor steal when they themselves are so often victims of predatory lenders?  No lying?  Are you kidding?  We’d be killing each other if we always told the truth.   And I’ve always wondered about the alleged harm caused by coveting.  Maybe we need more coveting and fewer bad acts. 

Consider also that violating a Commandment often doesn’t correlate with harm.  Even though lies often prevent us from knowing the truth, consider whether an occasional lie can sometimes spare someone needless pain.  Consider whether adultery is sometimes a symptom that one of the participants is engaged in a horribly dysfunctional relationship that should be ended.  And what about when I covet my neighbor’s wholesome and generous qualities and I then set out to act more like him or her?

But there’s a bigger problem with the Commanments: what does love got to do with any of them?  Where is tiniest hint of generosity or patience in the Commandments of the Old Testament?  How are these Commandments any improvement over the Golden Rule, which long pre-dated the Commandments?

Sam Harris has suggested that it would be quite easy to improve the holy Commandments. 

Consider the possibility of improving the Ten Commandments. This would appear to be setting the bar rather high, as these are the only passages in the Bible that the Creator of the universe felt the need to physically write himself. But take a look good look at commandment #2. No graven images? Doesn’t this seem like something less than the-second-most-important-point-upon-which-to- admonish-all-future-generations-of-human-beings? Remember those Muslims who recently rioted by the hundreds of thousands over cartoons? Many people wondered just what got them so riled up. Well, here it is. Was all that pious mayhem nothing more than egregious, medieval stupidity? Yes, come to think of it, it was nothing more than egregious, medieval stupidity. Almost any precept we’d put in place of this prohibition against graven images would augment the wisdom of the Bible (Don’t pretend to know things you don’t know? Don’t mistreat children? Avoid trans fats?). Could we live with all the resulting problems due to proliferating graven images? We’d manage-somehow.

When Christians tout their Commandments, they usually speak as though Bible thumpers are the only organizations with a meaningful set of moral rules.  How incredibly not true.  Although they aren’t “commandments,” compare the lists of Buddhists and Secular Humanists, for example.  

When I first started Dangerous Intersection (about 1 1/2 years ago), I tried to create a new improved set of Ten Commandments. I still like some of my ideas, though I’m afraid that some of these are much too wordy.  Someday, I might try to trim these down to something more eloquent.   It is difficult, however, to compile the important lessons of life into a mere ten sentences.  Packing a lot of ideas clearly into only a few words is the plight of every writer.

Ben Franklin cheated by coming up with 13 “virtues.”  He developed this list of thirteen virtues when he was only 20 (in 1726) and continued to practice them throughout his life.  I like Franklin’s list of virtues because they are simply worded and they make good sense:

1. ”TEMPERANCE. Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation.”
2. ”SILENCE. Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation.”
3. ”ORDER. Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.”
4. ”RESOLUTION. Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.”
5. ”FRUGALITY. Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i.e., waste nothing.”
6. ”INDUSTRY. Lose no time; be always employ’d in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.”
7. ”SINCERITY. Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly.”
8. ”JUSTICE. Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty.”
9. ”MODERATION. Avoid extremes; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve.”
10. ”CLEANLINESS. Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, cloaths, or habitation.”
11. ”TRANQUILLITY. Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable.”
12. ”CHASTITY. Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another’s peace or reputation.”
13. ”HUMILITY. Imitate Jesus and Socrates.”

[Note:  “venery” is the pursuit of or indulgence in sexual pleasure.]

I’ll mention one other well-honed list of moral precepts that has impressed me: the Desiderata.   I learned of this list when I was a teen-ager in the 1970’s because the list took the form of a pop song entitled The Desiderata.  It’s origins are not entirely clear, but the advice is thoughtful.  Here is an excerpt:

Exercise caution in your business affairs, for the world is full of trickery. But let not this blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals, and everywhere life is full of heroism. Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is as perennial as the grass. Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth.

Compared to the top-down heavy-handed Commandments, the lists of Ben Franklin and the Desiderata appear to be written by people who seem to know and trust other human beings. And that is how it should be.  Those who dish out advice on how to get along with others should be the sorts of people who strive to see goodness in others and try to overlook human foibles. The styles of each of these lists of advice reveals much about the authors’ attitudes toward other people.  Whenever the list takes the form of “commandments,” it reveals that the author thinks of other people as untrustworthy and that others need to be bossed around as though they were unruly children or dogs.

