A daily dose of philosophical food for your noodle!
Monday, April 13, 2009
Renewal By Diana Hsieh @ 1:01 PM
Here's a scary but potentially useful resource on religious environmentalism: the documentary Renewal. Here's how the film's web site describes the project:
Across the nation, people of faith are standing up for the environment. Evangelical Christians are fighting mountaintop removal, a coal mining process that is decimating Appalachia. Muslims are supporting sustainable farming. Jews are helping children experience the bond between nature and spirituality. Interfaith Power and Light is mobilizing people of all faiths in a religious response to global warming.
For the first time, the combined energy of these diverse activists is the driving force behind a feature-length documentary, entitled RENEWAL. Veteran film producers Marty Ostrow and Terry Kay Rockefeller have crisscrossed the country to capture these exciting stories of people whose passion and deep moral commitment are making a difference in a time of grave ecological threats.
The RENEWAL Project has been designed to make the documentary and its inspiring stories available to people and organizations who want to be a part of this growing movement to protect life on our planet and reverse the damage that humans have done to the environment. Learn how you can get involved today!
That Wise Man Jesusophile on Sex By Diana Hsieh @ 4:02 PM
I can't properly express my great amusement at this two videos, found via Andrew Sullivan. They're done by one Jesusophile -- a brilliant satirist, I think. Behold, and prepare to wonder and laugh mightily! (Just don't do it at work; the descriptions are too explicit.)
First, we have proof that condoms don't protect against AIDS using spoiled milk, a strainer, and a glass. (Seriously!)
Next, a rambling bit on why the pleasure of the woman doesn't matter in sex:
Everything about that video is beyond compare, but I'm particular taken with (1) the repeated mis-pronunciation of "vaginal," (2) his explanation and demonstration of how sex works using the orange and the spoon, (3) his befuddlement about lesbianism, and (4) his uncertainty about how Jesus feels about the clitoris.
Here's another gem -- albeit from real Christians: the world's worst movie ever. You simply must watch the trailer. You think it's bad enough -- and then it gets much, much worse.
Pat Condell's argument for free speech as his new religion in this video is similar to the simple reductio ad absurdem of Leon Kass's intuitionist appeal to "repugnance" as grounds for banning human cloning. That reductio says the following:
In his case against cloning, Kass relies heavily on his own moral feelings of repugnance, without any serious attempt to justify them by plausible appeal to facts. Of course, Kass does offer some arguments against cloning, but those arguments are quite laughable. They would imply that we should ban in vitro fertilization, identical twins, and step-parents too.
Unfortunately for Kass, I find his appeal to repugnance itself repugnant. I'm an advocate of solid reasoning based on facts, after all. Heck, I find his pathetic attempts at substantive arguments -- rationalization, really -- quite repugnant too.
So if repugnance is as wise as Kass himself claims, then his whole method of arguing against cloning can and ought to be rejected on that very basis. Heads I win, tails he loses!
Obviously, that's not the strongest argument against mystical theocrats of various stripes, not by a long shot. Nonetheless, it highlights the absurdity of ethical and political claims based on a corrupt epistemology. It's a way of hoisting these folks with their own petard.
...just do the following: Make a list of all the very morally worthy and life-enhancing procedures Kass finds repugnant. Now, declare that what we need to do is re-engineer people so that we don't find those things repugnant anymore, because those kinds of unreasoned sentiments prevent us from improving our lot here on Earth. How can a Kassian respond? The only non-fallacious course is to argue for the moral authority of the human moral sense as it is presently constituted, without assuming its authority in the argument. And that's what I want from Kass, and from all those who argue via "the argument from 'yuck.'" And that's what we never get.
Now, before you go and conclude that the 8% means I'm some kind of moral monster, let me explain. Really, the 8% result was only due to poor question design -- not to any flaw in my character! Exhibit A in my defense:
12. What is the best way to curry favor with the Lord?
By treating all people, including atheists, with kindness and courtesy.
By learning and accommodating the culture and customs of other people.
By ritualistically slaughtering animals and burning the parts.
See, all the other questions asked what I would do or what I understand to be right, whereas this one only asked me to recall what the Bible says -- which is why I got an answer "right" Biblically.
Jack and Max are walking from religious service. Jack wonders whether it would be all right to smoke while praying.
Max replies, "Why don't you ask the priest?"
So Jack goes up to the priest and asks, "Father, may I smoke while I pray?"
The priest replies, "No, my son, you may not! That's utter disrespect to our religion."
Jack goes back to his friend and tells him what the good priest told him.
Max says, "I'm not surprised. You asked the wrong question. Let me try."
And so Max goes up to the priest and asks, "Father, may I pray while I smoke?"
To which the priest eagerly replies, "By all means, my son. By all means. You can always pray whenever you want to."
Not too get too technical, but that's actually a great example of the fascinating psychological effect of "framing."
Second:
The priest was walking down the street looking sad.
"What happened?" asked a parishioner.
"I am afraid someone from the parish stole my umbrella."
"Here's what you do. Next sermon talk about the Ten Commandments and look around when you quote 'Thou shall not steal' and see who bows his head in shame."
Next week the priest walks happily down the avenue, twirling his umbrella.
The smart parishioner said, "I see my advice worked."
"Not exactly," said the priest. "When I reached 'Thou shall not commit adultery,' I remembered where I forgot it."
A Terry Schiavo Case in Italy By Gina Liggett @ 12:01 AM
Remember in 2005 when then-President Bush rushed back to Washington to get the Republican-dominated Congress to intervene directly in the Terry Schiavo right-to-die case? Terry Schiavo had been in a persistent vegetative state for 15 years, alive only because she was receiving nutrition through a feeding tube. Her husband and legal guardian--who knew she would never want to live like that--fought Terry's staunchly Catholic family in the court system for years over her right to die in such a circumstance. A Florida state appeals court agreed with Terry's husband and allowed the feeding tube to be removed in spring of 2005.
Out of all legal options, the family went to the top of the political ladder, and got President Bush and his religious-right powerhouse in Congress to counteract that ruling. Congress passed, and Bush signed, emergency legislation, sending the case back to the federal court. But wisely, the federal court did not overrule the previous decision. The feeding tube was not reinserted, and Terry was allowed to die.
The case was a sickening display of not only the breach of the separation of powers as well as the separation of church and state, but also of how quickly and deeply one's personal life can be penetrated by a government. A federal appeals court judge in Atlanta quite eloquently admonished Congress and the White House for acting “in a manner demonstrably at odds with our Founding Fathers’ blueprint for the governance of a free people — our Constitution.”
Fast forward to 2009, and there is an eerily similar kind of family nightmare in Italy. A 37-year old woman, Eluana Englaro, has been in a coma since a car crash in 1992. Her father, who claims that her daughter would not want to live in such a vegetative state, has spent years petitioning the Italian court system to allow her to die. Finally, doctors were allowed to implement a medical protocol for withdrawing Eluana's artificial nutrition--that is, until Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, after consulting with the Vatican, issued an emergency decree stating nutrition cannot be withdrawn.
Magnifying the absurdity of the Italian government's and Vatican's interference in the private lives of these citizens is the Prime Minister's justification for his decree: physically at least, Eluana was "in the condition to have babies."
Allow me to elucidate. Irregardless of the comatose woman's inability to consent to anything, the Italian Prime Minister and the Vatican are in effect saying that it would be acceptable for someone to impregnate this woman, have her body incubate a fetus, then deliver it; but to allow her to die a natural and dignified death by withdrawing artificial nutrition would be immoral, despite what Eluana would have wanted.
Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, who pleaded with Berlusconi to not permit Eluana to die, told him "We have to stop this crime against humanity." (I must say, I find it ludicrous and ironic that the religious institution responsible for the horrific crimes of the medieval Crusades and the systematic enabling of pedophilia in the priesthood has the audacity to say anything about crimes against humanity.)
In these two right-to-die cases, Terry and Eluana were young when they suffered their irreversible brain damage and had not made their wishes explicitly known in writing. But those closest to them and legally responsible for making decisions on their behalf have a better idea than the government or the Church about whether or not they would want to linger for decades in an unconscious state.
Even more fundamentally important than the ethics of proxy medical decision-making is the right to die. I think this right is a corollary of Ayn Rand's concept of the right to life: "There is only one fundamental right (all the others are its consequences or corollaries): a man's right to his own life."
In their quest to take away the right-to-die, the Vatican and America's Religious Right are basically taking away the right to life, claiming your life belongs to God, not to you. This religious view is the reason the Schiavo family fought Terry's right to die; this was the reason they took their case to a President who actively promulgated religious initiatives; and this is what the Italian father is fighting.
Your right to life includes your right to end your life according to your values. If you would not want to be kept alive for decades in a comatose state--and your proxy decision makers know that--then they have the ethical and legal obligation to carry out your wishes. And any governmental or church interference with that right is an immoral and egregious offense to the citizens of a society obligated to uphold their Constitutional rights.
Update: Eluana died Monday Feb 9 as legislators debated her case. The Italian government intends to push for an anti-right-to-die law.
Beck poses as a victim, asking why it is that the 10% of the country who doesn't believe in God is pushing the other 90% around and forcing their nonbelief down their throats. Believers don't do that, he says, so why not just let people be? Of course, striking down a mandatory moment of silence-or-prayer isn't forcing nonbelief down peoples' throats -- it's only stopping believers from forcing their religion down others' throats via violations of individual rights. Talk about spin. Even purely secular-sounding "moments of silence" only exist because of believers' desire to get God into the classroom to indoctrinate children.
Beck goes on to exaggerate that "it's been deemed unconstitutional to even say the word 'prayer' to our children," and Dobson says that "they just have to eliminate even the possibility that someone might pray." Um, no: the kiddies are free to pray anywhere at any time as long as they aren't being disruptive. What's been deemed unconstitutional is taking money from taxpayers by force to fund schools students are compelled to attend, and then requiring them to do or be indoctrinated in your religion. Reading the text of the ruling, you can see how the judge traces out where and how the line is crossed. (Of course, if we didn't have government schools that people are forced to fund and required to attend, then this would be a non-issue. Don't like your school's policy regarding religious indoctrination? No rights violation there, and you're free to find or form another school. Have a nice day.)
So, does it count as dishonest or just weak-minded when Beck turns to a wider point to claim that "in this country, our rights come from God" and to ask the rhetorical question, "if you take God out of the picture, then where do rights come from?" Oh, I see your point: you don't seek to ram your religion down peoples' throats... but we really do have to make sure your religious ideas are rammed down peoples' throats lest civilization collapse. Got it.
But I'm happy he asks about the basis of rights, because it reminds me that more people need to appreciate the analysis Ayn Rand offered in her classic essay, "Man's Rights":
The concept of individual rights is so new in human history that most men have not grasped it fully to this day. In accordance with the two theories of ethics, the mystical or the social, some men assert that rights are a gift of God -- others, that rights are a gift of society. But, in fact, the source of rights is man's nature.
The Declaration of Independence stated that men "are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights." Whether one believes that man is the product of a Creator or of nature, the issue of man¿s origin does not alter the fact that he is an entity of a specific kind -- a rational being -- that he cannot function successfully under coercion, and that rights are a necessary condition of his particular mode of survival.
"The source of man's rights is not divine law or congressional law, but the law of identity. A is A -- and Man is Man. Rights are conditions of existence required by man's nature for his proper survival. If man is to live on earth, it is right for him to use his mind, it is right to act on his own free judgment, it is right to work for his values and to keep the product of his work. If life on earth is his purpose, he has a right to live as a rational being: nature forbids him the irrational." (Atlas Shrugged)
Once again, the answer to the idea that our options are restricted to either religion or anything-goes subjectivism is that this alternative is malformed. Rather: it is either objectivity and facts, or whim. The right-religious whimsy approach to "rights" is just as wrongheaded and dangerous as the left-secular whimsy approach to "rights."
Where's the Airsickness Bag? By Greg Perkins @ 12:01 AM
Really, I was ready to let it go and move on. But then this floated by in one of those endlessly-forwarded emails that friends and family pass around. What's so revolting is the utter inversion of justice it represents in the mainstream treatment of the accident.
God is routinely given credit and thanked for saving those people; but notice that He's not similarly given "credit" for needlessly killing those geese, destroying that plane, endangering and distressing the people involved, and soaking up lots of resources to deal with it all. Nor is He reflexively given such "credit" for all the deaths that aren't averted in other plane mishaps.
Such psychoses aside, the real problem I have with this is that it dilutes and distracts from the recognition genuinely earned by the heroes involved!
The pilot trained long and hard to be able to fly planes of various kinds, and to identify and execute just such a lifesaving maneuver. Then, in the moment it was needed and under tremendous stresses, he kept his head and did an absolutely brilliant job.
The crew trained as well in managing such a process -- and when their moment came they likewise kept their heads and executed brilliantly.
Engineers labored long and hard to design a plane that didn't just fly, but which would have ever better chances in all sorts of rare and strange circumstances, working to reduce the odds and impact of the unexpected. The result is a craft that could withstand this sort of water landing and float long enough to get those people out.
People on the ground sprang into action to scoop up the passengers and contain the danger.
And on and on. How about the experts who will analyze what happened and use it to make people a little safer in the future?
These folks deserve all of the credit and admiration and thanks, and it's an absolute injustice that the mainstream reaction would take even the tiniest sliver of their due and pretend it was earned by someone or something else.
The contraceptive pill is polluting the environment and is in part responsible for male infertility, a report in the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano said on Saturday.
The pill "has for some years had devastating effects on the environment by releasing tonnes of hormones into nature" through female urine, said Pedro Jose Maria Simon Castellvi, president of the International Federation of Catholic Medical Associations, in the report. "We have sufficient evidence to state that a non-negligible cause of male infertility in the West is the environmental pollution caused by the pill," he said, without elaborating further. "We are faced with a clear anti-environmental effect which demands more explanation on the part of the manufacturers," added Castellvi.
The article was promptly dismissed by several organisations. "Once metabolised, the hormones contained in oral contraceptives no longer have any of the characteristic effects of feminine hormones," said Gianbenedetto Melis, vice-president of a contraceptive research association, quoted by the ANSA news agency. The hormones contained in the pill such as oestrogen "are present everywhere... in plastic, in disinfectants, in meat that we eat," added Flavia Franconi, of the Society of Italian Pharmacology. ...
The alliance between capitalism and religion in the 20th century in America was artifact of the rise of atheistic communism. It's not a sustainable union: a religious worldview cannot ground the rights of the individual to pursue his own happy life by his own rational judgment as required by capitalism. (On that point, see Ayn Rand's essay "Faith and Force" in Philosophy: Who Needs It.) More particularly, the Christian scriptures preach disdain for this world, blind obedience to the whims of God, abject sacrifice for the sake of the poor and weak, acceptance of sin, the positive value of suffering, and the moral corruption of wealth. A person who takes those values seriously cannot preach or practice capitalism. (See this LTE and this one.)
Consequently, I'm not surprised to see supposedly "conservative" religious institutions abandon their marginal respect for individual rights in favor of statist causes like the welfare states and environmentalism. Of course, the Catholic Church has never been a defender of individual rights, particularly not reproductive rights. But its embrace of environmentalist arguments to further that end is something new -- and ominous.
GOP's 'social conservatism' alienates young Republicans
In regard to the Dec. 17 article, "Young Republicans seek a new kind of party": I voted Republican in 1996, 2000, and 2004, but not in 2008, because I was finally fed up with the ever-increasing influence of the religious right on the Republican Party – especially on issues such as abortion, stem-cell research, and gay marriage.
If the GOP returned to affirming individual rights, limited government, and fiscal responsibility, then I would be glad to support it again.
But as long as they support the toxic "social conservative" agenda of the religious right, then they will continue to alienate many young and independent voters and lose elections. And deservedly so.
Celebrate reason and science on December 25th, instead of the same old bearded mystic!
I like to send Christmas cards, but as an atheist, I have had to limit myself to the hundreds of bland cards that neutrally say "Happy Holidays." I decided that if it's okay for (almost) everyone else to stamp, seal, and deliver their philosophy to me every Christmas, I'll do just the same.
Sir Isaac Newton's ideas helped to rescue mankind from drudgery and propel it into the space age. I am a lover of reason, and I love it unashamedly, and I want my friends to know it too. They will this Christmas. Yours can, too.
Details
Outside: "On December 25th, a Savior was born. He revealed eternal Truth, bringing Joy to millions. He astonished the world with His command over Nature. He changed history forever."
Inside: "Happy Birthday, Sir Isaac Newton. December 25, 1642 - March 20, 1726".
"And Now, Let Us Pra....GLOAT!" By Gina Liggett @ 12:07 AM
The Religious Right has been driving a sledgehammer into the wall of separation of church and state for 30 years, and has enjoyed an especially-intimate relationship with the politically powerful for eight years running. They have achieved significant successes: Bush's faith-based initiatives, the partial-birth abortion ban, the passage of parental-notification laws, the Bush appointments of Supreme Court Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito, and the constitutional amendments against gay marriage just passed in Florida, Arizona and California. There are doubtlessly many other successes I've left out, especially at the state and local level.
Now, bow your heads and let us gloat. Because the Religious Right had some significant defeats this election, and I think its time to celebrate!
First and foremost, let's sing a hallelujah to the crushing, sweeping, stunning blow to Amendment 48 in Colorado. Hip-hip-horrrahhhh!! Your possibility of getting sued in court by a fertilized egg claiming its right to your body and property is just not gonna happen!
Washington state passed the nation's second assisted suicide law in the country! Now individuals who are suffering and who rationally decide to end their life with dignity have more opportunity to do so humanely. This is a "right-to-life" issue: the right to choose to control your life, and that includes ending interminable suffering, even if evangelical Christians don't want you to.
Another attempt to severely ban abortion in South Dakota failed! Hurrah!! Proponents tried to make a previous draconian abortion bill more palatable by allowing rape and incest victims or women in danger for their health to have an abortion if necessary. Oh, gee, thanks for the crumb, but all women in South Dakota will get to retain at least most of their right to terminate an unwanted pregnancy according to their decision.
And candidates favored by the Religious Right suffered some losses at the polls. Hurrah!! In five of eight Senate races, the Religious Right's favorite candidate lost (Colorado, Mississippi, New Mexico, North Carolina and South Dakota); and two races are in a run-off (Georgia and Minnesota). In eleven races for the the House, six incumbent Representatives favored by the Religious Right were ousted (Colorado, Florida, Idaho, North Carolina, Michigan and Virginia). And three incumbents held off religious challengers (Indiana, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania). This means that it will be more difficult for evangelicals to forcibly decide for all of us that we should abide by a biblical morality.
