Masturbation and Evolution: Or Don't Cry Over Spilled Sperm

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Newsweek had an interesting article (Why Masturbation Helps Procreation)

observing something that should fall under the Duh category, but unfortunately remains controversial thanks to fundamentalist nonsense propagated by people like Christine "I'm Not a Witch" O'Donnell.   

As Newsweek kindly put it, "O’Donnell’s mid-’90s crusade against autoeroticism wasn’t based on science."

 Those who adhere to the "every sperm is sacred" idea have absolutely no idea how many sperm are produced each day (about 100 million) or how many are present in each ejaculate (about 50-200 million). If a man were to have several young wives and impregnate them all several times, only the tiniest fraction of his spermatazoa would ever end up becoming people; there is no sperm shortage, in other words, far from it, and only one healthy sperm is needed to fertilize an egg (so it's the proportion of healthy sperm in each ejaculate, not the number, that matters).

What first stimulated Charles Darwin's interest in what became known as natural selection (versus artificial selection practiced by animal breeders, gardeners, and farmers) is that so many more seeds are produced than could ever lead to offspring, and so many more fertilizations occur than could ever lead to a surviving reproducing organism, and that the odds against any seed therefore passing on its genetic material into the next generation asymptotically approaches zero (he didn't quite use the mathematical language, but the idea is the same). 

Nature is shockingly wasteful with its output of seed in all species.  Only a tiny minority of seeds ever become offspring.  Most offspring of most species die young (including ours until recent advances in hygiene, nutrition, and medicine).   Those individuals who don't die possess some advantage, often randomly acquired, over those who do. Those traits, if genetically based, will more likely pass to the next generation if the survivors reproduce and their offspring survive. 

It's all quite brutal ("red in tooth and claw" as Tennyson put it) and frankly depressing when you think about it too much, but on balance none of us should be here.  The fact that we are is so shockingly, freakishly small.  

Let us consider the odds of one particular sperm and one particular ovum from our parents coming together in the year of our birth.  (This actually narrows the odds considerably, since either of our parents could have chosen another partner or none at all, and it only looks at one year, but the odds against us being here even with these constraints are astronomically high.)  

Since a conception requires a sperm and an ovum coming together, the number of possible combinations can be computed by multiplying the total number of sperm produced by our father in a single year (100 million per day x 365 days = 36.5 billion sperm per year) times the total number of eggs made ready for fertilization by our mother in a single year (let's assume 12)  leading to 438 billion possible sperm-ovum combinations!  Out of those 438 billion possibilities came the "you" that is reading this right now.   

But even this is understating the odds, since when she is born, your mother had all of the eggs she would ever ovulate (whereas your father's testicles were busy producing sperm every day of his adult life).   How many eggs?  Perhaps 2 million.  But as part of nature's plan, about 11,000 of those potential brothers and sisters of yours die every month until she reaches puberty, when she has about 300-400,000 eggs remaining.   But even after she reached reproductive age, your mother was losing about 1,000 eggs per month in a natural pruning process. 

So just as the someone reaching into a bag to grab a ball at random has to count all of the balls in the bag to determine the odds of pulling out any single ball, to determine your odds of being fertilized from the particular egg that became you, you really should multiply the 36.5 billion sperm by the total number of maternal eggs, any one of which could have been ovulated at the the time your father's sperm came swimming upstream, beating out all the competition.   Multiplying 36.5 billion (the annual sperm production) times 300,000 (your mother's total egg supply) and you get an astonishingly tiny 10.95 million billion to 1 (that's 10.95 x 10 to the power of 16).   Those are the odds of you being you.

On average, none of us exists. It's absolutely mind-boggling, but another reason that those who get misty-eyed about frozen embryos or stem cells do not understand the astonishing wastefulness that is not only an inherent part of reproduction, but the absolutely critical importance of that wastefulness to genetic variation as well as viability of offspring.

Protect Your Phallus With a Condom: A Public Health Poster You Would Never See in the United States!

My wife sent me this picture from Bhutan, where she is traveling for work.  No doubt the religious right would have hysterics over this public health poster in the United States!

Karl Rove Courage and Consequences: my book review; "If you look for honesty, you might as well be blind..." - Billy Joel

I read this book looking for some insight into what went wrong, or at least some explanation or sense of compassion.  I was not expecting an apology - I have never heard Rove apologize for anything or even admit he did anything wrong  - but at least some attempt to explain why policy decisions that may have seemed a good idea at the time turned out so catastrophically.   Perhaps he could help future generations learn from his and his boss's biggest blunders.   After all, sometimes people who came across as arrogant and unfeeling in real time write memoirs that reflect more insight and sensitivity than they could show at the time events were unfolding.

But not Karl Rove. Few of the rationalizations and excuses in this book are new.  Most were Fox News talking points repeated with the mind-numbing discipline Republicans are famous for.  Most have been discredited, but they are repeated here.   Perhaps Rove realizes that if he were to admit those talking points were wrong, he would have to admit when he was wrong, and that would create a time line that would make it clear he was lying then and he is lying now.  

