TOM DELAY IS A LOUSY TEXAS CROOK
I think it should be noted that Delay, like LBJ and Bushes Jr. and Sr., is from Texas. Texas is not the sort of state where democratic principles are a guiding light. Just because the southwestern states were slow to come into the union doesn’t give them license to ignore democracy, start wars and dream of empire. We need to get a president from the northeast U.S. Up there, they've been practicing the art of democracy far longer than these western boys. They’ve got a nack for it.
All the information following is quoted directly from information supplied by the DNC:
Meet Rep. Tom DeLay (R-TX), the man Republicans have chosen as their Majority Leader in the House of Representatives.
Tom DeLay is at the center of a bewildering array of investigations into corruption, abuse of power, and ethics violations.
As the courts and committees investigate DeLay's misdeeds and hand down indictments, keeping track of all the scandals can be a full-time job. So we thought it would helpful to offer folks this quick and easy guide.
The Westar Scandal
In 2002, executives at Kansas energy company Westar wrote a memo outlining how they could purchase a "seat at the table" with $56,500 in contributions to political committees associated with Tom DeLay and the GOP. DeLay was later admonished by the House Ethics Committee for creating the appearance of impropriety.
The House Medicare Vote Bribery Scandal
Tom DeLay and the Republican leadership kept open the vote for the Medicare bill for three hours -- long past the 15 minutes specified in House procedures -- in order to pressure Republicans to vote for the bill. Rep. Nick Smith (R-MI) said GOP leaders offered "bribes and special deals," leading to an investigation by the Ethics Committee, which admonished DeLay.
The Texas Redistricting Scandal
When DeLay and his fellow Republicans were redrawing the Congressional districts in Texas to push Democrats out of the House, he used the Federal Aviation Administration to try and track a plane containing Democratic state legislators. The House Ethics Committee investigated DeLay's actions and once again admonished him.
The K Street Scandal
Tom DeLay has pushed lobbying firms to deny jobs to Democrats, and hire only Republicans, resulting in another Ethics Committee admonishment for inappropriately pushing a lobbying firm to hire a former GOP congressman. DeLay has pressured GOP lobbyists to make contributions to Republican candidates and the RNC.
The TRMPAC Scandal
In Texas, it's illegal for corporations to make donations to fund political campaigns. So Tom DeLay's Texans for a Republican Majority political action committee (TRMPAC) took $190,000 in corporate contributions and funneled them to the RNC, which then donated exactly $190,000 to TRMPAC-supported candidates. DeLay and TRMPAC are currently under investigation by a grand jury.
The Travel Scandal
An investigation by the Justice Department showed that Tom DeLay accepted a trip financed by the Korea-U.S. Exchange Council, breaking House rules that prohibit accepting travel expenses from "a registered lobbyist or agent of a foreign principal."
The Ethics Committee Scandal
Knowing that he faced investigation for a growing pile of scandals, Tom DeLay and the GOP House leadership purged the Ethics Committee of Republicans -- including Chairman Joel Hefley (R-CO) -- who weren't willing to overlook charges against DeLay, replacing them with members loyal to the leadership. They then changed the Committee rules to make it more difficult to begin investigations. Democrats on the Committee have refused to take any action in protest until the rules are restored.
===================================================
“Speech was given to man to enable him to conceal his thoughts.” —Malagriada, S.J.
Friday, April 01, 2005
Wednesday, March 30, 2005
RELIGION ALL IN THE MIND, SUGGESTS STEVEN PINKER
According to Steven Pinker, there are several emotional reasons for projecting a spiritual dimension into the world (he lists them in a lecture given before a meeting of the Freedom From Religion Foundation), but, he says, “… there also are cognitive predispositions, ways in which we intellectually analyze the world, which have been very skillfully explored by the anthropologists Dan Sperber, Pascal Boyer, and Scott Atrans. Anyone who is interested in the evolutionary psychology of religion would enjoy Pascal Boyer's RELIGION EXPLAINED and Scott Atran's IN GODS WE TRUST. Hamer's THE GOD GENE is also good, but I am more sympathetic to Boyer and Atran.
“The starting point is a faculty of human reason that psychologists call intuitive psychology or the ‘theory of mind module’—‘theory’ here not referring to a theory of the scientist but rather to the intuitive theory that people unconsciously deploy in making sense of other people's behavior. When I try to figure out what someone is going to do, I don't treat them as just a robot or a wind-up doll responding to physical stimuli in the world. Rather, I impute minds to those people.
“I can't literally know what someone else is thinking or feeling, but I assume that they're thinking or feeling something, that they have a mind, and I explain their behavior in terms of their beliefs and their desires. That's intuitive psychology. There is evidence that intuitive psychology is a distinct part of our psychological makeup. It seems to be knocked out in a condition called autism: autistic people can be prodigious in mathematics, art, language, and music, but they have a terrible time attributing minds to other people. They really do treat other people as if they were wind-up dolls. There's also a concerted effort underway to see where intuitive psychology is computed in the brain. Part of it seems to be concentrated in the ventromedial and orbital frontal cortex, the parts of the brain that kind of sit above the eyeballs, as well as the superior temporal sulcus farther back.
“Perhaps the ubiquitous belief in spirits, souls, gods, angels, and so on consists of our intuitive psychology running amok. If you are prone to attributing an invisible entity called "the mind'' to other people's bodies, it's a short step to imagining minds that exist independently of bodies. After all, it's not as it you could reach out and touch someone else's mind; you are always making an inferential leap. It's just one extra inferential step to say that a mind is not invariably housed in a body.” (From a Pinker speech recorded in the Jan/Feb 2005 issue of FREETHOUGHT TODAY newspaper, page 8)
MORALITY—A GAME OF ONE-UPS-MAN-SHIP, ANOTHER HOUSE OF CARDS???
So if the spiritual world is nothing more than a trick of intuition, perhaps morals might be nothing more than another psychological mechanism for keeping the pecking order in play in the supposedly rational herd of humankind. My reading in Dawes’s HOUSE OF CARDS (p. 208) brought me across the idea of “spatial paralogic” which is the habit of the human mind to make abstract hierarchies within the mind out of non-material values and concepts. People speak of improving themselves, getting better (according to what concrete standard, we should ask?). People speak of growing mentally and spiritually. What concrete yardstick are they putting themselves up against to measure their spiritual growth? That’s “spatial paralogic” in action—to imagine a hierarchy of value in the mind for abstract qualities that don’t have physical dimensions.
The human mind seems prone to create these hierarchies of values and life qualities in order to judge or evaluate itself and others. This, of course, enmeshes the self in the life of the culture against which one tests himself and his friends and acquaintances. I see evolution in this, our biological nature expressed as we try to find our place in the cultural hierarchy so that we can make allies and find mates. Values, judging and self-judging, and the resulting status in our minds and the minds of our acquaintances, are a human’s way of placing himself in relation to others. Thus we can’t help judging one another and ourselves because we are animals seeking a higher place among our fellows. We scramble among ourselves, pretending to be better than the other monkeys in the group, testing our moral strengths against one another. Let me try another way of saying it: spatial paralogic is a human psychological mechanism for seeking our and other’s values (i.e. “ranking) in the pecking order of the human herd.
__________________________________________________________
"If the shoe fits, you're not allowing for growth." —Robert N. Coons
According to Steven Pinker, there are several emotional reasons for projecting a spiritual dimension into the world (he lists them in a lecture given before a meeting of the Freedom From Religion Foundation), but, he says, “… there also are cognitive predispositions, ways in which we intellectually analyze the world, which have been very skillfully explored by the anthropologists Dan Sperber, Pascal Boyer, and Scott Atrans. Anyone who is interested in the evolutionary psychology of religion would enjoy Pascal Boyer's RELIGION EXPLAINED and Scott Atran's IN GODS WE TRUST. Hamer's THE GOD GENE is also good, but I am more sympathetic to Boyer and Atran.
“The starting point is a faculty of human reason that psychologists call intuitive psychology or the ‘theory of mind module’—‘theory’ here not referring to a theory of the scientist but rather to the intuitive theory that people unconsciously deploy in making sense of other people's behavior. When I try to figure out what someone is going to do, I don't treat them as just a robot or a wind-up doll responding to physical stimuli in the world. Rather, I impute minds to those people.
“I can't literally know what someone else is thinking or feeling, but I assume that they're thinking or feeling something, that they have a mind, and I explain their behavior in terms of their beliefs and their desires. That's intuitive psychology. There is evidence that intuitive psychology is a distinct part of our psychological makeup. It seems to be knocked out in a condition called autism: autistic people can be prodigious in mathematics, art, language, and music, but they have a terrible time attributing minds to other people. They really do treat other people as if they were wind-up dolls. There's also a concerted effort underway to see where intuitive psychology is computed in the brain. Part of it seems to be concentrated in the ventromedial and orbital frontal cortex, the parts of the brain that kind of sit above the eyeballs, as well as the superior temporal sulcus farther back.
“Perhaps the ubiquitous belief in spirits, souls, gods, angels, and so on consists of our intuitive psychology running amok. If you are prone to attributing an invisible entity called "the mind'' to other people's bodies, it's a short step to imagining minds that exist independently of bodies. After all, it's not as it you could reach out and touch someone else's mind; you are always making an inferential leap. It's just one extra inferential step to say that a mind is not invariably housed in a body.” (From a Pinker speech recorded in the Jan/Feb 2005 issue of FREETHOUGHT TODAY newspaper, page 8)
MORALITY—A GAME OF ONE-UPS-MAN-SHIP, ANOTHER HOUSE OF CARDS???