It seems to me that there is no substitute for articulating one’s own set of rules for living.  No one fully speaks for anyone else.  Each person needs to build his or her own bridge across his or her lifespan.  To be authentic and worthwhile, this bridge-building takes much effort; throughout one’s life it will remain a work-in-progress.

Even thoughtful and good-hearted people will only agree with each other regarding the most general principles.  To assume otherwise, that anyone–including ancient people–have figured out all of the meaningful advice (much less commandments) for living one’s life is a cop-out, an abdication of personal responsibility.  It is an desperate attempt at a concept George Lakoff labels objectivism:

“There is a major folk theory in our society according to which being objective is being fair, and human judgment is subject to error or likely to be biased.   Consequently decisions concerning people should be made on ‘objective’ grounds as often as possible.  It is the major way that people who make decisions avoid blame.   If there are ‘objective’ criteria on which to base a decision, then one cannot be blamed for being biased, and consequently one cannot be criticized, demoted, fired, or sued.”

[Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind, Preface, p. xiv, (1987).]

In sum, it seems to me that when people embrace a set of rules as “the” rules, they are trying to find a simple way to excuse themselves from responsibility.  They want to believe that they are OK, simply by the fact that they go to church and refrain from having sex with the neighbor’s spouse.   Too bad the Bible doesn’t have an “Eleventh Commandment” that reads thus:  “The pits of hell are full of people who carefully obey the Ten Commandments.”

Stewart is a talented interviewer, but this one is especially good. It was satisfying, indeed, to see Stewart expose the amoral and clueless Matthews.

It takes immoral lawyers to make it all OK, according to this comprehensive article from the NYT.

Talk about strange bedfellows!  You will never find any ideas supported by a more diverse following than “free will.”  What is free will?  Allegedly, it’s the ability to “freely” be in charge of one’s own thoughts and actions.  It’s the ability to be “in control.”  And as I pointed out here, there is almost nothing human beings fear more than being out of control.

It all gets very interesting, however, when you juxtapose the concept of “free will” with the concept of determinism, the belief “that every event, including human cognition and behavior, decision and action, is causally determined by an unbroken chain of prior occurrences.”  A few years ago, a friend of mine panicked when I started telling her of some of the recent findings of cognitive science.  These were findings that substantiated that humans are animals that are subject to natural laws. She panicked because I was telling her more than she was able to consider (I wrote another post mentioning this episode).  She wanted to believe in “free will,” but the incredible sameness and predictability of human cognition demonstrated by cognitive science caused her to fear that she might be a robot–a machine that utterly lacked freedom. 

Admittedly, there is not yet any way for scientists to precisely predict human behavior in all situations.  Nonetheless, my friend panicked because science appears to be headed in that direction.  In fact, if the more people considered what cognitive scientists were up to more carefully, they would be burning down the cognitive science labs and think tanks, calling out that cognitive scientists were evil destroyers of all human values.  Thank goodness that more people don’t realize that so many scientists are daring to explore what makes humans tick!

We are finding more and more that, as Robert Wright pointed out in The Moral Animal, our emotions are “evolution’s executioners.” We are highly predictable in more ways than we care to imagine, including our biological routines for relating to our children, our parents, our mates our allies and our enemies.  Maybe we don’t yet know how to precisely map all the “causes” for my decision to buy strawberries today, but there are many of us out there (I am one of them) who assume that my behavior did, indeed, result from that particular constellation of causes that preceded my behavior. It is my assumption that science will continue to shine its light further and in a more fine-grained fashion in coming years.  In my opinion, there is an inevitability to this process.  In fact, in the coming decades, it will be impossible for honest people to overlook the thousands of physical connections human cognition must have with its surrounding environment in order to enable the sorts of things that humans do. Someday (though it might be decades away), the concept of “free will” will be considered quaint.