Far from contrite, Rove comes across as almost triumphant, lashing out at his critics instead of addressing the merit of their criticism.  In other words, Rove's book is classic Rove.  

"Because of his success, Rove has been attacked," the book's blurb proclaims.  It wasn't his divisive, unethical tactics, from playing on racial prejudice to torpedo the Republican primary frontrunner McCain in South Carolina in 2000 to homophobia in the 2004 election to the vicious attacks on a decorated Vietnam combat veteran's service record.   And it wasn't his role in maliciously outing a covert CIA operative and destroying her career in the hopes of getting back at her husband who dared to state the obvious:  that President Bush was lying when he claimed that Saddam Hussein had recently sought to obtain uranium from Africa.  (According to Rove (see below) Wilson didn't even say this!)  No, we who find Rove's tactics repulsive, dishonest, and deeply injurious to the fabric of our democracy just attack him because he is successful.  Really. 

In his Prologue, Rove has the audacity to claim that he faced "moments of peril, enormous stress, and danger," citing the legal inconvenience Scooter Libby faced when he was convicted of obstruction of justice and lying in the investigation of the outing of Valerie Plame.  I think any soldier who served in harm's way, or any of the hundreds of thousands of civilian killed by the Iraq invasion Rove helped champion, shill, and spin, could give him a lesson on what real peril, stress, and danger look like.  This sentence reflects the arrogance of Mr. Rove equating his legal jeopardy with the very real physical danger those in war face every day.   Of course, Mr. Rove did not serve in the military, so he would have no way of appreciating how insulting and self-serving this comparison is.  

He spends much of the book protesting his innocence about charges against him, and there are many, some even I have not heard of.  On page 62, he goes into detail about the "myth" that he spurred the FBI to investigage Democratic officeholders in Texas. 

He manages to prove his critics right on page 64 in responding to the observation that a "Rovian style" of political campaigning is "fear-based, smear-based, anything goes."   Instead of responding to whether these charges have merit, he instead uses voters as human shields, equating criticism of him with criticism of "the electorate", implying they are "stupid, easily misled by smashmouth TV ads, dirty tricks," etc.   If Karl Rove did not believe these tactics worked, then why on earth has he made a career using them?   On this single page, he managed to do what he has done his entire political life:  take a criticism of a specific behavior (the use of attack ads that play on people's fears of homosexual marriage or terrorism, let's say), twist it into a global and noble issue (this is not an attack on Rove's behavior but on the electorate), then create a strawman argument that was never made (those who criticize me must be calling the electorate stupid).  It's brilliant, just like portraying serious questions about whether Bush deserted his National Guard unit as an attack on all National Guard soldiers everywhere.  People were not criticizing Bush because he served in the National Guard but because he didn't, or at least did not complete his service and voters had a right to know why not.  Instead, thanks to "change the subject" Rove, we heard a shameful attack on a wounded Vietnam veteran which managed to twist Senator John Kerry's service records into something sinister (did he deserve 3 Purple Hearts or 2?).  It was masterful distraction, making us all think about something other than the fact that we might have a Commander-in-Chief who not only was not in Vietnam but for some reason or other failed to complete his cushy stateside billet in the Texas Air National Guard. 

Even his redefinition of what is a Rovian style of campaigning is creepy and undemocratic.  Yes, of course politicians want to win elections, but a campaign should be about ideals that matter to people, not finely targeted micro-advertising that slices Americans into demographic wedges that can be sold a war or a ban on gay marriage the same way the could be sold a deodorant or car.   I don't want a candidate who figures out that gun-owning churchgoers who shop at Walmart and live in Northern Virginia are far more likely to respond to a political advertisement that uses wolves and scary music than one that uses flags and an upbeat cadence, let's say.   I want a candidate with a set of core principles presented consistently and honestly, regardless of what targeted polling says will be popular.  

Rove writes about the importance of "big ideas" but what "big ideas" were reflected in the parallel push to make sure anti-gay marriage initiatives were on many voters' minds in 2004?   Or the systematic destruction of Senator Kerry's war record, a campaign that clearly was successful enough to make Americans choose the American who had never been in Vietnam over the one who had served with honor and distinction.  "Attack their strength" is the hallmark of that particular character assassination and it had no more to do with lofty ideals than the Swift Boat Veterans for Bush had anything to do with Truth. 

His defense of President Bush's decision to engage in torture - a decision Rove clearly and wisely (for self-preservation reasons) states occurred "unbeknownst to me at the time" (p. 295) - is once again put through the twisted lens of politics.  Those who recognize that drowning someone (there is no simulated about it), a technique invented by the Spanish Inquisition, who called it water torture  (I would posit they were in a position to know) are not all "Democrats" trying to "score points" as he alleges, something he calls "reprehensible and dangerous."  I would imagine the torture itself would be far more "reprehensible and dangerous" but then again I am not Karl Rove.  He does not even address whether Democratic critics have merit, instead shifting the argument to one of silence passing as assent.  Is it possible that  Democrats and Republicans who were briefed about these torture techniques were both wrong?  Of course.  There is no exception in the Torture Protocols that have been signed into United States law that mentions anything about party affiliation, national security, or the popularity of the proposed torture.  In fact, even a unanimous Congressional Resolution to authorize torture would be illegal and subject the government to a potential war crimes tribunal.  There are certain things a government simply is never empowered to do, and torture is one of them.  Period. 

