Those who deny evolution, almost always for religious reasons, have no idea how central to biology evolution is. Several of my West Point classmates years after graduate remain enamored of creationism. Since creationism and Tea Party affiliation are highly correlated, maybe in this area we can agree: for some of us the quarter-million-dollar West Point educational tab does represent government waste!
The fallacy of believing literally in a 7,000-year-old planet devoid of evolution is not simply at odds with what carbon-dating, sediment deposits, the fossil record, and our DNA tell us - it is absolutely irreconcilable.
As Herbert Spencer put it best, "Those who cavalierly reject the Theory of Evolution, as not adequately supported by facts, seem quite to forget that their own theory is supported by no facts at all." [1] In other words, there are not two competing theories. There is a comprehensive central theory of evolution supported by a wealth of data, proven in real time (asking anyone who deals with microbial resistance to antibiotics or dog breeding for verification). Juxtaposed against this theory is a fundamentalist minority offended that 99% of their DNA is identical to that of chimpanzees. They can speculate about whether the sun was really created on Day 4 but cannot chant away a far more compelling narrative told by their own genetic code, a code the authors of the bible never dreamed we would be able to read.
At any rate, given the behavior of our species as compared to, dogs, let's say, why should kinship with animals so offend us? If anything, it is the dog who should be offended!
Religious fundamentalists lost the early battles against evolution, which they thought they could win simply by stating evolution was counterintuitive (chimpanzees are clearly not human, end of story) or trumped by scripture (Genesis is as silent on evolution as it is on DNA, nucleotides, proteins, or amino acids). Their fear is understandable if they insist on telling their children the Bible is inerrant and should be believed literally. If their secular biology teacher exposed their children to evolution, it could risk making the biblical narrative seem at best an absurd fairy tale, at worst an outright fabrication.
But our DNA does not seem to care all that much about what people encoded with that DNA scribbled on parchment a relatively trivial (in geological time) couple thousand years ago. Nor does it much care how people encoded with that DNA feel about reconciling truth and Genesis. DNA like so much in our universe simply is regardless of how we might feel about it. In fact, there is no scientific phenomenon I can think whose existence is altered by how we feel about it.
Evolution does what any scientific theory is supposed to: it explains and it predicts. Modern fundamentalists have learned that sneering at such a theory wins few converts. Appeals to scriptural authority have been no more successful, especially since neither the authority nor the interpretation of those ancient texts is universal (even among religiously devout). So to win a scientific battle, religious fundamentalists had to don religious garb, however badly it fit.
We no longer ban outright the teaching of evolution, although we did until at least 1925 (John Scopes, the high school biology teacher of the famous 1925 case, was convicted, after all).
So to evade charges of censorship, fundamentalists created creationism and its in-bred offshoot, intelligent design. Creationism allows fundamentalists to distract us from the fact that they are imposing their religious beliefs on our children.
Why, it isn't a religious belief at all. It's a scientific theory, no more or less valid than evolution. Why not let our children be exposed to each and let them decide?
Speaking the language of science, reasonableness, and consumerism cannot hide the fact that every minute wasted on creationism is a minute stolen from understanding biological science. Put bluntly, creationism is not a viable competing counter-theory to evolution. It is a visceral protest disguised as a science.
100% of those who advance intelligent design are fundamentalists, the vast majority Christians. In contrast, most Christians see no contrast between their faith and science - only fundamentalists seem intent on believing that god wants us to ignore the story the universe is telling us.
Did you know there is a Christian fundamentalist group that even sponsors trips down the Grand Canyon to prove the verity of Genesis (which mentions neither America nor the Grand Canyon much less the hundreds of millions of years of geological time whose story the rocks there tell, a far more compelling and believable story than the childishly inaccurate fable some want us to take literally)? (Which version of Genesis I'm not sure, but perhaps different groups get to choose from Genesis I or II.)
Stephen Jay Gould, who has been in a running battle with fundamentalists all his life, reminds us that "evolution is as well documented as any phenomenon in science, as strongly as the earth revolves around the sun rather than vice versa. In this sense, we can call evolution a 'fact'. (Science does not deal in certainty, so "fact" can only mean a proposition affirmed to such a high degree in the perverse to withhold one's provisional assent.)"[2]
Sigmund Freud, a man I usually don't quote too much because some of his followers have created a pseudo-religious cult of personality around him with all the same reinforcing circular beliefs of any religion, even weighed in on why we resist accepting the truth our genes tell us:
"Humanity has over the course of time had to endure from the hand of science two great outrages upon its naive self-love. The first was when it realized that our earth was not the center of the universe, but only a speck in a world system of a magnitude hardly conceivable... The second was when biological research robbed man of his particular privilege of having been specially created and relegated him to descent from the animal world."
But Mark Twain put it best when he pointed out how ludicrous and self-centered it is to assume that a planet that existed for so long before our species' arrival was created only for that species: "Man has been here 32,000 years. That it took 100 million years to prepare the world for him his proof that that is what it was done for. I suppose it is, I dunno. If the Eiffel Tower were now representing the world's age, the skin of paint on the pinnacle knob at its summit would represent man's share of that age; and anybody would perceive that that skin was what the tower was built for. I reckon they would, I dunno."
Twain's numbers reflected the best guesses of the time, but of course since then, the depth of geological time has been extended dramatically, making his point even stronger. The Earth is probably about 4.6 billion years old and hominids - bipedal primates - have been on it for perhaps 4 million years. Our species maybe as young as a few hundred thousand years, depending on how you count, but even using 4 million, that represents about a tenth of a percentage of the total existence of the planet.
Bill Bryson uses an excellent analogy to illustrate this. If you spread your arms to represent the span of the Earth from left to right, visible life (non-microscopic life) didn't appear until your right wrist (the Cambrian Era) and hominids didn't appear until the very tip of your rightmost middle finger (the difference in lengths of your fingers is greater by many magnitudes than the total time of human existence). All of human history could be erased by simply scraping your outermost fingernail.
It could be our bodies were created for the benefit of the outermost cuticle of the fingernail on one hand. But as Twain would say, "I dunno."
Endnotes
[1] as quoted in Scientific American, March 2005)
[2] - Stephen Jay Gould, Time magazine, 8/23/99.
For a summary of excerpts and articles on evolution I have put together, visit http://docs.google.com/View?id=dfdcpm87_506wrb6xghm.
Thursday, October 21, 2010
Why a Faith-Based Foreign Policy is So Dangerous
When Tea Party candidate Christine O'Donnell recently demonstrated unawareness of the fact that the First Amendment mandates separation of church and state it illustrates how far public discourse has sunk that such a person, long on platitudes about her love of the Constitution in theory but short on any evidence that she has actually read it, could have a real shot at public office. Were it not for the fundamentalism of Palin, who no doubt found the fundamentalism of O'Donnell endearing, would such a candidate be viable?
Religious fanaticism is dangerous precisely because it blinds us to the obvious. It makes the ignorance of an O'Donnell or Bush or Palin forgivable in the eyes of the true believers who, once they are in power, seem to have a dangerous propensity to promote a faith-based foreign policy. The effects of such a policy are lethal.
It's ironic that Jesus was the ultimate pacifist. He even told his followers to put away their weapons when the Romans came to arrest him; he apparently didn't even believe in violence in self-defense which is a more extreme pacifism than I would personally advocate.
So how is it that so many of his believers say Jesus told them to start various and sundry wars throughout the ages? I think they are lying or delusional or both but the point is that overtly religious people can justify the most horrific atrocities in the name of religion which is why it is so divisive and dangerous when it enters the public arena. As Voltaire said, convince people to believe absurdities and you can get them to commit atrocities.
Bush told Chirac (and Chirac told the world) that Bush told him Jesus told him to invade Iraq. Many of Bush's public pronouncements implied or overtly stated that he was acting on behalf of God (a much more self-confident position than Lincoln, who reminded his audiences that the South prayed to the same god and they could not both be right and that this awareness should humble them, not embolden them). He arrogantly answered a debate question about how exactly Jesus provided political and philosophical guidance (a fair question since many people who claim the same thing interpret that guidance in radically different ways) by stating basically if you weren't a member of the Jesus club, you could never understand. This is unacceptable in a democracy; we have a right to know who he was really talking to because it is unlikely an omniscient deity would have told him to seize weapons of mass destruction that did not exist, all at such horrific loss of innocent life.
There are several examples of prominent Army commanders appearing at churches in uniform stating that their god was bigger and badder than "their" god (implying that the Allah of the Islamic faith was different than the Yahweh of the Bible, something many Muslims might take issue with). An American Arms manufacturer inscribed religious sayings (all Christian) on American armaments shipped to Iraq. Evangelical "end-of-times" Christians reflexively support Israel and the war in Iraq (which I still refer to in present tense because a draw down of combat troops does not a war end) because it might usher in the rebuilding and destruction of the Temple and hence the rapture. The United States Air Force Academy had its evangelical Christian scandal. The West's support of Israel, starting before the state was created, is rooted in religious prejudice; Balfour admitted that the declaration bearing his name granting rights to 5% of Palestine that was Jewish at the time (1917) that were not granted to the 95% who were not was based in the fact that as a Protestant he felt a kinship to Jews he did not feel to Muslims. The religious justification of the illegal settlement activity in the West Bank could not be more obvious; a single line in Genesis has been responsible for so much misery. Although Zionism (which began here in Switzerland (in Basel) in the late 19th Century) started as a secular movement led by assimilated European Jews, it has recently become much more overtly religious, and the changing demographics of Israel (with secular Jews having far fewer children on average than the conservative and orthodox) are changing the political landscape.
One can argue for or against the invasion of Iraq or for or against support of the Israeli right wing, but when religion and admitted religious bias is used as a justification for these policies we should find that frightening. Good things have not followed from faith-based foreign or domestic policies in the past. I do not believe there is any empirical evidence that repeatedly stating that you are a believer and everyone else an infidel endows you with any unique understanding of the world. There is plenty of evidence such religiosity may inhibit your understanding of the world since if you believe a deity will guide your hand, you don't need to prepare as hard or at all, do you? if someone will whisper the answers in your ear come test time, you need not read the book or study. And if you're convinced that god chooses goodies and baddies at conception, that some he hates, others he has chosen, most he will punish forever, then you don't have to worry about all those infidels downrange, do you?