So if the spiritual world is nothing more than a trick of intuition, perhaps morals might be nothing more than another psychological mechanism for keeping the pecking order in play in the supposedly rational herd of humankind. My reading in Dawes’s HOUSE OF CARDS (p. 208) brought me across the idea of “spatial paralogic” which is the habit of the human mind to make abstract hierarchies within the mind out of non-material values and concepts. People speak of improving themselves, getting better (according to what concrete standard, we should ask?). People speak of growing mentally and spiritually. What concrete yardstick are they putting themselves up against to measure their spiritual growth? That’s “spatial paralogic” in action—to imagine a hierarchy of value in the mind for abstract qualities that don’t have physical dimensions.
The human mind seems prone to create these hierarchies of values and life qualities in order to judge or evaluate itself and others. This, of course, enmeshes the self in the life of the culture against which one tests himself and his friends and acquaintances. I see evolution in this, our biological nature expressed as we try to find our place in the cultural hierarchy so that we can make allies and find mates. Values, judging and self-judging, and the resulting status in our minds and the minds of our acquaintances, are a human’s way of placing himself in relation to others. Thus we can’t help judging one another and ourselves because we are animals seeking a higher place among our fellows. We scramble among ourselves, pretending to be better than the other monkeys in the group, testing our moral strengths against one another. Let me try another way of saying it: spatial paralogic is a human psychological mechanism for seeking our and other’s values (i.e. “ranking) in the pecking order of the human herd.
__________________________________________________________
"If the shoe fits, you're not allowing for growth." —Robert N. Coons
Monday, March 28, 2005
Americans United for Separation of Church and State—AU.org
[Brochure]
Is America A 'Christian Nation'?
Religion, Government And Individual Freedom
Is the United States a "Christian nation"? Some Americans think so. Religious Right activists and right-wing television preachers often claim that the United States was founded to be a Christian nation. Even some politicians agree. If the people who make this assertion are merely saying that most Americans are Christians, they might have a point. But those who argue that America is a Christian nation usually mean something more, insisting that the country should be officially Christian. The very character of our country is at stake in the outcome of this debate.
Religious Right groups and their allies insist that the United States was designed to be officially Christian and that our laws should enforce the doctrines of (their version of) Christianity. Is this viewpoint accurate? Is there anything in the Constitution that gives special treatment or preference to Christianity? Did the founders of our government believe this or intend to create a government that gave special recognition to Christianity?
The answer to all of these questions is no. The U.S. Constitution is a wholly secular document. It contains no mention of Christianity or Jesus Christ. In fact, the Constitution refers to religion only twice in the First Amendment, which bars laws "respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," and in Article VI, which prohibits "religious tests" for public office. Both of these provisions are evidence that the country was not founded as officially Christian.
The Founding Fathers did not create a secular government because they disliked religion. Many were believers themselves. Yet they were well aware of the dangers of church-state union. They had studied and even seen first-hand the difficulties that church-state partnerships spawned in Europe. During the American colonial period, alliances between religion and government produced oppression and tyranny on our own shores.
Many colonies, for example, had provisions limiting public office to "Trinitarian Protestants" and other types of laws designed to prop up the religious sentiments of the politically powerful. Some colonies had officially established churches and taxed all citizens to support them, whether they were members or not. Dissenters faced imprisonment, torture and even death.
These arrangements led to bitterness and sectarian division. Many people began agitating for an end to "religious tests" for public office, tax subsidies for churches and other forms of state endorsement of religion. Those who led this charge were not anti-religion. Indeed, many were members of the clergy and people of deep piety. They argued that true faith did not need or want the support of government.
Respect for religious pluralism gradually became the norm. When Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, for example, he spoke of "unalienable rights endowed by our Creator." He used generic religious language that all religious groups of the day would respond to, not narrowly Christian language traditionally employed by nations with state churches.
While some of the country's founders believed that the government should espouse Christianity, that viewpoint soon became a losing proposition. In Virginia, Patrick Henry argued in favor of tax support for Christian churches. But Henry and his cohorts were in the minority and lost that battle. Jefferson, James Madison and their allies among the state's religious groups ended Virginia's established church and helped pass the Virginia Statute for Religious Liberty, a 1786 law guaranteeing religious freedom to all.
Jefferson and Madison's viewpoint also carried the day when the Constitution, and later, the Bill of Rights, were written. Had an officially Christian nation been the goal of the founders, that concept would appear in the Constitution. It does not. Instead, our nation's governing document ensures religious freedom for everyone.
Maryland representative Luther Martin said that a handful of delegates to the Constitutional Convention argued for formal recognition of Christianity in the Constitution, insisting that such language was necessary in order to "hold out some distinction between the professors of Christianity and downright infidelity or paganism." But that view was not adopted, and the Constitution gave government no authority over religion. Article VI, which allows persons of all religious viewpoints to hold public office, was adopted by a unanimous vote. Through ratification of the First Amendment, observed Jefferson, the American people built a "wall of separation between church and state."
Some pastors who favored church-state union were outraged and delivered sermons asserting that the United States would not be a successful nation because its Constitution did not give special treatment to Christianity. But many others welcomed the new dawn of freedom and praised the Constitution and the First Amendment as true protectors of liberty.
Early national leaders understood that separation of church and state would be good for all faiths including Christianity. Jefferson rejoiced that Virginia had passed his religious freedom law, noting that it would ensure religious freedom for "the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, the infidel of every denomination."
Other early U.S. leaders echoed that view. President George Washington, in a famous 1790 letter to a Jewish congregation in Newport, R.I., celebrated the fact that Jews had full freedom of worship in America. Noted Washington, "All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship."
Washington's administration even negotiated a treaty with the Muslim rulers of north Africa that stated explicitly that the United States was not founded on Christianity. The pact, known as the Treaty with Tripoli, was approved unanimously by the Senate in 1797, under the administration of John Adams. Article 11 of the treaty states, "[T]he government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion…."
Admittedly, the U.S. government has not always lived up to its constitutional principles. In the late 19th century especially, officials often promoted a de facto form of Protestantism. Even the U.S. Supreme Court fell victim to this mentality in 1892, with Justice David Brewer declaring in Holy Trinity v. United States that America is "a Christian nation."
The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion….
- U.S. Treaty with Tripoli, 1797
It should be noted, however, that the Holy Trinity decision is a legal anomaly. It has rarely been cited by other courts, and the "Christian nation" declaration appeared in dicta a legal term meaning writing that reflects a judge's personal opinion, not a mandate of the law. Also, it is unclear exactly what Brewer meant. In a book he wrote in 1905, Brewer pointed out that the United States is Christian in a cultural sense, not a legal one.
A more accurate judicial view of the relationship between religion and government is described by Justice John Paul Stevens in his 1985 Wallace v. Jaffree ruling. Commenting on the constitutional right of all Americans to choose their own religious belief, Stevens wrote, "At one time it was thought that this right merely proscribed the preference of one Christian sect over another, but would not require equal respect for the conscience of the infidel, the atheist, or the adherent of a non-Christian faith such as Mohammedism or Judaism. But when the underlying principle has been examined in the crucible of litigation, the Court has unambiguously concluded that the individual freedom of conscience protected by the First Amendment embraces the right to select any religious faith or none at all."
A determined faction of Christians has fought against this wise and time-tested policy throughout our history. In the mid 19th century, several efforts were made to add specific references to Christianity to the Constitution. One group, the National Reform Association (NRA), pushed a "Christian nation" amendment in Congress in 1864. NRA members believed that the Civil War was divine punishment for failing to mention God in the Constitution and saw the amendment as a way to atone for that omission.
The NRA amendment called for "humbly acknowledging Almighty God as the source of all authority and power in civil government, the Lord Jesus Christ as the Ruler among the nations, [and] His revealed will as the supreme law of the land, in order to constitute a Christian government." Ten years later, the House Judiciary Committee voted against its adoption. The committee noted "the dangers which the union between church and state had imposed upon so many nations of the Old World" and said in light of that it was felt "inexpedient to put anything into the Constitution which might be construed to be a reference to any religious creed or doctrine."
Similar theocratic proposals resurfaced in Congress sporadically over the years. As late as 1950, a proposal was introduced in the Senate that would have added language to the Constitution that "devoutly recognizes the Authority and Law of Jesus Christ, Saviour and Ruler of nations, through whom are bestowed the blessings of liberty." This amendment was never voted out of committee. Efforts to revive it in the early 1960s were unsuccessful.
Today, America's religious demographics are changing, and diversity has greatly expanded since our nation's founding. The number of Jews has increased, and more Muslims are living in America than ever before. Other religions now represented in America include Hinduism, Buddhism and a myriad others. In addition, many Americans say they have no religious faith or identify themselves as atheists, agnostics or Humanists. According to some scholars, over 2,000 distinct religious groups and denominations exist in the United States.
Also, even though most Americans identify as Christian, this does not mean they would back official government recognition of the Christian faith. Christian denominations disagree on points of doctrine, church structure and stands on social issues. Many Christians take a moderate or liberal perspective on church-state relations and oppose efforts to impose religion by government action.
Americans should be proud that we live in a democracy that welcomes persons of many faiths and none. Around the globe, millions of people still dwell under oppressive regimes where religion and government are harshly commingled. (Iran and the former Taliban regime of Afghanistan are just two examples.) Many residents of those countries look to the United States as beacon of hope and a model for what their own nations might someday become.
When the underlying principle has been examined in the crucible of litigation, the Court has unambiguously concluded that the individual freedom of conscience protected by the First Amendment embraces the right to select any religious faith or none at all.
- Justice John Paul Stevens
Only the principle of church-state separation can protect America's incredible degree of religious freedom. The individual rights and diversity we enjoy cannot be maintained if the government promotes Christianity or if our government takes on the trappings of a "faith-based" state.