Rove's morality is more relativistic and opportunistic.  He gropes for narrow legalistic technicalities rather than first principles and his own conscience to defend the use of torture.  Torture is prohibited by, among other things, the Geneva Conventions, but, he assures us, the Geneva Conventions do not apply to "international terrorist attacks" not "civil wars."  By this definition, Hitler's torture of captured partisans (although it predated some of the Conventions since written) would have been OK, since he called those partisans international terrorists (and some indeed were).    Occupied France was not engaged in a "civil war" so Germany, by Rove's logic, should have been free to torture away.  I don't buy that for a minute and neither should he. 

He states falsely that "broader Geneva protections were meant to apply only to signatory nations, which means they don't apply to al Qaeda."  Never mind the fact that al Qaeda is a group, not a nation, and that those tortured had been caught in countries that were signatories to the Geneva Conventions, this statement is both dangerous and false.  ALL people, combatants and noncombatants are covered by the Geneva Conventions that demand a minimum level of humanity in how we treat those people caught in a war zone, even those we believe are trying to do us harm (that's why it's called a war zone).  WE signed the Geneva Conventions, we must therefore follow them.   We cannot grab someone, inquire about his nationality, consult our attorneys, then kill or torture him based on a legalistic quibble.  

We do not have a right to torture people because we are scared, angry, or our lawyers tell us we won't get in trouble if we do.   If lawyers for the torturing government have a right to give their own government the right to torture, no international agreement against torture would not be worth the paper it is written on (something that Rove should have considered when he engaged in this legal sophistry).  

It is shocking and at some level chilling to read him defend the use of water torture because "this wasn't a settled issue of law when President Bush put us on a war footing and still isn't today."  Really?   Mr. Rove must be unaware - surprising for someone who describes himself as a bookish nerd - that a Japanese officer, Yukio Asano, was charged by the United States government (the same one Rove served) with war crimes for waterboarding and sentenced to 15 years' hard labor.  How can something that was a war crime in 1947 not be "a settled issue of law" in 2002?  There were no rulings since then that overturned or challenged that conviction, and indeed American troops in Vietnam were investigated for allegedly engaging in this form of torture.  Does Rove believe those investigators were wasting their time?  

At any rate, this legalism - something the Republicans attacked Clinton for in his Whitewater investigation defense - shows an appalling lack of morality.  Must we consult with attorneys before deciding if an action is just?  Does neither Bush nor Rove have any moral qualms about torturing other human beings, regardless of circumstances?   His, "well it wasn't technically illegal" argument - even though patently untrue - sounds like the sort of adolescent excuse a teenager would give for joy-riding and wrecking the family car  ("well, you didn't technically say I couldn't, so I assumed I could").  

But it is on the issue of Iraq that Rove seemed to do a real cut-and-paste job from 2002.   Nothing in his narrative reflects what has been established since and what we actually know he knew then.  Rove grossly misrepresents the case for war.  On page 304, he states that Saddam Hussein had not allowed "international inspectors to verify and oversee the process" of disarmament.  This is a flat-out lie.  At the time Bush ordered the invasion, as Rove should know full well, international inspectors had been re-admitted to the country and were busy continuing where they left off following their ejection much earlier (nuclear arms inspectors, the ones we worry most about, were never kicked out of the country, and the IAEA was operating continuously).   Perhaps I should correct myself because the weapons inspectors were ultimately kicked out of Iraq although not by Saddam Hussein, but by George W. Bush, who ordered them out so he could invade.  Technically, he had no legal authority to do so (the inspectors were working for the United Nations and no resolution gave Bush that power). 

Given that Saddam Hussein had no WMD program, how on earth does Rove still insist that Iraq was not "comply[ing] with the world's just demands."  And once again, notice the language:  not the United States demands, but the world's.   This grandiosity belies the fact that vast majorities in every country except 2 (Israel and the United States) opposed our invasion, the UN Security Council to whom Bush had made his case rejected it, and Kofi Annan stated that the war was "illegal."  If Saddam Hussein posed such a threat, why did none of his neighbors, who arguably would have the most to lose if he were, support the invasion?   For Rove to make this case in 2003 was irresponsible.  For him to repeat it years later is breath-taking in its audacity.  A lie repeated often enough might be believed in the controlled environment of Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, but does Rove not understand that a schoolchild with an Internet connection and a pulse can fact check these 2002 sound bites?   

After all of this legalistic sophistry, Rove later states that Bush "was a man of his word" (p. 304).  To his credit, he is not alleging that Bush was honest, only that he was delivering on his long-stated, pre-9/11 threat to invade Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein from power.  