I do think Bush's confidence that his morning prayers endowed him with a certain wisdom made him less likely to read such profane, earthly things such as his Presidential Daily Briefs in August, 2001, warning of a likely al Qaeda attempt to hijack airplanes. There is no evidence he actually read these intelligence reports, prepared at great taxpayer expense, and certainly none that he responded to them. The FAA was never put on high alert or even told of the contents, nor were any of the airlines. None of the pilots on 9-11 had that knowledge. The only hijacked plane that was aware of information that Bush could have disseminated was not successfully turned into a cruise missile, most likely as a result of that information.
Afghanistan is admittedly more complicated, but were it not for the religious fervor that created the Taliban, and their decision (based again on religion) to admit and harbor Arab fundamentalists including Osama bin Laden, we would not have troops on the ground there. After all, the Taliban did not attack us on 9-11, al Qaeda did, so the moral justification of our presence in Afghanistan, although infinitely greater than in Iraq, is indirect. Were we truly at war with al Qaeda (which I believe we are) then we should be in Pakistan, but that country is still blocking the flow of supplies into Afghanistan because of outrage over our violation of their sovereignty and our killing of some Pakistani soldiers. At any rate, I don't think invading and occupying countries is a particularly effective means of fighting terrorism (although it is a wonderful strategy for encouraging it, or creating it in the first place - 100% of suicide bombing campaigns are launched in response to military occupation).
You don't fight religious fundamentalism with religious fundamentalism or intolerance with intolerance (well, you can try, and the last decade has shown the results). I think you have to stand up to the religious bullies everywhere and if you don't do it in your own ranks, you will never have moral credibility when pointing the finger in other cultures. But morality aside, religious fanaticism does not work. You can't use prayer beads to find weapons of mass destruction anymore than you can use a divining rod to find water or patterns in the stars to predict the stock market. The fact that many people fervently believe such things does not make them true.
Religious fundamentalism led to the deaths of thousands in lower Manhattan 9 years ago and hundreds of thousands in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine. The people who founded our country would not have been surprised at the lethal consequences of so much unchecked religious fervor which is why they tried to protect us from it by separating it from government. Too bad Christine O'Donnell didn't take the time to read the documents Madison, Jefferson, and Adams worked so hard to hammer out.
So how is it that so many of his believers say Jesus told them to start various and sundry wars throughout the ages? I think they are lying or delusional or both but the point is that overtly religious people can justify the most horrific atrocities in the name of religion which is why it is so divisive and dangerous when it enters the public arena. As Voltaire said, convince people to believe absurdities and you can get them to commit atrocities.
Bush told Chirac (and Chirac told the world) that Bush told him Jesus told him to invade Iraq. Many of Bush's public pronouncements implied or overtly stated that he was acting on behalf of God (a much more self-confident position than Lincoln, who reminded his audiences that the South prayed to the same god and they could not both be right and that this awareness should humble them, not embolden them). He arrogantly answered a debate question about how exactly Jesus provided political and philosophical guidance (a fair question since many people who claim the same thing interpret that guidance in radically different ways) by stating basically if you weren't a member of the Jesus club, you could never understand. This is unacceptable in a democracy; we have a right to know who he was really talking to because it is unlikely an omniscient deity would have told him to seize weapons of mass destruction that did not exist, all at such horrific loss of innocent life.
There are several examples of prominent Army commanders appearing at churches in uniform stating that their god was bigger and badder than "their" god (implying that the Allah of the Islamic faith was different than the Yahweh of the Bible, something many Muslims might take issue with). An American Arms manufacturer inscribed religious sayings (all Christian) on American armaments shipped to Iraq. Evangelical "end-of-times" Christians reflexively support Israel and the war in Iraq (which I still refer to in present tense because a draw down of combat troops does not a war end) because it might usher in the rebuilding and destruction of the Temple and hence the rapture. The United States Air Force Academy had its evangelical Christian scandal. The West's support of Israel, starting before the state was created, is rooted in religious prejudice; Balfour admitted that the declaration bearing his name granting rights to 5% of Palestine that was Jewish at the time (1917) that were not granted to the 95% who were not was based in the fact that as a Protestant he felt a kinship to Jews he did not feel to Muslims. The religious justification of the illegal settlement activity in the West Bank could not be more obvious; a single line in Genesis has been responsible for so much misery. Although Zionism (which began here in Switzerland (in Basel) in the late 19th Century) started as a secular movement led by assimilated European Jews, it has recently become much more overtly religious, and the changing demographics of Israel (with secular Jews having far fewer children on average than the conservative and orthodox) are changing the political landscape.
One can argue for or against the invasion of Iraq or for or against support of the Israeli right wing, but when religion and admitted religious bias is used as a justification for these policies we should find that frightening. Good things have not followed from faith-based foreign or domestic policies in the past. I do not believe there is any empirical evidence that repeatedly stating that you are a believer and everyone else an infidel endows you with any unique understanding of the world. There is plenty of evidence such religiosity may inhibit your understanding of the world since if you believe a deity will guide your hand, you don't need to prepare as hard or at all, do you? if someone will whisper the answers in your ear come test time, you need not read the book or study. And if you're convinced that god chooses goodies and baddies at conception, that some he hates, others he has chosen, most he will punish forever, then you don't have to worry about all those infidels downrange, do you?
I do think Bush's confidence that his morning prayers endowed him with a certain wisdom made him less likely to read such profane, earthly things such as his Presidential Daily Briefs in August, 2001, warning of a likely al Qaeda attempt to hijack airplanes. There is no evidence he actually read these intelligence reports, prepared at great taxpayer expense, and certainly none that he responded to them. The FAA was never put on high alert or even told of the contents, nor were any of the airlines. None of the pilots on 9-11 had that knowledge. The only hijacked plane that was aware of information that Bush could have disseminated was not successfully turned into a cruise missile, most likely as a result of that information.
Afghanistan is admittedly more complicated, but were it not for the religious fervor that created the Taliban, and their decision (based again on religion) to admit and harbor Arab fundamentalists including Osama bin Laden, we would not have troops on the ground there. After all, the Taliban did not attack us on 9-11, al Qaeda did, so the moral justification of our presence in Afghanistan, although infinitely greater than in Iraq, is indirect. Were we truly at war with al Qaeda (which I believe we are) then we should be in Pakistan, but that country is still blocking the flow of supplies into Afghanistan because of outrage over our violation of their sovereignty and our killing of some Pakistani soldiers. At any rate, I don't think invading and occupying countries is a particularly effective means of fighting terrorism (although it is a wonderful strategy for encouraging it, or creating it in the first place - 100% of suicide bombing campaigns are launched in response to military occupation).
You don't fight religious fundamentalism with religious fundamentalism or intolerance with intolerance (well, you can try, and the last decade has shown the results). I think you have to stand up to the religious bullies everywhere and if you don't do it in your own ranks, you will never have moral credibility when pointing the finger in other cultures. But morality aside, religious fanaticism does not work. You can't use prayer beads to find weapons of mass destruction anymore than you can use a divining rod to find water or patterns in the stars to predict the stock market. The fact that many people fervently believe such things does not make them true.
Religious fundamentalism led to the deaths of thousands in lower Manhattan 9 years ago and hundreds of thousands in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine. The people who founded our country would not have been surprised at the lethal consequences of so much unchecked religious fervor which is why they tried to protect us from it by separating it from government. Too bad Christine O'Donnell didn't take the time to read the documents Madison, Jefferson, and Adams worked so hard to hammer out.
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
Most People Are Just Doing What Is In Front of Them: We Need to Make Sure What is In Front of Them Shapes Good Behavior and Discourages Harmful Actions
We teach the medical students and residents that 1-3% of males and about 1% of females are sociopaths, but this number is probably a bit low. I personally think that all of us are capable of doing some pretty horrific things not because we lack empathy but because our understanding of the impact of our actions is far too regional. I remember seeing pictures of the German guards at Auschwitz celebrating Christmas with their smiling families and to me that was most chilling of all, the sheer normalcy of it all, the way we can compartmentalize killing and go home and help our kids with their homework or tuck them into bed.
We can push a button or cast a vote that starts a war because we do not fully imagine the suffering of the human beings downrange. Most people, if confronted with the true horrors of war, would oppose it, which is why most Europeans opposed our invasion of Iraq (13% was the largest minority in support) but a majority of Americans supported it. The difference was coverage and this sense of Otherness. If it was our family accidentally shot up in a minivan approaching a checkpoint on the way to school, most of us would do whatever it takes to stop the war. I still hear decent, otherwise rational people, shrugging their shoulders and saying that it is better to fight terrorists "over there" than to fight them "here." In a nutshell (besides the lunacy of believing there is a Law of Conservation of Terrorism) this summarizes what is wrong with our way of viewing other members of our species. We have empathy in the same way mafia families have empathy for their friends and family. Our task is to broaden that empathy to people we have never met.
In financial matters, most people are trying to keep their jobs and do whatever it takes to meet their quotas, please their boss, generate revenue. No one in private industry has an incentive to see the whole picture. Mortgage brokers, bankers, real estate agents, and speculators are not all evil; they are simply responding to market forces that pay them based on volume of deals done. Everyone sees their little piece of the playing field; there is no effective referee in the game thanks to Bush-era deregulation, so the system can do some pretty strange and destructive things. It can even blow up from time to time.
I do think a handful of people at the top, CEOs who pay themselves hundreds of millions of dollars, are entitled, narcissistic sociopaths, but the vast majority of people in the food chain are just doing what is in front of them. I think our job as progressives is to make sure that what is in front of them - the rewards and punishments that shape and reinforce behavior - encourage more things that are societally beneficial and fewer that are harmful. Creative rules that shape good behavior and gives people a financial reward for doing right is the way to go, such as tax credits to companies whose ratio of CEO pay to median employee compensation stays below some obscene level, or a progressive income tax (what an idea) that makes obscene pay packages not worth the haggling because most of it will get shared with the least among us anyway. Or giving bankers who work out new terms with borrowers who are in trouble a strong financial incentive for doing so.
One thing we don't need is greed-gone-wild, government-off-our-back-ch
We can push a button or cast a vote that starts a war because we do not fully imagine the suffering of the human beings downrange. Most people, if confronted with the true horrors of war, would oppose it, which is why most Europeans opposed our invasion of Iraq (13% was the largest minority in support) but a majority of Americans supported it. The difference was coverage and this sense of Otherness. If it was our family accidentally shot up in a minivan approaching a checkpoint on the way to school, most of us would do whatever it takes to stop the war. I still hear decent, otherwise rational people, shrugging their shoulders and saying that it is better to fight terrorists "over there" than to fight them "here." In a nutshell (besides the lunacy of believing there is a Law of Conservation of Terrorism) this summarizes what is wrong with our way of viewing other members of our species. We have empathy in the same way mafia families have empathy for their friends and family. Our task is to broaden that empathy to people we have never met.
