Condi Rice was on ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopolis" talking about how Isreal should "consider the broader consequences" of its current bombing activities in Lebanon, and she specifically urged Isreal to try harder to avoid civilian casualties. Huh? As much as I deplore Israel's bombings, does anyone in the…
Ever since the tragedy of September 11, 2001, there has been a fairly constant refrain heard in the United States. Americans, who once thought their country invulnerable, their culture beyond reproach and their global image impeccable, are asking, “Why do they hate us?” Human emotion being what it is, there is no single or simple answer to that question. They hate us for a number of reasons, some illogical, but some very understandable. And, while hatred is never productive, never defensible, its causes should never be ignored because its consequences can be catastrophic.
One of the things I hear Americans say they hate about us is our freedom. I would have to agree. There are those in the rest of the world who are as offended by our freedoms as are we by their despotism. They hate the fact that we have freedom of religion, that we have freedom of speech, that our women are becoming increasingly free to determine their own destinies. They believe that all these freedoms are an offense against all that is decent and holy.
I believe they are wrong. It is because of our freedom that I am able to write what I write, however controversial, however offensive to some. It is because of our freedom that my family moved to the United States in 1960. We left South Africa when the white government there was stripping the people, both white and black, of their freedom to speak out against injustice, to live wherever and …
My government’s violent occupation of Iraq has not flustered me nearly as much as the nonchalance of half of America. Why are so many Americans utterly complacent about the wretched and rampant killing going on in our names? Is it possible that we have become confused and seduced by the magnitude of the killings and by the music? Allow me to explain.
First, the magnitude. Stalin’s well-cited quote comes to mind: “The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.” Perhaps the immoral nature of Bush’s aggression would be clearer had Bush caused the death of only one man. Imagine this hypothetical:
…President Bush looks out the window of the oval office and sees a man wearing a backpack walking down the sidewalk. In a dry-drunkish paranoid moment, Bush tells his security officers that the man walking down the sidewalk has nuclear weapons grade aluminum tubes in his backpack and orders his guards to capture “that terrorist.” While capturing the man with the backpack (it turns out to be empty), a U.S soldier is accidentally shot by friendly fire of a fellow soldier.
It is later disclosed that, one minute before giving his order to capture the man, a former ambassador had advised Bush the man wearing the backpack had just been searched and that he was not carrying anything dangerous. Then it came out that Bush and his highest advisers had intentionally blown the cover of a CIA agent to discredit the former
In the 2004 New York Times bestseller, The End of Faith, Sam Harris wrote that
…120 million of us place the big bang 2,500 years after the Babylonians and Sumerians learned to brew beer. If our polls are to be trusted, nearly 230 million Americans believe that a book showing neither unity of style nor internal consistency was authored by an omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent deity.
Harris, author of the Atheist manifesto, was interviewed by Truthdig.com. Despite the above-described unsubstantiated beliefs of many theists, it is somehow the atheists who have become “America’s least trusted minority group, “trusted less than Muslims, recent immigrants and homosexuals.”
Harris lays much of the blame for the success of fundamentalists on religious moderates, whose “political correctness” serves to protect long-overdue criticism of the fundamentalists:
religious moderates are giving cover to fundamentalists because of the respect that moderates demand of faith-based talk. Religious moderation doesn’t allow us to say the really critical things we must say about the abject stupidity of religious fundamentalism. And as a result, it keeps fundamentalism in play, and fundamentalists make very cynical and artful use of the cover they’re getting by the political correctness in our discourse.
Harris also takes aim at those who call themselves “agnostic,” because they are not “intellectually honest.” Per Harris, agnostics refuse to disavow claims for which there isn’t a drop of evidence.
According to the Associated press, Tobacco alone is predicted to kill a billion people this century, 10 times the toll it took in the 20th century, if current trends hold. This humongous number begs for a morbid illustration. If you lined up the dead bodies of one billion dead smokers end to…