Here’s where the story gets interesting, however. If everything is caused by an unbroken chain of prior events, is there any room for human autonomy?  My friend insisted that human cognition was “different.”  In her opinion, all of those natural chains of causation somehow don’t penetrate to the level of human cognition.  I cross-examined her, however.  It went something like this:

What is the nature of all those gaps and causation such that you are endowed with an ability to “freely” think and act?  If you are not subject to the causal chain of natural events, your claim is that you must somehow transcend nature.  But you are not a very convincing uncaused entity.  To the contrary (I argued), your own body and brain appear to be quite at home in our natural world.  In fact, if you study other primates carefully, you will see that humans are only incrementally “different” than the other primates.  However you spin it, we are much more like chimpanzees than angels.

There doesn’t seem to be much room for “free will” to the extent that one strongly believes in a deterministic world.  If one thing leads to another, which leads to another, which leads to your body and brain reacting in certain ways, there simply can’t be any “free will,” as it is often portrayed by those who believe in free will.  Who are those Believers?  In my experience, just about everyone on the planet.  Why do they believe?  Because it terrifies them to not believe in free will.

What is the alternative to determinism?  Periodic breaks in the causal chain, and nothing less.  (more…)

Why fear the Invisible Hand?  Because the invisible hand is evil.  As construed by those conservatives currently in power, it is the economic equivalent of the Devil. 

This conclusion is going to come as a shock to many conservatives, because they give homage to the invisible hand as though it were the Fourth Person of the Holy Quartet. 

Before going further, let’s consider the literary origin of “the invisible hand.”  The phrase was coined by Adam Smith, as recounted by Wikipedia:

In The Wealth of Nations and other writings, Smith claims that, in capitalism, an individual pursuing his own self-interest tends to also promote the good of his community as a whole through a principle that he called “the invisible hand”. In detail, a free competitive market ensures that those goods and services perceived as most beneficial, efficient, or of highest quality will naturally be those that are most profitable. Thus, self-interest striving for profit has the side-effect of benefiting everyone by increasing standards. Smith saw the mechanism for this as being the free price system.

Conservatives have grabbed this metaphor of the invisible hand as though it were both descriptive and prescriptive.  The current use of the phrase by conservatives is admittedly more expanded than Adam Smith’s original use.  The modern conservative claim is not only that the invisible hand controls the economy.  They also claim that the invisible hand should be in charge.  They believe that millions of private purchasing decisions are automatically and deftly coordinated by the omniscient and omnipotent Invisible Hand. We do the bidding of the Hand.  We benefit “the good of the community as a whole” when we buy our whiskey, our triple cheeseburgers, our stacks of gambling chips, our Barbie Dolls and our Hummers. 

Conservatives are convinced that the Hand orchestrates all of our private local urges into decisions that are also “best” for our communities and our world. When we race out to buy anything at all, then, the Invisible Hand allegedly smiles Its approval. To violate the Will of the Invisible Hand would be to contravene the will of God, for conservatives.  Lucky for us, however, even our most impulsive seemingly-irresponsible purchases cannot, by definition, violate the Will of the Invisible Hand.  Everything we buy is pre-approved by the Invisible Hand.  Foolishness is the equivalent of intelligence, by the grace of the Invisible Hand.

To be socially responsible (according to conservatives), we don’t need to give any thought to our purchase decisions.  Nor does government need to regulate any industry.  It’s all taken care of by the Hand.  “The Free Market will take care of it,” conservatives assure me, “no matter what it is.”  It is the Government that screws up the economy; the remedy is to stay out of the way of the healing powers of lassie faire, they say, i.e., kill government spending.  When we stay out of the way (by not interfering with the Majesty of the Hand), the Invisible Hand watches out for us, takes care of us and solves all problems in an utterly perfect way.   That’s what conservatives claim, even though they dramatically and irresponsibly increase government spending.

I disagree.  It’s time to judge the Invisible Hand by the damage It has wrought. It’s time to be irreverent, even blasphemous.  It’s time to mock the Hand and then kill it.