The United States, in short, was not founded to be an officially Christian nation or to espouse any official religion. Our government is neutral on religious matters, leaving such decisions to individuals. This democratic and pluralistic system has allowed a broad array of religious groups to grow and flourish and guarantees every individual American the right to determine his or her own spiritual path or to reject religion entirely. As a result of this policy, Americans enjoy more religious freedom than any people in world history. We should be proud of this accomplishment and work to preserve the constitutional principle that made it possible separation of church and state.
If you would like to learn more about this issue, please contact Americans United for Separation of Church and State at our national headquarters in Washington, D.C. We have a wide range of books, fact sheets and other literature about church-state separation. We welcome your comments and your support.
[Brochure]
Is America A 'Christian Nation'?
Religion, Government And Individual Freedom
Is the United States a "Christian nation"? Some Americans think so. Religious Right activists and right-wing television preachers often claim that the United States was founded to be a Christian nation. Even some politicians agree. If the people who make this assertion are merely saying that most Americans are Christians, they might have a point. But those who argue that America is a Christian nation usually mean something more, insisting that the country should be officially Christian. The very character of our country is at stake in the outcome of this debate.
Religious Right groups and their allies insist that the United States was designed to be officially Christian and that our laws should enforce the doctrines of (their version of) Christianity. Is this viewpoint accurate? Is there anything in the Constitution that gives special treatment or preference to Christianity? Did the founders of our government believe this or intend to create a government that gave special recognition to Christianity?
The answer to all of these questions is no. The U.S. Constitution is a wholly secular document. It contains no mention of Christianity or Jesus Christ. In fact, the Constitution refers to religion only twice in the First Amendment, which bars laws "respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," and in Article VI, which prohibits "religious tests" for public office. Both of these provisions are evidence that the country was not founded as officially Christian.
The Founding Fathers did not create a secular government because they disliked religion. Many were believers themselves. Yet they were well aware of the dangers of church-state union. They had studied and even seen first-hand the difficulties that church-state partnerships spawned in Europe. During the American colonial period, alliances between religion and government produced oppression and tyranny on our own shores.
Many colonies, for example, had provisions limiting public office to "Trinitarian Protestants" and other types of laws designed to prop up the religious sentiments of the politically powerful. Some colonies had officially established churches and taxed all citizens to support them, whether they were members or not. Dissenters faced imprisonment, torture and even death.
These arrangements led to bitterness and sectarian division. Many people began agitating for an end to "religious tests" for public office, tax subsidies for churches and other forms of state endorsement of religion. Those who led this charge were not anti-religion. Indeed, many were members of the clergy and people of deep piety. They argued that true faith did not need or want the support of government.
Respect for religious pluralism gradually became the norm. When Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, for example, he spoke of "unalienable rights endowed by our Creator." He used generic religious language that all religious groups of the day would respond to, not narrowly Christian language traditionally employed by nations with state churches.
While some of the country's founders believed that the government should espouse Christianity, that viewpoint soon became a losing proposition. In Virginia, Patrick Henry argued in favor of tax support for Christian churches. But Henry and his cohorts were in the minority and lost that battle. Jefferson, James Madison and their allies among the state's religious groups ended Virginia's established church and helped pass the Virginia Statute for Religious Liberty, a 1786 law guaranteeing religious freedom to all.
Jefferson and Madison's viewpoint also carried the day when the Constitution, and later, the Bill of Rights, were written. Had an officially Christian nation been the goal of the founders, that concept would appear in the Constitution. It does not. Instead, our nation's governing document ensures religious freedom for everyone.
Maryland representative Luther Martin said that a handful of delegates to the Constitutional Convention argued for formal recognition of Christianity in the Constitution, insisting that such language was necessary in order to "hold out some distinction between the professors of Christianity and downright infidelity or paganism." But that view was not adopted, and the Constitution gave government no authority over religion. Article VI, which allows persons of all religious viewpoints to hold public office, was adopted by a unanimous vote. Through ratification of the First Amendment, observed Jefferson, the American people built a "wall of separation between church and state."
Some pastors who favored church-state union were outraged and delivered sermons asserting that the United States would not be a successful nation because its Constitution did not give special treatment to Christianity. But many others welcomed the new dawn of freedom and praised the Constitution and the First Amendment as true protectors of liberty.
Early national leaders understood that separation of church and state would be good for all faiths including Christianity. Jefferson rejoiced that Virginia had passed his religious freedom law, noting that it would ensure religious freedom for "the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, the infidel of every denomination."
Other early U.S. leaders echoed that view. President George Washington, in a famous 1790 letter to a Jewish congregation in Newport, R.I., celebrated the fact that Jews had full freedom of worship in America. Noted Washington, "All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship."
Washington's administration even negotiated a treaty with the Muslim rulers of north Africa that stated explicitly that the United States was not founded on Christianity. The pact, known as the Treaty with Tripoli, was approved unanimously by the Senate in 1797, under the administration of John Adams. Article 11 of the treaty states, "[T]he government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion…."
Admittedly, the U.S. government has not always lived up to its constitutional principles. In the late 19th century especially, officials often promoted a de facto form of Protestantism. Even the U.S. Supreme Court fell victim to this mentality in 1892, with Justice David Brewer declaring in Holy Trinity v. United States that America is "a Christian nation."
The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion….
- U.S. Treaty with Tripoli, 1797
It should be noted, however, that the Holy Trinity decision is a legal anomaly. It has rarely been cited by other courts, and the "Christian nation" declaration appeared in dicta a legal term meaning writing that reflects a judge's personal opinion, not a mandate of the law. Also, it is unclear exactly what Brewer meant. In a book he wrote in 1905, Brewer pointed out that the United States is Christian in a cultural sense, not a legal one.
A more accurate judicial view of the relationship between religion and government is described by Justice John Paul Stevens in his 1985 Wallace v. Jaffree ruling. Commenting on the constitutional right of all Americans to choose their own religious belief, Stevens wrote, "At one time it was thought that this right merely proscribed the preference of one Christian sect over another, but would not require equal respect for the conscience of the infidel, the atheist, or the adherent of a non-Christian faith such as Mohammedism or Judaism. But when the underlying principle has been examined in the crucible of litigation, the Court has unambiguously concluded that the individual freedom of conscience protected by the First Amendment embraces the right to select any religious faith or none at all."
A determined faction of Christians has fought against this wise and time-tested policy throughout our history. In the mid 19th century, several efforts were made to add specific references to Christianity to the Constitution. One group, the National Reform Association (NRA), pushed a "Christian nation" amendment in Congress in 1864. NRA members believed that the Civil War was divine punishment for failing to mention God in the Constitution and saw the amendment as a way to atone for that omission.
The NRA amendment called for "humbly acknowledging Almighty God as the source of all authority and power in civil government, the Lord Jesus Christ as the Ruler among the nations, [and] His revealed will as the supreme law of the land, in order to constitute a Christian government." Ten years later, the House Judiciary Committee voted against its adoption. The committee noted "the dangers which the union between church and state had imposed upon so many nations of the Old World" and said in light of that it was felt "inexpedient to put anything into the Constitution which might be construed to be a reference to any religious creed or doctrine."
Similar theocratic proposals resurfaced in Congress sporadically over the years. As late as 1950, a proposal was introduced in the Senate that would have added language to the Constitution that "devoutly recognizes the Authority and Law of Jesus Christ, Saviour and Ruler of nations, through whom are bestowed the blessings of liberty." This amendment was never voted out of committee. Efforts to revive it in the early 1960s were unsuccessful.
Today, America's religious demographics are changing, and diversity has greatly expanded since our nation's founding. The number of Jews has increased, and more Muslims are living in America than ever before. Other religions now represented in America include Hinduism, Buddhism and a myriad others. In addition, many Americans say they have no religious faith or identify themselves as atheists, agnostics or Humanists. According to some scholars, over 2,000 distinct religious groups and denominations exist in the United States.
Also, even though most Americans identify as Christian, this does not mean they would back official government recognition of the Christian faith. Christian denominations disagree on points of doctrine, church structure and stands on social issues. Many Christians take a moderate or liberal perspective on church-state relations and oppose efforts to impose religion by government action.
Americans should be proud that we live in a democracy that welcomes persons of many faiths and none. Around the globe, millions of people still dwell under oppressive regimes where religion and government are harshly commingled. (Iran and the former Taliban regime of Afghanistan are just two examples.) Many residents of those countries look to the United States as beacon of hope and a model for what their own nations might someday become.
When the underlying principle has been examined in the crucible of litigation, the Court has unambiguously concluded that the individual freedom of conscience protected by the First Amendment embraces the right to select any religious faith or none at all.
- Justice John Paul Stevens
Only the principle of church-state separation can protect America's incredible degree of religious freedom. The individual rights and diversity we enjoy cannot be maintained if the government promotes Christianity or if our government takes on the trappings of a "faith-based" state.
The United States, in short, was not founded to be an officially Christian nation or to espouse any official religion. Our government is neutral on religious matters, leaving such decisions to individuals. This democratic and pluralistic system has allowed a broad array of religious groups to grow and flourish and guarantees every individual American the right to determine his or her own spiritual path or to reject religion entirely. As a result of this policy, Americans enjoy more religious freedom than any people in world history. We should be proud of this accomplishment and work to preserve the constitutional principle that made it possible separation of church and state.
If you would like to learn more about this issue, please contact Americans United for Separation of Church and State at our national headquarters in Washington, D.C. We have a wide range of books, fact sheets and other literature about church-state separation. We welcome your comments and your support.
Friday, March 25, 2005
THE ARTIST
Today I’m glad I stored my trusty laptop in the trunk of the Rio. I wasn’t sure I wanted to write today, but my reading, only a few more pages of Vidal’s The GOLDEN AGE to go, wasn’t keeping me concentrated. Too much post nasal drip clogged my throat and my eyes felt sandy, scratchy. But writing called to me so out to the cold trunk to get my Mactop and, so, to writing.