Nah-nah-nah-nahhhh-nahhh!!
Cheers to us all! The Wall of Separation of Church and State is still there. It's big!!! It won't come down... for the time being, at least!
The Word Spreads By Diana Hsieh @ 10:22 PM
I'm delighted to report that Paul's Denver Post op-ed How the GOP Lost My Vote seems to be making the rounds of the blogosphere. Most notably, it's a "top headline" on Michelle Malkin's Hot Air and a good chunk of it was sympathetically quoted on Little Green Footballs. (Yikes! LFG has over 1000 comments on that post already.)
After a resounding electoral defeat, in which voters in this once-red state rejected Republicans McCain, Schaffer, and Musgrave, the Colorado Republican Party will undoubtedly be asking themselves, "Why did we lose?"
I want to let them know that they lost the vote of many former supporters (including myself) because they have chosen to embrace the Religious Right.
I voted Republican in 1996, 2000, and 2004. I believe in limited government, individual rights, free market capitalism, a strong national defense, and the right to keep and bear arms - positions that one normally associates with Republicans.
But I didn't vote for a single Republican in 2008. I've become increasingly alienated by the Republicans" embrace of the religious "social conservative" agenda, including attempts to ban abortion, embryonic stem cell research, and gay marriage.
The Founding Fathers correctly recognized that the proper function of government is to protect individual rights, such as freedom of speech and freedom of religion. But freedom of religion also implies freedom *from* religion. As Thomas Jefferson famously put it, there should be a "wall of separation" between church and state. Public policy should not be based on religious doctrines.
Instead, the government's role is to protect each person's right to practice his or her religion as a private matter and to forbid them from forcibly imposing their particular views on others. And this is precisely why I find the Republican Party's embrace of the Religious Right so dangerous.
If a woman chooses not to have an abortion for reasons of personal faith, then I completely respect her right to do so. But she cannot impose her particular religious views on others. Other women must have the same right to decide that deeply personal issue for themselves.
The Religious Right's goal of outlawing abortions would violate that important right, and sacrifice the lives of actual women for clumps of cells that are only potential (but not yet actual) human beings, based on religious dogma. As a physician, I find that position abhorrent and deeply anti-life.
In his October 24, 2008 radio broadcast, Rush Limbaugh told pro-choice secular supporters of limited government such as myself that we should leave the Republican Party. Many of us have already taken his advice and changed our affiliation to "independent."
The Republican Party stands at an important crossroads. The Republican Party could choose to follow the principles of the American Founding Fathers and promote a limited government that protected individual rights but otherwise left people alone to live their lives.
This includes affirming the principle of the separation of church and state. If they did so, I would happily support it.
Or the Republican Party could instead choose to become the party of the Religious Right and seek to forcibly impose the religious values of one particular constituency over others (thus violating everyone else's rights).
In that case, it will continue to alienate many voters and lose elections -- and deservedly so.
Even though I no longer regard myself as a Republican, I definitely regard myself as a loyal American.
My parents immigrated legally from Taiwan to America over 40 years ago. They had very little money, but they worked hard, sent two children to college and medical school, and are now enjoying a well-earned and comfortable retirement.
Their life has been a real-life embodiment of the American dream. America is a beacon of hope to millions of people around the world precisely because our system of government allows honest, hard-working people to prosper and thrive.
Our system is a testament to the genius of the Founding Fathers, who recognized that the proper function of government is to protect individual rights, such as our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Hence, I believe the Republican Party should choose the first path - the path of limited government, separation of church and state, and protection of individual rights.
This is the America that brought my parents from a ocean away in hopes of a better life for themselves and their children. This is the America I want to live in. And this is the America I want the Republican Party to stand for.
Miracles Galore By Diana Hsieh @ 2:37 PM
One of the most bizarre aspects of serious religious devotion are routine assertions of miracles. Even the most pedestrian events are claimed to be miracles, simply because a person can impose some meaning on them, however contrived. Case in point:
Subject: My Mother
From: S******@aol.com Sent: Wednesday, October 24, 2007 6:45 PM To: r*****@nyc.rr.com
10/24/07
Just wanted you to know
After her fight with Alzheimer's Mother passed in the wee hours of the morning. Last night as they were giving her a pain reliever, we stepped outside and saw a miracle.
Here in Alabama, we have had some really scary weather. I forgot how dark and mean the clouds can get. The sun was setting and suddenly, for a brief moment, we had the most beautiful sunset. In Alabama, this is a rare sight. Suddenly above our heads flew 3 geese. We immediately thought that was my Mother, my Father and the hope for the future giving us a message to be strong and have faith.
Peace, Amanda
Ohmigod! A beautiful sunset! That's amazing! And wow, three geese! (I particularly love that that's one goose too many, hence the need for a goose to represent something totally different, namely "hope for the future." If only she had another dead relative...)
So along these lines, I propose some further miracles:
"The line was short in the grocery store when I was in a hurry last week!"
"The dog didn't puke on the carpet during my dinner party!"
"My parents had sex at just the right time to conceive me!"
"When I turned on the water spigot, water came out!"
Then again, I'm sure that such ordinary events are routinely claimed as miracles. No reductio ad absurdem of claims to miracles is possible, as the claims of miracles are already absurd.
ARC and Obama on Gay Marriage By Paul Hsieh @ 3:00 AM
The Ayn Rand Institute just published a good press release on California's Proposition 8, warning that Americans should not allow a dangerous breach in the separation of church and state:
Church and State: A Marriage Not Made in Heaven October 31, 2008
Washington, D.C. -- Californians will soon have the chance to vote on Proposition 8, which would define marriage in the state constitution as being only between a man and a woman, denying marriage to same-sex couples. The proposition is heavily supported by the religious community. Said one religious leader who supports the measure, "We believe it is a religious issue as well as a political issue. That's where we feel the Church must have a word."
According to Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, "Regardless of how one thinks 'marriage' should be defined, there's a much graver issue at stake: this is a flagrant attempt to inject religion into politics.
"As our Founders understood, religion is properly a private matter -- not a legitimate basis for government action. The government's only role is to protect our rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. Under our secular political system, individuals are free to hold any religious views they wish, but they cannot impose their views on the rest of us. That is the meaning of freedom of religion.
"Once we accept the view that the 'Church must have a word' in the political sphere, we are accepting a principle completely opposed to freedom. If gay marriage can be barred because, as one supporter of Prop. 8 put it, 'I don't think God has ordained it,' then why, for instance, can't speech that similarly offends religionists also be banned? Indeed, this is the very principle that motivates the religious right's crusade against broadcast 'indecency' -- and the brutal principle that recently led the Afghani government to sentence a journalism student to 20 years in prison for blasphemy.
"The separation of church and state is a cornerstone of liberty. It protects our right to live by our own judgment, free from the dictates of ministers and mullahs. To protect that right, we should oppose any attempt to bring religion into politics."
Diana and I wholeheartedly support gay marriage, and Diana has stated her reasons in this NoodleFood post:
The essence of marriage is the total integration of two lives: sexually, legally, socially, financially, geographically, sexually, morally, etc. The fact that most marriages involve two people with contrasting genitalia is not of any grand significance.
Several gay friends and wealthy gay donors to Senator Barack Obama have asked him over the years why, as a matter of logic and fairness, he opposes same-sex marriage even though he has condemned old miscegenation laws that would have barred his black father from marrying his white mother.
The difference, Mr. Obama has told them, is religion.
As a Christian -- he is a member of the United Church of Christ -- Mr. Obama believes that marriage is a sacred union, a blessing from God, and one that is intended for a man and a woman exclusively, according to these supporters and Obama campaign advisers. While he does not favor laws that ban same-sex marriage, and has said he is "open to the possibility" that his views may be "misguided," he does not support it and is not inclined to fight for it, his advisers say...
(The article notes that McCain also opposes same-sex marriage.)
Clearly, Barack Obama has no problems taking political positions based on his personal religious views. Anyone who votes for Obama thinking that he will offer any kind of principled defense of church-state separation is going to be deeply disappointed.
...I fully support the continued separation of church and state in this country. As our founding fathers recognized when they made religious freedom a fundamental principle of our Constitution, our nation is home to people of a large variety of religious backgrounds and beliefs. Our government has no role to play in selecting those beliefs, in advocating for one religion over another religion, or in supporting the presence of religion in favor of no religion. I will continue to vote against legislation that compromises our country's ability to keep religion and government separate. That includes programs that discriminate against people based on their religious belief or that use government funds to support one religion over another.
Although I sharply disagree with many of Udall's positions on other important issues, I applaud his clear and unambiguous position on this one.
I am 22 and my dad passed away almost 10 years ago. Every year a gathering is arranged in his memory. This is where the whole thing starts getting weird. According to Hinduism (which my family subscribes to), the son is obligated to perform a ritual every year. The ritual presumes the notion of an afterlife and is filled with the stuff of idealism.
I have recently read OPAR [Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand] and have decided to live according to Objectivist principles to the best of my knowledge. In the present case, I have absolutely no problem with a gathering in his memory, but I stand opposed to these customs which believe in the afterlife and the like.
I will probably take a lot of heat for my decision considering the faith of Indian's in God or whatever. It's not the heat that am really worried about (although it makes me a little nervous sometimes), but the correctness of my decision. I would like to be very sure of my decision before I stand trial. I do not know anybody better to ask this question to. Please feel free to answer in any manner you choose to.
If possible, also do elaborate on stuff like marriages in Church or a funeral conducted by a Catholic priest.
I wrote the following very hasty reply:
I don't have time to write much, but I would say that you should not -- as an adult -- actively participate in a ceremony contrary to your beliefs. It's not a problem to attend such a ritual, but to actively participate in it implies that you agree with it. Some of your family members may be angry, but if you don't assert yourself on this point, how many other compromises will they be able to wheedle out of you? Plus, the better family members -- namely those who respect you as an individual -- will get over any initial feelings of anger or resentment.
I'm posting this in the hopes that others will chime in with further remarks in the comments, as that was really far too brief.
...We flushed 'em out. We found out they're not really Republicans and they're by no means conservatives, and now they're gone. Now the trick is to keep 'em out.
...The minute you say that conservatism includes people who are pro-choice, you've destroyed conservatism because conservatism stands for "life, liberty, pursuit of happiness." Without life, there is nothing else here, and if we're going to sit around indiscriminately deciding who lives and who dies based on our own convenience, that's not conservative. Individual liberty. The essence of innocence is a child in the womb who has no choice over what happens to it. Sorry. If we don't stand up for that person, if the government doesn't, then nobody will. And if we allow ourselves to get watered down by a bunch of people who are embarrassed over that position, they're not conservatives.
No problem, Rush. I've already sent the following message to numerous Republicans at the local, state, and national level:
I used to support the Republican Party because I believe in individual rights, free markets, a strong national defense, and the right to keep and bear arms.
However, the Republican Party alliance with the religious right on "social issues" like stem cell research, abortion and gay marriage has turned off many former supporters such as myself.
Americans have a right to practice their religion as a purely private matter, and I defend everyone's right to do so.
But the government should not force one group's religious views on everyone. Hence, I no longer have a home in any political party. To paraphrase a quote from Ronald Reagan, "I didn't leave the Republican Party, the Republican Party left me."
Given that Rush Limbaugh has just confirmed that they don't want members like me, I'm happy to oblige him.
If the Republican Party wants to become the party of the Religious Right, then they will lose big in 2008. And they will deserve to do so.
Update:An Objectivist friend has also contacted us privately to point out that in another show, Limbaugh spoke out to defend individual rights, but as part of a pro-McCain plea. As our friend notes (quoted with his permission):
And let's not forget that his impassioned defense of individual freedom (which I heard part of, and which by itself was quite good) was made in defense of voting for JOHN MCCAIN... you know, the guy who blames the financial crisis on greedy Wall Street, who dismisses those who pursue profit instead of "service," who thinks the First Amendment deserves scare quotes, who supports cap and trade, who opposes drilling for oil in Alaska, whose hero is Teddy Roosevelt, who chose religious nut-job and anti-intellectual populist Sarah Palin as his running mate, etc., etc., etc. What a sin it would be to elect that kind of nightmare in the name of *capitalism*!
If McCain and Limbaugh were the only "defenders" of individual rights against the likes of Obama, then our country would be in sorry shape. Fortunately, there are better defenders out there...
Flemming Rose at Duke University on Thursday By Diana Hsieh @ 4:56 PM
Notice of a Special Event: A Lecture by Mr. Flemming Rose, editor of Jyllands-Posten, publisher of the Danish Muhhamad cartoons, on "Free Speech in a Globalized World."
When: Thursday, October 30, 2008, 7:00 PM
Where: Page Auditorium, Duke University (directions)
In September 2005 the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published a series of cartoons depicting the Islamic figure Muhammad with images of terrorism. The newspaper’s publishers stated that they wanted to bring issues of free speech and censorship forward into public awareness. The result was a firestorm of protest, ordered by clerics some weeks after the publication, that highlighted the seriousness of this issue. Over one hundred people were killed in the ensuing riots.
This event will be a unique opportunity to hear the cultural editor of this publication explain the decision to publish these cartoons, the issues at stake in the decision, and the meaning of the protests and the violence that followed. A Q&A will follow the talk.
Flemming Rose is a journalist with long experience in European, Russian, and American issues. He has been awarded the "Free Speech Award" from the Danish Free Press Society.
The column focuses on Colorado's Amendment 48, particularly on the difficulty of mobilizing secular voters in opposition to this faith-based measure. I appear toward the end, as part of a gentle criticism:
With their trust in the power of reason, atheists might also be ill-equipped for the gritty work of retail politics -- the phone banks, the door-knocking, the car pools to the polls. If nothing else, they are coming late to the craft.
As founder and leader of a Colorado-based coalition for secular government, Diana Hsieh has written a detailed position paper attacking Amendment 48. Other atheist activists have written letters to the editor and participated in online forums about the ballot measure. Relatively few, however, have thrown themselves into the get-out-the-vote operations that conservative Christians, for instance, have excelled at.
"We need to get more of our people out," said Ms. Hsieh, 33, a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the University of Colorado. "It's just not the strategy I've taken. I'm a policy-wonk type. Going to talk to people outside the grocery store is just not going to be my strong suit."
It's true: my battle is philosophical. Support for Amendment 48 is rooted in the deeply-held but false belief that "life begins at conception." (By that, people mean that a new person, with the right to life, is created at conception.) Recent polls show that, of likely Colorado voters, 41% believe that "life begins at conception" and 39% support Amendment 48. The overlap is not coincidental. So as I said in a recent press release for the Coalition for Secular Government:
To effectively combat measures like Amendment 48, the whole 'pro-life' ideology must be challenged at its root... Reproductive rights must be defended on principle, based on the objective facts of human nature. With regard to abortion, the fact is that a fetus or embryo is only a potential person so long as encased within and dependent on the woman. Once born, the infant is a new individual person with the right to life. That view ought to be the basis for the laws of a free society. Any alternative -- any attempt to grant rights to the embryo or fetus -- would violate the rights of pregnant women.
While I don't dispute with the importance of "retail politics" for winning elections, the defeat of the religious right in Colorado will require sustained philosophic arguments about the nature, source, and scope of rights. I'm pleased with what I've been able to do on that score so far. And once I finish my Ph.D at Boulder this spring, I'll be able to do far more than I can now. Nonetheless, I hope to never stand outside a grocery store arguing abortion with random passersby!
Finally, I must mention that it was a pleasure to discuss these issues with Samuel Freedman. He was sharp, fair, and interested in my views. His column reflects that -- and I am very appreciative.
Faith-based politics costs Colorado Republicans by Ari Armstrong
Colorado is known for its Western values of independence and economic liberty. So why do Republicans, the supposed champions of those values, keep getting trounced?
Republicans can blame wealthy Democratic donors, but in large part Republicans have beaten themselves by pushing a faith-based agenda of banning abortion and stem-cell research, discriminating against homosexuals, and directing welfare dollars to religious groups. They have subverted the law to religious doctrine and weakened the wall between church and state.
Republicans also have alienated freedom-minded independents and Republicans. Polls released by Pew show most Americans, and half of conservatives, now oppose church involvement in politics. As Ryan Sager shows in his review of 2005 Pew data, the Interior West holds a "live and let live" philosophy, with 53 percent of residents saying homosexuality "should be accepted by society" and 59 percent saying "the government is getting too involved in the issue of morality." [See the appendix of Sager's The Elephant In the Room.]
Yet the GOP panders to its evangelical base at the expense of political victory.
This year, Republicans passed a resolution at their state convention calling for the overturn of Roe v. Wade. Eighteen Republican candidates signed the Colorado Right to Life survey, saying they want to ban abortion as the will of God and outlaw stem-cell medical research.
The same candidates also endorsed Amendment 48, which would define a fertilized egg as a person in Colorado's constitution. This would lay the ground to ban all abortion except perhaps to save the mother's life, ban the birth control pill and other forms of contraception that may prevent a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterus, and ban most fertility treatments. Women would be forced to bring a pregnancy to term, even in cases of rape, incest, fetal deformity, and health risks.
True, some of these candidates, such as Congressman Doug Lamborn and congressional candidate Mike Coffman, live in safe districts for Republicans. But Libby Szabo, a candidate for state senate in District 19, does not. Her opponents have hammered her over her answers to the survey, making sure to link her views to the GOP.
Congresswoman Marilyn Musgrave, the incumbent in a Republican district, has managed to fall behind challenger Betsy Markey in some polls [one and two]. Musgrave wants to outlaw abortion, and she is most well known for sponsoring a constitutional gay marriage ban.
Republican Bob Schaffer is trailing Mark Udall in the polls in the U.S. Senate race in part because of Schaffer's faith-based politics. Udall has written, "I fully support the continued separation of church and state in this country." He opposes bans on abortion and stem-cell research. Schaffer, evoking God's will, said abortion is "always wrong."
Republicans should have learned their lesson when they lost the governership to the Democrats in 2006, when Bob Beauprez touted his faith-based politics and selected a running mate of the same cloth, Janet Rowland. Like Beauprez, Rowland wanted to outlaw abortion and maintain faith-based welfare.
Yet the GOP continues to actively push its anti-abortion agenda. A recent flyer "Paid for by Colorado Republican Committee" urged recipients to vote for a presidential candidate who opposes abortion and who will appoint Supreme Court justices to outlaw it.