Under the Hand’s reign, we have seen our forests, soil and air contaminated.  The Hand has repeatedly given Its approval when we frivolously waste non-renewable resources like oil and fresh water.  The Hand has is conspicuosly silent now, however, in light of the total loss of commercial quality fish from most of the North Atlantic. The Hand approves that we are spending big money on foolishly while many of our schools are desperate for funds.  The Hand has allowed pesticides and toxins spread far and wide, despite the fact that we have almost no idea how these chemicals are affecting the health of humans. Our individual spending decisions are making us fat and sick and stupid, but that’s all OK by the Hand. 

All of this can only lead to one conclusion. The Invisible Hand is not benevolent.  Based on the waste, pollution and reckless spending allowed by the Hand, it is clear that the Hand is evil.  It’s time to publicly acknowledge the Hand’s evil and destructive intent so that we can make some big changes.  What’s the biggest change? 

We’re going to have to start thinking for ourselves when we make purchases. 

We can’t depend on the Invisible Hand to keep us “helping” our communities in blissful ignorance anymore.  No purchase should any longer simply be presumed to be beneficial–many purchases are damaging to the community and to our environment. There needs to be a counter-weight to private decisions to consume and confiscate.  No purchase should any longer be considered completely local–many products have wide-ranging damaging effects.  Nor should purchases any longer be presumed, in the absence of evidence, to be community-enhancing or amoral.  Many private purchases are destructive and immoral. We need to acknowledge that dollars are not fungible and that every purchase has moral consequences.

We need to start thinking more when we make purchases, or else we will continue to crap up our planet to such an incredible extent that the next generation will curse us every day for our failure to think.   

It’s time to kick the fiction of the Benevolent Invisible Hand out of our lexicon.  But first, it is time to expose the Hand for what it has become for too many people who currently hold political power: The Invisible Hand is an excuse for our collective refusal to think, our failure to care about others and our failure to care about even our own future. 

The current version of the Invisible Hand amounts to a total abdication of responsibility. It is a license to hurt others and destroy our own future. It’s time to kill the Hand before it kills us.

“Thou shalt not kill” (often translated as “You shall not murder”) has outlived its usefulness.   It’s time to repeal this Commandment.  Better yet, we should rewrite it to reflect society’s true moral policy regarding human conduct that causes death. Rewrite it as: “You may act in such a way that needless deaths result.”

“What do you mean?” someone might object.   “It can’t be OK to go around randomly killing people.” 

That’s correct.  It’s not a good thing to walk up kill other people.  We should imprison anyone behaving like this.  But we don’t need a Commandment to tell us not to do this.  It’s obviously wrong.  

But why tinker with a Holy Commandment prohibiting killing?  Because it is hermetically sealed—where we most need moral guidance in our convoluted world, “Thou shalt not kill” is useless.  For most people, this Commandment only prohibits affirmative acts of killing–murder–leaving unaddressed all of the acts of negligence, recklessness, thoughtlessness and failures-to-act that result in deaths. I cynically suspect that conservatives insist on displaying the Ten Commandments in public spaces to remind themselves that the only killing specifically prohibited by “God” is intentional murder. In other words, as long as they don’t take an axe to someone in cold blood, they can continue basking in God’s glory. 

As indicated above, many translations of the Bible indicate that the Commandment doesn’t prohibit every sort of killing, but rather only “murder.” What does it mean to commit murder?  Here’s what Wikipedia says:

Murder is the illegal killing of one human being by another. Murder is generally distinguished from other forms of homicide by the elements of malice aforethought and the lack of justification. 

Engaging in conduct that causes deaths is widely accepted.  Most conduct that leads to deaths is not considered “murder.” Almost every one of us is guilty every day.  We just don’t like to acknowledge this. If you’re still perplexed, allow me to explain.   There are many ways to cause the deaths of other people.  Many of them involve negligently or thoughtlessly depriving people of basic resources necessary for living.

Consider Mother Teresa, who exhibited great empathy but also contributed to widespread misery.  For all of the work she did tending to the sick, she was a significant part of a worldwide movement that has caused great despair, pain, sickness and death by preventing people from having access to birth control.  The policies she promoted have resulted in appalling overpopulation and death-inducing squalor in many parts of the world.  For those who dare question her conduct, her apologists can always argue that she didn’t violate “Thou shalt not kill” when she worked to outlaw birth control.  They would argue that there isn’t any Commandment that prohibits discourages responsible family planning, leading to the exhaustion of the Earth’s precious resources, leading to widespread sickness and death.  That’s true.  There is no such Commandment, but there should be.