I’ve taken a few classes in drawing in my life, at the senior center and at Spokane Art School. I haven’t started a drawing in well over a year, but every once in awhile, something will catch my eye, like yesterday at Hammer’s coffee shop in downtown Spokane, and I’ll imagine starting a project.
I was eyeing two, chubby (not fat) young women at the coffee counter over the top edge of Vidal’s book when a vision came to me with my lightly stirred libido providing the impetuous. These young women were chubby in a Rubenesque, delightful sort of way. They were there for some time after buying their lattes, sitting at a table chatting as women do, friendly with one another and smiling. One, more than once, glanced toward my ancient visage. Did I remind her of a doting grandfather? Was she so nearsighted she couldn’t tell how old I was?
Though heavy, they still had small waistlines but larger than life breasts. Their flesh was firm and smooth rather than droopy and creased like mine. Their faces were pretty and one had short black hair while the other’s locks were sandy, medium long and curly.
Suddenly, in my vision, they were naked, on their knees and left hands, facing one another with the right hand in a clawed position. They were as two cats hissing at one another, playfully I imagined, two bosom buddies in imaginary cat fight. I realized I would take snapshots of the two posed that way and work from photos. With tripod, I saw myself beginning toward the rear of one the young ladies, a bit to the side though so that the face of the other would be in the picture and working in a half circle to the rear of that other face.
My imagining stirred me up quite a bit. I could see the beginning photo of the series of shots quite clearly. The round buttocks of the one woman with the round cherubic face of the other to the left of those globes of delight. I felt a delightful, friendly humor in the whole thing, the three of us enjoying our project in the intimacy of my imaginary studio.
I have had the experience of sketching a nude while taking a drawing course. My feeling was erotic as I contemplated my subject but not lustful. She was not a beautiful young woman at all, but an older, fleshy, mottled woman of considerable experience in France. The feeling I had was love, respect and awe for her. Drawing my nude, I felt intimately connected to her, as if we were two alone, sharing an experience, even though in the presence of other art students. It was now the same with these two young women—erotic, stimulating with intimations of intercourse unfulfilled.
I repeatedly imagined approaching them to ask them to be a part of my project and reviewed the project in my mind several times, wandering if I took up drawing in a serious way, would I really be able to ask strangers to pose for me?
Then, suddenly, my two posers were facing away from each other, sitting back on their heels with hands on knees and faces jauntily turned up, nose proud of their youthful nudity. They were bookends with a large book squeezed between their fulsome buttocks. What would the book be? The first book I saw would be proportionately large to match the size of its bookends.
Then, suddenly, my imagination quickened, and the book became a small, real size book squashed between huge real life buttocks. The slender volume was almost lost in the flesh. Very funny indeed! At first, it was only a nameless book, confronting the realities of flesh, then a book about sex, then a book about men which these proud women to the core of their bottomly life disdained. The book grew large and shrank again as I looked for interesting images.
Now my women faced each other again in their original pose and between them stood a very skinny woman, an anorexic dying woman with hand on hip. Now my posers weren’t so disdainful. They wanted to be slender like this self-destructive woman. Then the object between my fleshy women became the headless, skinny mannequin which I’d seen that morning while passing through Nordstrom’s. Everything and nothing to be read into that headless part!
Next my two fleshy, nude women became four women, and the object they surrounded became a 70 to 80 year old woman, knowledgeable and aloof in her nude droopiness and lined, dry skin, as if she had a secret these younger women could only guess at, then a coy, middle-aged religious woman protecting her crotch appeared to me. Soon I imagined a whole series of these drawings or paintings in which different objects or persons were surrounded by my youthful, nude, heavy women by twos and fours.
Each imagined image drew from me a different reaction, but mostly it was a lighthearted series, poking fun at so many of our cultural pretensions and hidden reactions to what confronts the women among us. Then the two women left the coffee shop and I returned to Vidal’s homosexual rapier, none the worse for wear, having mounted my imagination and given it a good gallop over fertile fields.
_______________________________________________
“The important thing in acting is to be able to laugh and cry. If I have to cry, I think of my sex life. If I have to laugh, I think of my sex life.” —Glenda Jackson
Today I’m glad I stored my trusty laptop in the trunk of the Rio. I wasn’t sure I wanted to write today, but my reading, only a few more pages of Vidal’s The GOLDEN AGE to go, wasn’t keeping me concentrated. Too much post nasal drip clogged my throat and my eyes felt sandy, scratchy. But writing called to me so out to the cold trunk to get my Mactop and, so, to writing.
I’ve taken a few classes in drawing in my life, at the senior center and at Spokane Art School. I haven’t started a drawing in well over a year, but every once in awhile, something will catch my eye, like yesterday at Hammer’s coffee shop in downtown Spokane, and I’ll imagine starting a project.
I was eyeing two, chubby (not fat) young women at the coffee counter over the top edge of Vidal’s book when a vision came to me with my lightly stirred libido providing the impetuous. These young women were chubby in a Rubenesque, delightful sort of way. They were there for some time after buying their lattes, sitting at a table chatting as women do, friendly with one another and smiling. One, more than once, glanced toward my ancient visage. Did I remind her of a doting grandfather? Was she so nearsighted she couldn’t tell how old I was?
Though heavy, they still had small waistlines but larger than life breasts. Their flesh was firm and smooth rather than droopy and creased like mine. Their faces were pretty and one had short black hair while the other’s locks were sandy, medium long and curly.
Suddenly, in my vision, they were naked, on their knees and left hands, facing one another with the right hand in a clawed position. They were as two cats hissing at one another, playfully I imagined, two bosom buddies in imaginary cat fight. I realized I would take snapshots of the two posed that way and work from photos. With tripod, I saw myself beginning toward the rear of one the young ladies, a bit to the side though so that the face of the other would be in the picture and working in a half circle to the rear of that other face.
My imagining stirred me up quite a bit. I could see the beginning photo of the series of shots quite clearly. The round buttocks of the one woman with the round cherubic face of the other to the left of those globes of delight. I felt a delightful, friendly humor in the whole thing, the three of us enjoying our project in the intimacy of my imaginary studio.
I have had the experience of sketching a nude while taking a drawing course. My feeling was erotic as I contemplated my subject but not lustful. She was not a beautiful young woman at all, but an older, fleshy, mottled woman of considerable experience in France. The feeling I had was love, respect and awe for her. Drawing my nude, I felt intimately connected to her, as if we were two alone, sharing an experience, even though in the presence of other art students. It was now the same with these two young women—erotic, stimulating with intimations of intercourse unfulfilled.
I repeatedly imagined approaching them to ask them to be a part of my project and reviewed the project in my mind several times, wandering if I took up drawing in a serious way, would I really be able to ask strangers to pose for me?
Then, suddenly, my two posers were facing away from each other, sitting back on their heels with hands on knees and faces jauntily turned up, nose proud of their youthful nudity. They were bookends with a large book squeezed between their fulsome buttocks. What would the book be? The first book I saw would be proportionately large to match the size of its bookends.
Then, suddenly, my imagination quickened, and the book became a small, real size book squashed between huge real life buttocks. The slender volume was almost lost in the flesh. Very funny indeed! At first, it was only a nameless book, confronting the realities of flesh, then a book about sex, then a book about men which these proud women to the core of their bottomly life disdained. The book grew large and shrank again as I looked for interesting images.
Now my women faced each other again in their original pose and between them stood a very skinny woman, an anorexic dying woman with hand on hip. Now my posers weren’t so disdainful. They wanted to be slender like this self-destructive woman. Then the object between my fleshy women became the headless, skinny mannequin which I’d seen that morning while passing through Nordstrom’s. Everything and nothing to be read into that headless part!
Next my two fleshy, nude women became four women, and the object they surrounded became a 70 to 80 year old woman, knowledgeable and aloof in her nude droopiness and lined, dry skin, as if she had a secret these younger women could only guess at, then a coy, middle-aged religious woman protecting her crotch appeared to me. Soon I imagined a whole series of these drawings or paintings in which different objects or persons were surrounded by my youthful, nude, heavy women by twos and fours.
Each imagined image drew from me a different reaction, but mostly it was a lighthearted series, poking fun at so many of our cultural pretensions and hidden reactions to what confronts the women among us. Then the two women left the coffee shop and I returned to Vidal’s homosexual rapier, none the worse for wear, having mounted my imagination and given it a good gallop over fertile fields.
_______________________________________________
“The important thing in acting is to be able to laugh and cry. If I have to cry, I think of my sex life. If I have to laugh, I think of my sex life.” —Glenda Jackson
A GOD FOR ALL SEASONS
Here is another most interesting thing about the gods of the Christians—whether we mean father god or his son, Jesus, or the ghost that runs around with lots of power too. For the purpose of this discussion, we'll just mash together all three Christian gods into one god.
Bush says he's doing god's will when he removed Saddam from power. But didn't god put Saddam in power? Maybe god meant Saddam to be in power, maybe god was punishing the Iraqi's for some sin they committed against god and Bush overstepped his bounds in overturning god's plan. Maybe Bush isn't doing god's will at all. How can we know?
But then the Christians can fire back that if god didn't mean for Saddam to be removed from power then Saddam would still be in power. Okay—that's interesting, because that sort of says that whatever happens is god's will. Okay, if everything that happens is god's will, then god's real purposes in human activity can't be discerned in any of history because nothing god does can be picked out in history. His will is everywhere, therefore, it's invisible; it's just whatever is. That means that whatever happens is god's will and that whatever is is god. That makes god pantheistic. It also means that any act by any person is god's will so no person can be blamed for his actions since he's doing god's will which is everything that happens.
If your head is spinning in circles, never mind. So is the holy ghost's.
Here is another most interesting thing about the gods of the Christians—whether we mean father god or his son, Jesus, or the ghost that runs around with lots of power too. For the purpose of this discussion, we'll just mash together all three Christian gods into one god.