But some who are pro-choice across the board are fighting back. Diana Hsieh founded the Coalition for Secular Government, which issued a paper that she and I wrote titled, "Amendment 48 Is Anti-Life." Diana's husband Paul wrote to Dick Wadhams, head of the state GOP, "Although I'm pro-free market, pro-strong national defense, and pro- gun, the position that the CO GOP has taken against abortion is a clear breach of the principle of separation of church and state." Doug Krening wrote to Republican officials, "I have been a Republican for my entire voting life, but cannot endorse the GOP currently because of it's explicit endorsement of religion in government."
On September 11, Amanda Mountjoy, chair of the Colorado Republican Majority for Choice, hosted a banquet with 240 participants to oppose Amendment 48. Former Senator Hank Brown told the crowd, "At the point that we give up supporting and defending individual freedom and choice, we give up the very core of this great party."
Colorado Republicans have two options. They can respect the separation of church and state and defend individual freedom and choice, or they can continue to lose and deserve to do so.
Ari Armstrong is a writer for the Coalition for Secular Government and the editor of FreeColorado.com.
Lurch to Religion? By Diana Hsieh @ 8:31 AM
Rob Tarr recently posted the following warning on HBL about people turning to religion en masse in times of crisis. (He also sent it to me, as I don't subscribe to that list. He gave me permission to post it here.)
From Rob Tarr
What about a turn to religion as a test?
I expressed in a Sep 18th post my fear that the coming severe recession/depression would cause a strong turn to religion:
"Tens of thousands of people working for Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns saw their jobs, careers, and life-savings wiped out this year. There will be millions more throughout the economy as we head into a very deep recession in the next 6 months. Times of crisis always lead people to reassess their lives and turn to whatever version of philosophy is at hand to explain the "true meaning of life". Often this has been religion, and with the energized state of religion today, this will be true more than ever. The religious message will resonate more deeply than ever as many people watch their material wealth evaporate (wealth that in many cases they have worked decades to accumulate). Doesn't this prove that pursuing material wealth is a "false god", a "mirage"? That you shouldn't be wasting time piling up "treasure on earth"; instead you should be piling up "treasure in heaven"?"
This week, the Pope stole my talking points, and started his "p.r. campaign" to take advantage of the crisis, in a widely reported story:
"Opening a Synod of Bishops in the Vatican the Pope referred to a passage from St Matthew's Gospel on false prophets, saying ''He who builds only on visible and tangible things like success, career and money builds the house of his life on sand''.
''We are now seeing, in the collapse of major banks, that money vanishes, it is nothing. All these things that appear to be real are in fact secondary. Only God's words are a solid reality''
Expect to see this times 100 over the next few years. I see this as the biggest danger by far. People will turn away from rational, this-worldly, long-term values en masse. Why work for decades long goals when you can lose it all in a few months? People will become *much* more short-term focused in their plans and values over the next few years, due to the crisis and the uncertainty; and much less interested in long-term material production as a goal. But that is a difficult place to be, psychologically. Religion will step in to fill the void.
This warning is important to my -- and hopefully your -- effects to advocate good principles in the culture. It underscores the urgency of the task, as well as the importance of advocating Objectivism as an alternative to the mysticism of the right and the nihilism of the left.
Personally, I'd thought about the possibility of a major economic crisis making people ripe for major lurch toward statism. In contrast, during good times, most people aren't willing to knock over the apple cart of prosperity and comfort for the sake of ideology. However, in such times of crisis, a mass lurch to religion seems just as likely -- and even more dangerous in the long run.
The upcoming election is the most critical in the history of our nation. The very future of our nation's foundation is at stake. Every person will be affected. If the liberals win, then our foundation will no longer be based on the traditional Judeo-Christian morality. It will gradually but assuredly be based on an ever shifting, ever moving foundation.
In case you may think I'm a "the sky is falling" type of person, you should know: I am a graduate of Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, and Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. I am an ordained United Methodist minister and have been for 44 years. I founded AFA more than 30 years ago and see the upcoming election as the most critical ever. Yes, if the liberals win you will lose some of your religious freedom and free speech rights. You will not be allowed to say certain things about a particular group. Homosexual marriage will be approved.
I cannot overemphasize the importance the Nov. 4 election. That is why I hope you will sign the Pastor's Pledge, and forward it to fellow pastors and encourage them to sign the Pastor's Pledge.
Donald E. Wildmon, Founder and Chairman American Family Association
The Pastor's Pledge
I pledge to:
1. Encourage my members to register to vote. 2. Encourage my members to study the issues. 3. Encourage my members to vote.
I've seen plenty of gushing praise for Sarah Palin and nasty criticism for Barack Obama from various e-mail lists of evangelical political organizations, but these alarm bells are pretty shrill. Obama is not an opponent of Christianity, nor even a real defender of the separation of church and state. So just imagine how these folks would react to a politician with a genuine understanding of and commitment to individual rights, including an absolute wall of separation between church and state. They'd go ballistic, to put it mildly.
Religulous: One Cheer out of Three By Greg Perkins @ 12:32 PM
Bill Maher has a new documentary slamming religion, Religulous, which opened Friday night around the nation. Short review: Sure, go see it. It will make you snort and laugh and shake your head at the endless nuttiness of religion. And it will make you think -- but not that much. Unfortunately, there is a fundamental flaw that keeps it from being great.
The movie had the working title of "A Spiritual Journey," and it begins that way with homey early photos of Maher up to his adolescence, and some sit-down exchanges with his mother about their family's religion (raised Catholic, though half Jewish). But the movie isn't really about him and his spiritual journey; it is mainly spent in interviews with an array of religious figures representing various big and some not-so-big religions and sects. We get to gawk at their goofiness, and Maher gives them plenty of opportunities to show their plumage. Interspersed are passages of him talking while driving around the nation. (Maybe that's the sort of "journey" he's really referring to.)
Maher is a comedian who's made religion a target for years, so he's got lots of funny, biting material to toss off. And sometimes his boldness and quick wit really pay off in his interactions with the religious loonies he's rounded up for inspection. That is where the film shines. He wraps the film up with a speech about the dangers of faith and religion, and generally encourages people to grow up.
It is refreshing to see a film here in one of the reddest of the red states taking a huge swing at the endless goofiness and insanity of religion. But as with 'New Atheists' like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris, its effect will be necessarily shallow and likely counterproductive in improving the culture. Consider: Maher wants to ding the destructiveness of faith and expose religionists' obvious nuttiness -- yet he works from the weak platform of a Skeptic who Just Doesn't Know, and who explicitly touts Doubt as his big epistemological tool. Well, the faithful will simply see him as ultimately expressing just another kind of faith, and they'll rightly think him a bullying hypocrite for baselessly attacking theirs. If he wants to be effective, he has to gain enough of the correct philosophical grounding to be able to explain just how one knows with valid certainty that faith and reason, science and religion, are fundamentally different and utterly irreconcilable.
And believers will see the gray kind of Relativism that flows from such skepticism and rightly dismiss his approach as a dangerous prospect -- after all, humans' need for morality is real. Lost in this sadly-partial exchange is the fact that both the religious and the subjectivist approaches to morality are dead wrong. Values have an objective basis here in reality -- they aren't subjective constructs or edicts from another realm -- and moral principles to guide us in pursuing the values required to live happy lives are just as open to discovery, dissemination, and proper use as the principles of engineering and economics.
While Maher's movie has a lot of humorous red meat for the god-free, all that believers will find is a journey out of the frying pan and into the fire. That is a shame, if the goal is to help humanity get over religion.
Vatican Sullies the Mantle of Science and Reason By Greg Perkins @ 1:07 AM
The Vatican has announced it will host an "Evolution Congress" as a part of the Pontifical Council for Culture's "Science, Technology and the Ontological Quest" project. This is to mark the 150th anniversary of Darwin's landmark work, The Origin of Species.
Phillip Sloan, a professor at Notre Dame, told the press conference the evolution debate, "especially in the United States, has been taking place without a strong Catholic presence ... and the discourse has suffered accordingly."
See? They're here to help! And you can tell they're serious because they are planning to exclude creationists and "intelligent design" advocates (but I repeat myself). After all, these religionists are intellectually respectable, unlike all those biblical literalists:
Jesuit Father Marc Leclerc, a philosophy professor at the Gregorian, told Catholic News Service Sept. 16 that organizers "wanted to create a conference that was strictly scientific" and that discussed rational philosophy and theology along with the latest scientific discoveries.
He said arguments "that cannot be critically defined as being science, or philosophy or theology did not seem feasible to include in a dialogue at this level and, therefore, for this reason we did not think to invite" supporters of creationism and intelligent design.
(Yes, it isn't obvious how ID Creationism isn't theological, being a product of religious dogma.) But here's what should be catching everyone's attention: they also said that "the other extreme of the evolution debate -- proponents of an overly scientific conception of evolution and natural selection -- also were not invited."
Of course. We wouldn't want our science to be too scientific at a "strictly scientific" conference, would we? What a charade.
It's tragic that all the church has to do is invite the zillions of conflicted, disintegrated people who consider themselves to be both religious and scientific. Many would jump at the chance to help the church pretend to be intellectually respectable. And the church will absolutely hit the jackpot with any nonreligious scientist stupid or unprincipled enough to show up and wrap them in the mantle of reason and science.
But try as they might, there's simply no getting around the fact that science and religion are fundamentally incompatible. Maybe some day the church will drop their fantasy of faith and reason being complementary means to knowledge, like the two wings of a bird.
I am a wife and a homeschooling mother of three beautiful girls and an adorable baby boy. I am also a right-wing fanatic on assignment from God to be a good helper to my husband and to train up my children with the Fear and Admonition of the Lord! My beliefs are radical, oftentimes offensive, and fundamental to the core. You're either going to love me or hate me, but I am here to share the TRUTH to an entire generation trained not to notice and blinded by lies. ===> "Have I now become your enemy by telling the TRUTH?" - Galatians 4:16
Are you willing to punish a woman with the death penalty or life in prison for terminating a pregnancy, whatever her circumstances? To lock up a woman so that she will bring a non-viable fetus to term?
Do you want to ban the birth control pill and IUD, thereby causing more unwanted pregnancies? Would you like to see a ban on in vitro fertilization? To grant frozen embryos in labs inheritance rights?
If not, then you ought not vote for or support Amendment 48 -- because those evils and absurdities would be the real-life consequences granting fertilized eggs full legal rights. To kill or harm a fertilized egg would be a criminal offense under Colorado law, regardless of the circumstances.
The fact is that Amendment 48 is deeply, profoundly anti-life. For the details, read "Amendment 48 Is Anti-Life: Why It Matters That a Fertilized Egg Is Not a Person," an issue paper by Ari Armstrong and myself. It's available for download at:
The Christians supporters of Amendment 48 are welcome to act on their own beliefs in their own lives. They have no right to force their religious views on the rest of the people of Colorado -- just as Muslims have no right to force Christians to pray to Allah five times per day.
Now, consider her reply:
Diana - you asked, "Are you willing to punish a woman with the death penalty or life in prison for terminating a pregnancy, whatever her circumstances?"
Yes, abortion should be re-criminalized and punishable by death. As individuals we do not have the authority to legalize murder, and I believe the government should enforce the law upon those who take an innocent life. In the same respect, if a baby is conceived through rape or incest, we should not punish the child because it's father is a criminal - the rapist and child molester should also be swiftly put to death.
If a woman's "health" is supposedly at risk, you don't need to intentionally kill the baby in order to save the mother's life. Doctors should do everything in their power to save both the mother and the baby, and if the child should die from natural causes in the process, then there is nothing immoral or illegal about that.
"Do you want to ban the birth control pill and IUD, thereby causing more unwanted pregnancies?"
Well, if those forms of birth control terminate a fertilized egg or prevent implantation, then yes, they should be banned.
"To grant frozen embryos in labs inheritance rights?"
Yes! As evidence of the Snowflake Children - Since 1997 over 400,000 frozen embryos became real live human beings and were given a chance at life.
"The Christians supporters of Amendment 48 are welcome to act on their own beliefs in their own lives. They have no right to force their religious views on the rest of the people of Colorado..."
The fundamental right to life is a universal right given to us by our Creator, regardless of a person's beliefs or religious background. Even the atheists have the right to life, and radical, baby-killing feminists like you, Diana, do NOT have the authority or the right to decide when an innocent child should die. Quit being so selfish and quit advocating for the real evils and absurdities which comes from re-defining when a person becomes a person.
Amendment 48 is simple - The term "Person" or "Persons" shall include any human from the time of fertilization.
A person who shrinks from the horrifyingly destructive real-life consequences of his abstract ideas might be -- maybe, possibly -- convinced to abandon those ideas by some further experience or argument. He has an internal conflict that might be resolved for the better.
Such a happy resolution is not possible when a person wholeheartedly embraces the horrifyingly destructive real-life consequences of her vicious ideas -- as does Dani. Such a person is not admirable for her consistency; consistency is only a virtue in the service of the good. Such a person is completely evil, likely irredeemably so.
Palin's Pastor = Hunter of Witches By Diana Hsieh @ 1:01 AM
Oy, if you thought Barack Obama's pastor was a nutjob, just consider Sarah Palin's: "The pastor whose prayer Sarah Palin says helped her to become governor of Alaska founded his ministry with a witchhunt against a Kenyan woman who he accused of causing car accidents through demonic spells."
Ari Armstrong has the details. Just remember Exodus 22:18: "You shall not permit a female sorcerer to live."
The Proper Subservience of Christian Women By Diana Hsieh @ 12:01 AM
Some evangelicals are less than thrilled with Sarah Palin's new role as the Republican vice-presidential candidate. According to them, a Christian woman's proper place is in the home, raising her family and supporting her husband. While probably a minority opinion at present, such views are worthy of our attention, I think. They represent the leading edge of evangelical Christianity in America. If the Christians win their battle for American politics and culture, these views will become ever-more dominant. Women will be confined to their homes, relegated to a life of supporting husband and children. Women will not be lawyers, doctors, politicians, journalists, or entrepreneurs. They will be daughters, then wives, and then mothers.
If that seems insane, just consider the following quotes collected from Christian message boards about Sarah Palin:
Why is a wife and mother with five children (including a newborn with Down's syndrome) running for vice president? She has a bountiful amount of work cut out for her by the Lord sitting in her lap and around her dining room table. I can certainly respect her Christian and biblical views, but I am really amazed at Christians leaping to embrace putting a wife and mother into political office--particularly an office that will essentially make her the helpmate of the highest official in the land and practically remove her from her husband and children.
Isaiah 3:12 truly applies: "As for My people, children are their oppressors, and women rule over them. O My people! Those who lead you cause you to err, and destroy the way of your paths." I can assent to Sarah Palin's conservative views and even applaud them, but I mourn for a nation whose men have forgotten how to lead their families and their land in the way our Founders envisioned and the way God intended. A wife and mother has already been elected by God to the highest office in the land. She has her own particular husband to help, his calling to make successful, and her children to nurture and train to the glory of God. How could the vice-presidency possibly compare with a task that God has personally designed her to fill?
And:
The home, the family, the raising of children--it is the zenith of human accomplishment. It's a full-time job, requiring full-time attention if it's to encompass all God intended. [...]
The message is "women can have it all"...and it is a lie, because they can't.
The message is "men and women should have equal access to the same roles". The reality is, that's not how God created HIS universe to run. He created them male and female, and yes, by their very biological design, nature screams at our dull senses "YOU ARE DIFFERENT"! Created for different purposes, created to compliment one another in their life work.
Such views are not from nowhere: they are actively developed and advocated by Christian intellectuals. For example, some critics of Palin favorable quoted Christian minister William Einwechter's 2004 essay entitled "Should Christians Support a Woman for the Office of Civil Magistrate?" It argues that a woman ought not hold any public office, based purely on scripture. Here's the opening paragraph:
With more and more women entering the political sphere and running for political office, the conscientious, biblically oriented Christian is confronted with the question of whether or not he should give his support and vote to a woman. This question becomes more pressing for many when the "best candidate," i.e., the most conservative, pro-life candidate in a particular race is a woman. A number of years ago, we in Pennsylvania were confronted with this issue when an articulate, pro-life, politically conservative woman (who was also a wife and mother) ran for governor of our state. Many Christians enthusiastically supported her. But not all of us were confident that this was the right or consistent thing to do. The following essay grew out of the concern over her candidacy, and seeks to address the larger questions of the acceptability of women magistrates and the Christian's responsibility before God in regard to supporting a woman for political office.
His methodology is simple: scripture reigns supreme, reason is dispensable. He writes: "In approaching this matter, we need to first understand that these questions can only be answered from Scripture. Mere human opinion or reason is not sufficient for the Christian. The Word of God is the only infallible, authoritative standard for directing us into the paths of righteousness."
He considers four scriptural "arguments" against women holding political office. His primary case -- with the most far-reaching implications -- is found in the first section. Here it is, in full:
1. The Biblical Doctrine of the Headship of Man Disqualifies a Woman for Civil Office.
The scriptural revelation of the creation of man and woman, and the scriptural commentary on their creation establishes the headship of the man over the woman. The text of Genesis 2:7 and 2:18-24 teaches us that man was made first, and then the woman was made to be man's helper and companion. The Bible instructs us that this order of creation was by God's design, and that it establishes the positional priority of the man over the woman in regards to authority and leadership. In setting forth the authority of the man over the woman in the context of the local church, Paul appeals to the creation order saying, "For Adam was formed first, then Eve" (1 Tim. 2:13). In another passage, Paul states the divinely ordained order of authority and headship: "But I would have you to know, that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God" (1 Cor. 11:3). Therefore, the Apostle Paul teaches that God has decreed that the order of authority be as follows: God-Christ-Man-Woman. Each one in this "chain of command" is under the headship (i.e., authority) of the one preceding him or her. Later on in this same text, Paul, as in 1 Timothy 2, calls upon the order of creation to show man's headship over the woman. He says, "For the man is not of the woman; but the woman of the man. Neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man" (1 Cor. 11:8-9). The Bible explicitly states that the man has headship over the woman, and that this headship is not based on cultural factors, or even the fall; rather, it is based on the created order established by God Himself.
Now it is also plain in the Bible that God has ordained that the order of the headship of man must be maintained in each governing institution set up by God. There are three primary institutions established by the Lord for the ordering of human affairs. These are the family, the church, and the state. Each of these institutions has authority to govern within its appointed sphere. We could say, then, that there are three "governments" in the world: family government, church government, and state government. In each of these governments, God has commanded that men bear rule. The man has headship in the family (Eph. 5:22-24), the church (1 Tim. 2:11-14; 1 Cor. 14:34-35), and also by implication and command, in the state as well (1 Cor. 11:3; Ex. 18:21; see point 2 below).