Rove states that "the information Wilson returned with actually bolstered the case that Iraq had attempted to acquire uranium from Niger" (p. 345).  I met Ambassador Wilson, heard him speak in detail about this matter, and read his book; the case against Bush he made was compelling, methodical, and painstaking.  If Wilson's charges were without merit, as Rove now wants us to believe, or even bolstered Bush's allegations, why then did Bush remove them from a speech and publicly express regret about having used them in another?  Was Bush wrong when he said he was wrong or does Karl Rove just hope that those of us who lived through those events forgot about them?  And if Wilson's charges bolstered Bush's case for war, why did Rove go after his wife so savagely?   None of this makes any sense.  If Rove can lie so blatantly about what Ambassador Wilson did not find in Africa, why should we believe him when he tells us anything else?  

I frankly do not trust Karl Rove.  I believe he has done more damage to our Republic than Osama bin Laden.   Not directly through driving planes into buildings, but indirectly through manipulating, cunning, and deceit.  Buildings can be rebuilt, victims can be buried, and families can heal.  We can and should hunt down those responsible for the almost 3,000 killed on 9-11, but who will hold those accountable for the higher number of Americans killed in our invasion and occupation of Iraq or the hundreds of thousands innocents killed as a result of Rove's successful selling of the war?    Who can put the torture genie back into the bottle and cross back over that line that Bush and Rove crossed because their lawyers said they wouldn't get in trouble if they did?  Who will restore the credibility and trust in America that it will never go it alone, violating the will of the international community while claiming to act on its behalf?   

And closer to home, how will political campaigns ever again be about ideals, values, and honestly presented choices instead of about which candidate you think is most likely to let gay terrorists marry?  Rove did not invent the attack ad, but he elevated it to an art form, a pornography of hate, a titillating but ultimately deeply dishonest portrayal of one's opponent as something evil, sinister, and dangerous.   We should have been talking about the best way to prevent another 9-11 or whether tax cuts justified by a surplus really made sense once that surplus disappeared.  Instead we had commercials with wolves and scary music and promises that an elected Democrat was a virtual guarantee of another 9-11.  

I still remember seeing the Rovian ads against Senator Max Cleland, a man who lost 3 limbs in Vietnam during the Battle of Khe Sanh, morphing his image into that of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.  I laughed and shook my head.  That would never work.   But I was wrong and Karl Rove was right:  attack ads reducing a complex idea - should the newly formed Department of Homeland Security federal employees have the same rights and benefits of other federal workers? - into a vicious smear - Max Cleland is an ally of Osama bin Laden because his position on this staffing differs from Bush's.  

Invading Iraq may not have been Rove's idea, but without his slick marketing campaign, does anyone really believe 60% of Americans would have supported something so transparently and mind-numbingly disastrous and counter-productive?  At the time we were hunting for al Qaeda and needed all the resources we could (including the Arab linguists fired by a homophobic Bush administration intent on appeasing religious fundamentalists at home even if it compromised our ability to hunt for religious fundamentalists abroad).  The rest of the world was outraged at what we seemed intent on doing, but the rest of the world did not have Karl Rove to slice their demographics and find out what buttons could be pushed to get otherwise reasonable, compassionate people to be scared enough or angry enough or confused enough to launch a war that has killed hundreds of thousands, displaced millions, and triggered a civil war.  

History has not been kind to Mr. Rove or to the man he worked for.   When Bush left office, he managed to set a record for the highest disapproval rating of any President in American history, topping even Jimmy Carter and a post-Watergate Nixon.   As Rove admits, his name has become an adjective, a synonym for dirty campaigns that play to people's basest instincts.   Even his citing of  "Libya's Gaddafi" (p. 304) as proof of the wisdom of invading Iraq (the Libyan dictator and admitted terrorist was given lucrative oil contracts and brought in out of the diplomatic cold in exchange for promising never to develop a nuclear program he couldn't develop anyway) must be deeply embarrassing now.  

But of course to be embarrassed, one must have self-awareness, decency, and a capacity for shame.  If you are looking for evidence in those in the Karl Rove as presented in this book, you will be sadly disappointed.  

Beck Like Marx Should Stop Theorizing About Capital and Go Out and Earn Some (Honestly)

1.0 out of 5 stars Beck Like Marx Should Stop Theorizing About Capital and Go Out and Earn Some (Honestly), March 28, 2011

By 

Mark Vakkur - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Broke: The Plan to Restore Our Trust, Truth and Treasure (Hardcover)

I must admit that this looks like a carefully-thought-out book. It has side bars and historical quotations and is even peppered with some facts. It stretches over a few hundred pages. And the writing style is at times amusing, at times amusingly pompous, but rarely boring. However, appearances are deceptive as any Fox News viewer should have discovered long ago, and anyone who expects to be enlightened by this book by a former chemically dependent Top 40 DJ turned part über-patriot, part televangelist Fox employee, will be as disappointed as one should expect considering the source. Beck illustrates the dangers of trying to get historical, political, or economic advice from professional entertainers. 