Bush says he's doing god's will when he removed Saddam from power. But didn't god put Saddam in power? Maybe god meant Saddam to be in power, maybe god was punishing the Iraqi's for some sin they committed against god and Bush overstepped his bounds in overturning god's plan. Maybe Bush isn't doing god's will at all. How can we know?
But then the Christians can fire back that if god didn't mean for Saddam to be removed from power then Saddam would still be in power. Okay—that's interesting, because that sort of says that whatever happens is god's will. Okay, if everything that happens is god's will, then god's real purposes in human activity can't be discerned in any of history because nothing god does can be picked out in history. His will is everywhere, therefore, it's invisible; it's just whatever is. That means that whatever happens is god's will and that whatever is is god. That makes god pantheistic. It also means that any act by any person is god's will so no person can be blamed for his actions since he's doing god's will which is everything that happens.
If your head is spinning in circles, never mind. So is the holy ghost's.
Thursday, March 24, 2005
LET YOUR PSYCHE SOAR!
“Today, as we all know, such thoughts and forms are of a crumbling past and the civilizations dependent on them in disarray and dissolution. Not only are societies no longer attuned to the courses of the planets; sociology and physics, politics and astronomy are no longer understood to be departments of a single science. Nor is the individual interpreted (in the democratic West, at least) as an inseparable subordinate part of the organism of a state. What we know today, if we know anything at all, is that every individual is unique and that the laws of his life will not be those of any other on this earth. We also know that if divinity is to be found anywhere, it will not be ‘out there,’ among or beyond the planets. Galileo showed that the same physical laws that govern the movements of bodies on earth apply aloft, to the celestial spheres; and our astronauts, as we have all now seen, have been transported by those earthly laws to the moon. They will soon be on Mars and beyond. Furthermore, we know that the mathematics of those outermost spaces will already have been computed here on earth by human minds. There are no laws out there that are not right here; no gods out there that are not right here, and not only here, but within us, in our minds. So what happens now to those childhood images of the ascent of Elijah, Assumption of the Virgin, Ascen-sion of Christ—all bodily—into heaven?” (MYTHS TO LIVE BY, p. 251 of Joe Campbell’s 1972, Bantam Book edition)
There are times when I read Joe Campbell’s work which are like reading Carl Sagan or S. J. Gould, when something he says makes me grateful to have shared a fragment of my life span with a fragment of his. His thoughts serve as a springboard to my imagination, and I realize just what humankind is capable of or will be capable of when the dead superstitions of the past finally do really die and the new mythologies set in. The passage above was just such a moment as I sat in Hammer’s coffee shop downtown and read it, and I was so glad to be a human and to able to appreciate what I was reading and so grateful not to have been born in the 17th or any past century!!! Then, again, even in those days, if one was looking to be attuned to the myth of his day, he could soar in those days too, so I take this last sentence back.
Certain local blogs have been full of the screaming rage of religious people who are unable to accept that the face of Terri Schiavo is only a representation of the face of nature in all its brutal reality. Because they are stuck in the old mythologies which they really no longer believe in, they can’t seem to transcend the moment and navigate to the larger vision. I don’t find anything about the Schiavo case to be pleasant, but I am not fixated on it like so many religious persons who do not seem to remember that Terri’s going to a better place according to their mythologies. In fact, that’s how we know that their mythologies no longer work—they’re fighting to keep her alive rather than accepting their supposed reality of death and heaven. No—divinity is not “out there” and they know it in the deepest realms of their psyches. They know there is no heaven and their desperation proves it.
________________________________________________________________________
“[Fox TV News editors] are men who separate the wheat from the chaff, and then print the chaff.” —Adlai Stevenson [I do know that Fox News wasn’t around when Adlai was! Allow me a little poetic license here.]
“Today, as we all know, such thoughts and forms are of a crumbling past and the civilizations dependent on them in disarray and dissolution. Not only are societies no longer attuned to the courses of the planets; sociology and physics, politics and astronomy are no longer understood to be departments of a single science. Nor is the individual interpreted (in the democratic West, at least) as an inseparable subordinate part of the organism of a state. What we know today, if we know anything at all, is that every individual is unique and that the laws of his life will not be those of any other on this earth. We also know that if divinity is to be found anywhere, it will not be ‘out there,’ among or beyond the planets. Galileo showed that the same physical laws that govern the movements of bodies on earth apply aloft, to the celestial spheres; and our astronauts, as we have all now seen, have been transported by those earthly laws to the moon. They will soon be on Mars and beyond. Furthermore, we know that the mathematics of those outermost spaces will already have been computed here on earth by human minds. There are no laws out there that are not right here; no gods out there that are not right here, and not only here, but within us, in our minds. So what happens now to those childhood images of the ascent of Elijah, Assumption of the Virgin, Ascen-sion of Christ—all bodily—into heaven?” (MYTHS TO LIVE BY, p. 251 of Joe Campbell’s 1972, Bantam Book edition)
There are times when I read Joe Campbell’s work which are like reading Carl Sagan or S. J. Gould, when something he says makes me grateful to have shared a fragment of my life span with a fragment of his. His thoughts serve as a springboard to my imagination, and I realize just what humankind is capable of or will be capable of when the dead superstitions of the past finally do really die and the new mythologies set in. The passage above was just such a moment as I sat in Hammer’s coffee shop downtown and read it, and I was so glad to be a human and to able to appreciate what I was reading and so grateful not to have been born in the 17th or any past century!!! Then, again, even in those days, if one was looking to be attuned to the myth of his day, he could soar in those days too, so I take this last sentence back.
Certain local blogs have been full of the screaming rage of religious people who are unable to accept that the face of Terri Schiavo is only a representation of the face of nature in all its brutal reality. Because they are stuck in the old mythologies which they really no longer believe in, they can’t seem to transcend the moment and navigate to the larger vision. I don’t find anything about the Schiavo case to be pleasant, but I am not fixated on it like so many religious persons who do not seem to remember that Terri’s going to a better place according to their mythologies. In fact, that’s how we know that their mythologies no longer work—they’re fighting to keep her alive rather than accepting their supposed reality of death and heaven. No—divinity is not “out there” and they know it in the deepest realms of their psyches. They know there is no heaven and their desperation proves it.
________________________________________________________________________
“[Fox TV News editors] are men who separate the wheat from the chaff, and then print the chaff.” —Adlai Stevenson [I do know that Fox News wasn’t around when Adlai was! Allow me a little poetic license here.]
Wednesday, March 23, 2005
THIS IS THE JOY OF SCIENCE
Reports of experiments like the one below, I love to copy out and read and to follow step by step as they are unfolded to me. Then to share them with others like yourselves. This is the joy of the scientific method, to see something revealed so clearly that, it's truth is clear to all. Nothing is more pleasurable to my sensibilities, I assure you. Sometimes, of course, more information reveals a even deeper truth here and there but nothing can match reading about and following in one's own mind the clear, incontrovertible moments of truth as the following two experiments demonstrate.
"The demand to “show me” can also be quite subtle. In the late] 1840s for example, Dr. Ignaz Phillipp Semmelweis noted that the rate of death from “childbed fever” among mothers who had given birth in a ward serviced by physicians was almost four times as high as mothers in a ward in the same hospital serviced by midwives. The deaths tended to occur in women in the same rows of beds. Semmelweis wondered whether the reason was that they were attended by the same doctor. The doctors didn’t clean their hands, even after returning from dissecting a cadaver in the morgue, because such practice was considered to be unmanly. Or perhaps the effect was psychological, since after a priest administered last rites to a dying patient, he went down the line of beds ringing the “death bell.” At Semmelweis’s request, the priest stopped ringing the death bell in the hospital, but the mothers continued to die in rows. Semmelweis then demanded that his colleagues and assistants wash their hands in solution of chlorine of lime before they examined a woman or delivered a baby. Over the next fifteen months, the death rate fell from 12 percent to 1.2 percent. After participating in a republican street demonstration in 1848, however, Semmelweis was fired from his hospital post. His successor stopped the silly requirement of hand washing, and the death rate rose to 15 percent. We would be more certain that the changes in death rate were due to hand washing if he had required the doctors to wash their hands in some randomly picked rows but not in others. Semmelweis happened nevertheless to be correct, and he tested it in a way that allowed him to present evidence to a person who demanded “show me.” Unfortunately, the medical people at the time were not as impressed as we believe in retrospect that they should have been. The old practices were retained until the 1880s, when Dr. Joseph Lister [ah, the wonders of Listerine] understood the importance of Semmelweis’s experiments. In the meantime, Semmelweis had lost his sanity, begun accosting people on the streets to warn them to stay away from doctors who didn't clean their hands, and died in a mental institution in 1865." (HOUSE OF CARDS, by Robyn Dawes, pp. 77-78)
[And right after his commitment the Civil War in America started. Could his commitment to an asylum have caused the Civil War? Within this set of brackets lies religious logic? Which will you trust?]
Another joy is to watch a scientific mind sort through the problems in developing ways to arrive at experiments and valid results. I once worked with a physicist in an experiment about gravity and to watch him work was a revelation and a joy. You can't escape a wonderful optimism in watching the process of arriving at truth with scientific methods just because scientific methods allow us to arrive at the only certainty in the world which has any verifiability by others. Everything else is mere subjective palaver, even my own palaver.
"How does a clinical judge integrate a positive test result in a medical test or an unusual response to a Rorschach Ink Blot Test with knowledge that a disease indicated by such results is extremely rare?