Could it be that the man has headship only in the family and the church but not in the state? No, this could not be, lest you make God the author of confusion, and have Him violate in the state the very order He established at creation and has revealed in Holy Scripture! If one is going to argue for the acceptability of women bearing rule in the civil sphere, then to be consistent, he or she also needs to argue for the acceptability of women bearing rule in the family and the church. Now it is true that some attempt to do just that; but their denial of male headship for the family, church, and state is really a rejection of the Word of God and is a repudiation of God's created order. And it is not sufficient to contend that it is acceptable to support a woman for civil ruler when she is the best candidate, unless you are also prepared to argue that it is acceptable to advocate a woman for the office of elder because she is better suited than the available men in the church; and unless you are also prepared to say that the wife should rule over her husband if she is better equipped to lead than her husband is.
Notice that his arguments do not merely concern the proper place of women in politics. He explicitly claims that men must rule over women in the family, in the church, and in politics. Yet his analysis would apply just as well to any endeavor, including business. By his principles, no woman should ever claim any authority over any man in any sphere of life, regardless of her knowledge, skills, experience, and capacities. So a woman doctor ought never order a male nurse to medicate her patient as she directs. A woman police officer cannot rightfully demand a male criminal to submit himself to lawful arrest. A woman professor cannot fail a male student for cheating over his protests. A woman business owner cannot fire a male employee for failing to show up to work on time. God has designed men and women such that men always have "positional priority" over women in "authority and leadership."
That's our future -- unless we fight for rational values today.
However, I thought this comment said more than all the insane ravings of his critics:
I would like to thank you, Nicholas, for your stand here. As the mother of a child with Down syndrome born prior to Roe v. Wade and before the advent of pre-screening tests, I did not have the choice when it came to giving birth to my daughter. While I loved my daughter deeply (who is now deceased), had I known what I would have faced and had I had the freedom to choose to accept this responsibility or not, I very well might have been with the 90% of women who choose to terminate their pregnancy because of Down syndrome.
Those who think that it is vicious to not want to have a child with severe retardation should try raising with one before they pass judgment. It is no easy task; in fact, it is a cruelty made real when you realize that your beloved child can never think like a healthy person, never be independent, or find the love that a person can find when they are in full possession of all their faculties.
I spit on all of you here who would morally condemn a woman for rejecting such a fate. I spit on all of you here who would condemn such a choice as murder. You simply have no idea what you are talking about, and it offends me that you prance around as if you do. Walk a mile in my life before you presume to tell me that abortion is wrong.
Also, Nick has posted an excellent defense of abortion rights. I don't expect that bit of reasoned argument to slow the rate of death threats against him, however.
One of the key insights in "Nixonland," the new book by the historian Rick Perlstein, is that Nixon's political strategy throughout his career was inspired by his college experience, in which he got himself elected student body president by exploiting his classmates' resentment against the Franklins, the school's elite social club. There's a direct line from that student election to Spiro Agnew's attacks on the "nattering nabobs of negativism" as "an effete corps of impudent snobs," and from there to the peculiar cult of personality that not long ago surrounded George W. Bush -- a cult that celebrated his anti-intellectualism and made much of the supposed fact that the "misunderestimated" C-average student had proved himself smarter than all the fancy-pants experts.
If you want to know why I have focused more on the shortcomings of Republicans recently than those of Democrats, this observation by Krugman is part of the reason why. They have explicitly made a virtue of "anti-intellectualism." Now, I'm not saying that Democrat-style intellectualism is the way to go -- it's not. Democrat-style intellectualism is basically just nihilism -- there is no right and wrong, everything's relative, and if you're looking for value you ought to stop looking for it in the human race and look for it in polar bears and wilderness. But still, the Left at least pays lip service to the notion that the right course of action is discovered by using your mind, by thought.
The Right sees thought as a threat, and openly so. They don't denounce the Left primarily for thinking the wrong things, but for thinking as such.
The Right militantly embraces faith. They don't embrace faith in the manner of Buddhists up on mountains contemplating their navels, or in the manner of Middle Age ascestics who stop flogging themselves only long enough to eat a piece of moldy bread and take a sip from a mud puddle. They openly embrace their faith just as Ayn Rand said faith ultimately must be embraced: with a steaming side helping of force.
So, in a nutshell, here's the religious right's advice for women. 1. Absolutely do not have sex unless you're married. 2. At most, use only birth control that cannot possibly hinder the implantation of a fertilized egg. 3. If you get pregnant, regardless of the circumstances, you absolutely must have the baby, even if you were raped, and even if your health or the health of the embryo is at risk, except perhaps if you're on the brink of death. 4. Once you bear a child, you should stay home to raise the child, rather than have a career, but perhaps you can have a career that advances the agenda of the religious right.
And some people wonder why I'm deeply concerned about the religious right's growing power in American politics!
The context is the proposed new law that would grant special protections for religious health care workers who chose not to provide abortion care or information to patients out of reasons of "conscience". In effect, the new law would forbid employers from firing such workers and enforce this by threatening the employer with loss of federal funding.
Leaving apart the fact that such issues should be settled by private contract (as nicely argued by Thomas Bowden of the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights in their recent press release, "Let Doctors Protect Conscience by Contract"), this proposed law has spawned a controversy over what exactly constitutes an "abortion" in the eyes of the federal government.
As Saletan documents in his first piece from 8/28/2008, "Contraceptive Fudge", the initial definition was:
...[A]ny of the various procedures -- including the prescription, dispensing and administration of any drug or the performance of any procedure or any other action -- that results in the termination of the life of a human being in utero between conception and natural birth, whether before or after implantation
However, this was dropped after protest from physicians and reproductive rights advocates who correctly noted that this would include some forms of birth control that are not generally regarded as "abortion" -- including IUDs and sometimes birth control pills.
When others have asked Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt to clarify this point, he has been cagey. In Saleton's second piece from 8/29/2008, "Contraceptive Fudge: Addendum", he notes the following statement by Leavitt:
But when pressed about whether the regulation would protect health-care workers who consider birth control pills, Plan B and other forms of contraception to be equivalent to abortion, Leavitt said: "This regulation does not seek to resolve any ambiguity in that area. It focuses on abortion and focuses on physicians' conscience in relation to that."
Secretary Leavitt is trying to have it both ways. While claiming this would not "change a patient's right to a legal procedure", his deliberate characterization of this issue as one of "ambiguity" is leaving the door open for the conflation of popular forms of birth control with abortion, and thus preparing the way for future restrictions of birth control in the name of restricting abortion.
Saletan also explicitly supports the private contract approach to the "conscience" issue, and I applaud his principled stance:
As a pharmacist, you have every right to refuse to fill contraceptive prescriptions. But your customers have every right to boycott your store, and your employer has every right to fire you. If you don't like your employer's policy, open your own pharmacy.
He also notes that federal government is soliciting citizens' opinions on this issue. You can e-mail them at: consciencecomment@hhs.gov.
Here's a slightly edited version of the comment I sent them:
The US government needs to be completely clear and unambiguous as to whether it regards standard forms of contraception such as birth control pills and IUDs as forms of "abortion", if they result in the expulsion of an egg that has already been fertilized but not yet undergone implantation.
Rather than fudging this issue and calling it an "ambiguity", it must let practicing physicians such as myself know whether restrictions on abortion will also entail restrictions on these other forms of contraception.
If the Bush administration wants to call those "abortions", then please be up front about it and say so. If the administration does not consider those to be "abortions", then say so and clear the air. To straddle the fence does a grave disservice to millions of men and women, and also leads to the concern that there is a hidden agenda amongst some in the government to also include restrictions on these forms of birth control when they propose future restrictions on abortions.
Ultimately, you'll be able to find all six parts on our author page.
Here's what the paper is about:
Colorado's proposed Amendment 48 -- the ballot measure that would grant full legal rights to fertilized eggs -- would usher in disastrous government controls on abortion, birth control, medical research, and in vitro fertilization. It would violate the rights of real men and women -- based on the faith-based fiction that a fertilized egg is a person with the same moral standing as a born infant. Yet the biological facts of pregnancy show that the embryo/fetus becomes a human person with rights only when born.
Our paper offers some philosophic analysis of the politics and ethics of abortion not seen elsewhere, I think. So go check it out on CapMag -- or you can download and read the full pdf version.
(By the way, I'm in a massive dissertation writing crunch right now. I wrote for eight hours on Sunday, eleven hours yesterday, and I have a huge day ahead of me to finish this &@*#! chapter on moral judgment. So I'm not answering any e-mails or whatnot -- except to put out fires. I'll be back in the game by the end of the week.)
The Religious Right has historically staked its moral claim on the Republican Party, focusing on what they call "pro-life" issues such as abortion, stem-cell research, euthanasia, human cloning, and other issues that pertain to life and death.
But we have an emerging phenomenon among what has traditionally been the morally-vacuous Left: a religious basis for their agenda to tackle the Iraq war, so-called "social justice" and environmentalism.
To many, the Left has been always been perceived as coldly "scientific" and therefore anti-moral. But now that the Democrats are eagerly jumping into bed with religion, it must be very reassuring to some voters on the fence who "kind of like" the leftist ideology, but just can't embrace its moral hollowness. Now they have a new leader: Barack Obama, who has been apologetically leading his Christian Democrat soldiers into battle.
This is a marriage that should be annulled. It is a Las Vegas wedding of two faiths: religious belief in the supernatural with the statist's hatred of individualism.
Ayn Rand opened the lid on the leftist movement in her book, The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution. Although published in 1970s, the essays are as relevant today as ever.
And now that the Left can claim moral sanction from God, that's just one big heavenly green light for Obama's Blueprint for Change.
His plan is explicitly clear: Obama will expropriate wealth from capitalist producers and fund a welfare state on a grand scale with the the moral call-to-arms that we are our brothers' and sisters' keepers (to paraphrase his exact quote).
What a rallying cry for a purposeful America! The Taliban couldn't do any better!
Where is that third alternative to the bible-quoting statism of the Left and the mystical-biblical politics of the Right? It is Ayn Rand's rational egoism.
Rational egoism means that an objective reality exists as we perceive it by our senses and by a process of reason (not by prayer or mystical revelation). This includes the knowledge that humans are individuals, not globs of "society" that must follow the state's or God's commands. Morally we have the right to pursue happiness and our necessities of life without violating the rights of others to do the same. It means we can have a society where we interact benevolently with others on the basis of trade with one another, free from theft of our lives and property by the state or criminals.
The bleak reality is this: our politicians are ruining America. But they don't have our minds yet. It is the ideas of rational egoism that will lead us to a better future--a future of freedom, wealth and happiness.
Most religious or "spiritual" values include the belief in eternal life, such as an afterlife in heaven or reincarnation into another life after death. The common theme is the idea that each person has an eternal soul that lives beyond the physical body after death.
Meanwhile, in the here and now, a key goal of modern religious activism is advocacy for what many faithful call the "sanctity of life". Believers are taught that life is given by and belongs to God, and therefore we must not meddle in the godly matters of life and death.
This is the biblical basis for prohibitions against abortion, euthanasia, and stem cell research, even though these practices are for the purpose of relieving suffering and improving the lives of living individuals. (And it is also the moral basis for the Colorado ballot proposal to grant rights to fertilized eggs.)
But when the religious interpretation of the "sanctity of life" is the law of the land, people are forced to endure suffering. For example, a woman who is impregnated by a vicious rapist must forever live with the psychological and social burden of raising a child she doesn't want. A terminal cancer patient with agonizing pain only has the option of withering away using ever-increasing mega-doses of pain drugs rather than being allowed the choice of ending his life with dignity. These examples demonstrate the opposite of respect for the sanctity of life.
How do the faithful psychologically tolerate these indignities? By believing in an eternal life: that when it's all over, one's soul will live on. It may go to heaven to be with God in a state of eternal bliss, or it may reincarnate and advance to a "higher plane" of existence with "lessons learned" from the previous life.
But this belief comes at a high price: believing in an eternal soul essentially renders one's life in the here and now expendable. If you live forever, it doesn't ultimately matter if you suffer in this life. All that matters is that humans must not "play God" by taking ownership over their own their lives.
One of the most difficult truths we face as humans is that our existence is finite. This is something we have to learn to accept and cope with. The religious belief in an afterlife is a total evasion of this blunt truth.
The fundamental fact that we all die means that it is this life that is sacred. Therefore, we must have a society that protects the unique, finite and precious life of each living individual. Such a society based on rational egoism has a moral code founded on the realities of our finite existence and the requirements of human life.
But a faith-based society that unquestioningly accepts the idea of an eternal soul can rationalize doing anything it wants to individuals in the name of God, because people get eternal life anyway.
A proper sanctity of life is for the living. It is not for potential life, a dreamy "eternal" life, or for God.
Colorado's Amendment 48 -- the proposed constitutional amendment that would grant full legal rights to fertilized eggs -- would usher in disastrous government controls on abortion, birth control, and in vitro fertilization. It would do so by grossly violating individual rights -- in the name of the faith-based fiction that a fertilized egg is equal to a born infant.
Here's the press release:
MEDIA RELEASE -- COALITION FOR SECULAR GOVERNMENT
New Paper: "Amendment 48 Is Anti-Life," an issue paper by Ari Armstrong and Diana Hsieh, published by the Coalition for Secular Government is available on the web at:
"Amendment 48, the ballot measure that would define a fertilized egg as a person with full legal rights in the Colorado constitution, is profoundly anti-life," said Diana Hsieh, founder of the Coalition for Secular Government.
"It would obliterate basic reproductive rights in Colorado based solely on the faith-based fiction that a fertilized egg is the moral equal of a born infant. The biological facts show just the opposite: that only the pregnant woman, and then the born infant, are persons with rights," Hsieh said.
"Amendment 48 Is Anti-Life," written by Ari Armstrong and Diana Hsieh and published by the Coalition for Secular Government, shows that the ballot measure is hostile to human life in myriad ways:
* Given existing criminal statues, Amendment 48 would subject women and their doctors to life in prison or the death penalty for abortions, even in cases of rape, incest, and fetal deformity.
* It would prevent doctors from properly treating non-viable ectopic pregnancy until the woman's life and health was in serious danger, thereby causing needless deaths.
* It would force thousands of women each year to bear unwanted children, whatever the cost to their own lives and happiness.
* The measure would ban popular and effective forms of birth control, including the birth-control pill, thereby increasing unwanted pregnancies.
* It would outlaw the fertility treatments responsible for the birth of hundreds of Colorado babies to eager parents each year.
"The voters of Colorado must protect their reproductive rights against this dangerous assault. They must vote 'NO' on Amendment 48," Hsieh said.
Forget Congress. Forget President Bush. About four months ago, frustrated by the apparently immutable laws of supply and demand, Rocky Twyman turned to a higher authority in his quest for cheaper gasoline.
The recent dip in prices, he says, is proof of divine intervention. "Prayer is the answer to every problem in life," said Twyman, founder of the Pray at the Pump movement, whose members huddle around gas pumps and ask the Almighty to lower gasoline prices.
"If the whole country keeps on praying, we can bring down prices even more, to even less than $2," Twyman said.
The article notes that the average nationwide price for gas has dropped 32 cents in the past month. However, this current low is 25 cents higher than it was on April 23, when these Christians began praying. Oh but not to worry, these wingnuts won't let the pesky facts get in the way of their spiritual triumph! God is great!
Thu August 14, 2008 Kern seeking to destroy protective wall
Regarding "Kern vows to fight for morals in government; The legislator's anti-gay remarks drew ire earlier this year" (news story, Aug. 6): State Rep. Sally Kern describes herself as a "cultural warrior for Judeo-Christian values." Such claims should raise alarm bells for patriotic Americans. A free society can't be founded on Judeo-Christian principles. The Bible doesn't uphold capitalism, nor support our individual rights to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness. It demands only that we suffer and sacrifice in obedience to God's will.
Individual rights are based on the objective requirements of human life in society. A person must be free to act on his own rational, independent judgment -- without forcible interference from others -- to survive and flourish. The only proper purpose of government is the protection of individual rights. For a government to do anything else -- including promote religion -- is tyranny. That's why a free society must, in the words of Thomas Jefferson, build "a wall of separation" between church and state.
Kern and her fellow culture warriors seek to destroy that protective wall, thereby paving the way for a repressive theocracy. In the name of freedom, they must be opposed at every step.
Diana Hsieh, Sedalia, Colo.
Hsieh is founder of the Coalition for Secular Government, which supports homosexual rights and opposes restrictions on abortion, tax exemptions for churches and government-sanctioned faith-based initiatives.
The description of the Coalition -- written by the newspaper -- isn't fully accurate. As stated in its mission, the Coalition doesn't support homosexual rights: it opposes government discrimination against homosexuals. (That's a fine distinction, I know.) More importantly, the Coalition doesn't oppose tax exemptions for churches, but rather opposes any special exemptions from the tax laws governing all non-profits for churches.
In a totalitarian society, individuals lack any kind of private life. Individuals are only a means to the end of society, everything -- from one's purchases to one's friendships -- is the province of the state.
That same totalitarian impulse is present in American churches today, as illustrated by this news story on a pastor's prophetic sermons:
Last Sunday, pastor Irwin Alton, 62, preached against several specific sins during his sermon. Some people in the audience gasped with recognition. "When he talked about skipping mid-week service to go to the lake, and buying a new boat when you haven't tithed, I felt nailed to my pew," said one man. "It was like the Holy Spirit was speaking right to me."
But it wasn't the Holy Spirit -- it was the man's own blog where he had posted photos of himself and his buddies on his new boat on a Wednesday evening.
Pastor Alton, who cultivates a reputation as a computer illiterate techno-phobe, is actually an avid reader of MySpace pages, blogs and personal websites of the people in his congregation. "I appear, shall we say, un-hip," he says. "Therein lies my advantage."
Though he publicly refers to the Worldwide Web as the "Worldwide Waste" and e-mail as "sin-mail," in his home office is a bank of computer screens with more than 170 bookmarked sites -- personal web pages, blogs, Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg, Flickr and more. Each week Alton surfs the sites for hours to find evidence of questionable behavior by people in his church. He jots offenses down and incorporates them into his Sunday sermons.
He even checks the blogs of friends of people in his church. That's where he found photos of Emily Dotson, 31, at a local sports bar. During the service last week Alton paused mid-sermon to say, "Some of you have been visiting places you shouldn't be seen in as a Christian, drinking establishments and the like." Emily was taken aback.
"He was speaking right to me," she says. She came forward and repented for being at the sports bar, even though she'd been celebrating a girlfriend's birthday. "I knew I shouldn't have lingered in that environment," Emily says. "I could have gone in, said hi and left."