Here’s another example of death-inducing conduct that, in many peoples’ minds, doesn’t violate a Commandment.  Millions of people are dying in Africa due to the spread of AIDS.  One way to slow the spread is to use condoms.  The Catholic Church, assisted by the United States, has discouraged the use of condoms among millions of people whose lives condoms could save.  It doesn’t take much of a brain to connect the dots.   No condoms means more AIDS and more deaths.  Depriving people of condoms doesn’t violate a Commandment, even though it results in foreseeable deaths.  There isn’t any Commandment such as “Thou shalt not cause millions of people to die by depriving them of condoms.”  There should be.

When people belong to outgroups, we don’t violate any of the Ten Commandments when we fail to assist them. There’s no Commandment that says to “Send food to starving people in Africa,” for instance.  Deaths by omission aren’t covered by the Commandment, only deaths by commission.  24,000 people die every day of starvation, most of them children under five years of age. Because no Commandment actually applies to our choices to not send available food to these starving people, it’s OK to spend that money on things like going to the movies or upgrading your expensive stereo system.  There’s no Commandment prohibiting us from purchasing frivolous things when a billion people are starving. Similarly, there’s no Commandment that declares the undeniable truth that hours and dollars are fungible.  Maybe there should be a Commandment to remind you that the money you blew on gambling last night should have (and could have) been used to save many lives.

I know that many people would protest these examples, claiming that Jesus gave a general Commandment requiring that we love one another.  But such a general formulation is much too prone to shameless self-centered interpretations.  Multitudes of preachers tell us that it’s OK to spend our money on luxuries rather than helping desperate people.  That’s what a general platitude like “love one another” gets you.  See here and here, for example.

Killing is acceptable in many other contexts, of course. Shooting someone in a “war” does not violate any Commandment, according to many Believers.  Even preemptive war is now considered to be a form of “self-defense” by many Christians.  Therefore, killing in “war” might be doubly-OK.   Yes, innocent people die whenever wars are fought.  There’s no commandment prohibiting bombing just because children get in the way of our bombs and missiles, however, even though such deaths are perfectly foreseeable and even though there are often better ways to resolve conflicts than provoking wars.

Does the Commandment against killing apply to those who drive while drunk?  Not on its face.  Same thing for those who fail to keep their small children out of busy streets.  And what about those who overeat so much that they cause themselves to have strokes and heart attacks?  Does the Commandment against “killing” prohibit obesity?  It should, but if the preachers start dissing fat folks, 2/3 of the congregation might get up and leave.

When we capture one of those “terrorists,” the U.S. policy is that it’s OK to water-board him, suffocate him or beat him, even though these techniques often result in deaths.  If he dies in our custody, he probably had it coming, since he hangs around with people who remind us of people we’re afraid of.  Is it killing when we recklessly drown a prisoner we know nothing about?  Certainly not, or there would have been an eleventh Commandment addressing this situation.  

Manufacturers often negligently manufacture goods and people sometimes die when those products eventually fail. Did somebody say “Vioxx?”  As many as 50,000 people dead from using Vioxx.  There’s no Commandment prohibiting the sale of dangerous pharmaceuticals, however, so it won’t send you to hell to work for a company that promotes the use of Vioxx.

Governments often fail to promote cheap and effective health care screenings, preventative measures and cost-efficient measures that could save lives.   Unfortunately, there’s no Commandment that requires us to provide critically important health care.  When the government lets people die, then, it is merely saving money, not violating God’s favorite ten laws.  When governments fail to regulate dangerous activities, people often die.   On their face, however, the Commandments don’t apply to governments.  They should on their face.  They should make it clear that people have non-stop obligations to help the poor avoid dying of preventable medical causes, even if we don’t like them, even if they are somewhat to blame for their predicament, and even if we’d rather cut taxes and spend that money on better vacations.