In financial matters, most people are trying to keep their jobs and do whatever it takes to meet their quotas, please their boss, generate revenue. No one in private industry has an incentive to see the whole picture. Mortgage brokers, bankers, real estate agents, and speculators are not all evil; they are simply responding to market forces that pay them based on volume of deals done. Everyone sees their little piece of the playing field; there is no effective referee in the game thanks to Bush-era deregulation, so the system can do some pretty strange and destructive things. It can even blow up from time to time.
I do think a handful of people at the top, CEOs who pay themselves hundreds of millions of dollars, are entitled, narcissistic sociopaths, but the vast majority of people in the food chain are just doing what is in front of them. I think our job as progressives is to make sure that what is in front of them - the rewards and punishments that shape and reinforce behavior - encourage more things that are societally beneficial and fewer that are harmful. Creative rules that shape good behavior and gives people a financial reward for doing right is the way to go, such as tax credits to companies whose ratio of CEO pay to median employee compensation stays below some obscene level, or a progressive income tax (what an idea) that makes obscene pay packages not worth the haggling because most of it will get shared with the least among us anyway. Or giving bankers who work out new terms with borrowers who are in trouble a strong financial incentive for doing so.
One thing we don't need is greed-gone-wild, government-off-our-back-ch
Monday, October 18, 2010
Is Planned Parenthood Racist?
I have supported Planned Parenthood for years and have yet to encounter a racist. I'm sure there are some in their ranks, just as there are in any large organization, but nothing in their literature, philosophy, or life-saving work has ever struck me as racist in fact or intent.
Planned Parenthood does fantastic work keeping government bureaucrats and religious extremists from harming our mothers, sisters, and daughters. It would take an awful lot of "gotcha" statements or secretly recorded phone calls to offset that good.
I know Planned Parenthood has never launched a racist push poll campaign in South Carolina to torpedo a front-running candidate, as George W. Bush's campaign did in 2000.
I know they have never used the "n" word repeatedly and in a degrading manner to a caller as a conservative anti-choice radio host recently did, leading to her firing (but not before she could spit "don't NAACP me!").
I know they never spoke wistfully of all those problems over all those years that we could have avoided had a certain segregationist platform prevailed as Trent Lott remarked a few years ago at Thurmond's birthday party.
I know they never ran a major campaign using the face of an African American male to scare white voters, as Bush's father did with Willy Horton.
I know they never talked about nudge-nudge-wink-wink welfare queens as Ronald catsup-is-a-vegetable Reagan did.
I know they never systematically targeted programs that try to help or are staffed by African Americans, such as Acorn, the NAACP, or a poor Department of Agriculture employee.
I know they never dropped defeatist hints about why universal healthcare could never work in the United States because we have - you know - different demographics.
I know they have never accused our first African American president of being a racist harboring a "deep hatred of white people" as Tea Party darling Glenn Beck recently charged.
If racism were a reason for abandoning an organization and everything it stood for, then surely no one would support the Republican Party or its even more severely bleached offshoot the Tea Party, would they?
Forget for a moment about all these racist words; what about actions? You know, by their fruits you shall know them? How is giving massive tax cuts to the extremely wealthy 1% of this country who are disproportionately white going to help people of color who are overrepresented among the ranks of the poor? More than a quarter of all blacks and a similar percentage of Hispanics are poor; cutting off or defunding services to help the poor (getting government off "our" backs as Palin would call it) disproportionately hurts them as does trying to abort universal healthcare before it is even viable. If someone can name as many Republican-initiated programs that have helped minorities as I can name books Sarah Palin tried to ban from the Wasilla, Alaska, library, then I will buy them a coffee.
One may oppose giving women access to the full range of legal, scientifically validated family planning services for religious reasons, but it is unfair to characterize that access as racist. I do not understand how performing pap smears and cervical cancer screening in poor black neighborhoods is racist, but do understand how well-to-do white evangelicals trying to cut off such services for religious reasons is.
Fox News has been targeting Planned Parenthood almost as vigorously as they have the NAACP. Bill O'Reilly has already incited the murder of one healthcare provider he repeatedly smeared on his show; I am frankly not interested in anything he has to say about an organization he wants so much to silence.
One thing is hopeful about the right wing in this country finally deciding it is shocked, shocked to discover racism in an organization it viscerally dislikes. Now if they could just apply that level of critical inquiry to themselves. Who know? Our discourse as a country would get a lot more civilized and we might actually be able to get things done.
Planned Parenthood does fantastic work keeping government bureaucrats and religious extremists from harming our mothers, sisters, and daughters. It would take an awful lot of "gotcha" statements or secretly recorded phone calls to offset that good.
I know Planned Parenthood has never launched a racist push poll campaign in South Carolina to torpedo a front-running candidate, as George W. Bush's campaign did in 2000.
I know they have never used the "n" word repeatedly and in a degrading manner to a caller as a conservative anti-choice radio host recently did, leading to her firing (but not before she could spit "don't NAACP me!").
I know they never spoke wistfully of all those problems over all those years that we could have avoided had a certain segregationist platform prevailed as Trent Lott remarked a few years ago at Thurmond's birthday party.
I know they never ran a major campaign using the face of an African American male to scare white voters, as Bush's father did with Willy Horton.
I know they never talked about nudge-nudge-wink-wink welfare queens as Ronald catsup-is-a-vegetable Reagan did.
I know they never systematically targeted programs that try to help or are staffed by African Americans, such as Acorn, the NAACP, or a poor Department of Agriculture employee.
I know they never dropped defeatist hints about why universal healthcare could never work in the United States because we have - you know - different demographics.
I know they have never accused our first African American president of being a racist harboring a "deep hatred of white people" as Tea Party darling Glenn Beck recently charged.
If racism were a reason for abandoning an organization and everything it stood for, then surely no one would support the Republican Party or its even more severely bleached offshoot the Tea Party, would they?
Forget for a moment about all these racist words; what about actions? You know, by their fruits you shall know them? How is giving massive tax cuts to the extremely wealthy 1% of this country who are disproportionately white going to help people of color who are overrepresented among the ranks of the poor? More than a quarter of all blacks and a similar percentage of Hispanics are poor; cutting off or defunding services to help the poor (getting government off "our" backs as Palin would call it) disproportionately hurts them as does trying to abort universal healthcare before it is even viable. If someone can name as many Republican-initiated programs that have helped minorities as I can name books Sarah Palin tried to ban from the Wasilla, Alaska, library, then I will buy them a coffee.
One may oppose giving women access to the full range of legal, scientifically validated family planning services for religious reasons, but it is unfair to characterize that access as racist. I do not understand how performing pap smears and cervical cancer screening in poor black neighborhoods is racist, but do understand how well-to-do white evangelicals trying to cut off such services for religious reasons is.
Fox News has been targeting Planned Parenthood almost as vigorously as they have the NAACP. Bill O'Reilly has already incited the murder of one healthcare provider he repeatedly smeared on his show; I am frankly not interested in anything he has to say about an organization he wants so much to silence.
One thing is hopeful about the right wing in this country finally deciding it is shocked, shocked to discover racism in an organization it viscerally dislikes. Now if they could just apply that level of critical inquiry to themselves. Who know? Our discourse as a country would get a lot more civilized and we might actually be able to get things done.
Sunday, October 17, 2010
Must One Be Catholic to Criticize Catholicism?
I do not pretend to be an expert on Catholic law or dogma, but don't have to be to have an educated opinion. I have read and know what was written in the texts on which the church bases its authority and teachings, and believe it is unfair and inherently self-serving to claim that one must be a Catholic to criticize Catholicism anymore than one must be a Marxist to criticize Marx or a psychoanalyst to criticize Freud.
No, I cannot criticize someone's family because they will always know them better until and unless they wade into the public arena in which case we have a right and a duty to examine who they are and what they say and do. Most families do not have paper trails long enough to fill libraries, nor do they pretend to be authorities on all things moral, political, and even scientific. Because of selection bias (those who believe most in these systems will adhere to them) those most critical of a belief system or organization will tend not to join, so relying on insiders (who are also constrained in what they can say for reasons of loyalty or self-preservation within the organization) will not produce valid and balanced criticism.
In Angela's Ashes (Irish Catholic) author Frank McCourt describes his shock at discovering a whole range of great Irish authors like James Joyce - but only after he had moved to America. The reason? Because they were Protestant and his Catholic educators in Ireland did not feel it necessary to include them in the curriculum or even mention them apparently.
My mother is Catholic. My brother is Catholic. All of my siblings were educated at Notre Dame where they received an outstanding Catholic education. I attended the largest Catholic majority college on the East Coast (West Point, believe it or not, although not nominally religious does attract a disproportionate number of Catholics, perhaps because of the discipline aspect). My mother's brother, my father-in-law's brother, and my sister-in-law's uncle are or were all priests. One served a long prison term in China for his religious affiliation. Both of my in laws are Catholic and I respect both of them very much. Were it not for the Jesuits, my father-in-law never would have received an education and been whisked out of China when the communists took over. Two of my favorite novelists (Walker Percy and Graham Greene) were Catholic and Catholic themes featured prominently in their writings.
So I know of what I speak. I personally believe criticism makes us stronger, and we are wise to listen to our critics. To paraphrase another spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, our perceived enemies are our guides. We shut them out at our expense.
I do think the Catholic church as an institution has a difficult history when it comes to tolerating critics, perhaps no more ugly than any large corporate entity, but unlike Exxon-Mobil or the Knights of Columbus, the Catholic Church had the power of life and death over ordinary citizens for a number of centuries and their behavior was anything but pro-life during this period.
No, I cannot criticize someone's family because they will always know them better until and unless they wade into the public arena in which case we have a right and a duty to examine who they are and what they say and do. Most families do not have paper trails long enough to fill libraries, nor do they pretend to be authorities on all things moral, political, and even scientific. Because of selection bias (those who believe most in these systems will adhere to them) those most critical of a belief system or organization will tend not to join, so relying on insiders (who are also constrained in what they can say for reasons of loyalty or self-preservation within the organization) will not produce valid and balanced criticism.
In Angela's Ashes (Irish Catholic) author Frank McCourt describes his shock at discovering a whole range of great Irish authors like James Joyce - but only after he had moved to America. The reason? Because they were Protestant and his Catholic educators in Ireland did not feel it necessary to include them in the curriculum or even mention them apparently.