[Update: Doh! It's actually a satire, even if a bit too close to real life for many Christians.]
As for my own personal experience, I spent one year in a church that was dangerously close to Pastor Alton's. Right after college, I accepted a teaching position in a private Christian school in south Florida in order to take a year off from my education. In my incredible naivete, I assumed that the school would be as free-thinking as my Christian college had been, and I was assured that I would be able to teach evolution. Nevertheless, the school that I taught at was incorporated along with the church. As a condition of our employment, we were required to attend church weekly, "voluntarily" tithe 10% of our pre-tax income to the church, and serve on at least one church charity or ministry project. As someone who accepted the premise of altruism [at the time], I had no problem with these rules.
My students got a good dose of actual education about evolution, but not without some parents discussing this matter with the administration. It became apparent that I was only to teach evolution from the standpoint of exposing its supposed fallacies. My most important lesson was learning what a consistently Christian life was all about. If your life is lived consistently according to religious values rather than your own implicit values, it becomes an agonizing web of deceit and dishonesty -- both with oneself and others. It was the worst, most stressful year of my life. There were several aspects of my personal life that I kept very secret, dreading the day when some church member might find out about it. One day I was confronted by the school/church administration for using the word "crap" in my classroom -- a student had reported that. I can't possibly hope to communicate with others who think Christianity is benign how oppressive a consistently Christian life is. It is something you must experience for yourself.
If Christians choose to live in such personal confinement within the bounds of their own church, that's their right. However, they have no right to use government force to herd the rest of us into a such confinement via controls on obscenity, drinking, drugs, blasphemy, abortion, birth control, homosexuality, dress, and the like.
For those of us who reject Christian morality -- who regard Christian values of faith, sacrifice, suffering, and submission as positively immoral -- such a life would be intolerable. That's precisely why I formed the Coalition for Secular Government: I do not wish to attempt to eke out an existence in an airtight Christian world.
College Student Steals Jesus By Diana Hsieh @ 1:41 PM
When I discovered this story last weekend, I belly-laughed for a good five minutes. It's just that inane.
In brief, Catholics became totally hysterical when a University of Central Florida student walked out of Mass with a Eucharist wafer in tow. It was the kidnapping of a Jesus! Once consecrated, such wafers are supposed to be the substance of the body of Christ -- albeit with all the attributes of a cracker. (Yes, it's a miracle!)
The title the blog post on the incident -- well worth reading -- sums up my feelings exactly: IT'S A FRACKIN' CRACKER!". Many of the comments are damn funny too, particularly #29.
The Christian theocrats are attempting to transform America into a thoroughly Christian nation in her laws, institutions, and mores. They demand that abortion be banned, solely based on their tenuous interpretation of scripture. They vigorously campaign against any attempt to allow loving homosexual couples to secure their bond by law. They demand that all television be prudishly "family-friendly," without a boob or butt in sight.
One of the most common arguments of these theocrats for their coveted religious transformation is based on an appeal to our Founding Fathers. The Founders, they say, were devout Christians seeking to establish a Christian nation. The Founders, they say, never envisioned anything like the secularism of today's society and government.
Most Americans feel some reverence for our Founding Fathers, yet they know little of the actual words and deeds of the men who shaped our country: Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, George Washington, and others. (Thanks, government schools!) So too many American can be bamboozled by these claims of the theocrats. The snippets so often quoted by Christians to support their case are usually ripped from their proper context, then interpreted through Christian lenses. Any mention of God is read with an endorsement of Christianity and Christian government. The deism of many prominent Founders is ignored, as is their strident opposition to any kind of promotion of religion by the government.
However, the most clear evidence that the Founders intended their new government to be independent of any religion is found in three places in the Constitution:
We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Notice what is missing from that basic statement of purpose: God. Moreover, the Constitution attempts to secure the very kind of this-worldly goods like peace, security, and justice that Jesus admonishes his followers to ignore. And it does not aim to promote the otherworldly goods like the salvation of one's soul that Jesus admonishes his followers to seek above all else.
The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the members of the several state legislatures, and all executive and judicial officers, both of the United States and of the several states, shall be bound by oath or affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.
So all government officials are required to uphold the Constitution, yet none can be subject to any kind of religious test. They cannot be required to espouse belief in Jesus, nor even belief in God, nor even in some vague Higher Power. Surely, if the Founders wished to create a Christian nation, they would have required that government officials be Christian.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
The First Amendment forbids the government from interfering in people's religious lives, whether by forbidding or promoting certain religious beliefs and practices. If a Christian nation was their aim, then the Founders should have required the government to promote Christianity -- not forbidden it from doing so.
In future blog posts [on Politics without God], I will say more on the relationship of the Founding Fathers to religion, as the half-truths and outright lies spread by the theocrats must be combated. Yet it's amazing that a clear look at just these few passages from the Constitution wholly undermine their basic claim that America was founded as a Christian nation.
Whatever the current facts on the ground, the United States is still regarded today primarily as an idea -- the idea that freedom is the only proper social system. Every day the United States and other freedom-loving countries remain in the U.N. is another day dictators and violent theocrats worldwide enjoy a patina of legitimacy through association with free nations. If the free nations withdraw, the legitimacy of the violent nations will vanish and the U.N. will implode as they try to kill each other. Best thing for the U.N., really.
This law will allow teachers to use "supplemental materials" to promote the "open and objective discussion of scientific theories being studied including, but not limited to, evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning."
That might sound pretty good, given the deplorable state of science education in the public schools, but it's not. The purpose of this bill is to allow schools to teach Creationism in the science classrooms, a blatant violation of the separation of church and state.
People who believe in Creationism--the biblical explanation for the origins of the earth and life--are fighting against Darwin's theory of evolution, a brilliantly-discovered thesis which ignores God in favor of actual facts.
There is no credible scientific debate against evolution. It is the unifying theory in all biology, and has been proven over and over again. The mere act of denouncing it in favor of "what the bible says" does not constitute a valid competing theory.
The bill's stated goal of teaching "critical thinking" is a sickening offense to the human mind. It will critically shut off all rational thinking, exhorting young minds to accept on faith alone ancient mythical tales of our beginnings.
The Discovery Institute, a big promoter of teaching Creationism, deeply criticized the opponents of Louisiana's law. They had the nauseating audacity to equate Galileo's struggle against the church with their struggle against what they call, the "antichurch." The author states: "But a funny thing about the truth is that no one can control it because sooner or later it reveals itself."
This statement is a direct repudiation of our essence as humans: that we are beings who must discover the truths of reality by a process of reason in order to survive. The faithful have no more choice about this fact of our existence than the non-faithful.
Teaching the myth of Creationism, which requires faith, alongside the science of evolution, which requires reason, will cause confusion in students' minds about what science is and why it's important. It will impair--not enhance--the development of their ability to think.
Learning about evolution is a wondrous and fascinating experience. And it's a crime that evangelicals are basically telling the next generation: "learning how to reason is irrelevant."
European Cartoonists By Paul Hsieh @ 12:31 PM
Those who are interested in the future of free speech in Europe might find this article from the July 12, 2008 Wall Street Journal noteworthy. It documents the contrasting responses of Denmark and Holland to cartoonists accused of insulting Islam. Here are a few excerpts:
"Denmark protects its cartoonists. We arrest them," says Geert Wilders, a populist member of the Dutch Parliament...
The contrasting Danish and Dutch responses "show that there is a serious struggle of ideas going on for the future of Europe," says Flemming Rose, a Danish newspaper editor who commissioned the drawings of Muhammad in Jyllands-Posten. At stake, he says, is whether democracy protects the right to offend or embraces religious taboos so that "citizens have a right not to be offended."
As Arts & Letters Daily notes, "The Netherlands once sheltered Jews and other refugees from the Inquisition. Now it runs its own Inquisition..."
Now a local church is going for a ballot initiative to force schools to provide 5 minutes of meditation each day. This is nothing more than a naked attempt to get prayer in the schools, and they darn well know it.
These groups are not ignorant of our constitutional right to worship as we choose. But it isn't good enough for them to practice their religion and respect the right of others to do the same.
Their goal is nothing less than to impose upon all Americans a society legally based on religious-right Christian morals. If you don't believe me, just readtheirwebsites.
Our precious freedoms in America are based on secular principles of reason and reality, not on mystical ideas like those defining the repressive, backward and utterly irrational Sharia laws of Islamic societies. And we certainly can't forget the centuries of stagnation and suffering under the tyranny of the power-lusting Catholic Church.
The separation of church and state protects churches from being overtaken by the state, and protects our society from being overtaken by the church.
But more than that, it's a principle that upholds as society's moral foundation not ghostly revelations by control freaks wearing goofy hats, but the facts of human nature and our requirements for thriving as civilized and rational beings.
The religious right groups must be stopped before they've had that second pot of coffee. In each of our states where these initiatives are happening, we must not sign their petitions. And we must soundly defeat their initiatives at the ballot box. We must write letters to the editor and to our legislators saying, "No more!"
If we don't defeat the religious right by proudly reclaiming America as a secular society, we will have the church in our schools, in our doctors' offices, in our bedrooms, in public buildings, in parks, at work: we will have the church in our lives everywhere.
If we don't stop the religious right from hijacking the moral foundation of our society, we will never be able to turn back.
Pope Benedict XVI used his first major address at the Roman Catholic Church's youth festival here [Sydney, Australia] on Thursday to warn that the world was being scarred and its natural resources used up by humanity's "insatiable consumption."
In a broad criticism of consumer culture, before a crowd of more than 140,000, Pope Benedict reinforced the Vatican's growing concern with protecting the environment, a theme he has addressed before.
Although environmentalism and religion would seem to be fairly disparate ideologies, Drs. Brook and Ghate point out that the two could easily unite in an "unholy marriage" in which each strengthens the other.
For instance, many of the radical environmentalists believe they have failed in their attempts to change the culture. Although they had hoped that their ideas would cause Americans to renounce industrial society, this simply hasn't happened. Americans are not willing to sacrifice their current level of material prosperty for a nebulous ecological concept such as "Gaia". On the other hand, they might be willing to renounce material prosperity if their religion preaches that such material prosperity is immoral. And some radical environmentalists are starting to recognize this fact.
Religion also thrives on guilt. If people start to feel guilty for productive activities in the material world necessary for physical survival, then religion could gain much more power over the human spirit. Hence, there is a strong possibility of a synergy between environmentalism and religion, especially in the younger generation.
As Brook and Ghate note, what unites the environmentalists and religionists is the "don't move" approach. The environmentalists favor a "don't move" approach towards the material world. They want mankind to maintain a static relationship relative to the natural world. Any kind of change made to improve man's lot is viewed as disrupting this desirable "harmony" and therefore wrong.
Similarly, the religionists advocate a "don't move" approach towards man's mind. Obedience to authority is preferred over an independent mind that asks questions and is willing to challenge authority.
A union of religion and environmentalism could therefore form a powerful ideology which preaches that your very existence is a sin and that you should therefore feel guilty for merely wanting to live.
Fortunately, most Americans do not feel that way, at least not yet. But if this ideology ever gains a foothold in the American psyche, then we will be in deep trouble. Such an ideology would kill the innovative American spirit that has created computers, antibiotics, and factories, bring material progress to a halt, and return us to the horrors of a medieval existence, where life was "nasty, brutish, and short".
Hence, this is why it's important for humans to explicitly recognize that it's morally proper to want to live, that it's right to exercise our minds in order to better our lives, and that it's right to utilize natural resources according to our rational judgment for human benefit.
Why The Republicans Have Lost My Vote By Paul Hsieh @ 12:49 AM
Over the past few days, I've sent letters to multiple county and state officials of the Colorado Republican Party, asking for them to support a strict separation of church and state. I wanted to let them know that their alliance with the Religious Right was costing them votes from former supporters such as myself.
Given that I believe that the Republicans will lose in 2008 here in the "purple" swing state of Colorado, I believe that it's important that they hear that particular message now (before the election) and later (after the election) -- specifically, that they lost because they were too religious.
In particular, I don't want the only message they receive coming from the evangelical Christians telling them that they lost because they were not religious enough.
The relevant excerpt from my most recent letter is below. Although I don't think I will necessarily change the minds any of the current local party leaders, it's still important for them to know that there are people who oppose them mixing religion with politics. I also wanted to articulate a positive vision of America that I do support, one which should resonate with the better Republicans:
...My parents came to America over 40 years ago as legal immigrants from Taiwan. They had very little money, but they came to America because they wanted to make a better life for themselves. Over the years, they worked hard, lived frugally, saved enough money to send two sons to college and medical school, and are now happily and comfortably retired in Los Angeles. From them, I learned a deep appreciation for America as the "land of opportunity". America is a beacon of hope to millions of people around the world precisely because it has a system of government which allows honest, hard-working people such as my parents to thrive and prosper. Our system of government is a testament to the genius of the Founding Fathers, who recognized that the proper function of government is protect individual rights, such as the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Consequently, I don't believe that one should ground principles of government in faith. Instead, they can and should be grounded in observable objective facts about human nature -- specifically our need to use our minds to think and live. Man's essential nature requires that he uses his reasoning mind to create the values necessary for sustaining his life. Hence, the basic purpose of a government is to protect a man's right to produce and to voluntarily trade with others for the products of their thought and labor. Protecting individual rights means protecting men from those who would use force to predate on others -- i.e., protecting Americans from external enemies who would wage war on us as well as from internal criminals who would use force to steal, murder, commit rape, etc. But apart from that, the government should leave honest people alone - which is why our government properly protects our right to free speech, the right to keep and bear arms, the rights of property and contract, and the right to worship freely.
In particular, a person's religious faith should not enter into issues of government. Instead, the government's role is to protect each person's right to practice his or her religion as a private matter and to forbid them from forcibly imposing their particular views on others. And this is precisely why I find the influence of the Religious Right on the Republican Party to be so dangerous. If someone chooses not to get an abortion for reasons of personal faith, then I completely respect her right to live by her beliefs. But she should not impose her particular religious stance on others. Other women must have the right to decide that deeply personal issue for themselves. The Religious Right's goal to outlaw abortions would violate that important right, and sacrifice the lives of actual women for clumps of cells that are only potential (but not yet actual) human beings, based on a religious dogma. As a physician, I find that position abhorrent and deeply anti-life.
The Religious Right's positions on other issues, such as banning stem cell research and same sex marriage are similarly troubling because it advocates using the power of the government to interfere with individual rights. I already see enough of that kind of harmful nonsense from the Democrats.
Hence, I think the Republican Party stands at an important crossroads. The Republican Party could choose to follow the principles of the American Founding Fathers and promote a limited government that protects individual rights but otherwise leaves people alone to live their lives. In that case, I would happily suppport it. Separation of church and state is a natural (and essential) consequence of that approach. Or the Republican Party could choose instead to embrace the Religious Right and enshrine into law the religious values of one particular constituency over others (thus violating everyone else's rights). In that case, it will alienate many voters and do tremendous harm to our great country.
Even though I can no longer regard myself as a Republican, I definitely regard myself as a loyal American. Hence, I believe the Republican Party should choose the first path -- the path of limited government, strict separation of church and state, and protection of individual rights. This is the America that brought my parents from a ocean away in hopes of a better life for themselves and their children. This is the America I want to live in. And this is the America I want the Republican Party to support.
Thank you for your consideration, Paul Hsieh, MD
That letter was a response to an earlier e-mail I received from the secretary of my local county Republican Party, which I am posting below with his permission. In particular, he states that faith should be the basis of morality, and he explains his stance on abortion which essentially reflects the standard conservative Christian view. Here is an excerpt of his earlier letter:
...You seem to suggest that the opposition to stem-cell research and abortion places the GOP "in bed" with the religious right. Why this may appear to be the truth, there is an underlying connection that you are failing to acknowledge. The Republican Party upholds the founding principles of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, as the founding fathers specifically cited as rights Endowed by the Creator (Nature’s God, to be exact). These are rights not given, but endowed -- bestowed upon every human to protect. The idea of the endowment of Life is not new and not owned exclusively by the religious right. In the spirit of following the intent of the founders, and embracing their understanding of basic human rights, the Republican Party must uphold the Right of Life.
Inasmuch, the question is begged: When does life begin? Therein lies the debate.
In accordance with the 14th amendment, the rights of the founding documents are applicable to those "born" in the United States. That word would seem to indicate that a fetus of any gestational age is therefore without rights. This is the basis of the Roe decision in the Supreme Court. However, as a doctor, you should well understand that a fetus is very much alive and responsive to their environment from a fairly early gestational age, regardless of their ability to survive independent of their mother at the time. With the complexity of life in gestation, it serves humanity to better define Life -- not limiting life to begin merely at birth. Therefore we are in support of the Right of Life, as we consider life to exist during gestation.
Barack Obama has shown in his political career that he shows almost no compassion for life in the womb, supporting late term abortion and referring to children as a punishment. Having lost our first pregnancy, my wife and I are happy to have recently delivered our first child -- rest assured we do not feel punished. My brother and his wife also recently gave birth to their first child, who has been diagnosed with Propionic Acidemia -- and rest assured, they do not value his life any less, nor feel punished. I would assume that Mr. Obama would consider such a child a burden on society and the parents -- most likely he would suggest such a fetus be discarded. But is it not the challenge of life that should cause us to persevere... perhaps this young child holds the key to medical research that could aid in curing this and other genetic defects. Where Obama sees punishment and burden, I choose to see opportunity. This is a fundamental difference between me and the Senator -- and I would imagine that this is a similar difference between the Senator and a majority of Republicans who continue to fight, not because it is easy, rather because it is right.
The Republican Party does not openly nor privately advocate for any one religion, but we are advocates against the absence of faith from the lives of Americans. We are not a Christian organization, merely an organization that supports and endorses the existence of faith as a basis of morality -- not in government, but in the lives and hearts of the individual, at their own request and choosing. I personally could never be part of an organization that openly endorsed a state religion (such as the Constitution Party which openly supports naming Christianity as the official religion of the US). Furthermore, you will notice that the ranks of the GOP are filled with many people of faith, from many different religions. We support them all...
Sincerely, Steven M Nielson Secretary, Douglas County Republican Party
Over the past few months, I have told several local non-religious Republicans that I can't support the party, including one of the delegates to the state convention. He runs a small coffee cart in the building where I work and is a prototypical hard-working small businessman. He is also frustrated by the dominance of the religious conservatives in the party, so I told him where I stood in hopes that it would give him some moral support to more forcefully advocate his own views at the Party convention.