What about the situation where the federal government fails to conduct basic scientific research that has a 20% chance of resulting in a new method of saving lives, instead of spending money (money that dwarves those research dollars) on preemptive wars?  Some would argue that that is OK because there is no Commandment such as “Thou shalt conduct basic research that might save lives.”  Wouldn’t it be better to add a Commandment requiring us to conduct basic research that might someday save lives?  And how about a Commandment that tells people to not obsess over saving human embryos that don’t yet have any brain cells and, instead, to spend their energies saving real human babies by encouraging stem cell research?

You get the idea. People use blindered interpretations of “Thou shalt not kill” as a salve, as a license to engage in acts and omissions that result in widespread and needless deaths.  As that Commandment is currently interpreted, it constitutes a very low bar, indeed.

Therefore, let’s change the murder-prohibiting Commandment to reflect the cold nasty reality of the modern world.  Let’s knock down the facade of the current Commandment, “Thou shalt not kill.”  Let’s make it clear that we are allowed to go forth and cause deaths, as long as it is done with a good conscience.

This is an excerpt from a book written by presidential candidate Chris Dodd:

“For six decades, we learned the lessons of the Nuremberg men and women well,” the presidential candidate writes in his book, “Letters from Nuremberg” published this week. “We didn’t start wars — we ended them. We didn’t commit torture — we condemned it. We didn’t turn away from the world — we embraced it.”

“But that has changed in the past few years,” Dodd writes.

This post is from Press Esc:  

The Pope’s calls to save the environment [were] met with dismay by critics who have repeatedly pointed out that the Vatican’s ban on contraception will effectively negate all attempts at protecting the environment and tacking climate change.

“Care of water resources and attention to climate change are matters of grave importance for the entire human family,” Benedict XVI said today, on th eve of an international symposium on the defense of the Arctic. “Encouraged by the growing recognition of the need to preserve the environment, I invite all of you to join me in praying and working for greater respect for the wonders of God’s creation.”

But William Lawrence argues in New Scientist that Catholic church is responsible for denying women access to condoms that could halt the population explosion, which is the main cause of Planet Earth’s environmental ills.

All of those people who take the Bible literally need to apply the proper rules for killing people by throwing stones.  The process is quite straightforward.  The purpose is to cause the stonees (the people being struck by the stones) to die of broken bones and hemorrhaging of blood.   What are the Bible rules regarding stoning?  Luckily, they have been summarized right here.  I’ll elaborate on a few of these rules in this post.

As you can see from Deuteronomy 22:13-21, believers in the inerrant Bible need to stone all non-virgins who dare to get married.  It’s all very logical, you see.  “Oh, you’re a woman who is not a virgin?  Then God requires that I must brutally kill you.  But it truly was such a beautiful wedding . . .”

According to Deuteronomy 17:2-5 , Bible literalists need to kill all of those people who worship gods, other than the god of the Bible, by hitting them with stones.

I escape judgment on these first two rules because I’m not a woman and I don’t worship any god, but I’m afraid that I probably am a “stubborn and rebellious” son.  The Bible requires that such sons need to be taken out and killed by hitting them with stones.  See Deuteronomy 21:18-21.  It’s not entirely clear by this rule whether I also need to also be a glutton and a drunkard to deserve this death-by-stoning penalty.  I might be a glutton (since I live in a highly materialist society), though I’ve never been drunk.  If I qualify for the death penalty under this rule, I would need to be stoned by all of the men of my city.  I live in Saint Louis; I’d therefore have to gather up about one million men for my stoning.  They have to find one million stones, unless they could share a smaller number of stones by taking turns. The Bible doesn’t say whether they could throw things other than naturally formed stones, such as bricks, balls of hardened clay or toasters. 

Here’s another important rule.  Everyone who has gathered sticks on the sabbath needs to die by stoning.  The stones need to be hurled by the entire congregation, per Numbers 15:32-56.  This passage doesn’t say what to do if the entire congregation is guilty of gathering sticks on the sabbath.  Maybe they need to gather everyone into one big circle, each person being obligated to throw stones at the person in front of him or her.  The last one standing, I suppose needs to try to commit suicide by hitting himself or herself in the head with a stone. 