My mother is Catholic. My brother is Catholic. All of my siblings were educated at Notre Dame where they received an outstanding Catholic education. I attended the largest Catholic majority college on the East Coast (West Point, believe it or not, although not nominally religious does attract a disproportionate number of Catholics, perhaps because of the discipline aspect). My mother's brother, my father-in-law's brother, and my sister-in-law's uncle are or were all priests. One served a long prison term in China for his religious affiliation. Both of my in laws are Catholic and I respect both of them very much. Were it not for the Jesuits, my father-in-law never would have received an education and been whisked out of China when the communists took over. Two of my favorite novelists (Walker Percy and Graham Greene) were Catholic and Catholic themes featured prominently in their writings.
So I know of what I speak. I personally believe criticism makes us stronger, and we are wise to listen to our critics. To paraphrase another spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, our perceived enemies are our guides. We shut them out at our expense.
I do think the Catholic church as an institution has a difficult history when it comes to tolerating critics, perhaps no more ugly than any large corporate entity, but unlike Exxon-Mobil or the Knights of Columbus, the Catholic Church had the power of life and death over ordinary citizens for a number of centuries and their behavior was anything but pro-life during this period.
Thursday, October 14, 2010
We Are Planned Parenthood...
ppaction.org
Birth control matters! Making birth control available at no cost is the single most important step we can take to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies. The time has come make it available at no cost to every woman who wants it...
In an ideal world we would not have to keep fighting for these settled scientific and legal rights anymore than we have to fight for the right to teach our children the Earth revolves about the Sun but that is the world we live in. Please sign to help make sure that the latest in reproductive technology is available to all Americans.
Some who oppose the idea of a woman controlling her reproductive life on religious grounds wrap their orthodoxy in scientific clothing, but it usually does not fit. Some claim oral contraceptives elevate some forms of cancer (which is true in breast cancer, for example, especially among smoking women) but fail to point out that other cancer risks are lowered (such as ovarian and endometrial cancer) . The National Cancer Institute has a good fact sheet on these risks.
The FDA has looked hard at the data for and against OCPs and feels the benefits outweigh the risks. At any rate, the family planning services include a whole panoply of interventions including barrier contraception that most certainly has not been shown to increase any form of cancer but has been shown to decrease HIV, hepatitis, and STD transmission rates, as well as unintended pregnancies (and hence abortion), and deaths.
Some on the religious right are trying to make a case for denial of all family planning services to poor women of all faiths because some women (but mostly men) of one faith would not personally choose to use such services. I usually ask them whether, if the Vatican reversed Humane Vitae, would they be looking for reasons to justify such a denial? And if the Vatican does not reverse itself, is there any scientific evidence that would ever compel them to oppose the Vatican's position?
If not, then they've already made up their minds, so there is really no reason to interject science into what is essentially a religious position.
I do not believe any of us has a right to use the government to impose our religious beliefs, beliefs most certainly not shared by all faiths or even all denominations of Christianity, on all women, especially poor ones who may have nowhere else to turn except publicly funded services. Trying to dress up such a religiously-driven policy in scientific garb misleads women also about the rationale for their denial of care if religious lobbyists and interest groups prevail.
The inappropriateness of using the government to impose our religious beliefs on those who do not share them should be, to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, self-evident.
Why Do Religious Opponents of Stem Cell Research Think Rooting for Its Failure is Humane?
A friend forwarded me a link to a news story regarding a Catholic priest's opposition to an experimental embryonic stem cell treatment to help save a paralyzed patient's life. In the interview, Father Tim Hepburn seemed to imply that he was rooting for the failure of the treatment in order not to encourage it, since he viewed it as immoral.
Sidestepping for a moment the entire issue of when life begins and what obligation if any we have to bring every potential human life into being, this second-guessing of critical decisions involving patient care and scientific research reminds me of the Terri Schiavo media circus. A prominent spokesman at the time for other Christians, now-disgraced Congressman Tom Delay, expressed gratitude for Schiavo's vegetative state: "one thing that God has brought to us is Terri Schiavo, to help elevate the visibility of what is going on in America" and to bring a "biblical world view" to America.
Now this same vocal minority, using similar sloppy logic, opposes a treatment they do not understand of someone who is not their loved one and root (pray?) for its failure. In effect, they are hoping for the prolonged paralysis and suffering of a living person out of fear it may encourage research that threatens potential life. I fail to see how this position is humane or pro-life.
Indeed, it reminds me of the Parable of the Good Samaritan, where the pious of Jesus's day avoided alleviating the suffering of the man before them for abstract, deferred, and highly dubious religious reasons.
I have text-searched the Bible for embryonic stem cells and generated no hits, so am curious as to how such a cruel position can be justified on religious grounds anyway. Applying very broad prohibitions against terminating life cannot with any confidence be applied to all forms of potential life, especially those that could never have been dreamed of in the agrarian, relatively primitive society that created the Bible. I can understand intelligent adults disagreeing about these things, but it is intellectually dishonest to cover one argument in the cloak of religious certainty, certainly not to the level that justifies aborting this newly conceived medical research and treatment before it is fully viable.
If those with no medical or scientific training are confident enough to weigh in, based on what they heard, about the best way to treat patients suffering from spinal cord injuries, why stop there? What, for example, is the Vatican's opinion about the most effective chemotherapeutic agent to use in Stage IV breast cancer? Or which surgical procedure is most appropriate for removing an appendix? Does Father Hepburn prefer external beam or brachytherapy radiation therapy for Stage II prostate cancer?
If those questions sound ridiculously technical and inappropriate for a religious representative to address, then why is it any less inappropriate to assume that one has either the expertise or the moral standing to wade into such a complex field in such a selective way?
Father Hepburn was disingenuous when he claimed that his was not a religious position per se. His religious position seemed the only reason he was being interviewed at all, and so respectfully. I am sure there are many engineers and teachers and philosophy professors who have similar educational backgrounds and as much standing on this issue as Father Hepburn who were not invited for an on-camera interview.
At any rate, the vocal minority opposed to stem cell research IS highly correlated with although not strictly limited to religious affiliation (those who describe themselves as born again are somewhat more likely than those who describe themselves as Catholics to oppose stem cell research).
Nevertheless, 69% of Catholics in a recent Harris poll support stem cell research. This issue, like birth control and Copernican theory (I date myself, but I have a long historical memory), is another where the pronouncements of the hierarchy are out of step with the beliefs and practices of those in the pews who financially support them.
Of course the hierarchy of the Catholic church does not pretend to be a democratic organization in any sense, and certainly it's possible that most Catholics are wrong and the church leadership is right. But over time, overwhelming public opinion and scientific evidence do change church pronouncements.
Overwhelming opposition to the church's 1616 condemnation and excommunication of Galileo and its resultant loss of credibility led the church to reverse its insistence on a geocentric universe and allow Copernican theory, the stem cell research of its time, to be taught a few centuries later.
Church opposition to the rising tide of representative democracy and reflexive support of monarchy by this most traditional of institutions eventually softened. Voting in Italian elections is no longer seen as grounds for excommunication as it was at one perilous point in the late 19th century.
Attitudes towards Jews and women have softened over time to reflect changing cultural mores, and recently a more humane posture toward homosexuality seems to be in the works.
So we can progress and grow and change. I understand that Father Hepburn is in a particularly difficult position that even most of those he represents do not agree with. For all I know, he personally would rather not like the recipient of this stem cell treatment to suffer or die, but he is a loyal soldier and the Vatican has given him his marching orders.
But we are free to follow the dictates of our own conscience and to use our own reason. As Galileo, who remained a devout Catholic all his life, put it best:
Indeed. Substitute biology for astronomy and stem cells for planets and he could have been writing to a modern audience. In many ways, he was.
Sidestepping for a moment the entire issue of when life begins and what obligation if any we have to bring every potential human life into being, this second-guessing of critical decisions involving patient care and scientific research reminds me of the Terri Schiavo media circus. A prominent spokesman at the time for other Christians, now-disgraced Congressman Tom Delay, expressed gratitude for Schiavo's vegetative state: "one thing that God has brought to us is Terri Schiavo, to help elevate the visibility of what is going on in America" and to bring a "biblical world view" to America.
Now this same vocal minority, using similar sloppy logic, opposes a treatment they do not understand of someone who is not their loved one and root (pray?) for its failure. In effect, they are hoping for the prolonged paralysis and suffering of a living person out of fear it may encourage research that threatens potential life. I fail to see how this position is humane or pro-life.
Indeed, it reminds me of the Parable of the Good Samaritan, where the pious of Jesus's day avoided alleviating the suffering of the man before them for abstract, deferred, and highly dubious religious reasons.
I have text-searched the Bible for embryonic stem cells and generated no hits, so am curious as to how such a cruel position can be justified on religious grounds anyway. Applying very broad prohibitions against terminating life cannot with any confidence be applied to all forms of potential life, especially those that could never have been dreamed of in the agrarian, relatively primitive society that created the Bible. I can understand intelligent adults disagreeing about these things, but it is intellectually dishonest to cover one argument in the cloak of religious certainty, certainly not to the level that justifies aborting this newly conceived medical research and treatment before it is fully viable.
If those with no medical or scientific training are confident enough to weigh in, based on what they heard, about the best way to treat patients suffering from spinal cord injuries, why stop there? What, for example, is the Vatican's opinion about the most effective chemotherapeutic agent to use in Stage IV breast cancer? Or which surgical procedure is most appropriate for removing an appendix? Does Father Hepburn prefer external beam or brachytherapy radiation therapy for Stage II prostate cancer?
If those questions sound ridiculously technical and inappropriate for a religious representative to address, then why is it any less inappropriate to assume that one has either the expertise or the moral standing to wade into such a complex field in such a selective way?
Father Hepburn was disingenuous when he claimed that his was not a religious position per se. His religious position seemed the only reason he was being interviewed at all, and so respectfully. I am sure there are many engineers and teachers and philosophy professors who have similar educational backgrounds and as much standing on this issue as Father Hepburn who were not invited for an on-camera interview.
At any rate, the vocal minority opposed to stem cell research IS highly correlated with although not strictly limited to religious affiliation (those who describe themselves as born again are somewhat more likely than those who describe themselves as Catholics to oppose stem cell research).
Nevertheless, 69% of Catholics in a recent Harris poll support stem cell research. This issue, like birth control and Copernican theory (I date myself, but I have a long historical memory), is another where the pronouncements of the hierarchy are out of step with the beliefs and practices of those in the pews who financially support them.
Of course the hierarchy of the Catholic church does not pretend to be a democratic organization in any sense, and certainly it's possible that most Catholics are wrong and the church leadership is right. But over time, overwhelming public opinion and scientific evidence do change church pronouncements.