Local writer Ari Armstrong has noted that the Colorado Republicans know that they are being hurt badly by their support of religious causes. It may not make a perceivable difference in 2008, but I think it's important for them to know that there is a group of voters whom they are alienating precisely because the party is mixing religion and politics. If the Republicans think that courting the religionists has only an upside without a downside, then they'll keep doing it. But if they start recognizing that there is a downside, then it might spark more badly-needed internal discussion.
Hence, I decided to log on to the GOP Platform site and leave comments under the sections for "Abortion", "Religious Liberty", "Same Sex Marriage", and "Other" including a couple of links to Ayn Rand's essays on government and rights from the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights website.
I don't expect any specific or immediate response from them. But as usual, you never know when the right idea might reach the right mind. Here are a couple of represenative comments:
The Republican Party must promote the strict separation of church and state. I used to support the Republican Party because I believe in individual rights, free markets, a strong national defense, and the right to keep and bear arms.
However, the Republican Party alliance with the religious right on "social issues" like stem cell research, abortion and gay marriage has turned off many former supporters such as myself.
Americans have a right to practice their religion as a purely private matter, and I defend everyone's right to do so.
But the government should not force one group's religious views on everyone. Hence, I no longer have a home in any political party. To paraphrase a quote from Ronald Reagan, "I didn't leave the Republican Party, the Republican Party left me."
(This should not be taken as any kind of endorsement of Barack Obama - I find his policies loathsome and anti-American.)
Paul Hsieh, MD Sedalia, CO
And
The Republican Party must promote the strict separation of church and state. I used to support the Republican Party because I believe in individual rights, free markets, a strong national defense, and the right to keep and bear arms.
However, the Republican Party alliance with the religious right on "social issues" like abortion and gay marriage has turned off many former supporters such as myself.
The proper function of the government is to protect individual rights, as philosopher Ayn Rand notes:
The government should not force one group's religious views on everyone. Hence, I no longer have a home in any political party. To paraphrase a quote from Ronald Reagan, "I didn't leave the Republican Party, the Republican Party left me."
One of the most astonishing claims in the book is that Charles Darwin -- the quiet Victorian gentleman naturalist -- was responsible for the worst evils of the 20th century: racism, communism, fascism, Nazism, terrorism and, ultimately, 9/11.
I guess the Muslims weren't really the ones to blame for 9/11.
Kjaergaard concludes:
One thing is clear: creationism has indeed come to Europe and unfortunately, therefore, we have to take it seriously. We can't afford to be complacent, or imagine that creationism is just a bizarre and distant American phenomenon. Just as manipulative as the worst of American creationists, European creationists are hard at work and some of them have a lot of money... What we have seen so far is just the beginning.
All the more reason we need to fight for rational education here in America. If mysticism and faith become entrenched in American education, then there's no reason to believe that other Western countries will be somehow immune.
Islamists Owe U.S. a Thank You Card By Gina Liggett @ 1:05 AM
It's nearing the end of another U.S. Administration--and another gross failure of leadership that has allowed Islamic terrorism to adapt and thrive.
The modern threat of Islamic totalitarianism should have ended when it began with the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis, but it hasn't.
Al-Qaeda, declared enemy number one after 9/11, has been reestablishing itself in the remote tribal area between Pakistan and Afganistan ever since U.S. armed forces failed to capture its leader, Osama bin Laden, at Tora Bora in 2001. And Taliban terrorists have resurfaced in these no-man's lands, increasing their attacks on U.S. and NATO forces within Afganistan.
How is this possible after President Bush's promise of Sept. 20, 2001: "I will not forget the wound to our country and those who inflicted it. I will not yield, I will not rest, I will not relent in waging this struggle for freedom and security for the American people"?
An excellent New York Times article details three important factors that have facilitated the ongoing threat: (1) infighting within and between our National Security bureaucracies, the State Department and the Administration; (2) the detrimental consequences of turfing onto Pakistan much of the responsibility for fighting these brewing Islamic movements; and (3) the diversion of priorities, expertise and resources to the war in Iraq.
But our inability to prevail against Islamic totalitarianism once and for all is due to a more fundamental cause than committing bureaucratic blunders and relying on shady allies to do our dirty work:
It's a failure of our leaders to unequivocally declare that we have the moral right to destroy those who threaten us, and do whatever is necessary and sufficient to quickly and permanently end the threat.
It means: if Iran has been identified as the founder and prime sponsor of Islamic totalitarianism, then the Iranian regime must be terminated.
It means: if Islamists are setting up boot camp with the complicity of local tribes in some wasteland, then our forces---not a third party--must wipe them out, totally, using whatever means is required.
It means: we declare to the world that we will not play diplomatic games, rely on bureaucrats with conflicting agendas, or take into account the cultural sensitivities of our enemies or their enablers.
No more holding hands and singing Kumbaya with a mortal enemy who blatantly threatens to annihilate us.
This lack of full commitment to "the war on terror" isn't lost on the American psyche. Remember when little American flags used to be proudly displayed on millions of cars after the twin towers were attacked? You don't see much of that anymore because maybe the Islamists have called our bluff.
It's time to regain our pride, and claim our moral right to exist in peace as a free country defined by the principles of individual rights.
It's time to implement our moral imperative to decisively end Islamic totalitarianism--once and for all.
Thank you for your editorial opposing the proposed "personhood amendment" to the Colorado constitution.
Unfortunately, some people in Colorado are eager to impose their religious dogmas on others -- by whatever means necessary. They demand that everyone submit to their values, including people who disagree with their dubious interpretations of scripture, deny the morality of blind obedience to divine commands, and reject faith in God as irrational superstition -- as I do.
By any rational standard, that demand for submission is morally wrong.
These theocrats reject the very principle protecting their own freedom to worship: the separation of church and state. Under that principle, each person practices whatever faith he chooses, including none at all -- as a matter of right. He may live as he sees fit, according to his own values, without forcible interference from others. So if opposed to abortion, he can refuse any involvement with the procedure.
The proposed "personhood amendment" embodies the opposite principle: government entanglement with religion, particularly the enforcement of Biblical law. Adopting that principle would subject matters of private conscience to government meddling. Everyone who wishes to live in a free country should vigorously oppose it.
Diana Hsieh, Sedalia
It's time for me to start writing op-eds on this topic, I think!
In one of his debates with the "New Atheists," Dinesh D'Souza talked about how religion demands that we move outside of ourselves and sacrifice, and alleged that atheists chafe under the moral rules of Christianity that hold them accountable. He went on to say atheism is a rebellion against that—that atheism is not really an intellectual revolt against unsubstantiated ideas, but a moral revolt against rules they simply don't like being held to. While the New Atheists have a few sharp things to say to religionists on the moral front, their response has lacked the clarity and broad force of the fundamental response that needs to be delivered.
Values vs. Subjectivism
To begin with, D'Souza's charges do have some merit because his opponents stumble badly with respect to the issue of values. Most secular thinkers subscribe to the idea that values are somehow arbitrary, relative, based in emotions like empathy or in "intuitions," subject to a collective agreement of society or to the wishes or whims of the individual. In all its varieties, such subjectivism is open to criticism because there is, in fact, an objective basis for values: What makes something good or bad is that it furthers or frustrates the goals of some agent, and the most fundamental alternative any organism can face is life or death, existence or nonexistence as a living being. This is to say, life is the ultimate yardstick by which all subsidiary goals and alternatives are measured for their value-significance.[1] Sunlight and water are valuable to the plant, which turns its leaves and grows its roots to gain those things and maintain its existence. Nuts and shelter are valuable to the squirrel, as is avoiding hungry predators. And the same is true of people: the good is that which ultimately furthers our lives.
This perspective makes it clear that values are a factual concern, not a matter of arbitrary opinion or feelings or loose "intuitions." Merely hoping, feeling, or asserting something is good can't make it stand in a positive relationship to a life, any more than declaring 2+2=5 would make that so. The true and the good are determined by the facts of reality, and we avoid grasping the facts and acting accordingly at our peril. This is why any inwardly-focused, subjectivistic conception of values is necessarily bankrupt, a threat to human life.
But for those accused of rebelling against the moral absolutes of God, there is a silver lining to be enjoyed in this lesson: the religionists are themselves guilty of the sin of moral subjectivism. The essence of subjectivism is acting on whim—wishing, assuming, feeling, or declaring that facts will align themselves with thoughts and lives. Of course, this gets it exactly backwards: thoughts and lives must align themselves with the facts because facts are absolutes to be discovered, not declared. Merely hoping or asserting something is good doesn't make it so, and it doesn't matter whether we're talking about the whim of a lone subjectivist deciding what is good or bad, the whim of an entire civilization voting on it, or the whim of a "supernatural" mind decreeing it. So the religious who claim to have an absolute morality are really only subjectivists of a supernatural stripe. The trouble for them is that their sort of subjectivism is just as false as any other: God telling Abraham that it is good to slay his innocent son Isaac doesn't make it good. His ordering the enslavement of entire peoples in the Old Testament doesn't make that good. On and on—the bottom line is that calling poison "food" doesn't make it nutritious, and pretending otherwise is to court destruction.
Determinism vs. Morality
Next, consider that we humans don't automatically act in support of our lives like squirrels and plants do. We have the power to freely choose to harm ourselves, to do the wrong thing, to not pursue the values we know are required for our existence as living organisms. We don't have instincts to tell us how to build shelter or to guide us in choosing food over poison—we have to learn those things, whether it means building a lean-to or erecting a skyscraper, and whether it means avoiding the wrong mushrooms or properly cooking a gourmet chicken dish to ensure it is not just tasty but safe. In fact, being the rational animal born without conceptual knowledge to act by, we have to learn everything we need to know about what furthers or harms our lives—and we have to choose to abide by that knowledge or perish.
This is especially important in the case of the most abstract, most fundamental knowledge that guides our choices and actions—the overarching principles which can help us to consistently pursue the values needed to maintain our existence and flourish over the span of an entire lifetime. These are moral principles like honesty, productiveness, justice, and integrity. Essentially, a proper morality consists of grasping these kinds of principles for the support of human life: i.e., recognize these basic facts and flourish, or evade them and suffer. Indeed, we need morality because we are conceptual animals. This is why moral codes have appeared wherever and whenever humans have appeared; the impact of moral values (both proper and improper) is tremendous precisely because of how fundamental they are to our existence, guiding us in myriad concrete circumstances great and small.
Just like any other matter of fact, we can approach morality rationally and scientifically, working to discover, validate, and teach each other about the relevant fundamental principles. Such a project is just as feasible—and just as challenging—as discovering and sharing the fundamental principles of engineering or economics. But of course this kind of development is only possible if we recognize the nature of the field in the first place, and this is another terrible weakness in the New Atheists and their scientific friends that prevents their giving a robust answer to the likes of D'Souza. The fashionable but unnecessary materialism and mechanistic determinism that is prevalent among them leads to the denial of the very fact that gives rise to morality in the first place: that we have volitional minds and our choices have life-and-death consequences. This denial has hobbled the scientific study of morality, leaving them looking in the wrong place and for the wrong thing. Notice the categorical error in such prominent programs as "evolutionary morality," where researchers look for moral behavior in the actions of nonvolitional, nonconceptual animals like mice and birds. And in how they search for the roots of morality in evolved behavior "modules" in brains, neglecting the basic fact that the moral is the learned and chosen—not the inbuilt and determined.[2] A sound philosophical foundation would help them be more productive and less prone to these sorts of distractions and blind alleys.
Sacrifice vs. Life
Finally, there is the most disastrous error confusing the scientific study of morality and stopping the New Atheists from knocking D'Souza out of the intellectual ring: they may challenge the existence of God, but they uncritically accept the moral standard that Christianity has injected into Western culture. That is, they accept the moral standard of altruism, literally "other-ism," a moral standard of sacrifice. This can be seen in various facets of their struggles to explain secular morality: they restrict the domain of morality to the social, they uphold sacrificial sentiments and principles of conduct, and they cite scientists who work to understand the biological basis for morality by searching for altruistic behavior in animals. (Though the scientists muddy the sacrificial core of the concept by also reflexively labeling life-serving, nonsacrificial social behaviors better characterized as cooperation, investment, and trade as "altruism." Sacrifice means surrendering a higher value for a lower one or no value at all—not giving up a lesser value to gain a greater one.) Having assumed an altruistic standard of morality, the New Atheists and most secular thinkers are likewise led to the conclusion that determining the good merely comes down to determining who or what one has a duty to sacrifice to: neighbor, family, tribe, race, society, nation, leader, species, environment, god.
But sacrifice can't be the proper standard of morality. In fact, it represents the inversion of a proper moral code because giving up values is inimical to life. Fully and consistently adhering to such a standard means a swift death, so anybody accepting the moral standard of sacrifice lives only through the inconsistency of compromising and diluting it, mixing in elements of its antithesis. But managing to survive poison by mixing it with food doesn't render it part of a healthy diet, much less a central staple. Sacrifice per se is the opposite of the good, and seeking it is irrational, so the New Atheists will forever flail in trying to scientifically support or rationally justify such an approach to morality.
Genuine virtue consists in creating values, not in surrendering them—in focusing on reality and discovering a vaccine, in searching our spiritual nature and producing a play, in building a stadium, in raising a loving family, in digging a canal, writing a textbook, cooking a meal. This understanding drives the proper response to D'Souza's charge of rebelliousness: Any healthy person armed with the correct perspective would reject the subjectivist moral code of Christianity and its enshrinement of sacrifice because it is fundamentally set against human life and happiness. Instead, we should seek a morality that is truly absolute, reality-based, scientific, and which rejects human sacrifice in its every form and degree as irrational.[3] We should seek a genuine morality of life.
This is certainly not to say that evolutionary biology should stand mute on morality—values are rooted in the phenomenon of life, after all. I am arguing that scientists must take care to recognize the difference between the slate and what is written on it. For example, they might profitably investigate the evolutionary basis of what gives rise to and enables morality: the phenomenon of volitional, conceptual minds.
For further investigation of such a morality, I recommend the bite-sized introductory book, Loving Life by Craig Biddle and its scholarly yet accessible big brother from Cambridge University Press, Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics: The Virtuous Egoist by Dr. Tara Smith.
Employers frequently complain about the cost of health benefits for employees and retirees. The shareholder proposal would not require companies to provide health benefits for employees, but asks top corporate executives to view the issue in a broader context, as a question of social policy.
"We are doing what we can as shareholders," said the Rev. Michael H. Crosby, a 68-year-old Capuchin priest who has had discussions with nine companies on behalf of 20 Roman Catholic orders this year. "We come out of a religious tradition, but we are not engaged in a messianic enterprise. We are one voice among many seeking equitable access to health care for all."
Despite the fact that many have argued that these sorts of statements have no place in shareholder debates, the Securities and Exchange Commission has ruled that these resolutions must be included on the ballot.
I thought there were two noteworthy points:
First, the convergence of interests between religious activists and causes favored by the secular left previously described in this earlier New York Times article from October 28, 2007 is accelerating.
Second, the trend towards inappropriate shareholder activism is also accelerating. Yaron Brook discussed this issue in more detail in his excellent course, "The Corporation" given at the 2007 OCON Conference.
...What motivates these activists is not the wellbeing--i.e., the wealth--of fellow shareholders, but an anti-profit, anti-capitalist social agenda. It is they who call for corporate "social responsibility"--the idea that executives and shareholders should sacrifice money-making for the sake of sundry "stakeholders." This is incompatible with the purpose of business and with the responsibility of corporate leaders to maximize shareholder wealth.
...But far from fighting government controls, shareholder "activists" fight to hand control over American corporations to government--or to organizations controlled indirectly by politicians, such as public pension plans. Indeed, this is already beginning, prompting many businesses to flee to the relative safety of private ownership--i.e., being owned and run by professionals--so that they can continue to maximize their wealth.
These activists are using the leverage and power of productive men and women running corporations to force them to advocate for government policies that will strangle the ability of such individuals to keep producing. I don't think we'll be seeing the last of this particular tactic.
It also means that whenever issues like this arise, pro-capitalism stockholders of corporations should make sure that their voices are also heard when it comes time for a shareholder vote.
In his op-ed, "Taking aim at God, and missing," Dinesh D'souza continues his counters to "New Atheists" such as Christopher Hitchens. This time we find him saying that "Thanks to the astounding discoveries of modern science, I think the God hypothesis has a lot more going for it today than it did in the eighteenth century." What he considers convincing on this front is telling, so I'll quote him at length:
Modern science has discovered that the universe, far from existing eternally, had a beginning. Not only matter but space and time itself came into existence around 15 billion years ago in the fiery burst that scientists term the Big Bang. The laws of physics themselves originated at that point, and those laws were inoperative "before" the founding moment. So what is the secular explanation for how the universe and its laws came into existence? Is there a natural explanation for nature's own origin? If so, what is the evidence for it? Hitchens supplies no such theory and no supporting evidence. His rejection of the God hypothesis seems nothing more than an assertion of atheist dogma.
In recent decades, scientists have found innumerable ways in which our universe—not just our planet but the entire universe—is narrowly tailored to permit life. Change the variables of nature by an infinitesimal amount and this would be a very different universe without observers to perceive and study it. As physicist Freeman Dyson puts it, with an intended mystical touch, the universe behaves as though it knew we were coming! So why are the laws constructed in such a way that we are here to discover them? It's possible that there is a convincing natural explanation, but Hitchens certainly does not produce one. Once again the God hypothesis seems unavoidable.
Now consider man, undoubtedly a product of natural selection, but also possessing qualities such as the ability to tell right from wrong that are unexplained by Darwin and his followers. ... There is within us all a moral law that speaks to us gently but firmly, urging though not compelling us to do what is right... If natural selection cannot account for this moral law, where does it come from? I am not saying that science will never explain this, I am saying that science cannot explain it now. It seems much more reasonable, based on existing evidence, to believe that moral laws derive from a divine legislator than to embrace Hitchens' promissory atheism: one day we'll figure out a natural way to account for all this.
If only his opponents had the philosophical foundation to resist all those temptations for distraction in debate. In response to this sort of thing, they should be asking a simple question to expose a pervasive methodological problem in religious thought: Since when did not knowing the answer to a puzzle entitle us to go and make one up?
In fact, these sorts of arbitrarily asserted "explanations" pulled out of thin air should be simply dismissed out of hand—a principle long recognized in logic and law. When someone brings a baseless charge before a court, it is to be dismissed as beneath consideration (and could even earn penalties for wasting the court's time). Likewise, when someone brings a baseless idea before a rational mind, it should be simply dismissed as beneath consideration. And D'Souza consistently relies on the logical fallacy of the "argument from ignorance," taking peoples' lack of knowledge around this and that as evidence in support of "the God hypothesis." That is exactly the error that dishonest magicians rely on to convince gullible people that they are psychics and mediums and instruments of God. Not knowing how the guy did it is not itself evidence that he is actually a psychic or some sort of divine instrument—just as our ignorance of why the laws of nature seem so exquisitely fine-tuned is not evidence that "God did it." In all such cases, our ignorance only constitutes evidence that we don't yet understand something.