Let's start as Beck does, with religion. On page 6, Beck cites the fact that 12% of Americans state they have "no religion" in 2008 versus 2% in 1948. Since he gives this sidebar along with other indicators establishing the decline of what he calls American "empire," and inserts it in a parallel discussion of the decline of the Roman empire, we can only conclude that he believes that a decline in religious affiliation (and he elsewhere says of the Judeo-Christian variety) is associated with a decline in empire. Perhaps he does not realize this, but early Christian writers such as Augustine were tortured by it: the Roman Empire which lasted centuries collapsed shortly after adopting Christianity as the official state religion. This may have been true, true, and unrelated, but it does not support his case that religiosity is important to empire maintenance. There was a correlation between Christianity and empire in the case of the Romans - an inverse one. 

It is unclear why Beck holds up the Roman Empire as a model to emulate anyway, since only a minority of wealthy men could engage in politics, slavery was a cherished institution, and torture, aggressive war, and mass crucifixions were considered appropriate powers to be granted to a central government. This hardly seems the stuff of the "Don't Tread on Me" Tea Party. 

The "simple" recipe that Beck gives for the decline of this Empire, however little it is analogous to the world we live in, is that "the state encroaches on freedom... people want more handouts ... taxes go up to pay for the handouts." Now I will admit to not being a Roman historian by trade, but I have read and studied the works of those who are, and have never heard this theory. Beck is the first person I know of who has ever described ancient Rome as a welfare state. Rome's fall was complex, but it wasn't that it cared for its poor or paid its teachers too much (it didn't have any publicly paid teachers anyway). 

"God's hand has been evident throughout American history" he tells us on page 13, and he attributes to this deity the additional gift of books, technology, and history. This is an interesting theory since European Christians spent so much energy destroying the works of pre-Christian Greece that many were lost forever and those that we have were largely preserved in the Muslim world. The Romans were far more steeped in the intricacies of Greek history and civilization than Mr. Beck - many sent their children to be educated in Athens - but that did not prevent their empire from collapsing. 

At any rate, and this seems a far bigger flaw, Beck repeatedly confuses freedom and empire. Many would argue they are diametrically opposed. Yes, being a subject of a great empire such as Rome gives you a certain freedom - from raids by enemies of that empire, for example - but you must exchange certain freedoms and pay tribute (taxes, Mr. Beck, lots of them) to Rome and provide men for the Roman Army. You must pledge loyalty to the Roman emperor and in the final days of the Roman empire you had to renounce your religion in favor of the state religion (Christianity). Whether these losses of freedom (to worship according to your conscience, to be loyal to your local leaders, government, and tribe, and to retain money and men that would have to be handed over to the state) were offset by the freedoms membership in that empire gave you is debatable, but the fact that the Roman Empire generally expanded through the sword, not persuasion or buy-in of the conquered, argues otherwise. Even after many areas were conquered, such as Judea or present-day Germany, the Romans were subject to frequent violent uprisings; Jews and Germanic tribes and Gauls and many others apparently did not share Beck's rosy view of the Roman legions as liberators. 

Beck passes off another myth of the religious right, that the "United States was founded on Judeo-Christian principles." Adams and Jefferson are both on record, as is Congress in a resolution to that effect, that the United States is in "no sense a Christian nation." God is mentioned not at all in the Constitution and only twice in the Declaration of Independence (in passing as the god of nature, not Jesus or Yahweh). "In God we trust" did not appear on our coins until the Civil War and the words "under God" were not inserted into our Pledge of Allegiance until the height of the McCarthyist hysteria in 1954. Most of the founders were Deists. At least one (Jefferson) was an atheist. 

Beck bemoans the fact that 12% of Americans cite no religion in 2008 but only 18% of Americans belonged to a church in 1776. True, the 82% who did not attend church may have told a pollster back then that they still considered themselves to have some sort of religious affiliation, but the generation of the Minute Men and the (real) Tea Party was far less religious than Beck's generation (slightly fewer than 60% of Americans belong to a church today). 

The idea of the "Judeo" part of that Judeo-Christian formulation would have been particularly curious to our founders. After all, we were a country that had strict quotas limiting the number of Jewish immigrants even during the Holocaust or that limited Jews from joining certain clubs or even attending certain universities (the SAT was developed in part to counter claims of Jewish preference by those who felt too many Jewish students were getting into the nation's top colleges). 

Beck's frequent quotations of Benjamin Franklin and even Aesop's fables on the importance of frugality and hard work are curious coming from a man who spent most of his life as a Top 40s DJ and by his own admission was often chemically altered and spiritually lost. If Beck, who now works as a highly paid entertainer, had a real job at some point in his life, it's not evident on his CV. Yet he feels he is in a position to lecture to the millions of hard-working Americans who do that they should stop whining about their working conditions or compensation and help him keep the hundreds of thousands he saves each years in taxes on his multi-million income stream as a Fox News and radio entertainer. 