Overwhelming opposition to the church's 1616 condemnation and excommunication of Galileo and its resultant loss of credibility led the church to reverse its insistence on a geocentric universe and allow Copernican theory, the stem cell research of its time, to be taught a few centuries later.
Church opposition to the rising tide of representative democracy and reflexive support of monarchy by this most traditional of institutions eventually softened. Voting in Italian elections is no longer seen as grounds for excommunication as it was at one perilous point in the late 19th century.
Attitudes towards Jews and women have softened over time to reflect changing cultural mores, and recently a more humane posture toward homosexuality seems to be in the works.
So we can progress and grow and change. I understand that Father Hepburn is in a particularly difficult position that even most of those he represents do not agree with. For all I know, he personally would rather not like the recipient of this stem cell treatment to suffer or die, but he is a loyal soldier and the Vatican has given him his marching orders.
But we are free to follow the dictates of our own conscience and to use our own reason. As Galileo, who remained a devout Catholic all his life, put it best:
- "I do not think it necessary to believe that the same God who gave us our senses, our speech, our intellect, would have put aside the use of these, to teach us instead such things as with our help we could find out for ourselves, particularly in the case of these sciences of which there is not the smallest mention in the Scriptures; and, above all, in astronomy, of which so little notice is taken that the names of none of the planets are mentioned. Surely if the intention of the sacred scribes had been to teach the people astronomy, they would not have passed over the subject so completely."
- - Galileo's Daughter, Dava Sobel, p. 65.
Indeed. Substitute biology for astronomy and stem cells for planets and he could have been writing to a modern audience. In many ways, he was.
With the World Population Growing by 1 Million Every 4 Days, Can We Really Afford to Mindlessly "Be Fruitful and Multiply"?
Since one of the single biggest contributor to climate change, wars, immigration (voluntary or not, legal or not), and human misery in general appears to be overpopulation, can we really afford to do nothing when the human population increases (births minus deaths) by 1 million EVERY 4 DAYS? 90% of those new people are born in developing countries. Be fruitful and multiply made sense in a time when unless you had about 13 children you could not have confidence one would live to pass on your genes to the next generation, but is ecologically suicidal if obeyed literally today. To apply so rigidly a mandate that made sense to the primitive Mediterranean society that wrote it regardless of changes in infant and child mortality implies a level of denseness that I would rather not blame on a deity.
In fact, one could argue that a woman who uses birth control and has 3 children later in life today who are much healthier and better nourished than the 13 her great-grandmother had is actually obeying this mandate, but with much greater efficiency (and much lower loss of maternal (and child) life, something generally ignored by those who advocate high birth rates regardless of consequences). Those 3 modern children are much more likely than their grandparents to survive infancy and have children who in turn reproduce successfully.
Ironically, those most rigidly dictating that we obey this ancient command are themselves most likely to violate it. Most women who use birth control do eventually have children of course, whereas a priest (who keeps his vows) has none at all. Celibacy is a far greater threat to the propagation of our species than birth control (although thankfully far more Catholic women use birth control than Catholic men pursue celibacy (which is posing an enormous logistical and manpower problem for the church)).
Today, the payoff from even a small change in reproductive behavior at the margin can have an enormous, outsized impact on the type of world our children and grandchildren will live in.
Not only do we need to make the full range of family planning services available to all women who want or need them, financing such programs (unlike tax cuts for the wealthy) will more than pay for themselves.
It is ironic that the most Catholic country in the world, the place where Catholicism was created, itself has largely ignored the teachings of the Vatican: Italy's population is flat and by some measures declining slightly. Not such good news for retirees dependent on the income of new workers coming on line, but very good news for anyone paying attention. We can respect religious teachings where appropriate (the press in Italy tends to be rather noncritical of the church) but politely ignore them where they are overstepping their credible authority.
Monday, October 11, 2010
Mankiw Can Afford To Tell the Truth About Taxes. But That Would Make Him Work.
Harvard economics professor and Bush economic advisor Gregory Mankiw in a recent New York Times editorial argues that yes, he could pay more taxes, but at the margin higher tax rates would make him write fewer articles. If the quality of this article was any indication, we can only hope that marginal tax rates revert to the highest possible levels.
The article is full of distortions and outrageous assumptions that a first year accounting student should understand; it is hard to believe that a Harvard professor who as he all wants us to know is highly paid cannot afford to hire someone to fact check his article.
First, he calls the reversion to the tax rates when Bush took office "tax increases advocated by the Obama administration." Perhaps we should have seen this a mile away, but when the Bush administration Mankiew advised sold the tax cuts (advocated in response to a long-vanished surplus) they included an automatic expiration date to keep the price tag down. So to be fair, we should call this reversion of top marginal rates included in the package of tax cuts, the Bush tax hike. Unless of course, President Bush was lying when they he said they were affordable because they were temporary.
Second, he creates the false impression that his current top marginal tax rate is zero. As Donald Cohen, Executive Director on Policy Initiatives points out, Mankiw's top marginal tax rate would increase not by 39.6% but by 2-3.6%, since the comparison has to be with rates today. As an economics professor, Mankiw must know this. The fact that he does yet reports a grossly misleading number is illustrative of those like Mankiw who never let facts get in the way of an opinion, especially when our misunderstanding an issue will personally enrich them (as he admits in the column).
Third, Mankiw states that the 35% corporate income tax rate on the top dollar of net earnings must almost halve his theoretical return to 5.2% from 8% per annum. Wow! This extraordinary legerdemain, along with an assumption that all of this compounding will be taxed at above 20% per year effectively, accounts for the lion's share of the "90%" marginal tax rate he is trying to blame on Obama (67%, to be exact, the difference between an amount compounded at 4% per year for 30 years versus 8%). But companies do not pay anywhere close to 35% taxes on their net earnings anymore than households pay anywhere close to their top marginal tax rates on all of their income. Thanks to generous tax credits and loopholes and aggressive accounting, many companies pay close to nothing in taxes. Those that do pay taxes, pay an increasing proportion of them overseas to governments over which President Obama has no control. At any rate the 35% is only applied to the top marginal dollar, not the entire stream of earnings and there is no evidence it should so dramatically lower returns; the long-term historical return of stocks, with varying rates of corporate taxation over time, as another economic professor, Jeremy Siegel, has carefully calculated is remarkably stable over long time periods - about 7% average after inflation. Assuming 3% inflation, this translates to a 10% nominal return, a far cry from 5.2%. Mankiw also ignores the dynamic impact of higher personal income tax rates on top management; did he consider that a more progressive tax code might also give corporate executives less incentive to write themselves fatter paychecks and more incentive to return marginal dollars to shareholders? The historical record provides no evidence for the neat 1:1 zero-sum trade-off between dollars paid in corporate taxes and dollars returned to shareholders implied by Mankiw.
Fourth, Mankiw claims that after compounding at this lower rate for 30 years, his initial $1,000 of additional income will only compound to $1,700, then will be hit with a massive 42% effective inheritance tax. Has Mankiw not heard of trusts or 529 college savings plans? Is he not aware there is a cadre of underemployed financial advisors who would love to help him set one up? And is he not aware that this tax will not be paid by him - he will be dead after all - but by his heirs, who did nothing to earn it? Since the point of the article is how tax rates impact living workers, it seems unfair to throw in this deferred, theoretical, entirely avoidable tax as an argument to bolster his case. I doubt many people avoid work because their heirs may or may not be taxed on part of the extra money generated decades hence; if so, they are foolish as well as lazy, since no tax rate is 100%.
Mankiw makes a few extraordinary assumptions, compounds them over thirty years, and hopes we don't check those assumptions or his math too closely. He compares the top theoretical amount he could earn if he had to pay no taxes to what he will actually keep in the universe we actually live in. As he quotes Einstein without attribution, the effect of compounding is a "miracle" that allows all sorts of things to grow dramatically, including bad initial assumptions.
The article is full of distortions and outrageous assumptions that a first year accounting student should understand; it is hard to believe that a Harvard professor who as he all wants us to know is highly paid cannot afford to hire someone to fact check his article.
First, he calls the reversion to the tax rates when Bush took office "tax increases advocated by the Obama administration." Perhaps we should have seen this a mile away, but when the Bush administration Mankiew advised sold the tax cuts (advocated in response to a long-vanished surplus) they included an automatic expiration date to keep the price tag down. So to be fair, we should call this reversion of top marginal rates included in the package of tax cuts, the Bush tax hike. Unless of course, President Bush was lying when they he said they were affordable because they were temporary.
Second, he creates the false impression that his current top marginal tax rate is zero. As Donald Cohen, Executive Director on Policy Initiatives points out, Mankiw's top marginal tax rate would increase not by 39.6% but by 2-3.6%, since the comparison has to be with rates today. As an economics professor, Mankiw must know this. The fact that he does yet reports a grossly misleading number is illustrative of those like Mankiw who never let facts get in the way of an opinion, especially when our misunderstanding an issue will personally enrich them (as he admits in the column).
Third, Mankiw states that the 35% corporate income tax rate on the top dollar of net earnings must almost halve his theoretical return to 5.2% from 8% per annum. Wow! This extraordinary legerdemain, along with an assumption that all of this compounding will be taxed at above 20% per year effectively, accounts for the lion's share of the "90%" marginal tax rate he is trying to blame on Obama (67%, to be exact, the difference between an amount compounded at 4% per year for 30 years versus 8%). But companies do not pay anywhere close to 35% taxes on their net earnings anymore than households pay anywhere close to their top marginal tax rates on all of their income. Thanks to generous tax credits and loopholes and aggressive accounting, many companies pay close to nothing in taxes. Those that do pay taxes, pay an increasing proportion of them overseas to governments over which President Obama has no control. At any rate the 35% is only applied to the top marginal dollar, not the entire stream of earnings and there is no evidence it should so dramatically lower returns; the long-term historical return of stocks, with varying rates of corporate taxation over time, as another economic professor, Jeremy Siegel, has carefully calculated is remarkably stable over long time periods - about 7% average after inflation. Assuming 3% inflation, this translates to a 10% nominal return, a far cry from 5.2%. Mankiw also ignores the dynamic impact of higher personal income tax rates on top management; did he consider that a more progressive tax code might also give corporate executives less incentive to write themselves fatter paychecks and more incentive to return marginal dollars to shareholders? The historical record provides no evidence for the neat 1:1 zero-sum trade-off between dollars paid in corporate taxes and dollars returned to shareholders implied by Mankiw.
