The Other Sides

Let’s imagine the conflict known as the Civil War. It had been brewing since before the Constitution was ratified. The issues were marrow deep in American society, so much so that any attempt to address the issue of slavery was, in effect, a deal breaker for the new nation. The South made it abundantly clear that any action on the part of the North to write into the new guiding document the idea that black slaves were somehow deserving of the liberty being claimed for their white owners—and thereby signaling the end of slavery among the Thirteen Colonies—would be met with absolute refusal to play. Had the reformers, exemplified by the likes of Benjamin Franklin, tried to assert any kind of racial equality at the time, the United States would have been stillborn. Instead, they put a time limit into the document—20 years—which forbade the topic from even being discussed in Congress until that later year, at which time, presumably, the issue would come to the floor for some kind of resolution. History shows that every such attempt was met with denunciations by southern members of Congress and often with threats of secession—which by then were illegal. Make no mistake, as some revisionists might have you believe, secession was not an option and everyone who voted to ratify the Constitution knew it. Contrary to popular mythology, the original 13 states locked themselves together permanently. [More . . . ]

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Festivities, Faith, but not Stupidity

At the end of a social event on the weekend before Mardi Gras, a casual friend asked a surprising question. I was bedecked with beads, primarily in purple and gold. This Catholic friend comes up and says something like, "Why are you all dressed up for the Christian holiday? Don't you believe that anyone who believes in God is stupid?" Dumbfounded. It took me a moment to parse this and compose a reply. As we were all heading out the door, I didn't have time to fully answer all the implied misconceptions. So I said something on the order of, "I don't think that; I know many smart people who are faithful." Let me first detail a minor misconception. Sociologically, rituals are important. Mardi Gras (literally Fat Tuesday, also Shrove Tuesday) was adopted by Christians from the earlier Carnival, and Saturnalia before that. It is a long standing late winter festival ending the season of harvest plenty in the days when food preservation was limited, and entering the lean period of rationing until the spring produce appeared (greens, lambs, milk, etc). And festivities are fun, whatever the nominal purpose. The Holy Roman church had so successfully rebranded all the pagan festivals that most Christians are unaware of the deeper not-Jesus purpose behind them, even as they embrace all the pre-Christian trappings. But the big issue is the perception that I, an an atheist, think that Christians (the majority faith at present time and place) are stupid. Many converted Atheists do vehemently decry their former faith and deride its practitioners, as do Dawkins and Hitchens. My parents converted from religious to irreligious, and so I was raised without a particular god and with their lower expectations of people of faith. But that didn't stick. I grew up as a closeted atheist. On Sunday mornings I was dragged to a secular Sunday School where I had to wear jacket and tie from the age of 5. It didn't fool my church going peers. I opted for the less hated liberal-Jew label that try to explain that all invisible friends seemed equally improbable to me. I endured various epithets in public schools hurled at non-Christians by the God fearing. But as I grew older and my peers become more reasonable, I started talking to them about such things. I was actually less surprised to find people of deep faith at my fairly-high-standards college than I was to find sports fans. One of my closest college friends was a Young Earth, Born Again sort. I admit that I would sometimes light his fuse in a room full of geology or astronomy types, just to see to what heights his rationalizations could wax. (Anyone else visualizing Ceiling wax?) I have also been reading arguments from both sides of the God conjecture since puberty. The problem is not whether one side is smarter, but which is the set of assumptions on which their sense of reality rests. Either cause and effect are real and the universe is knowable through a continuing and contentious process of observation, documentation, and modeling (science), or else the continually meddling god of Christianity is possible, as was declared by ancient authority. The majority of the American founders were Deists who believed that if there was a creator God, he did not meddle in the day-to-day affairs of men. I can accept that God, but still don't believe in it. Cosmologists and astronomers are pushing his creative acts farther and farther to the margins. So although I acknowledge the high correlation between less-learned people and deep faith, I do not assume that having faith implies that people are stupid.

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Test your knowledge of American civics and history

I just finished taking this test of United States government civics and history.  I correctly answered 32 out of 33 questions, having guessed at a couple of them.  I believe that most of these questions are fairly worded and that they concern important topics of which American voters should be familiar.  I assume that I scored highly because I work as a lawyer, because I read quite a bit, and I actually lived through some of the events mentioned in the questions.  I would think that Americans who choose to vote should be able to answer more of these questions correctly than incorrectly. In fact, it is my opinion that people who do terribly (those who answer more incorrectly than correctly) should voluntarily refrain from voting in national elections because they lack a basic foundation of knowledge on which to base political decision-making.    Now consider this:

More than 2,500 randomly selected Americans took ISI's basic 33 question test on civic literacy and 71% of them received an average score of 49% or an "F." The quiz reveals that over twice as many people know Paula Abdul was a judge on American Idol than know that the phrase "government of the people, by the people, for the people" comes from Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.
As discussed by the linked article, even significant numbers of elected officials who took this test displayed ignorance regarding basic topics. This is highly discouraging, of course (and see here). It is difficult to argue that the People of this country should self-govern when so many of them are so ignorant of the basic information they need in order to cast meaningful votes.   It's time to break the silence and to admit to each other that in order to self-govern, the citizens will need to be much more selective in how they spend their free time. They apparently need to be much more selective in their television viewing and book choices (25% of Americans did not read any books last year).  Better education is the answer, but how can we educate the many millions of people who have already graduated from school?  How can we pry them, at least once in a while, from the addictive fare offered by the Entertainment Industries? I would love to make all candidates currently running for President take a comparable test. I would suspect that at least several of them would fail even this simple multiple choice test.   Actually, I believe that Presidential candidates should be required to take a much more difficult and detailed test under supervised conditions to demonstrate whether they are well-versed in American politics and history.  Their scores should then be published (along with the questions and their answers) for voters to consider. These test results indicate that these are dangerous times for our country. It's frustrations like these that lead me to advocate dramatic measures, such as passing a Constitutional Amendment to get money out of politics. Such an amendment would be a start, and only then might we have meaningful conversations about what needs to be done to fix the country. We cannot have such conversations while we have ignorant voters and corrupted politicians.  If we can't depend on the People of this country and if we can depend on our elected officials, on whom can we depend? Maybe, after passing a constitutional amendment to get money out of politics, we could have some chance to break up big banks and big media, we maybe then we could start weaning ourselves off of fossil fuels and we could start investing in better quality civics and history education for our children. Or maybe my proposed first step is a pipe dream.    Based on many conversations I've been having with people I respect, I'm increasingly worried that we don't have what it takes to pull out of our current nose dive.

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Rand Paul Appears to Back Sharia Law

I have recently been seeing a series of campaign ads for Rand Paul on certain liberal blogs. These are Google ads that target keywords, and thus regularly appear on pages that argue against those things supported by the ads. But the Tea Party slant of this ad series offends me. The 1976 Hyde amendment already and still prohibits tax funding of abortions, except in cases of rape and incest. That is, if you can go to court and get a judge to rule your pregnancy as such, you can then get federal funding for your abortion. This does not happen very often, as the abortion is cheaper than a court appearance. But the goal of this campaign seems to say that, as in the Old Testament and thus Sharia law, a poor rape victim must bear and raise the child of her rapist (and marry him, if he so chooses). This only applies to impoverished women; not the sort of folks that congresspeople know. After all, their servants have jobs. Rand Paul and the Tea Party: Old Fashioned Morality for those who can't afford better.

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