There is something almost offensive about a man such as Beck misrepresenting Benjamin Franklin who fought so hard to keep religiosity out of the public square. Franklin successfully argued for substituting the phrase "self-evident" (reflecting his enlightenment preference for observation and reason) instead of "sacred and undeniable" (Thomas Jefferson's original wording) in the Declaration of Independence. He said light houses are more useful than churches. Franklin also had some progressive ideas that Beck would ridicule (if he knew about them, which apparently he does not). For example, Franklin never patented his inventions, believed scientific inventions should all benefit mankind. Greed did not motivate him. He had made his fortune by hard work at age 42, but said he wanted to spend the rest of his life finding a way to "do well by doing good." He invented the Franklin stove in 1741 because other designs led to frequent house fires and burn accidents, as well as smoke inhalation. He created in 1751 the first hospital in America, Pennsylvania Hospital. It still stands today. It was raised using matching private-public grants. He found the Philadelphia Academy which became University of Pennsylvania to promote public curiosity and service through the liberal arts in its students. Yes, LIBERAL arts, Mr. Beck. 

It's also interesting that nowhere does Beck mention one of my favorite Benjamin Franklin quotations, in which Franklin chastises people like Beck who whine about their high taxes. "Friends and neighbors complain that taxes are indeed very heavy, and if those laid on by the government were the only ones we had to pay, we might the more easily discharge them; but we have many others, and much more grievous to some of us. We are taxed twice as much by our idleness, three times as much by our pride, and four times as much by our folly." In other words: get over it. We tax ourselves far more than our government does (but which do you think it easier to complain about?). 

And let's not forget - before getting too misty-eyed about the days of Ben Franklin and his fear of a government that might tax one tenth of his income that in his America, fully 1 out of 5 Americans had a 100% tax rate. Slaves - who of course were not paid at all - in effect had all of their wages taxed away even though it flowed not to the government but to their owners. That works out to an average American tax rate of 20% before any other taxes are even considered, far higher than the current 15% (of GDP) tax "burden." The much higher tariffs of the time not just internationally but between states represented an embedded tax in every product. Beck ignores slavery in this book and in his calculations about the burden of government, but it is hard to see why we should be trying to hard to turn back the clock to a time when our government collaborated with slave-owners to insure they could expropriate 100% of their income and even beat them to death or sell them like animals if they chose. Of all the evil powers Beck believes our out-of-control federal government, it does not - thank God! - have that one. 

Beck claims, without any supporting data (a theme of his approach to just about everything he writes), that "frugality ignites freedom." Is this really true? Do nations with higher savings rates have higher freedom? By that measure Japan should have far greater freedom than the United States. So too should socialist Germany and communist China (which he condemns elsewhere despite its eagerness to buy our debt). If it is government frugality he extols, is it true that governments that spend less as a percentage of GDP are found in countries enjoying greater freedom? Was the United States freer at its founding when the central government was so small and spent so little that it essentially did not work, requiring the Articles of Confederation to be scrapped for our current system? I imagine if Beck had surveyed the one out of five Americans who were slaves in Colonial America, his answer not only would have been no, but hell no. If he had asked the 50% of citizens who were female and therefore unable to vote, own property directly, or have their testimony fully counted in court, they would have also not given a glowing endorsement of Beck's freedom through frugality thesis. 

On page 33, he takes one of the first of his gratuitous swipes at "progressives" who did not appreciate the fruits of the "Tree of Liberty." No, in those days which Beck wants us to believe were so golden because the government spent less and had less debt, progressives felt that our country should be judged by more than one variable, and that freedom should not be the gift of a few white men (only 7% of the country could vote in Beck's Golden Age of Low Government Spending) but the right of all people, including women and people of color. One of those crazy progressives who had such subversive ideas? None other than Ben Franklin whom Beck spent so many earlier pages praising. Not only did Franklin promote progressive societies for improving public education and public health using public funds but he also was one of the first proponents of this radical notion that would become known as emancipation. What a liberal! 

Beck goes on to praise Lincoln while somehow sidestepping the fact that Lincoln introduced the first federal income tax (to pay for the Civil War). 

He gives a cartoon-like summary of the Cold War on page 320, stating that we wisely outspent the Soviets, driving them into bankruptcy by patiently waiting for oil prices to decline "drying up one of their main sources of income." Hmmm. A cursory examination of oil prices will show that the glasnost and the revolt against Soviet communism was relatively uncorrelated with oil prices, and Russian dependence on oil revenues increased exponentially after the collapse of communism, not before, as improvements in technology and better East-West partnerships led to more efficient exploitation of this natural resource. Again, Beck offers an idiosyncratic view of history that is generally not taught because it is generally not true. 

One of the most maddening things about Beck's approach is that he claims as his ideological soul-mates people who espoused progressive ideas radically different than Beck's. Besides Franklin and Lincoln (and Jesus), Beck also feels compelled to quote President Dwight Eisenhower on page 321, who made the point that security is the product of economic and military strength. Fair enough, but Eisenhower also railed against the "military-industrial complex" (a term he coined) that Beck adores, and reminded us that ever dollar spent on bombs is a dollar that cannot be spent on schools or roads or the poor. He slammed those who now form the ideological core of Beck's Tea Party, calling them "a splinter group" that wants to "abolish social security, unemployment insurance and eliminate labor laws and farm programs," and that "among them are a few Texas oil millionaires" but "their number is negligible and they are stupid." (- Dwight David Eisenhower, 11/8/1954). Today such a remark would probably merit a special place of honor for President Eisenhower on Beck's chalkboard of shame, perhaps with an arrow pointing straight back at Mao. 