Fourth, Mankiw claims that after compounding at this lower rate for 30 years, his initial $1,000 of additional income will only compound to $1,700, then will be hit with a massive 42% effective inheritance tax. Has Mankiw not heard of trusts or 529 college savings plans? Is he not aware there is a cadre of underemployed financial advisors who would love to help him set one up? And is he not aware that this tax will not be paid by him - he will be dead after all - but by his heirs, who did nothing to earn it? Since the point of the article is how tax rates impact living workers, it seems unfair to throw in this deferred, theoretical, entirely avoidable tax as an argument to bolster his case. I doubt many people avoid work because their heirs may or may not be taxed on part of the extra money generated decades hence; if so, they are foolish as well as lazy, since no tax rate is 100%.
Mankiw makes a few extraordinary assumptions, compounds them over thirty years, and hopes we don't check those assumptions or his math too closely. He compares the top theoretical amount he could earn if he had to pay no taxes to what he will actually keep in the universe we actually live in. As he quotes Einstein without attribution, the effect of compounding is a "miracle" that allows all sorts of things to grow dramatically, including bad initial assumptions.
Floods Last Fall Were 10,000 Year Rain Event - Atlanta News Story - WGCL Atlanta
Floods Last Fall Were 10,000 Year Rain Event - Atlanta News Story - WGCL Atlanta
It sounds as though we missed an incredible, once-every-100-centuries event!
Sunday, October 10, 2010
Why Can't Our Children Enjoy the Same Access to Healthcare as Our Pets?
My sister recently remarked that her dog, Bud, was a cancer survivor who benefited from chemotherapy and is now approaching his 15th birthday. She commented that we can learn much from his example, and I must agree.
1.) Just because a family member is not economically productive or employed does not mean he does not deserve access to healthcare.
2.) The idea that our species is always superior to and distinct from our mammalian close relatives is arrogant and cruel. Bud would probably be the last one out of the house if there were a fire and he wouldn't leave until all of the humans were safe. Many NIMBY (Not in My Back Yard) hominids would likely leap out the nearest window then worry about everyone else only after first saving their own skin (a doctrine called "personal responsibility" by the right wing spin-meisters).
3.) Thank God we threw off the shackles of religious fundamentalism that forbade dissecting the human body and developing the medical science that ended up saving Bud's life a few centuries later. If we don't let them get in the way of stem cell research today perhaps someone a few years from now will be able to keep a member of their family, canine or human, alive who otherwise would have died.
4.) Thank God Bud had access to healthcare and previously forbidden technology. Now wouldn't it be great if we lived in a country where poor children had as much right to life-saving treatment as a dog in a middle class home? And wouldn't it be great if Republicans could understand that children should have as much of a right to life following birth as fetuses and frozen embryos do prenatally?
5.) Bud is good, compassionate, and kind because he is, not because he mumbles certain words in an incense-filled temple in just the right way. We judge him for who he is, not for some metaphysical filter applied arbitrarily (although he may be a Muslim dog, or Hindu, who knows?) We don't expect Bud to find Jesus or worship Yahweh before winning our approval.
6.) Keeping science out of schools has real world consequences. Had the scientists who developed the life-saving technology that allowed Bud to survive his cancer been taught to memorize ancient texts instead of the amino acid sequence of certain key proteins, Bud would be dead.
7.) Bud is living proof that all that the federal government produces is not evil. The majority of medical treatments are developed because of scientific breakthroughs funded with federal dollars, either directly through NIH or NIMH or indirectly through federal support for research on universities and in private industry. Even in for-profit firms that enjoy charging Americans 20-25% more for the same medications others enjoy at a discount, their employees are largely government-trained in public schools or in private schools made possible through generous federally guaranteed student loans and federal grants. All of the medications go through a rigorous federal screening process before they are allowed to be marketed and can be yanked from the market by the federal government if they are found to be dangerous or ineffective. So Bud is very much alive today thanks to the federal government that Sarah Palin would like to get off [his?] back.
2.) The idea that our species is always superior to and distinct from our mammalian close relatives is arrogant and cruel. Bud would probably be the last one out of the house if there were a fire and he wouldn't leave until all of the humans were safe. Many NIMBY (Not in My Back Yard) hominids would likely leap out the nearest window then worry about everyone else only after first saving their own skin (a doctrine called "personal responsibility" by the right wing spin-meisters).
3.) Thank God we threw off the shackles of religious fundamentalism that forbade dissecting the human body and developing the medical science that ended up saving Bud's life a few centuries later. If we don't let them get in the way of stem cell research today perhaps someone a few years from now will be able to keep a member of their family, canine or human, alive who otherwise would have died.
4.) Thank God Bud had access to healthcare and previously forbidden technology. Now wouldn't it be great if we lived in a country where poor children had as much right to life-saving treatment as a dog in a middle class home? And wouldn't it be great if Republicans could understand that children should have as much of a right to life following birth as fetuses and frozen embryos do prenatally?
5.) Bud is good, compassionate, and kind because he is, not because he mumbles certain words in an incense-filled temple in just the right way. We judge him for who he is, not for some metaphysical filter applied arbitrarily (although he may be a Muslim dog, or Hindu, who knows?) We don't expect Bud to find Jesus or worship Yahweh before winning our approval.
6.) Keeping science out of schools has real world consequences. Had the scientists who developed the life-saving technology that allowed Bud to survive his cancer been taught to memorize ancient texts instead of the amino acid sequence of certain key proteins, Bud would be dead.
7.) Bud is living proof that all that the federal government produces is not evil. The majority of medical treatments are developed because of scientific breakthroughs funded with federal dollars, either directly through NIH or NIMH or indirectly through federal support for research on universities and in private industry. Even in for-profit firms that enjoy charging Americans 20-25% more for the same medications others enjoy at a discount, their employees are largely government-trained in public schools or in private schools made possible through generous federally guaranteed student loans and federal grants. All of the medications go through a rigorous federal screening process before they are allowed to be marketed and can be yanked from the market by the federal government if they are found to be dangerous or ineffective. So Bud is very much alive today thanks to the federal government that Sarah Palin would like to get off [his?] back.
We can learn a lot more from a dog than from Sarah Palin's blather about personal responsibility and the evils of federal encroachment on the freedom of citizens to free ride. Bud reminds us that real lives are at stake. 45,000 Americans a year under 65 according to a recent Harvard study are not as fortunate as Bud: they died for want of health insurance. Is it really so outrageous to demand our children have the same access to healthcare as your dog?
Saturday, October 9, 2010
How Religions Might Have Started: The Faith of Fred
Thanatophobia has a strong evolutionary basis; of course we are wired with an intense dread of our own demise and an inability to imagine a world without that entity we call "I" (although Mark Twain quipped that such a world without him existed for all of time before he was born so why should it bother him if that state returned following his death?). Combining an intense dread of death with knowledge of death's inevitability has created the existentialist crisis that peddlers of religious explanations, especially of the metaphysical variety, have preyed on. Imagine 100 people scared and trying to figure out how to console themselves with their mortality. 99 admit that they have no idea about what happens after death since no one has gone there and returned. Maybe one guy, let's call him Fred, says quite loudly and angrily that he has a vision that they are all going to eternal bliss - all they have to do is follow him. In fact, he has a book he just discovered, an ancient text that promises such a reward, and punishment for those who do not believe.
Our brains are drawn to charismatic certainty, even ideas that are almost certainly wrong. Honest equivocation seems weak, flip-flopping. Fred does not sound weak. He seems to be sure of himself. Maybe he is on to something.
So perhaps half in that first generation join the new Religion of Fred (what do they have to lose?) and spend their lives consoled with the idea that they have tapped into a way to dodge death (only their bodies will seem to die - their spirits will live forever). The problem is those other 50 who keep bringing up those pesky doubts. If they could just find some way to silence them.
Then something bad happens to this group, perhaps a drought or a flood. The Followers of Fred pounce on this as proof that if everyone followed the new faith, this never would have happened. Fred Followers sacrifice a couple of free thinkers in an imaginatively horrific way (after all they are acting for God who hates people do doubt), burning them alive or drowning them while everyone, including their family members are forced to watch. Following the execution, people are asked if they would like to join the Faith of Fred.
What do you know? Membership goes through the roof. Now those who have not done the reasonable thing and join to save their own hides are seen as obstinate, even dangerous. They are ostracized by Fred's Faith, denied jobs, told they can't hold property, and occasionally rounded up and executed or tortured. But they still do not break, not all of them anyway.
After many generations of this, you will see what you see now: one dominant, loudly confident religion with a long and bloody history of suppressing all dissidents. But since the ashes of those who resisted have long since cooled, the victims mostly nameless and forgotten, the great-great-great grandchildren of those who mouthed words they did not really believe to avoid the pyre or the gallows forgot or were never informed of the circumstances of their ancestors' renunciation of their faith. Like Marilyn Albright, who discovered her family was Jewish but had converted to Christianity to avoid persecution, they live blissfully unaware of the torment the Faith of Fred has caused and the alternate belief systems (including none at all) that Fred snuffed out. They light candles, sing songs, hold hands, and get together for special holidays whose non-Fred origins are politely forgotten.
With the passage of time, the Word of Fred becomes enshrouded in a misty fog that modern adherents say excuses its obvious logical and moral lapses. Maybe Fred made some statements about things he never thought anyone would be able to test, and when those statements are proven to be not just false but patently absurd (such as that the Earth is the center of the universe, flat, and only 7,000 years sold), the error is forgiven, forgotten, or politely ignored.
So asking people to renounce Fred outright seems too much. Let them keep their softer, gentler Fred, just as long as we all remember that we can never rely on the Teachings of Fred to shape foreign policy, train surgeons, or decide the number and timing of our children.
Why A Frontal Assault on Fundamentalism Will Probably Be Less Successful than Just Continuing to Marginalize Them
I am trying to be kind; in an ideal world we would challenge every assertion and throw out those that cannot be proven or disproven along with those that are patently false, keeping only what we actually know. We did this in medicine about a century ago, throwing out bleeding and purgatives and tinctures of opiate and creating a much thinner compendium of evidence-based treatments on which we have building since then. When Semmelweiss, an Austrian physician, pointed out his colleagues were killing their patients by not washing their hands, he was dismissed as a quack - tradition dictated that he was wrong even if carefully controlled trials showed he was right. Which do you think prevailed at the time? Even in medicine (perhaps particularly in medicine) mindless adherence to tradition trumps truth but for the past couple centuries at least, truth has been winning most rounds.