Sadly, D'Souza has a lot of company in these errors: history is littered with examples of something "supernatural" being arbitrarily asserted as the explanation, only to be retracted later as our knowledge expanded. Every gust of wind and bolt of lightning was a direct act of God. But then came Ben Franklin, and we no longer think about meteorology that way. The same thing happened with tornadoes and earthquakes: the Acts of God that insurance policies exclude used to be divine punishment, but with our current understanding the term is really a euphemism for natural disasters. And today, most people don't consider themselves impious or afflicted with demons just because they catch the flu or get a nasty infection—they know it's because of germs. The history of mankind has been one long account of religious explanation being crowded out by scientific discoveries and rational understanding. This pattern of poor thinking is so common that it even has its own name: the "God of the Gaps," where a supernatural agent is cited as the reason behind something we do not understand. Here's the clincher: just notice how it always goes one way—natural, rational explanations are never displaced by supernatural "explanations."
What's a bit humorous about D'Souza's point is that we can even predict that advances in science will make this sort of sophistry all the more enticing and common. After all, you can't wonder about the design of the inner workings of the cell until you find out there are cells and that they contain marvelous machinery, and you can't explore the delicate interplay of cosmological constants until you have discovered those constants in the first place. So sure, if you let your thinking be corrupted by arbitrary God of the Gaps arguments from ignorance, then you'll believe "the God hypothesis has more going for it today" in our impressive explosion of scientific progress.
D'Souza is a bright and scholarly fellow who certainly understands the basic principles of logic. And he is obviously well-read in the history of Western thought, which has seen the fundamental errors in these religious arguments exposed countless times through the ages. Yet he presents them again with a straight face. His opponents and fans alike should be asking another question as well: Why would the truth need the support of false arguments?
Repealing Blue Laws By Paul Hsieh @ 8:10 AM
What happens when various "blue laws" (i.e., laws restricting commercial retail activity on Sundays) are repealed? According to this study:
Repealing America's blue laws not only decreased church attendance, donations and spending, but it also led to a rise in alcohol and drug use among people who had been religious...
The economists used data from the General Social Survey on religious attendance and from the Consumer Expenditure Survey to show a very strong reduction in religious attendance and a decline in religious contributions once the blue laws were repealed. They found no change in other charitable activity, [MIT economist Jonathan] Gruber notes.
Interestingly enough, the former church-goers also went out and did more things on Saturday nights.
A new threat to a woman's life, liberty and pursuit of happiness has arrived out here in the West. And it's going straight for the jugular. Groups in Colorado and Montana believe they're on a mission from God: to get voters to pass state Constitutional amendments defining "personhood" as beginning with fertilization. Under these amendments, full rights and equal protection under the law would be granted--not to a human being from the moment of birth--but to a fertilized egg.
But the country shouldn't dismiss this lunacy as a bunch of "wild west hooey." While similar efforts since 2005 in Georgia, Oregon, Michigan, Wisconsin and Mississippi have fizzled, advocates vow to not give up on redefining "personhood" in their image.
This utter perversion of the "right to life" is a mockery of the principle of liberty established by our Founding Fathers. It will create an inherent and irreconcilable conflict between the individual rights of a living person and a single-celled product of conception.
Groups pursuing "personhood" amendments use a simplistic combination of religious belief and scientific fact to advance their agenda. The Thomas More Law Center, which provides legal support for these organizations, calls itself "the sword and shield for people of (Christian) faith" to fight for Christian values, which it claims is the foundation of our nation. Kristi Burton, the founder of Colorado's group (which just succeeded in being first in the country to get the proposal on the November ballot), was quoted as "....we have God. And he is all we need." A religious supporter of Montana's initiative finds her "proof" in Psalm 139:13, "For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb."
These groups conveniently usurp the facts of human embryology in making their case for "personhood." But the biological reality that life begins developing at conception is totally irrelevant in terms of rights.
Our Constitutional rights as citizens apply only once we are born as separate entities. To quote Ayn Rand, a 20th century novelist and philosopher, "Rights do not pertain to a potential, only to an actual being. The living take precedence over the not-yet-living (or the unborn)."
If a barbaric "personhood" amendment passes in some state, whose rights will prevail when a woman has a life-threatening ectopic pregnancy? Will a girl who's been raped be compelled against her will to carry a pregnancy resulting from that brutality? Will lawyers defending fertilized eggs argue that a miscarriage is a violation of an embryo's right to life, making a woman and her physician legally negligent?
Our hard-fought scientific and political achievements in controlling fertility will revert back to the horse-and-buggy era. Many reliable birth control methods would have to be outlawed because they interfere with implantation of a fertilized egg. Couples unable to conceive would be forbidden to try in-vitro fertilization because some of the lab-created fertilized eggs are not used.
"Personhood" advocates brag about going for the gold: the outright overturn of Roe v Wade. They think they are being clever by passing in just one state a "personhood" amendment that will ultimately challenge the "loophole" in the 1973 majority opinion of Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun. He wrote: "If this suggestion of personhood is established, the appellant's case, of course, collapses, for the fetus' right to life would then be guaranteed..."
Traditional religious-right groups have tried for decades to outlaw abortion by the piecemeal evisceration of that fundamental right. But if a tyrannical majority of voters in Colorado or Montana approves a Constitutional amendment redefining the human being according to particular religious beliefs, it will be a milestone in tearing down the wall of separation between church and state.
Our freedoms, based fundamentally on the right to life, mean that we as individuals have the right to pursue life-sustaining goals--including decisions about pregnancy. But the particular freedom of religion does not mean the right to pass laws forcing citizens to live by biblical values.
"Personhood" advocates have corrupted the principle, "right to life," and they're exploiting their freedom of religion do it. Constitutional rights protect all of our liberties from the moment we're born as separate individuals. And this is what we must zealously fight to preserve.
Abortion Debates in Great Britain By Paul Hsieh @ 5:35 PM
Americans are used to abortion as being a hot button issue in politics. Hence, I found this article from The Economist to be an interesting contrast object of how the issues could play out politically in a system without quite such a strong religious undercurrent. In the case, the issue was a proposed law to change the cutoff point for a legal abortion from 24 weeks gestation to 22 weeks. Here are a few excerpts:
BRITONS, thankfully, have been spared America's abortion wars. Political candidates' positions on the matter are of little interest to the electorate. More Conservatives are "pro-life" and more Labour MPs "pro-choice", but allegiances are rarely, if ever, based on this single issue. This is partly because Britain is less religious than America, but also because abortion laws are made in Parliament, where shades of grey can be debated, not in the courts, where black or white usually prevails.
...By precedent, votes on abortion are "free": MPs may vote according to their consciences rather than a party directive. They still divided along party lines. Most Labour MPs—including the prime minister, Gordon Brown—voted against all the amendments, although three Catholic cabinet ministers supported a cut to 12 weeks. Most of the shadow cabinet voted for some reduction, and the Conservative leader, David Cameron, backed lowering the limit to either 22 or 20 weeks.
...The day before that, MPs had voted on two other amendments. The first would have prohibited experiments involving "chimera" embryos created by placing human DNA inside empty eggs from other mammals. The second sought to rule out creating "saviour siblings": screening embryos created by IVF in order to select a match for an existing sick child whose life could be saved by cord blood or bone marrow from a suitable brother or sister.
All three issues went the government's way, even though Mr Brown had to allow his party a free vote after a campaign by Catholic bishops made it clear that he risked losing three ministers if he did not.
Clearly, religion still has some influence in the debates, although not as strong as in the US. The interesting question will be whether this influence increases or decreases over the next several years.
Taking on "New Atheists" such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, Dinesh D'Souza explains that he wants to strip away a kind of pose: atheists, he says, present themselves as men of data and evidence, merely following where it leads, when in reality they are faith-filled dogmatists who only assume that there are no gods and that miracles are not possible. In his debate with Hitchens, he drove this home by asking his opponent to name just one scientific law which he knows has no exceptions. Hitchens admitted he couldn't and had to stand there sheepishly while D'Souza crowed that he was leaving room for miracles even while denying them without investigation—that the atheist stance for science and against miracles is only based on faith in certain "metaphysical assumptions." In his view, the real difference between scientists and theologians is that religious people have enough integrity to admit their beliefs are rooted in faith.
D'Souza's effectiveness in exposing confusion and sowing skepticism illustrates how the New Atheists and most scientists lack an objective philosophical foundation. With a little training in the actual relationship between philosophy and science, they could explain how science is not perched atop blind faith in "metaphysical assumptions," and they could articulate exactly why miracles should not be dismissed as merely improbable, or even as inherently unverifiable, but as outright incoherent. In fact, they would know the issue is as stark as this: if miracles are possible, then science isn't.
To see why, let's begin by looking at what a miracle has to be. We are not talking about just any improbable happening, and not even something which violates our current understanding of the world as expressed in scientific laws, like D'Souza tries to argue. The entire point of miracles is to provide evidence of divine intervention, and surprises which may only reveal a current lack of understanding can't accomplish that: by that measure, even the tricks of magicians would count as miracles. Indeed, much of what we enjoy in our modern world would have been considered miraculous in previous times, from vaccines and medications, to cars, and the Internet and on and on. Yet none of these prove or even suggest a possibility that there is a God. No, a meaningful miracle is not merely something which would violate the laws of nature as we currently understand them, but something which would be a violation of any such law we could ever discover. That is, it would have to be a violation of lawfulness itself. That's a tall order.
Causality and Identity
When we talk about how things act and what they do and why, we are talking about causality. As Aristotle observed some 2500 years ago, things act according to their natures (their identities). They act the way they do because of what they are—balls roll when pushed, and piles of dirt don’t. Eggs break when dropped because that is an expression of their identity as things with a brittle shell and goo inside, crashing against a hard floor. Action is an expression of identity, and to understand why and how things act the way they do, we seek to understand what those things are. We seek to understand their identities. So if an egg broke into song instead of a messy puddle, it wouldn't be a normal egg—it would have to be something else. Because identities include capacities for action, we know and classify things by what they do, too.
The crucial thing to keep in mind about action being an expression of identity is that everything has identity merely in virtue of existing, not because of any dictate. Think of this as a law of existence, something true of Being itself. As Ayn Rand observed some 50 years ago: to be, is to be something—to be something particular, to be this and not that, to be capable of these actions and reactions and transformations, and not those. Or from the opposite perspective: to not be anything particular, is to simply not be. And this is not any article of faith or merely a "metaphysical assumption." This is a philosophical axiom reaching below any will to the bedrock of existence itself, a self-evident truth that lies at the base of all truths and all thinking, a fact so absolute and inescapable that it is actually reaffirmed by any attempt to deny it.
It is this ironclad law of existence that tells us there are scientific laws to pursue in the first place. It is how we can have absolute confidence that we are in a position to plumb the depths of the world, that we can seek to understand the identities of the things which are acting and interacting in nature, and that it is worth working to understand it all in terms of ever broader and deeper principles. The fruitfulness of this pursuit can't be denied: just look around and marvel at how our striving for a rational, scientific understanding of the world has improved our lives in countless ways.
And it is this very same law of existence that also guarantees there can be no miracles for us to pursue. If we were to somehow experience an "egg miracle," it isn’t that we would have found something we thought was a regular egg that surprised us and needs more study. No, the very idea of miracles requires violating causality. It requires that a normal egg break into song. Or picking something from the Christian tradition: it requires a normal loaf of bread to break into 1000 servings. In short, a genuine miracle requires a thing to act against its own identity—to have a contradictory identity—to literally not be what it is, which is incoherent. Everything is what it is, and contradictions can only exist inside peoples' confused thinking.
Either-Or
That is why it is one or the other, science or miracles. Accepting the possibility of miracles means rejecting the very basis of science; accepting the basis of science means rejecting any possibility of miracles. Indeed, to the degree that scientists entertain the possibility of miracles, they tragically undercut their own psychological motive and ability to pursue such knowledge: there is no point in looking for the laws of nature when existence isn't actually lawful and there is no real understanding to be found. Even if scientists think they can be "practical" and approach the world as being "almost always lawful," they are still fatally compromised because every surprise they meet could be a clue that an idea is in need of refinement or correction—or it could be an inexplicable miracle from the arbitrary will of God. The harder and more important the puzzle, the harder it will be to resist that nihilistic pull to simply throw up their hands and give up being a scientist to blindly assert that it must be an arbitrary intervention.
All of those potential advances lost to scientists giving up on science are a tragedy—and any effort spent repelling that call to give up is a waste. At the dawn of science, Francis Bacon said that "nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed." Knowledge is power precisely because existence is in fact lawful, and every advance we've achieved up through the wonders of modern civilization is a brilliant testament to this simple truth.
Also, for my Israeli readers, Dr. Lewis will be speaking at Tel Aviv University on June 2nd. He writes:
I will be speaking at Tel Aviv University, Israel. on June 2, 2008, 18:00-20:00, Room 133 Gilman Building. The talk is sponsored by the Moshe Dayan Center. Thanks to Boaz Arad for arranging the invitation, and to the Ayn Rand Institute for logistical support.
Abstract of the talk: "The Inner Jihad and Islamic Totalitarianism."
This talk confronts and repudiates claims that jihad is not war, but rather a benign "inner struggle." These claims are ahistorical, and run contrary to the energetic statements of those waging war for Islam today. The purpose of such claims is to obfuscate the goal of imposing Islamic law by force. The outward manifestation of such obfuscation is the censorship and propaganda that exists in the Middle East today. This lecture will consider the relationship between this intellectual corruption and the rise of totalitarian Islam, a foe that must be confronted intellectually and defeated militarily.
I'd love to hear that talk!
Finally, I should note that Dr. Lewis' article "'No Substitute for Victory': The Defeat of Islamic Totalitarianism" has also been translated into Italian by Dr. Paolo Valerio Mantelli.
When Berkman's team asked about the teachers' personal beliefs, about the same number, 16% of the total, said they believed human beings had been created by God within the last 10,000 years.
And what do science teachers actually teach in the classroom?
Despite a court-ordered ban on the teaching of creationism in US schools, about one in eight high-school biology teachers still teach it as valid science, a survey reveals. And, although almost all teachers also taught evolution, those with less training in science – and especially evolutionary biology – tend to devote less class time to Darwinian principles.
...[A] quarter of the teachers also reported spending at least some time teaching about creationism or intelligent design. Of these, 48% – about 12.5% of the total survey – said they taught it as a "valid, scientific alternative to Darwinian explanations for the origin of species".
I find it deeply disturbing that an American child's only formal exposure to one of the fundamental principle of modern biological science may come from a government school teacher who is willing to let his own personal religious beliefs bias his portrayal of the facts.
Rocky Twyman has a radical solution for surging gasoline prices: prayer.
Twyman -- a community organizer, church choir director and public relations consultant from the Washington, D.C., suburbs -- staged a pray-in at a San Francisco Chevron station on Friday, asking God for cheaper gas. He did the same thing in the nation's Capitol on Wednesday, with volunteers from a soup kitchen joining in. Today he will lead members of an Oakland church in prayer.
Yes, it's come to that.
"God is the only one we can turn to at this point," said Twyman, 59. "Our leaders don't seem to be able to do anything about it. The prices keep soaring and soaring."
Gas prices have been driven relentlessly higher this year by the bull market for crude oil, gasoline's main ingredient. A gallon of regular now costs $3.89, on average, in California, while the national average has hit $3.58.
To solve the problem, Twyman isn't begging the Lord for any specific act of intervention. He is not asking God to make OPEC pump more oil. Nor is he praying for all the speculative investors to be purged from the New York Mercantile Exchange, where crude oil is traded. Instead, he says anyone who wants to follow his example should keep it simple. "God, deliver us from these high gas prices," Twyman said. "That's all they have to say."
Ah yes, giving recommendations to God would be the sin of pride, I suppose.
However, as an omniscient being, God must be already perfectly aware of the high price of gas. As an omnipotent being, he must be capable of lowering gas prices. Since he's all-benevolent, he wouldn't allow gas prices to remain as they are if that was an evil. Ergo, high gas prices must be all for the best.
Why the New Atheists Can’t Even Beat D’Souza: The Best and Worst in Human History By Greg Perkins @ 12:10 AM
In the firefight between Christian apologist Dinesh D'Souza and "New Atheists" such as Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris, the New Atheists are suffering serious damage. The tragedy is that D'Souza wouldn't stand a snowball's chance if they had a strong philosophical grounding.
For example, several of the New Atheists point to the Inquisition and Crusades and Witch Trials of early Christianity, the deadly Jihad waged in the name of Islam today, and so on—and D'Souza agrees this is a terrible toll that religion is responsible for. But he goes on to argue that when you actually look at the numbers, this responsibility is minuscule in comparison to the slaughter of over 100 million by the atheistic regimes of the 20th century. So he contends it is obvious that "Atheism, not religion, is responsible for the mass murders of history."
This point has devastated the New Atheists. They try to defuse it by arguing for some causal association between religion and those bloody regimes: if not explicitly by talking about the Catholicism in Hitler and Nazi Germany, then implicitly by gesturing to a "religious mindset" or some other vague influence of religion. But discussion of the Catholic connection to Hitler and Nazi Germany quickly turns into a back-and-forth of citations from competing historical experts. And while the dust is swirling over whether religion might be connected to that one part of 20th Century totalitarianism, D'Souza points to the explicitly godless Communist regimes. The New Atheists have been reduced to weakly objecting that the Crusades and Inquisition were done "in the name of" Christianity, while Communism and Nazism weren't done in the name of atheism—but given all the references that can be made to those regimes' explicit work to eradicate God, this approach is not convincing. The New Atheists are struggling because they aren't able to frame the issue properly.
What Atheism Isn't
First, consider that atheism is not itself an ideology; there is no such thing as an "atheist mindset" or an "atheist movement." Atheism per se hasn't inspired and doesn't lead to anything in particular because it is an effect—not a cause—and there are countless reasons for a person to not believe in God, ranging from vicious to innocent to noble. The newborn baby lacks a belief in God, as does the Postmodern Nihilist, the Communist, and the Objectivist—but each for entirely different reasons having dramatically different implications. So lumping all of these together under the "atheist" label as if that were a meaningful connection is profoundly confused. Yet this is exactly what the New Atheists do and encourage: they talk about how there are so many atheists out there, and advocate their banding together into an atheist community to seek fellowship, foster cultural change, build a political voice, and so on.[1] But what would a committed Communist and an Objectivist have in common—regarding what they do believe, why they believe it, how that leads them to live personally, the sort of social system they would strive for in government? Nothing. They are polar opposites in principle and practice, across the philosophical board.