"Warriors aren't whiners," Beck intones. "Our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines are the best damn [sic] people on the planet. Period." Yet despite this high praise, Beck did not feel it necessary when younger to serve in the military. He did cheer them on from the sidelines, however, spinning tunes for them as a disc jockey and this is something perhaps, but his absence of service undercuts the credibility of his praise. In his defense, though, he does advocate slashing military spending by 30-40% but his means of doing (reducing overhead) is beyond idealistic. I would argue, as would Eisenhower, that we need to move away from a permanent wartime level of spending in which every politician and many American workers and contractors have a deep dependence on military contracts. It is unclear what advantage we gain from having 6,000 nuclear warheads (6,000!) in an age when 19 guys with box cutters make those weapons beyond obsolete. 

I agree with Beck that our tax code is complicated, but there is a difference between complexity and fairness. He deliberately conflates the two. He states that a progressive tax code punishes the wealthy but offers no example to support this. The wealthiest countries in the world all have progressive tax codes. The poorest and most corrupt don't. A progressive tax code is not an advanced, wealthy society's obstacle, but its natural byproduct. Taxes are the dues for living in a civil society. 

He makes ludicrous claims about a monolithic movement of which I am unaware he calls "progressives" who, he tells us on page 351, want "to take this country from self-sufficiency to serfdom; from pursuit of happiness for all, to guaranteed happiness for none." I have never heard anyone advocating such a plan. I have heard them advocating a return of marginal tax rates to Clinton era levels (or the even higher Reagan era levels in some cases), or doing something about the 59 million Americans without health insurance, or enacting sensible firearm legislation to prevent someone so mentally unstable he was evicted from a college and rejected from the Army from purchasing a 9 mm semiautomatic weapon with an extended round magazine. That sort of thing. The "guaranteed happiness for none" part is alien to me. 

Beck has lots of quotations and some cute sidebars, but what he lacks is any sense of context. As is true with many self-educated and self-declared pundits who seem to confuse a large (but shrinking) television audience with credibility, Beck's gaping holes in scholarship make his premises so full of holes that his conclusions cannot be taken seriously. Only a man who does not understand (or perhaps does not care) about the horrors slaves had to endure in Colonial America or those conquered and crucified by the Roman empire (including one long-haired, bearded pacifist who preached a far more radical form of wealth redistribution than any contemporary progressive) would hold these periods up up as worthy of emulation. Only someone who is clueless about Benjamin Franklin's progressive secularism would devote so much of the early part of the book to him. And only someone who does not understand that tax cuts and out of control spending on a military equipped to fight an enemy that no longer exists have led us into our fiscal crisis, not the relative pittance we spend to help the least among us, can write this book and expect anyone to take it seriously. 

Beck is on record as calling our first African American president a "racist" with a "deep-seated hatred of white people." He condemned those who rose up for democratic reform in Egypt and Tunisia and Libya as a "virus" that would infect the entire region. Never has a man who had been so wrong so loudly and so repeatedly been paid so much to do so little. We could say the same thing about Beck and other right wing blowhards that the mother of another wildly speculating but generally unproductive and incorrect pseudo-intellectual, Karl Marx, once said: I wish he would stop theorizing about capital and go out and earn some. Honestly. 

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Bush Admits to War Crimes on p. 169; I am not interested about what he says elsewhere in the book

 Bush Admits to War Crimes on p. 169; I am not interested about what he says elsewhere in the book, March 27, 2011

By 

Mark Vakkur - See all my reviews
   

This review is from: Decision Points (Hardcover)