It seems to me that people are wired in such a way that most of them cannot live in a world in which they do not have some sense of connection to some force or power beyond themselves. Religious traditions, even ones that are patently wrong about some matters and absurdly so about others, give a sense of comfort that makes it very hard for its followers to test them critically. Since most have been lied to that their religion has a monopoly on truth or faith and that putting on other faith glasses will only make the world appear black, the impulse to just keep doing what mom and dad did, passing this relatively unexamined package of beliefs and moral dictates onto our children is made only stronger.
In an ideal world, we would all be rational, compassionate, and fearlessly self-critical, but we don't live in that world and perhaps never will (although 150 years ago, it would have been hard to imagine a world without de jure slavery and we got there). Religion seems to be dying a natural death as people evolve away from its less useful teachings - slavery and stoning of women come to mind, along with circumcision and absurd dietary restrictions (avoidance of rabbit and pork) come to mind - and realize the world does not end as Leviticus intoned it would.
It was while under attack, the Catholic church launched the Crusades and the Inquisition. Fearing for its life, Protestant faiths in the New World saw witches behind every tree. But left alone, these faiths mellowed out and became marginalized. We no longer burn people alive in the public square not only because brave men and women of conscience stood up to the religious bullies and hypocrites of their time (I number Jesus as one of those men of conscience) but because men and women who had jobs and families and real problems to solve slowly woke up to the idea that the teachings of a group of unelected men were not very helpful in running a government or guiding scientific research. We can even celebrate Christmas in Massachusetts, something that you could have been fined for (Christmas is not mentioned in the Bible) until the early 19th century, thanks to the quiet marginalization of the religious extremists who tried to create a theocracy but ended up founding a much more pluralistic and diverse place than they ever imagined.
Osama bin Laden and Jerry Falwell were both responding to the same perceived threat: a modernizing world that was largely marginalizing them and making them appear increasingly absurd and anachronistic. The religious conservatives who embraced monarchy over Republican democracy, then fascism over socialism, then more restrictive, gender-based suffrage over universal suffrage and the anti-Biblical notion that a woman's testimony should count as much as man's in court, for example, have been fighting a rear guard action for the past 200 years. The shrinking territory and now only titular power of the Vatican in an Italy that is nominally Catholic but largely ignores the teachings of Pope (Italy now enjoys a negative population growth thanks to its embrace of family planning practices condemned by the Church) is emblematic of this erosion. American Catholics are slightly more likely than their non-Catholic counterparts to get an abortion, and a majority use and believe in science-based contraception.
Yes, the religious fundamentalists of the Abrahamic faiths can be dangerous at times but I doubt many women will relinquish the right to vote, nor will we give our local religious leaders the power to break a perceived nonbeliever on the rack anytime soon.
What we have to do is continue to work within the framework of these traditions, emphasizing those parts that are good (and many are) while marginalizing or ignoring those parts that are morally and logically offensive. Yes, we have a Disneyfied view of Jesus and certainly of the bloody jihads and genocides purportedly condoned by Yahweh in the Old Testament. So we can remind people that the idea of trumpets causing walls to collapse is as ridiculous as the idea that god advocates genocide and the slaughter of innocent animals (the Battle of Jericho, if it can be called a battle, should be remembered with the same horror that we think of the much less bloody "cleansing" of the Warsaw Ghetto, not made into the stuff of children's songs).
Maybe one day someone will do for the entire Bible what Jefferson did for the New Testament and excise all those parts that are almost certainly false or that do not have any moral instruction anyway (memorizing a long list of names of descendants of David is about as helpful in raising my children or deciding optimal tax rates as memorizing the cast of Gilligan's Island). It would be a thinner, better book, perhaps with an appendix apologizing for all those killed in its name and all those murdered for stating what most of us agree to be not just true, but trite: that it was written by angry, vengeful, occasionally murderous men who wanted us to believe that they were created in the image of an equally angry, vengeful and occasionally murderous god.
It seems to me that people are wired in such a way that most of them cannot live in a world in which they do not have some sense of connection to some force or power beyond themselves. Religious traditions, even ones that are patently wrong about some matters and absurdly so about others, give a sense of comfort that makes it very hard for its followers to test them critically. Since most have been lied to that their religion has a monopoly on truth or faith and that putting on other faith glasses will only make the world appear black, the impulse to just keep doing what mom and dad did, passing this relatively unexamined package of beliefs and moral dictates onto our children is made only stronger.
In an ideal world, we would all be rational, compassionate, and fearlessly self-critical, but we don't live in that world and perhaps never will (although 150 years ago, it would have been hard to imagine a world without de jure slavery and we got there). Religion seems to be dying a natural death as people evolve away from its less useful teachings - slavery and stoning of women come to mind, along with circumcision and absurd dietary restrictions (avoidance of rabbit and pork) come to mind - and realize the world does not end as Leviticus intoned it would.
It was while under attack, the Catholic church launched the Crusades and the Inquisition. Fearing for its life, Protestant faiths in the New World saw witches behind every tree. But left alone, these faiths mellowed out and became marginalized. We no longer burn people alive in the public square not only because brave men and women of conscience stood up to the religious bullies and hypocrites of their time (I number Jesus as one of those men of conscience) but because men and women who had jobs and families and real problems to solve slowly woke up to the idea that the teachings of a group of unelected men were not very helpful in running a government or guiding scientific research. We can even celebrate Christmas in Massachusetts, something that you could have been fined for (Christmas is not mentioned in the Bible) until the early 19th century, thanks to the quiet marginalization of the religious extremists who tried to create a theocracy but ended up founding a much more pluralistic and diverse place than they ever imagined.
Osama bin Laden and Jerry Falwell were both responding to the same perceived threat: a modernizing world that was largely marginalizing them and making them appear increasingly absurd and anachronistic. The religious conservatives who embraced monarchy over Republican democracy, then fascism over socialism, then more restrictive, gender-based suffrage over universal suffrage and the anti-Biblical notion that a woman's testimony should count as much as man's in court, for example, have been fighting a rear guard action for the past 200 years. The shrinking territory and now only titular power of the Vatican in an Italy that is nominally Catholic but largely ignores the teachings of Pope (Italy now enjoys a negative population growth thanks to its embrace of family planning practices condemned by the Church) is emblematic of this erosion. American Catholics are slightly more likely than their non-Catholic counterparts to get an abortion, and a majority use and believe in science-based contraception.
Yes, the religious fundamentalists of the Abrahamic faiths can be dangerous at times but I doubt many women will relinquish the right to vote, nor will we give our local religious leaders the power to break a perceived nonbeliever on the rack anytime soon.
What we have to do is continue to work within the framework of these traditions, emphasizing those parts that are good (and many are) while marginalizing or ignoring those parts that are morally and logically offensive. Yes, we have a Disneyfied view of Jesus and certainly of the bloody jihads and genocides purportedly condoned by Yahweh in the Old Testament. So we can remind people that the idea of trumpets causing walls to collapse is as ridiculous as the idea that god advocates genocide and the slaughter of innocent animals (the Battle of Jericho, if it can be called a battle, should be remembered with the same horror that we think of the much less bloody "cleansing" of the Warsaw Ghetto, not made into the stuff of children's songs).
Maybe one day someone will do for the entire Bible what Jefferson did for the New Testament and excise all those parts that are almost certainly false or that do not have any moral instruction anyway (memorizing a long list of names of descendants of David is about as helpful in raising my children or deciding optimal tax rates as memorizing the cast of Gilligan's Island). It would be a thinner, better book, perhaps with an appendix apologizing for all those killed in its name and all those murdered for stating what most of us agree to be not just true, but trite: that it was written by angry, vengeful, occasionally murderous men who wanted us to believe that they were created in the image of an equally angry, vengeful and occasionally murderous god.
Thursday, October 7, 2010
"I Like Your Christ. I Do Not Like Your Christians. So Unlike Your Christ."
To My Fundamentalist Friends:
Labeling those things you think are true as "faith" (and therefore good, just, and above reproach) and any variation of those things as "nothing" (and therefore false, meriting eternal torture) is not likely to win many converts to your cause (which you, as a Christian, have an obligation to do).
I hope one day that telling other adults they are going to hell for what they believe will be seen as offensive, odious, and primitive as advocating slavery or the stoning of adulteresses. The fact that all 3 doctrines have some support in some parts of the Bible does not mean our ethics and morality cannot evolve beyond the narrow exclusivity and tribalism of the agrarian Mediterranean society out of which these belief systems developed.
Telling someone you believe something because your conscience dictates it, your parents or community taught it to you, or you discovered it through your own personal journey of exploration and study is beyond reproach. Telling everyone else who has not come to the same conclusion as you (even if we agree about many things) they are to be punished forever and ever (and that you find that punishment just) is just plain verbal bullying and I have a habit of standing up to bullies and calling them out.
Taunting people with your goodness and their wickedness is many things, but I doubt it would jive much with the message of compassion and forgiveness taught by a certain Jewish day laborer over whose divinity, you, I, and several billion of our fellow planetary citizens disagree.
When Jesus was asked how to pray, it was a simple prayer that didn't involve hell, but did involve a request to "forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us."
He never said Jews are going to hell, as you have repeatedly, which would have been some trick since he and all of his followers were Jewish.
He didn't say to taunt your enemies, but to forgive them, to treat them as you would a friend.
He didn't say to pummel your enemies with threats of hell (or stones) but not to throw stones unless you yourself are without sin. (When the alleged adulteress in question found Jesus had saved her life from the Biblically sanctioned horror she otherwise would have suffered, he didn't say anything about fire and brimstone. He told her to go and not sin again.)
Maybe I'm out of line and you are indeed without sin. For all I know, you're right, and those of us who disagree with you are as good as bacon, but if so there is nothing any of us can really do about it, since I cannot feign belief in a metaphysical reality anymore than you can feign tolerance for those who do not share your belief. So reminding us all that we are going to hell is a bit like telling chronic smokers about the horrors of emphysema that await them. It's just not very nice. Not very Christian.
I will close with a quotation from a wonderful human being whom you believe is suffering eternally right now, someone who nevertheless had far more moral courage and simple goodness than any of us. "I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. So unlike your Christ."
- Gandhi
Labeling those things you think are true as "faith" (and therefore good, just, and above reproach) and any variation of those things as "nothing" (and therefore false, meriting eternal torture) is not likely to win many converts to your cause (which you, as a Christian, have an obligation to do).
I hope one day that telling other adults they are going to hell for what they believe will be seen as offensive, odious, and primitive as advocating slavery or the stoning of adulteresses. The fact that all 3 doctrines have some support in some parts of the Bible does not mean our ethics and morality cannot evolve beyond the narrow exclusivity and tribalism of the agrarian Mediterranean society out of which these belief systems developed.