For the most part, what these stoning rules lack in civility and empathy, they make up for in clarity. For example, compare these straightforward stoning laws with the immense amount of common law necessitated by vague Constitutional provisions such as the First Amendment.  What would be the result, I wonder, if we put it up for a nationwide vote tomorrow:   Shall we throw away the U.S. Constitution and, instead, interpret the Bible literally as the highest source of U.S. law?  Given the religious ferver that still exists in the U.S., I suspect the vote would be about 53% in favor of the inerrant Bible over the manmade Constitution. 

Perhaps we could then rename our three branches of government:  A) Executors of Stoning Laws, B) Makers of Stoning Laws and C) Courts of Stoning.  Maybe we could also create a new cabinet position of Department of Stoning or maybe a more expansive Department of Sticks and Stones. 

What if the Branches of this new government disagree with each other?  No problem.  Just have them go out back and throw stones at each other.

“Imprecatory prayer”?  I’d never heard of it until today, thanks to Ebonmuse at Daylight Atheism.

Despite the rhyming title, this is a serious topic.   But not always a controversial topic . . .

Sociobiology is an un-controversial field of study as long as we stick to studying animals other than human animals.  Here’s how John Alcock describes sociobiology in The Triumph of Sociobiology (2001): “Genetic differences help explain why people develop differences in at least some aspects of their behavior.” (Page 53).  Here’s another way to put it: “Sociobiologists want to know the evolved function or purpose of whatever aspect of social behavior they are studying.”

Alcock is a prolific and highly respected biologist who teaches at the Arizona State University.  His textbook, Animal Behavior, is currently on its eighth edition.  I used his textbook when I took a class on animal behavior a few years ago. It is a terrific resource, highly organized and thoroughly researched.

On the first day of that course (also entitled Animal Behavior), the instructor, a biologist who worked at the St. Louis zoo, bemoaned the fact that so many people get upset when scientists dare to study human animals as animals.  Certainly, no one questions that the biological makeup of the most animals affects their behavior. Think about dogs, for instance.  We are all “racists” when it comes to dogs.  When a golden retriever seems to enjoy swimming, we summon up by saying “That’s how golden retrievers are.”  That’s why hunting dogs hunt and why herding dogs herd, we say, without anyone taking offense.  No one gets upset when we suggest that the behaviors of any animals other than human animals are systematically linked to their biology.

When it comes to human animals, however, we get nervous when anyone suggests that human behavior has anything at all to do with human biology.  Those who study human behavior from the basis of biology constantly hear accusations that they are like Nazis and other vicious racists.  But then again, why wouldn’t you study human behavior from the basis of human biology? Wouldn’t it be an extraordinarily strange thing to suggest that human behavior had nothing to do with human biology?

In The Triumph of Sociobiology, John Alcock argues that the war against sociobiology is over and that sociobiology (Alcock sees no need to use euphemisms such as “evolutionary psychology”) has overcome the ignorant attempts to slander it.  “The discipline employs a basic research approach that deserves our interests, respect, and even admiration as a potential source of improved understanding about ourselves and all other social species, from ants to antelopes.”  (Page 4).  Further, there is no need to apologize for sociobiology that conducted responsibly: “Social biology does not in any way provide an ideological foundation for accepting racism, sexism, genocide, rape, social dominance of the poor by the rich, or any other of the many unpleasant features of human behavior.”  (Page 20).

In fact, Alcock’s entire book is a response to numerous misunderstandings surrounding sociobiology.  In particular, Alcock argues that it is simply incorrect to assert any of the following:

Sociobiology is a novel and idiosyncratic theory of E. O. Wilson.

Sociobiology is primarily concerned with human behavior.

Sociobiology deals with the evolution of traits that benefit the species.

Sociobiology is a reductionist discipline based on the proposition that some behavioral traits are genetically determined. (more…)

Poet Sharon Olds has declined to attend the National Book Festival in Washington D.C. who won a National Book Critics Circle Award and who is professor of creative writing at New York University, was invited along with a number of other writers by First Lady Laura Bush.

Here’s her letter of explanation to Mrs. Bush, published by The Nation.