"Such integration cannot be done on an intuitive basis. Instead clinical judgment is often based on a number of cognitive “heuristics” rules of thumb. The first heuristic is to search one’s memory (including memory of one’s training) for instances similar to the one at hand. This heuristic is termed availability. Unfortunately, availability can be quite biased by selective exposure, selective recall, vividness of the instance or category recalled, and so on. A second heuristic is to match the cues or characteristics with a stereotype or a set of other characteristics associated with a category—a heuristic termed representativeness. The degree to which something matches a category, however, does not indicate how probable it is. For example, our stereotype of someone addicted to intravenous drugs is that such a person smokes marijuana; hence, marijuana-smoking is a characteristic that matches our stereotype of an intravenous drug addict—even though people who smoke marijuana are far more likely not to use intravenous drugs than to use them, let alone be addicted to them.
"Availability and representativeness are the heuristics that most commonly lead us to make poor judgments, but they are not the only ones." (H.O.C. p. 100)
___________________________________________________________
"Every government is run by liars and nothing they say should be believed." —I. F. Stone [Well—that's a bit harsh. If we all believed that sentiment all the time, we'd have anarchy. But in times like these when neocons have adopted and polished the practice of public lying to such a fine art, we should, at least, for the time being make Stone's warning our American watchword.]
Reports of experiments like the one below, I love to copy out and read and to follow step by step as they are unfolded to me. Then to share them with others like yourselves. This is the joy of the scientific method, to see something revealed so clearly that, it's truth is clear to all. Nothing is more pleasurable to my sensibilities, I assure you. Sometimes, of course, more information reveals a even deeper truth here and there but nothing can match reading about and following in one's own mind the clear, incontrovertible moments of truth as the following two experiments demonstrate.
"The demand to “show me” can also be quite subtle. In the late] 1840s for example, Dr. Ignaz Phillipp Semmelweis noted that the rate of death from “childbed fever” among mothers who had given birth in a ward serviced by physicians was almost four times as high as mothers in a ward in the same hospital serviced by midwives. The deaths tended to occur in women in the same rows of beds. Semmelweis wondered whether the reason was that they were attended by the same doctor. The doctors didn’t clean their hands, even after returning from dissecting a cadaver in the morgue, because such practice was considered to be unmanly. Or perhaps the effect was psychological, since after a priest administered last rites to a dying patient, he went down the line of beds ringing the “death bell.” At Semmelweis’s request, the priest stopped ringing the death bell in the hospital, but the mothers continued to die in rows. Semmelweis then demanded that his colleagues and assistants wash their hands in solution of chlorine of lime before they examined a woman or delivered a baby. Over the next fifteen months, the death rate fell from 12 percent to 1.2 percent. After participating in a republican street demonstration in 1848, however, Semmelweis was fired from his hospital post. His successor stopped the silly requirement of hand washing, and the death rate rose to 15 percent. We would be more certain that the changes in death rate were due to hand washing if he had required the doctors to wash their hands in some randomly picked rows but not in others. Semmelweis happened nevertheless to be correct, and he tested it in a way that allowed him to present evidence to a person who demanded “show me.” Unfortunately, the medical people at the time were not as impressed as we believe in retrospect that they should have been. The old practices were retained until the 1880s, when Dr. Joseph Lister [ah, the wonders of Listerine] understood the importance of Semmelweis’s experiments. In the meantime, Semmelweis had lost his sanity, begun accosting people on the streets to warn them to stay away from doctors who didn't clean their hands, and died in a mental institution in 1865." (HOUSE OF CARDS, by Robyn Dawes, pp. 77-78)
[And right after his commitment the Civil War in America started. Could his commitment to an asylum have caused the Civil War? Within this set of brackets lies religious logic? Which will you trust?]
Another joy is to watch a scientific mind sort through the problems in developing ways to arrive at experiments and valid results. I once worked with a physicist in an experiment about gravity and to watch him work was a revelation and a joy. You can't escape a wonderful optimism in watching the process of arriving at truth with scientific methods just because scientific methods allow us to arrive at the only certainty in the world which has any verifiability by others. Everything else is mere subjective palaver, even my own palaver.
"How does a clinical judge integrate a positive test result in a medical test or an unusual response to a Rorschach Ink Blot Test with knowledge that a disease indicated by such results is extremely rare?
"Such integration cannot be done on an intuitive basis. Instead clinical judgment is often based on a number of cognitive “heuristics” rules of thumb. The first heuristic is to search one’s memory (including memory of one’s training) for instances similar to the one at hand. This heuristic is termed availability. Unfortunately, availability can be quite biased by selective exposure, selective recall, vividness of the instance or category recalled, and so on. A second heuristic is to match the cues or characteristics with a stereotype or a set of other characteristics associated with a category—a heuristic termed representativeness. The degree to which something matches a category, however, does not indicate how probable it is. For example, our stereotype of someone addicted to intravenous drugs is that such a person smokes marijuana; hence, marijuana-smoking is a characteristic that matches our stereotype of an intravenous drug addict—even though people who smoke marijuana are far more likely not to use intravenous drugs than to use them, let alone be addicted to them.
"Availability and representativeness are the heuristics that most commonly lead us to make poor judgments, but they are not the only ones." (H.O.C. p. 100)
___________________________________________________________
"Every government is run by liars and nothing they say should be believed." —I. F. Stone [Well—that's a bit harsh. If we all believed that sentiment all the time, we'd have anarchy. But in times like these when neocons have adopted and polished the practice of public lying to such a fine art, we should, at least, for the time being make Stone's warning our American watchword.]
Monday, March 21, 2005
BUSH’S NOSE GETS LONGER AND LONGER BUT
HIS FOLLOWERS WILL NEVER SEE IT BECAUSE
THEY’RE BLINDED BY THE LIGHT—OR IS THAT “RIGHT”?
Bush’s people being mainly religiomaniacs and, therefore, unable to tell the truth from a lie (because they’ve been lied to in the Bible and lied to by their parents and religious leaders all their lives) are unable to determine when they’re being lied to. As you know, if you keep up on the science of evolutionary psychology, there’s an arms race going on between liars and those who can detect liars. Each evolutionary leap increases the ability of the dominant group, each going one up on the other until the next leap deposes the latter.
The best liar, of course, is the liar who believes his own lies. Religious lies are, therefore, harder to see through, and religious people are the most duped of all human groups because they believe a huge, nose popping, piegod in the sky lie. But, anyhow, here anyhow is a laundry list of Bush lies exposed in his budget:
[Open quote.]
Almost no aspect of his [Bush’s] budget squares with reality, John Farmer says.
Bush's credibility gap growing rapidly
John Farmer
Newark (N.J.) Star-Ledger
February 14, 2005
Bad as they are, the budget gap and the trade gap are not the worst gaps facing the federal government. That honor belongs to the fastest growing of them all – the credibility gap.
It wasn't always that way. In the years of greatest national crisis, the Great Depression and World War II, Americans of almost every political persuasion (except maybe Communists and the looniest of the lefties) believed what their government told them and generally identified with Washington and its priorities.
Beginning with the Vietnam War and escalating with Watergate, that faith began to fade. Both parties bear the blame – Democrats for the lies of the Johnson administration during Vietnam, Republicans for the criminal mischief of the Nixon years and Watergate.
Today, thanks to the almost daily deceptions practiced by the Bush administration and its refusal under any conditions to admit any mistake, the credibility gap is deeper than ever.
The president's latest plunge into the gap involves his $2.5 trillion budget. If a literary entry, it would be a real contender for the fiction prize. Almost no aspect of the Bush budget squares with reality, beginning with its total-spending claims.
The cost of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, currently a not-insignificant $6 billion a month, is not included, if you can believe it. Everyone knows the money will have to be raised and spent, so why omit it from the budget? One reason is that its inclusion would make it more difficult for Bush to meet his promise (surely just as bogus) to cut the $420 billion-plus annual deficit in half in four years. (Even that deficit estimate is a sham; it would be far worse but for the inclusion of Social Security taxes.)
An even larger cost item missing from the budget is the amount required to finance Bush's plan to take money from Social Security to finance his privatization plan. It's a glaring omission – a sum ranging from almost $800 billion to between $1 trillion and $2 trillion, depending on which estimate of potential offsets one accepts. One wonders, how did he overlook it?
As if that wasn't enough, the president also fails to include the cost of making his now-notorious tax cuts permanent, a $1 trillion-plus drain on the treasury of the next decade. Hardly chump change.
But it's not merely costs that the Bush budget omits. It sins on the other side of the ledger by anticipating revenue it either has little chance of getting its hands on or never plans to collect.
The former involves revenue Bush counts on from opening the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve to oil exploration. Fat chance. Unless Congress has a radical change of heart, the reserve in Alaska will remain off-limits to the oil industry. The second dodge involves the cash income Bush anticipates from the Alternative Minimum Tax while at the same time he proposes it be eliminated.
The budget duplicity comes on the heels of Bush's Social Security shell game. His much-heralded privatization scheme, the administration now concedes, will have no effect on closing the fund's anticipated shortfall. Surprise, surprise! But what's worse is the way the administration has employed conflicting estimates of economic growth to peddle privatization.
It's needed, the Bushies argue, because the aging of the population will, over time, slow economic growth and thus not produce enough payroll tax revenue to meet annual Social Security benefit costs. In the next breath, however, they insist that robust economic growth will be a bonanza for those who opt to privatize part of their Social Security account. Well, which is it?
Perhaps the worst thing about Bush's voodoo economic policies is how they have ensnared honorable men in the Republican leadership – House Speaker Dennis Hastert, for one. He's out there defending the plans when (at least one hopes) he knows better. Ultimately, Hastert's own credibility and that of the others who go along with the administration will be at stake come the 2006 congressional elections.
To his credit, Bush has been incredibly successful at keeping his party in Congress in line considering how far he has strayed from small-government conservative orthodoxy. As conservative economist Bruce Bartlett put it in a National Public Radio interview, Bush "has spent like a drunken sailor," creating the biggest federal government in history. Indeed, he has. If they had a Betty Ford clinic for big spenders, Bush would be a prime candidate.