The New Atheists can't rebuff D'Souza because he is actually following their own lead to associate them with brutal totalitarian regimes. And worse, that confusion makes it difficult to see the fundamental cause of the misery and bloodshed found across all of those failures of humanity—from the early Christian Crusades and Inquisition, through the 20th Century totalitarian regimes, up to the Islamic theocracies in the Middle East today. The important contrast is not atheism vs. religion, but rather rationality vs. irrationality.
The Wages of Irrationality
All of that bloodshed is a result of people rejecting reason as the way to do business in reality—which means rejecting our only means of peaceful and productive coexistence. Operating in the realm of reason, people are oriented to the facts, their means of dealing with one another is persuasion, and reality is the court of final appeal when there is disagreement. Take scientists, for example: necessarily focused on reason and reality, they resolve their scientific disputes with logic and by reference to facts. We don't find them fragmenting into sects and breaking out into violence over their disagreements. Indeed, just the opposite happens: the body of scientific knowledge converges over time as disagreements are sorted out and facts are acknowledged. Their successes and this convergence don't come from the use of guns and clubs, but from a commitment to reason and reality, facts and logic.
While it is easy to see brutes in totalitarian regimes reaching for a gun rather than peacefully persuading free minds, the connection to force may not be so obvious in the case of people of faith. Yet just as reason and freedom go together, so do their antagonists, faith and force. As Ayn Rand observed, "every period of history dominated by mysticism, was a period of statism, of dictatorship, of tyranny"—and she underscored this shared rejection of reason in identifying the two as species of the same basic animal: the brutes as "mystics of muscle," and the faithful as "mystics of spirit." To see how religious faith plays into the use of force, consider theologians in contrast to the scientists discussed above. Here we find ever-expanding divergence and fragmentation in their body of thought—just notice how religions and the denominations within them have multiplied through history. And we don't see believers resolving disagreements over their articles of faith by persuasion and reference to the facts of reality—whether it is Muslims vs. Christians, Catholics vs. Protestants, Baptists vs. Mormons, or one part of a congregation breaking away from another. This is because articles of faith aren't based on a grasp of the facts of reality, and so they can't be explained or defended by references to the facts of reality. Since people of faith can't resolve such differences using facts and rational persuasion, they are left with only one alternative: force.
Having it Both Ways
Besides trying to tar his opponents with the worst atrocities in history, D'Souza regularly tries to give Christianity credit for mankind's positive strides. For instance, he argues in an op-ed that "Christianity has illuminated the greatest achievements of the culture" such as the rise of science, human rights, equality for women and minorities, ending slavery, and so forth. That "when you examine history you find that all of these values came into the world because of Christianity." He contrasts Christianity and atheism, saying that these advances arrived in Christendom and by the hands of Christians—not atheists. And he uses this to score extra points in debate by asking his opponents what atheism has to offer humanity, other than the chance to undermine all that progress.
Once again, such a comparison is fundamentally confused. Recall that atheism is not itself an ideology and therefore doesn't lead people to do anything in particular—good or bad. So again we need to approach the issue in terms that will actually shed some light. The illuminating question to consider is: What does reason offer humanity over faith?
Here we see a striking contrast. Every discovery, every invention, every new idea that guided every step we have taken up from the poor, nasty, brutish, and short lives of those who came before has been made possible by one thing: thinking. Revelation never delivered a vaccine or explained the rainbow. Faith never designed a building or fed a baby. Submission to authority never discovered a better social organization or put a man on the moon. The power of this-worldly reason did.
Even the broadest strokes of history make this clear: Mankind stagnated for a thousand years through the Dark Ages while the Christian faith reigned supreme. Then what changed? Mankind started to believe that this world matters and that we are worthy and capable of living in it. The suffocating grip of faith and otherworldliness began to loosen as more people turned to reason and reality, and the West clawed its way from darkness into the Renaissance and Enlightenment. It took this-worldly thinking to discover the methods of science—not scripture and revelation, which had been present for millennia. It took free minds aimed at the task of living on earth to ignite the Industrial Revolution and the Information Revolution, and to deliver every bounty in the explosion of progress that followed—not prayer and intercession, which have been with us for all time.
Correlation isn't causation. Obviously, long-standing Christianity only accommodated the relatively recent changes that unleashed minds brought while its overwhelming authority eroded. We were delivered from the Christian Dark Ages despite Christianity, not because of it. Countless lives were made shorter and more miserable by its cruel stranglehold—and how much higher would we be flying now without its dead weight?
The New Atheists haven't been able to slam-dunk D'Souza because they lack the objective philosophical perspective necessary to penetrate to the core of these issues. In this case, their struggles reveal a failure to genuinely appreciate how religion is not itself the fundamental problem—irrationality is. Religion constitutes just one form of unreason, and the only thing that makes it particularly noteworthy and dangerous is that it has at its heart an explicit, committed, philosophical attack on reason: extolling faith as a virtue.
Sam Harris stands out as an exception to advocating atheists banding together under the atheist banner, though his rejection of the label appears to be more of a pragmatic move to avoid troublesome connotations than a principled avoidance of the basic mistake it represents.
With Friends Like These . . . By Paula Hall @ 12:59 AM
I frequent a blog called The Panda's Thumb, which keeps track of the dastardly intelligent design movement. Reading some recent entries on that blog led me to look up what some recognized cultural standard-bearers of atheism, such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, are actually saying.
So, if you're at all interested, read "The Atheism FAQ with Richard Dawkins" -- and weep. His answers to challenges to atheism are often clever, but they focus on non-essentials. And sometimes, they are downright pernicious. The most egregious, in my opinion (poor grammar and typos in original):
Q. Religious people claim they derive their morality from religion. Where from an atheist derive his morality?
A. . . . We derive our morality from the environment we live in, Talk shows, Novels, Newspaper editorials and of course by the guidance of parents. . . . An atheist derives his morality from the same source as a religious people do.
Q. In your book, you've said that God 'almost certainly' does not exist. Why are you leaving open the possibility?
A. Any scientific people will leave open that possibility, that they cannot disprove whatever unlikely the event might be. I would be the first person to accept God once evidence comes in favour of it.
Dawkins' answer to the first question unmasks him as a "mystic of muscle." His answer to the second unmasks him as a thoroughgoing skeptic. Which I guess is saying the same thing. I don't suppose it occurred to Dawkins to answer to the first question: "The choice to live in reality"; or to the second: "The law of identity and the validity of induction."
Now I remember why I couldn't get through more than the beginning of Dawkins' The God Delusion -- it's because anyone who argues against religion from the premises of social mysticism and skepticism is himself deluded.
Albert Einstein described belief in God as "childish superstition" and said Jews were not the chosen people, in a letter to be sold in London this week, an auctioneer said Tuesday. The father of relativity, whose previously known views on religion have been more ambivalent and fuelled much discussion, made the comments in response to a philosopher in 1954.
As a Jew himself, Einstein said he had a great affinity with Jewish people but said they "have no different quality for me than all other people". "The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this," he wrote in the letter written on January 3, 1954 to the philosopher Eric Gutkind, cited by The Guardian newspaper.
The German-language letter is being sold Thursday by Bloomsbury Auctions in Mayfair after being in a private collection for more than 50 years, said the auction house's managing director Rupert Powell. In it, the renowned scientist, who declined an invitation to become Israel's second president, rejected the idea that the Jews are God's chosen people. "For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions," he said. "And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people." And he added: "As far as my experience goes, they are no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them."
Previously the great scientist's comments on religion -- such as "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind" -- have been the subject of much debate, used notably to back up arguments in favour of faith. Powell said the letter being sold this week gave a clear reflection of Einstein's real thoughts on the subject. "He's fairly unequivocal as to what he's saying. There's no beating about the bush," he told AFP.
That's definitely a refreshing blast of anti-religious air. Yet it doesn't go far enough. The Hebrew Bible not a collection of "collection of honourable, but still primitive legends." It is a collection of bloody, barbaric, and primitive legends. As a body of primitive literature, the Hebrew Bible is fascinating and often compelling -- but it's wholly unsuitable for moral instruction. The moral lesson of The Binding of Isaac, for example, is the absolute obligation of blind obedience to God's commands, even when those commands require morally abhorrent sacrifices of priceless treasures. Abraham must sacrifice his only beloved son Isaac to God simply because God demands it -- and he's rewarded by God because he's willing to do so without so much as a peep of protest. Such stories ought to be studied and enjoyed as historical curiosities, not as a foundation for modern life and morals.
Faith Versus Reason #8 By Diana Hsieh @ 6:58 AM
The Ayn Rand Institute recently posted eight short Q&As on faith versus reason to its YouTube account. They're an excellent series, and I hope that ARI will post more such videos. Here's the eighth and final video:
If you like it, please give it a good rating! You can find links to all eight videos on the first one.
Faith Versus Reason #7 By Diana Hsieh @ 8:57 AM
The Ayn Rand Institute recently posted eight short Q&As on faith versus reason to its YouTube account. They're an excellent series, and I hope that ARI will post more such videos. Here's the seventh:
If you like it, please give it a good rating! You can find links to all eight videos on the first one.
Great stuff, except for the line about prosecuting criticism of his culture as a "hate crime". That's not a rights violation. (And thinking something viciously stupid while actually violating someone's rights wouldn't make it a worse crime; that only makes the criminal a worse person.)
Faith Versus Reason #6 By Diana Hsieh @ 7:26 PM
The Ayn Rand Institute recently posted eight short Q&As on faith versus reason to its YouTube account. They're an excellent series, and I hope that ARI will post more such videos. Here's the sixth, featuring Leonard Peikoff speaking on the morality of the Old Testament:
If you like it, please give it a good rating! You can find links to all eight videos on the first one.
The e-mails mostly consisted of bizarre texts and links on Jewish conspiracy, the Israel lobby, the evils of Judaism, and so on. Some were directed at me, e.g. "STOP HARASSING ISLAM AND THE MUSLIMS YOU FACIST ZIONIST SOW!!"
Although some of the e-mails were seriously disturbing, I wasn't too concerned about my safety, as the e-mail address and sending IP were out of the UK. However, I didn't want to receive more, so I stopped them by blocking the e-mail address on my server. In retrospect, I probably should have reported them to the authorities.
I've decided to post two of those e-mails now -- in the wake of the fatwa against Wafa Sultan -- to make crystal clear the thoroughly disgusting nature of threats against critics of Islam. It is quite frightful to have such sentiments personally directed against you -- and I can only admire the bravery people like Wafa Sultan, Daniel Pipes, Robert Spencer, Yaron Brook, and John Lewis who've been subject to serious harassment, threats, and worse for daring to criticize Islam. My brief encounter with "Shamyl" was nothing in comparison.
So, without further comment: Vicious E-mail #1 and Vicious E-mail #2. Beware of the second, as it contains some particularly revolting anti-Semitic cartoons.
Ten Commandments Weekend By Diana Hsieh @ 7:56 AM
In the comments, Mel McGuire recently posted a link to Senate Resolution 483 for a "Ten Commandments Weekend" in the first weekend of May 2008. Here's the relevant bits of text:
Recognizing the first weekend of May 2008 as 'Ten Commandments Weekend'.
March 13, 2008
Mr. BROWNBACK (for himself and Mr. LIEBERMAN) submitted the following resolution; which was referred to the Committee on the Judiciary
RESOLUTION
Recognizing the first weekend of May 2008 as 'Ten Commandments Weekend'.
Whereas the Ten Commandments are precepts foundational to the faith of millions of Americans;
Whereas the Ten Commandments are a declaration of fundamental principles for a fair and just society;
Whereas, from the founding of the United States, the Ten Commandments have been part of America's basic cultural fabric;
[Quotes from past presents omitted]
Whereas, in addition to being understood as an elemental source for American law, the Ten Commandments have become a recognized symbol of law in our Nation's culture;
Whereas a marble relief portrait of Moses, the Hebrew prophet and bearer of the Ten Commandments, is located prominently in the United States Capitol over the gallery doors of the chamber of the House of Representatives in honor of his work in establishing the principles that underlie American law;
Whereas images of the Ten Commandments are prominently displayed in many Federal buildings, including the United States Supreme Court, the National Archives, and the Library of Congress; and
Whereas the first weekends of May in 2006 and 2007 were celebrated by many Americans as 'Ten Commandments Weekend' in recognition of the importance of the Ten Commandments in their faith and the history and culture of the United States: Now, therefore, be it
Resolved, That the Senate--
(1) recognizes the first weekend of May 2008 as 'Ten Commandments Weekend';
(2) celebrates the Ten Commandments as a significant aspect of the national life of the United States; and
(3) encourages citizens of the United States to reflect on the integral role that the Ten Commandments have played in the life of the Nation.
UGH.
If you want to know why the basic moral view endorsed in this resolution -- Divine Command Theory -- is so totally, awfully, and completely wrong, regardless of the contents of the actual commands, I'd recommend Onkar Ghate's lecture: Religion and Morality. It's available for free to registered users of the Ayn Rand Institute web site.
(IsraelNN.com) Dr. Wafa Sultan has been forced to go into hiding with her family following a fatwa (religious edict) from an Islamic scholar, according to Omedia. Sultan faces the fatwa following a recent debate on Al-Jazeera in which she challenged Egyptian Islamist Talat Rheim over Dutch cartoons of Mohammed, who Muslims revere as a prophet. Sultan argued that Denmark had the right to print the cartoons.
Sultan joins a growing list of public critics of radical Islam facing death threats. Her supporters have asked the American public to join them in writing to the embassy of Qatar, the country which sponsors Al-Jazeera, as well as to United States President George Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, asking them to defend Sultan's right to free speech and personal safety.
I'm not sure that's the most effective response, so more suggestions for action would be much appreciated. (Via Brian Smith)
Feb 13, 2008: Since his last combat deployment in Iraq, Jeremy Hall has had a rough time, getting shoved and threatened by his fellow soldiers.
The trouble started there when he would not pray in the mess hall. "A senior ranking staff sergeant told me to leave and sit somewhere else because I refused to pray," Hall, a 23-year-old US army specialist, told AFP. Later, Hall was confronted by a major for holding an authorized meeting of "atheists and freethinkers" on his base. The officer threatened to discipline him and block his re-enlistment. "He said: 'You guys are being a problem and problems can be removed,'" Hall said. "He was yelling at us and stuff and at the very end he says, 'I really love you guys, I want you to see the light.'"
Now Hall is suing the major and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, accusing them of breaching his constitutional rights. A campaign group, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, is waiting for the Pentagon to respond to a lawsuit filed in a Kansas federal court on Hall's behalf. It alleges a "pernicious pattern and practice" of infringement of religious liberties in the military.
The group's founder, former Air Force lawyer Mikey Weinstein, said he has documented 6,800 testimonies by military personnel -- nearly all of them Christians -- of sometimes punitive or humiliating attempts to make them accept a fundamentalist evangelical interpretation of Christianity.
"I am at war with those people who would create a fundamentalist Christian theocracy in the technologically most lethal organization ever created by our species, which is the United States armed forces," he said.
He plans to add extra charges and possibly other lawsuits this month.
"It violates title seven of the US code for an employer to push their Biblical world view on an employee," he said. "But it's a trillion times worse when that is not just your shift manager at Starbucks but that is your military superior."
He singles out one of the major Christian groups in the military, the Officers Christian Fellowship (OCF). The group represents 15,000 US military personnel around the world, according to its director, retired Air Force general Bruce Fister. "It is not the position of OCF to try and coerce people to believe what we believe," Fister told AFP. OCF's aim, as stated on its website, is to achieve "a spiritually transformed military, with ambassadors for Christ in uniform, empowered by the Holy Spirit." It professes belief in "the eternal blessedness of the saved; and the everlasting, conscious punishment of the lost."
Faith Versus Reason #5 By Diana Hsieh @ 7:55 AM
The Ayn Rand Institute recently posted eight short Q&As on faith versus reason to its YouTube account. They're an excellent series, and I hope that ARI will post more such videos. Here's the fifth:
If you like it, please give it a good rating! You can find links to all eight videos on the first one.
FITNA By Diana Hsieh @ 5:05 PM
Probably for only a brief time, you can watch the short movie Fitna on YouTube, via this page on Little Green Footballs. (I'm linking to that page rather than the YouTube video directly, in the hopes that if that version is taken down, LGF will post a new link if available.) You can also save a copy of the video for yourself.
Paul and I just watched it; I strongly recommend that you do so while you have the chance. What I find so astonishing is that the video does absolutely nothing but accurately report the violent words and deeds of Muslims -- yet Muslims are threatening violence at this supposedly unjust accusation of their faith. By those very threats, the Islamic totalitarians prove their harshest critics right -- yet again.
Update from Greg: Looks like LiveLeak.com beefed up their security against the death threats for hosting the film, and now the full 15-or-so-minute version is available at http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=7d9_1206624103.
Flemming Rose, the courageous newspaper editor made world-famous for publishing the "Danish Cartoons" depicting Mohammed, has just written another good column on free speech: "Bin Laden Wants My Blood"
(Those of you who attended the special ARI conference on the "Jihad Against the West" may recall his fantastic talk entitled, "Islam and Europe after the Cartoon-Crisis.")
As Rose asks, "What kind of civilization are we, after all, if we refrain from mocking and ridiculing bin Laden and his followers?"
If only we had more news editors like him in the United States...
Faith Versus Reason #4 By Diana Hsieh @ 8:46 PM
The Ayn Rand Institute recently posted eight short Q&As on faith versus reason to its YouTube account. They're an excellent series, and I hope that ARI will post more such videos. Here's the fourth:
If you like it, please give it a good rating! You can find links to all eight videos on the first one.
I spoke at Georgia Tech last week on "No Substitute for Victory: The Defeat of Islamic Totalitarianism." A pro-Islamic group in the audience (some at least were students) tried to filibuster the Q&A. Their attacks openly called for Islamic law (a "good thing"), praised jihad as a "wonderful" concept, and proclaimed that subjugated peoples forced to pay the Islamic tax should be "grateful" for the "protection" they receive. They whitewashed history as well as the present situation, demanded that we stop "offending" them, said that the Iranians had no reason to trust the United States, and called me a "criminal mind." This was all-out support for a category of thoughtcrimes in American universities.