When I was in my 20’s, I was called a “God damned atheist” by a man who was sorely disappointed that I didn’t march off to the Catholic Church with his family.   I was dating his daughter at the time, and I had been welcomed to visit her family home for that weekend. Everything was going well until Sunday morning.   After I declined his invitation to go to Mass, the livid father announced that I was no longer welcome in that house.  It was as if I had tried to set the house on fire.  Worse yet, my then-girlfriend’s father was a college philosophy teacher—I had assumed that professors would be more tolerant than that.  I was shocked at his intolerance and I abided by his request.

I could give many other stories documenting that I have experienced discrimination, including discrimination that took the form of wholesale emotional rejection by adults when I was young and vulnerable.  My stories would not be unique. Here is an especially disturbing episode involving another young man. 

In many parts of America, those who don’t believe in God are stigmatized by members of their own communities.  That is the reason for the “Out” campaign.

As more and more people join the OUT Campaign, fewer and fewer people will feel intimidated by religion. We can help others understand that atheists come in all shapes, sizes, colours and personalities. We are labourers and professionals. We are mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, sisters, brothers and grandparents. We are human (we are primates) and we are good friends and good citizens. We are good people who have no need to cling to the supernatural.

It is time to let our voices be heard regarding the intrusion of religion in our schools and politics. Atheists along with millions of others are tired of being bullied by those who would force their own religious agenda down the throats of our children and our respective governments. We need to KEEP OUT the supernatural from our moral principles and public policies.

If you want to make your rejection of bureaucratic religion visible, you can buy t-shirts or bumper stickers. 

I must admit, though, that I am ambivalent about this campaign.  On the one hand, it is shameful that so many people ostracize those of us who don’t claim allegiance to a religion, as though we are per se immoral.  Statistics don’t bear out that non-believers are any less willing to help those in need than believers.  As I’ve argued before, non-religious altruism is a higher form of morality.   It is a purer form of morality to help others because it is the right thing to do, rather than because “God” ordered one to do it under threat of burning in hell.  Yet, somehow, the alleged immorality of non-believers is taken as a given by many Americans. 

For this reason that non-believers are unfairly criticized and politically ostracized, the “Out” campaign is critically important and I do hope it succeeds in its goals.   As Richard Dawkins writes, there are huge numbers of non-believers out there–if more of them would stand up and be counted, it would be harder to discriminate against all of us.

On the other hand, I am not comfortable with the term “atheist” being at the vanguard of the movement.  “Atheist” comes loaded with connotations of immorality and stridency.  “Atheist” is also a term that suggests, to many people, that one does not have a poetically spiritual side, that one does not appreciate walks in the forest, meditation, or the mutually-healing power of doing good works for others.  The problem is that the forces of intolerance have successfully commandeered the word “atheist.”

Personally, I find that it makes a huge difference whether I call myself an “atheist” or, rather, whether I characterize myself as someone who doesn’t “believe in God” or “follow a religion.”  When I’ve described myself in a way that doesn’t use the term “atheist,” I’ve found that the people with whom I am conversing are much less threatened and much more willing to engage in meaningful dialogue. 

An even better approach, in my experience, is to announce that I reject “bureaucratic religion.”  I find that this approach is quite well accepted by most of those who claim to belong to religions.  In my experience, most believers are troubled (some more than others) that religions try to get their members to assert factually vacuous claims in order to inspire or scare the members into conforming to programs that are essentially political.  It is amazing to me how many people, including church-goers, are at least somewhat suspicious of organized religions for this reason (and other reasons). 

What is the alternative to belonging to a religion?   How about making the search for ultimate truth a private decision for each person?  What if each of us undertook his or her search for “God” or “Meaning” in a manifestly unregimented way? Most people are quite open to this idea, at least in principle.  It’s an idea that meshes well with freedom of expression.  This approach would be a lot more work for the many who belong to the most regimented religions.   Many such people consider the search for meaning accomplished by engaging in rote oxymoronic chatter once per week.   I’m not trying to be cruel when I write this criticism–addressing one’s God with a rote prayer makes no more sense to me that if you regularly addressed your parents, children or friends with rote passages written hundreds of years ago instead of talking with them.  Reading things at each other strikes me as an odd way to try to communicate.

I’m aware that the negative connotations could change over time if this “Out” campaign is successful, but I’m afraid that shoving “atheist” in people’s faces might kick up the temperature w