He's on the wagon now, Bush claims. Whether Republicans who control Congress will continue to stick with him and follow him into the credibility gap will be the real test of this Congress and Bush's ultimate success or failure.
[Close quote.]
__________________________________________________________
“Boozer’s revision: A bird in the hand is dead.” from THE OFFICIAL RULES
HIS FOLLOWERS WILL NEVER SEE IT BECAUSE
THEY’RE BLINDED BY THE LIGHT—OR IS THAT “RIGHT”?
Bush’s people being mainly religiomaniacs and, therefore, unable to tell the truth from a lie (because they’ve been lied to in the Bible and lied to by their parents and religious leaders all their lives) are unable to determine when they’re being lied to. As you know, if you keep up on the science of evolutionary psychology, there’s an arms race going on between liars and those who can detect liars. Each evolutionary leap increases the ability of the dominant group, each going one up on the other until the next leap deposes the latter.
The best liar, of course, is the liar who believes his own lies. Religious lies are, therefore, harder to see through, and religious people are the most duped of all human groups because they believe a huge, nose popping, piegod in the sky lie. But, anyhow, here anyhow is a laundry list of Bush lies exposed in his budget:
[Open quote.]
Almost no aspect of his [Bush’s] budget squares with reality, John Farmer says.
Bush's credibility gap growing rapidly
John Farmer
Newark (N.J.) Star-Ledger
February 14, 2005
Bad as they are, the budget gap and the trade gap are not the worst gaps facing the federal government. That honor belongs to the fastest growing of them all – the credibility gap.
It wasn't always that way. In the years of greatest national crisis, the Great Depression and World War II, Americans of almost every political persuasion (except maybe Communists and the looniest of the lefties) believed what their government told them and generally identified with Washington and its priorities.
Beginning with the Vietnam War and escalating with Watergate, that faith began to fade. Both parties bear the blame – Democrats for the lies of the Johnson administration during Vietnam, Republicans for the criminal mischief of the Nixon years and Watergate.
Today, thanks to the almost daily deceptions practiced by the Bush administration and its refusal under any conditions to admit any mistake, the credibility gap is deeper than ever.
The president's latest plunge into the gap involves his $2.5 trillion budget. If a literary entry, it would be a real contender for the fiction prize. Almost no aspect of the Bush budget squares with reality, beginning with its total-spending claims.
The cost of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, currently a not-insignificant $6 billion a month, is not included, if you can believe it. Everyone knows the money will have to be raised and spent, so why omit it from the budget? One reason is that its inclusion would make it more difficult for Bush to meet his promise (surely just as bogus) to cut the $420 billion-plus annual deficit in half in four years. (Even that deficit estimate is a sham; it would be far worse but for the inclusion of Social Security taxes.)
An even larger cost item missing from the budget is the amount required to finance Bush's plan to take money from Social Security to finance his privatization plan. It's a glaring omission – a sum ranging from almost $800 billion to between $1 trillion and $2 trillion, depending on which estimate of potential offsets one accepts. One wonders, how did he overlook it?
As if that wasn't enough, the president also fails to include the cost of making his now-notorious tax cuts permanent, a $1 trillion-plus drain on the treasury of the next decade. Hardly chump change.
But it's not merely costs that the Bush budget omits. It sins on the other side of the ledger by anticipating revenue it either has little chance of getting its hands on or never plans to collect.
The former involves revenue Bush counts on from opening the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve to oil exploration. Fat chance. Unless Congress has a radical change of heart, the reserve in Alaska will remain off-limits to the oil industry. The second dodge involves the cash income Bush anticipates from the Alternative Minimum Tax while at the same time he proposes it be eliminated.
The budget duplicity comes on the heels of Bush's Social Security shell game. His much-heralded privatization scheme, the administration now concedes, will have no effect on closing the fund's anticipated shortfall. Surprise, surprise! But what's worse is the way the administration has employed conflicting estimates of economic growth to peddle privatization.
It's needed, the Bushies argue, because the aging of the population will, over time, slow economic growth and thus not produce enough payroll tax revenue to meet annual Social Security benefit costs. In the next breath, however, they insist that robust economic growth will be a bonanza for those who opt to privatize part of their Social Security account. Well, which is it?
Perhaps the worst thing about Bush's voodoo economic policies is how they have ensnared honorable men in the Republican leadership – House Speaker Dennis Hastert, for one. He's out there defending the plans when (at least one hopes) he knows better. Ultimately, Hastert's own credibility and that of the others who go along with the administration will be at stake come the 2006 congressional elections.
To his credit, Bush has been incredibly successful at keeping his party in Congress in line considering how far he has strayed from small-government conservative orthodoxy. As conservative economist Bruce Bartlett put it in a National Public Radio interview, Bush "has spent like a drunken sailor," creating the biggest federal government in history. Indeed, he has. If they had a Betty Ford clinic for big spenders, Bush would be a prime candidate.
He's on the wagon now, Bush claims. Whether Republicans who control Congress will continue to stick with him and follow him into the credibility gap will be the real test of this Congress and Bush's ultimate success or failure.
[Close quote.]
__________________________________________________________
“Boozer’s revision: A bird in the hand is dead.” from THE OFFICIAL RULES
Wednesday, March 16, 2005
PLAYING HARD
Again I hear a coach talk about his team’s need to “play hard”. Think about it? Really, playing hard has anything to do with winning? I can watch lots of teams play hard and lose, see it every day. Can you see a high school team playing hard and win against the Seattle Supersonics? No, there’s something more to winning than playing hard. You need talent for one thing, then you need skilled coaching, then you need well-designed plays, then you need a desire to win, then you need… ah… let me see… yes, lots of steroids. Steroids—that's the stuff that makes muscles hard and big so that a team can play “hard”. See, the athletes have been getting the message all along. No need to tell them to play hard.
THE VOW OF CHASTITY
A few European filmmakers have recently tried to create a stringent aesthetic for the creation of movies. Many films are coming out which try to practice these tough rules. I'm sure, though I don't see any credit on the DVD package, that the film I watched this week, "The Son", tried to stick to Dogme standards. I am passing on these rules so that, if you're a true movie buff you'll try identify Dogme films when you see them.
[Open quote.]
I swear to submit to the following set of rules drawn up and confirmed by DOGME 95:
1. ShootIng must be done on location. Props and sets must not be brought in (if a particular prop is necessary for the story, a location must be chosen where this prop is to be found).
2. The sound must never be produced apart from the images or vice versa. (Music must not be used unless it occurs where the scene Is being shot).
3. The camera must be hand-held. Any movement or immobility attainable in the hand Is permitted. (The film must not take place where the camera is standing; shooting must take place where the film takes place).
4. The film must be in colour. Special lighting is not acceptable. (If there is too little light for exposure the scene must be cut or a single lamp be attached to the camera).
5. Optical work and filters are forbidden.
6. The film must not contain superficial action. (Murders, weapons, etc. must not occur.)
7. Temporal and geographical alienation are forbidden. (That is to say that the film takes place here and now.)
8. Genre movies are net acceptable.
9. The film format must be Academy 35 mm.
10. The director must not be credited.
Furthermore I swear as a director to refrain from personal taste! I am no longer an artist. I swear to refrain from creating a “work”, as I regard the instant as more important than the whole. My supreme goal Is to force the truth out of my characters and settings. I swear to do so by all the means available and at the cost of any good taste and any aesthetic considerations. Thus I make my VOW OF CHASTITY.”
Copenhagen, Monday 13 March 1995
On behalf of DOGME 95
Lars von Trier & Thomas Vinterberg
[Close quote.]
TEMPERAMENT SORTER TEST
Recently I took a little on line test to see what my temperament has become from what it may have once been. I don’t blame you if you ignore this exercise in narcissism. The results follow:
“February 22, 2005 Free report for: George Thomas
“Rationals, are the problem solving temperament, particularly if the problem has to do with the many complex systems that make up the world around us. Rationals might tackle problems in organic systems such as plants and animals, or in mechanical systems such as railroads and computers, or in social systems such as families and companies and governments. But whatever systems fire their curiosity, Rationals will analyze them to understand how they work, so they can figure out how to make them work better. In working with problems, Rationals try to find solutions that have application in the real world, but they are even more interested in the abstract concepts involved, the fundamental principles or natural laws that underlie the particular case. And they are completely pragmatic about their ways and means of achieving their ends. Rationals don't care about being politically correct. They are interested in the most efficient solutions possible, and will listen to anyone who has something useful to teach them, while disregarding any authority or customary procedure that wastes time and resources. Rationals have an insatiable hunger to accomplish their goals and will work tirelessly on any project they have set their mind to. They are rigorously logical and fiercely independent in their thinking--are indeed skeptical of all ideas, even their own--and they believe they can overcome any obstacle with their will power. Often they are seen as cold and distant, but this is really the absorbed concentration they give to whatever problem they're working on. Whether designing a skyscraper or an experiment, developing a theory or a prototype technology, building an aircraft, a corporation, or a strategic alliance, Rationals value intelligence, in themselves and others, and they pride themselves on the ingenuity they bring to their problem solving. Rationals are very scarce, comprising as little as 5 to 10 percent of the population. But because of their drive to unlock the secrets of nature, and to develop new technologies, they have done much to shape our world.”
___________________________________________________________________
“The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.” —Salvador Dali
Again I hear a coach talk about his team’s need to “play hard”. Think about it? Really, playing hard has anything to do with winning? I can watch lots of teams play hard and lose, see it every day. Can you see a high school team playing hard and win against the Seattle Supersonics? No, there’s something more to winning than playing hard. You need talent for one thing, then you need skilled coaching, then you need well-designed plays, then you need a desire to win, then you need… ah… let me see… yes, lots of steroids. Steroids—that's the stuff that makes muscles hard and big so that a team can play “hard”. See, the athletes have been getting the message all along. No need to tell them to play hard.