Telling someone you believe something because your conscience dictates it, your parents or community taught it to you, or you discovered it through your own personal journey of exploration and study is beyond reproach. Telling everyone else who has not come to the same conclusion as you (even if we agree about many things) they are to be punished forever and ever (and that you find that punishment just) is just plain verbal bullying and I have a habit of standing up to bullies and calling them out.
Taunting people with your goodness and their wickedness is many things, but I doubt it would jive much with the message of compassion and forgiveness taught by a certain Jewish day laborer over whose divinity, you, I, and several billion of our fellow planetary citizens disagree.
When Jesus was asked how to pray, it was a simple prayer that didn't involve hell, but did involve a request to "forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us."
He never said Jews are going to hell, as you have repeatedly, which would have been some trick since he and all of his followers were Jewish.
He didn't say to taunt your enemies, but to forgive them, to treat them as you would a friend.
He didn't say to pummel your enemies with threats of hell (or stones) but not to throw stones unless you yourself are without sin. (When the alleged adulteress in question found Jesus had saved her life from the Biblically sanctioned horror she otherwise would have suffered, he didn't say anything about fire and brimstone. He told her to go and not sin again.)
Maybe I'm out of line and you are indeed without sin. For all I know, you're right, and those of us who disagree with you are as good as bacon, but if so there is nothing any of us can really do about it, since I cannot feign belief in a metaphysical reality anymore than you can feign tolerance for those who do not share your belief. So reminding us all that we are going to hell is a bit like telling chronic smokers about the horrors of emphysema that await them. It's just not very nice. Not very Christian.
I will close with a quotation from a wonderful human being whom you believe is suffering eternally right now, someone who nevertheless had far more moral courage and simple goodness than any of us. "I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. So unlike your Christ."
- Gandhi
Monday, October 4, 2010
Why Those of Us Who Do Not Claim a Monopoly on God May Have Greater Faith Than Those Who Do
"By their fruits you shall know them." Unlike Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, or Glenn Beck, I have no way of measuring anyone else's faith, but I do know a thing or two fruit inspection.
I have faith that whoever is in charge of this universe has greater wisdom and a larger sense of justice than those who claim so loudly to be his only followers.
I do not believe god makes junk or gives us reason and a sense of wonder and a strong sense of right or wrong only to have it count for nothing if we don't answer a single historical trivia question to his pleasing. More importantly, those who wrote the book you cited (but perhaps have not gotten around to reading) do not state this either, certainly not with the clarity you would like it to.
I find the idea of hell offensive, intellectually and morally, and oh-so-conveniently unprovable. Its invention and propagation are traceable to declining church or temple attendance by a rightly skeptical audience who wanted to explore more generous and compassionate faith traditions or none at all. It may exist but so are a thousand dancing virgins or blissful oblivion or a very long game of Tetris.
I don't know and either does anyone else. We may believe it, we may even want it, but we cannot know it in the sense that non-psychotic people use the term.
If I had to tally all of the religions that believe all the other religions are going to hell then the resulting list would probably be longer than one of the lineages from David to Joseph (either one, take your pick). From the suppression of the Aryan doctrine** (forever after known as the Arian heresy) in 325 to the the mutual "I excommunicated you first!" tit for tat of the Great Schism to the pointless religious-fueled cruelty in Northern Ireland, this game of mutual condemnation only seems to end when there is no one left to kill, or people suddenly wake up to the idea that midnight bowling is at least as entertaining as Midnight Mass.
I have faith that whoever is in charge of this universe has greater wisdom and a larger sense of justice than those who claim so loudly to be his only followers.
I do not believe god makes junk or gives us reason and a sense of wonder and a strong sense of right or wrong only to have it count for nothing if we don't answer a single historical trivia question to his pleasing. More importantly, those who wrote the book you cited (but perhaps have not gotten around to reading) do not state this either, certainly not with the clarity you would like it to.
I find the idea of hell offensive, intellectually and morally, and oh-so-conveniently unprovable. Its invention and propagation are traceable to declining church or temple attendance by a rightly skeptical audience who wanted to explore more generous and compassionate faith traditions or none at all. It may exist but so are a thousand dancing virgins or blissful oblivion or a very long game of Tetris.
I don't know and either does anyone else. We may believe it, we may even want it, but we cannot know it in the sense that non-psychotic people use the term.
If I had to tally all of the religions that believe all the other religions are going to hell then the resulting list would probably be longer than one of the lineages from David to Joseph (either one, take your pick). From the suppression of the Aryan doctrine** (forever after known as the Arian heresy) in 325 to the the mutual "I excommunicated you first!" tit for tat of the Great Schism to the pointless religious-fueled cruelty in Northern Ireland, this game of mutual condemnation only seems to end when there is no one left to kill, or people suddenly wake up to the idea that midnight bowling is at least as entertaining as Midnight Mass.
If the divinity of Jesus is so painfully self-evident that its questioning merits eternal punishment, as some fundamentalist Christians insist, why - fully 3 centuries after the birth of Jesus, did half of his followers not believe in it, and why did it require a decree by the Nicean Council in 325 to settle the matter (by fiat, not argument or persuasion, and mainly for political reasons - in an attempt, ultimately unsuccessful, since the Western half of the Roman Empire was to collapse a few decades later)? Why did so many who read the original Greek texts, such as Isaac Newton come to the conclusion Jesus was not divine?
Those who are confronted with textual counter-evidence from the book they like to thump so much more than read will sometimes counter that unless you first have decided to believe what you are going to read in the Bible, you will not really understand it. That is a strange, circular observation that does not apply to any work of literature or textbook. Even granting that reading a text with a certain spirit of generosity may make you more likely to overlook the glaringly inaccurate or just plain weird parts, it is intellectually dishonest to claim that only those predisposed to believe this of all texts claiming to be sacred and vying for our attention have faith.
A child who believes in Santa Claus has a certain form of faith; one who realizes it was his father dressing up all along, after overcoming the initial shock, is now free to have a much more honest and fleshed-out perspective of the world, his parents, and personal responsibility. He now must do right not because someone can magically read his thoughts and bring him presents if he is good, but because doing right is the right thing to do. There is no more evidence that those who do not believe in god suddenly go on killing sprees, freed from the inhibitions of a punitive father in the sky, anymore than those who have such a fearful vision of an all-knowing, all-powerful, judging god are any less likely to start wars, launch crusades, or turn planes into cruise missiles.
Is Homophobia a Core Teaching of Christianity?
With the tragic death of Rutgers student Tyler Clementi exemplifying an ugly recent homophobic trend, the central question emerges as to
whether one can be a good Christian without condemning homosexual behavior (along with the ingestion of shellfish, wearing clothes of a mixed fiber (polyester-cotton blends come to mind), rotating crops, and allowing menstruating women to enter a church or temple (which is apparently offensive to the Lord)). Most of us find homophobia abhorrent, just as we find Biblically-sanctioned slavery and stoning of adulteresses abhorrent, but there is no evidence that Jesus explicitly condemned the passages in Leviticus used to condemn homosexuality. However, there is one enormous piece of evidence that Jesus was no homophobe: he never once mentioned homosexuality, although he had a lot to say about other specific "transgressions" including adultery.Thank Zeus that most modern Christians have abandoned these Leviticus injunctions but not because of anything Jesus said. Rather, times have evolved and so have our mores. Most importantly, Western governments are now secular, so the church no longer has the power of life and death over citizens as it did as recently as the 1700s.
Although the potential universal appeal of Jesus's message has been seized upon to - among other things - justify its spread to Gentiles, Jesus was a Jew preaching to an all-Jewish audience about how to be a better Jew. The lost sheep he had come to save were Jews who were not properly following the mitzvahs (collected in what Christians have since come to call the Old Testament, although he would have found such a name strange, since of course there was no New Testament that had been written, nor would one be written until decades after he died).
The idea that he had come to replace the law would have been news to him; in Matthew, he told his followers that only if they followed the laws with perfection, every one of them, would they get into the Kingdom of Heaven, which he spent a great deal of time and energy describing:
The idea that he had come to replace the law would have been news to him; in Matthew, he told his followers that only if they followed the laws with perfection, every one of them, would they get into the Kingdom of Heaven, which he spent a great deal of time and energy describing:
- 5:17 Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.
- 5:18 For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.
- 5:19 Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven: but whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.
- 5:20 For I say unto you, That except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven.
- Matthew 5:17-20, emphasis added
When asked which of the many Jewish laws were most important, he gave various responses, but usually they involved the idea of loving God (Yahweh) with all your heart, not committing adultery, lying, or stealing, and not judging others lest you be judged yourself. The novelty of his message was his expansion on some of the mitzvahs.
He took Rabbi Hillel the Elder's formulation of what has become the Golden Rule to a new level, stating that you should not just tolerate but love your enemy, and if you have a falling out you should promptly make your peace (lest he be arrested and out you), and if he hits you, you should not just not hit him back, but turn the other cheek so he can hit that too!
His message of radical social justice and redistribution of wealth should be familiar to any reader of the Jewish prophets Amos or Isiah The rich are going to hell, Jesus said, unless they give away everything to the poor and follow him.
The only explicitly sexual message he gave was an expanded definition of adultery to include not just actual acts of sex but even sexual fantasies (what Jimmy Carter admitted to in a 1976 Playboy Interview) or remarrying following divorce. These last teachings in particular are said to have left his followers "amazed" but they certainly do not replace the Jewish laws he felt he was enforcing.
He did state that what comes from our bodies (our words and deeds) will condemn us far more than what we put into them (meaning pork or shellfish, for example), but that does not mean he was saying the teachings of Leviticus should be abandoned, only that they could not substitute for being kind to your enemies and treating the poor and outcast with justice.
It is quite clear from his teachings that he envisioned an imminent final judgment approaching that would come before his followers "tasted death" meaning in their lifetimes, which clearly was not the case, but may have explained why he didn't write anything down or if he did, why it was not preserved.
My fear of Christianity is the same as that of Chinese communism: although both have mellowed out quite a bit from their more blood-soaked days, there have been no statutory or formal doctrine amendments that would guarantee that Christians would not attempt to reimpose public executions of adulterers or Chinese would not shut down free markets and go back to the horrors of the Cultural Revolution.
Until and unless Christians come forward and formally renounce those doctrines such as slavery, the murder of accused adulterers or witches, misogyny, and homophobia (which most often involve other Christians), there is always the danger that the darker side of this faith will emerge again.
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