THE VOW OF CHASTITY
A few European filmmakers have recently tried to create a stringent aesthetic for the creation of movies. Many films are coming out which try to practice these tough rules. I'm sure, though I don't see any credit on the DVD package, that the film I watched this week, "The Son", tried to stick to Dogme standards. I am passing on these rules so that, if you're a true movie buff you'll try identify Dogme films when you see them.
[Open quote.]
I swear to submit to the following set of rules drawn up and confirmed by DOGME 95:
1. ShootIng must be done on location. Props and sets must not be brought in (if a particular prop is necessary for the story, a location must be chosen where this prop is to be found).
2. The sound must never be produced apart from the images or vice versa. (Music must not be used unless it occurs where the scene Is being shot).
3. The camera must be hand-held. Any movement or immobility attainable in the hand Is permitted. (The film must not take place where the camera is standing; shooting must take place where the film takes place).
4. The film must be in colour. Special lighting is not acceptable. (If there is too little light for exposure the scene must be cut or a single lamp be attached to the camera).
5. Optical work and filters are forbidden.
6. The film must not contain superficial action. (Murders, weapons, etc. must not occur.)
7. Temporal and geographical alienation are forbidden. (That is to say that the film takes place here and now.)
8. Genre movies are net acceptable.
9. The film format must be Academy 35 mm.
10. The director must not be credited.
Furthermore I swear as a director to refrain from personal taste! I am no longer an artist. I swear to refrain from creating a “work”, as I regard the instant as more important than the whole. My supreme goal Is to force the truth out of my characters and settings. I swear to do so by all the means available and at the cost of any good taste and any aesthetic considerations. Thus I make my VOW OF CHASTITY.”
Copenhagen, Monday 13 March 1995
On behalf of DOGME 95
Lars von Trier & Thomas Vinterberg
[Close quote.]
TEMPERAMENT SORTER TEST
Recently I took a little on line test to see what my temperament has become from what it may have once been. I don’t blame you if you ignore this exercise in narcissism. The results follow:
“February 22, 2005 Free report for: George Thomas
“Rationals, are the problem solving temperament, particularly if the problem has to do with the many complex systems that make up the world around us. Rationals might tackle problems in organic systems such as plants and animals, or in mechanical systems such as railroads and computers, or in social systems such as families and companies and governments. But whatever systems fire their curiosity, Rationals will analyze them to understand how they work, so they can figure out how to make them work better. In working with problems, Rationals try to find solutions that have application in the real world, but they are even more interested in the abstract concepts involved, the fundamental principles or natural laws that underlie the particular case. And they are completely pragmatic about their ways and means of achieving their ends. Rationals don't care about being politically correct. They are interested in the most efficient solutions possible, and will listen to anyone who has something useful to teach them, while disregarding any authority or customary procedure that wastes time and resources. Rationals have an insatiable hunger to accomplish their goals and will work tirelessly on any project they have set their mind to. They are rigorously logical and fiercely independent in their thinking--are indeed skeptical of all ideas, even their own--and they believe they can overcome any obstacle with their will power. Often they are seen as cold and distant, but this is really the absorbed concentration they give to whatever problem they're working on. Whether designing a skyscraper or an experiment, developing a theory or a prototype technology, building an aircraft, a corporation, or a strategic alliance, Rationals value intelligence, in themselves and others, and they pride themselves on the ingenuity they bring to their problem solving. Rationals are very scarce, comprising as little as 5 to 10 percent of the population. But because of their drive to unlock the secrets of nature, and to develop new technologies, they have done much to shape our world.”
___________________________________________________________________
“The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.” —Salvador Dali
Monday, March 14, 2005
I FORESEE A DAY WHEN THIS BLOG WILL SHRINK TO THREE DAYS A WEEK
Monday, Wednesday and Friday...
LET’S START WITH A RELIGIOUS JOKE TODAY
A character in the Shaw play “Man and Superman” says to another, “An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.”
How many uncomfortable believers do you think inhabit this globe who just can’t put down their uncomfortable feelings? I know that the more I judge (the angrier I am) the more harshly I judge others. It’s as if every judgment we make on one another in this global prison becomes just another bar in our own cages.
RELIGION BACKWARD, HATEFUL, DIVISIVE AND OUT OF IT BY
ABOUT TWO MILLENNIA
“LONDON (AP) - Anglican primates agreed Thursday that the U.S. Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada would withdraw from a key body of the global Anglican Communion after failing to overcome internal church disagreements about the election of a gay bishop in the United States and the blessing of same-sex unions there and in Canada.”
What can a sane man say? Religion is outdated if not dead and beyond recall. Religion has no relevance for the modern world and modern people. It increases problems, pain and psychological suffering everywhere it appears. Who but a failed modern being, one who cannot govern his own being, would require such backward teachings as modern religion offers?
Read the whole stinking story here.
A MEMBER OF THE "INLAND NORTHWEST FREETHOUGHT SOCIETY" BROUGHT THIS IN
Darwin probably has it right:
“I am a strong advocate for free thought on all subjects, yet it appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against Christianity & theism produce hardly any effect on the public; & freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds, which follow from the advance of science. It has, therefore, been always my object to avoid writing on religion, & I have confined myself to science. I may, however, have been unduly biased by the pain which it would give some members of my family, if I aided in any way direct attacks on religion” —Charles Darwin
When I think of all the religious debates around the worldly world and my own shadowy history and all the battles over religion, it seems that humankind has grown considerably more intelligent and comfortable despite our efforts to destroy and otherwise regress ourselves back to sticks and stones. The chief improving forces are always science and technology, not that those two engines of progress don't bring along problems of their own. Still those two marvelous rouges just silently and subtly keep spinning our change while the argumentative among us are busy swinging fists of debate, often over glasses of intoxicating beverages. One day we wake up from the knockout punch our interlocutor hit us with in the bar last night, and there's the wheel, next morning penicillin, then rocket travel, computer chips and, now, the Internet. Busy, busy, the good brothers of change in our knock down drag out world. We are in the ring while they are in the Universe.
STILL I GOTTA KEEP PULLING THE MONGREL'S TAIL
James Madison believed that "religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise [sic]."
LET GORE VIDAL HAVE THE LAST WORD THIS POSTING
In the last paragraph of THE GOLDEN AGE, Gore writes of evolution and eternity: "As for the human case, the generations of men come and go and are in eternity no more than bacteria upon a luminous slide, and the fall of a republic or the rise of an empire—so significant to those involved—is not detectable upon the slide even were there an interested eye to behold that steadily proliferating species which would either end in time or, with luck, become something else, since change is the nature of life, and its hope." —GORE VIDAL
___________________________________________________________
“If god lived on earth, people would break his windows!” —a Jewish joke. Seriously!
Monday, Wednesday and Friday...
LET’S START WITH A RELIGIOUS JOKE TODAY
A character in the Shaw play “Man and Superman” says to another, “An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.”
How many uncomfortable believers do you think inhabit this globe who just can’t put down their uncomfortable feelings? I know that the more I judge (the angrier I am) the more harshly I judge others. It’s as if every judgment we make on one another in this global prison becomes just another bar in our own cages.
RELIGION BACKWARD, HATEFUL, DIVISIVE AND OUT OF IT BY
ABOUT TWO MILLENNIA
“LONDON (AP) - Anglican primates agreed Thursday that the U.S. Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada would withdraw from a key body of the global Anglican Communion after failing to overcome internal church disagreements about the election of a gay bishop in the United States and the blessing of same-sex unions there and in Canada.”
What can a sane man say? Religion is outdated if not dead and beyond recall. Religion has no relevance for the modern world and modern people. It increases problems, pain and psychological suffering everywhere it appears. Who but a failed modern being, one who cannot govern his own being, would require such backward teachings as modern religion offers?
Read the whole stinking story here.
A MEMBER OF THE "INLAND NORTHWEST FREETHOUGHT SOCIETY" BROUGHT THIS IN
Darwin probably has it right:
“I am a strong advocate for free thought on all subjects, yet it appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against Christianity & theism produce hardly any effect on the public; & freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds, which follow from the advance of science. It has, therefore, been always my object to avoid writing on religion, & I have confined myself to science. I may, however, have been unduly biased by the pain which it would give some members of my family, if I aided in any way direct attacks on religion” —Charles Darwin
When I think of all the religious debates around the worldly world and my own shadowy history and all the battles over religion, it seems that humankind has grown considerably more intelligent and comfortable despite our efforts to destroy and otherwise regress ourselves back to sticks and stones. The chief improving forces are always science and technology, not that those two engines of progress don't bring along problems of their own. Still those two marvelous rouges just silently and subtly keep spinning our change while the argumentative among us are busy swinging fists of debate, often over glasses of intoxicating beverages. One day we wake up from the knockout punch our interlocutor hit us with in the bar last night, and there's the wheel, next morning penicillin, then rocket travel, computer chips and, now, the Internet. Busy, busy, the good brothers of change in our knock down drag out world. We are in the ring while they are in the Universe.
STILL I GOTTA KEEP PULLING THE MONGREL'S TAIL
James Madison believed that "religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise [sic]."
LET GORE VIDAL HAVE THE LAST WORD THIS POSTING
In the last paragraph of THE GOLDEN AGE, Gore writes of evolution and eternity: "As for the human case, the generations of men come and go and are in eternity no more than bacteria upon a luminous slide, and the fall of a republic or the rise of an empire—so significant to those involved—is not detectable upon the slide even were there an interested eye to behold that steadily proliferating species which would either end in time or, with luck, become something else, since change is the nature of life, and its hope." —GORE VIDAL
___________________________________________________________
“If god lived on earth, people would break his windows!” —a Jewish joke. Seriously!
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