This is a book that is impossible to separate from its author and what we know of his actions and how they shaped our world.
I have not read all of the book, nor do I intend to. I have read large excerpts and reviews written by others who fact-checked claims President Bush made, and have analyzed his admission, now in writing, to committing war crimes. Perhaps that is all we as Americans need to know, and perhaps at some level we owe him at least some gratitude for making the job of historians easier. We can now put to rest any theories that the worst abuses committed in violation of international law, the Geneva Conventions, and anti-torture treaties to which the United States is a signatory (and therefore President Bush was legally bound) were the result of a "few bad apples." President Bush himself admits to ordering the torture of detainees. Repeatedly.
On page 169, he admits that he was worried enough about the "enhanced interrogation program" to put a panel of lawyers to decide if they amounted to torture and were therefor illegal. This is an interesting admission meaning that he clearly was worried. Not worried enough to consult with experts in international law, human rights experts outside of his own government or even the Executive branch (all the lawyers he consulted were from his Justice Department or the CIA), or with medical experts who have worked with survivors of torture. He also apparently did not feel his own conscience was a guide; he sought a legal, not a moral opinion, and an arguably biased and self-serving one at that. It is unclear what expertise an attorney in the Justice Department would have on the psychological damage of torture or why even if that attorney (not facing torture himself) would sign off on the torture of another human being never tried or even charged in any court of law why the president should outsource his moral decision-making authority to someone whose expertise might be in contract law or government regulations, not human rights or international treaties.
He states that drowning someone (there is no "simulated" about it) does "no lasting harm." The definition of torture is not one of the endurance of pain but of its cruelty and intensity. The famous "is it safe" dental scene with Dustin Hoffman in The Marathon Man would not have been torture by this ridiculously narrow definition (the character in the movie could always have the dental damage caused by the drilling repaired later and the pain would pass anyway), but should any of us buy this?
None of the Geneva Conventions nor any of the Torture Protocols the United States signed state that there is an exception for either perceived national security threats or that there is a mechanism whereby torture is committee of attorneys selected by the torturing government authority approves the torture.
What Bush politely calls "simulated drowning" was called something quite different by those who invented it: the Spanish Inquisition labeled it tortura del agua. Even President Bush's Spanish is good enough to understand that the answer to this question is self-explanatory.
There is much else in the book that is self-serving and fallacious, but frankly I don't care much what President Bush has to say about why he failed on so many fronts. As we were taught at West Point, no excuse. I really am not interested in what a man who has admitted to war crimes on page 169 has to say on any of the other pages of the book.

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Your Tags: war, war crimes, torture, failure, worst president ever, true crime, how to ruin your country, idiot, lies, criminal

To My Conservative Friends Who Think That By Being Born on Third Base They Must Have Hit a Triple

To my conservative friends from humble beginnings who believe their success was self-generated:
First, if you can read this, you benefited from a public education system that had a government employee teach you. Many of the poorest on this planet are illiterate and have no hope of schooling of any kind. Indeed, were we to return to a pre-Jeffersonian system where only the wealthy hired tutors and public education was considered a radical luxury no government was in the business of guaranteeing or providing, you would have been unable to understand or respond to what I am writing now. 
You did not work in a sweat shop in Vietnam or serve as a gun runner for warlords in some Mexican village or a child soldier in Somalia. 
You had access to vaccinations, medicines, and clean running water and sewage that were all provided at public expense to you or your family (you could not have attended school without the former). 
You had safe, government-inspected roads and probably had some means of transportation with government-mandated safety devices such as seat belts. 
You ate government-inspected food that did not kill you. 
I bet you had shoes and even the ability to bathe regularly. You may not have had three cars and a vacation, but you probably were not hungry most of the time or walking 5 hours a day to fetch water, as is true for the world's poorest citizens. 
In other words, you didn't just survive childhood (something many of the poorest children don't do) and appear educated and ready to enter the business world by magic. You had an entire village of invisible helpers, most of them publicly funded and paid for by taxpayers so that the accidents of your birth would not condemn you to a life of poverty or an early death. 
And yes, you benefited from a socialized police and fire department that kept your streets relatively safe (compared to Mogadishu or Karachi, let's say) and allowed you to get to school and back each day and not find your house or apartment had burned down. 
So please stop begrudging all these benefits you enjoyed, man up and pay for them.  Find a cop or teacher and say thank you.  Ask how you can help pay back the society that gave you so much even if you did not appreciate it at the time. 
And stop trying to deny those same services to the least among us who deserve the same opportunities for hard work and success as you were given.

How To Present Religion to our Children, if We Must, Honestly

Consenting adults can believe in astrology or alien abduction, but most of us agree that we should not share these beliefs with children, or if we do, to let them know that these are our personal beliefs and most people do not share them.  Why then, can we not do the same with how we present religion to our children?
It's interesting how few people have even considered waiting until adulthood before exposing children to religion, if at all.  It seems a given in all religious traditions that you start children young, usually with a formal, staged, ritualistic program that is part memorization and recitation, part rite of passage.  I think a strong case can be made against this parental impulse to continue what in most cases is an education parents themselves resented as children whose teachings they mostly abandoned as adults.  The most common justification of childhood religious indoctrination goes something like this:  "Well, I know that most of what is in the Bible is contradictory and of course I don't believe it literally, but I want my children to have a sense of tradition and community and belonging.  I don't believe everything I was taught as a kid - I don't believe most of it really - but it's for adults to work out what they want to believe or reject - I think kids should hear it all, learn it, then if they choose to as adults they can decide whether to continue going to church or not."
Of course, just as compelling a case can be made for the opposite, that is allowing children to enjoy their childhood blissfully unaware that some adults are still fighting wars - cultural and literal - over the metaphysical interpretation of events that happened thousands of years ago in places most have never visited.   We don't expose them to graphical sexual images as children but most of us are confident that when they are ready, they will be introduced to sexuality.  Why do we have so much less faith when it comes to religion?
I think part of the answer lies in the fact that most of us have never seriously considered the question.  The idea of a dogma-free childhood, one based on the simplest of ethical systems based on self respect and some variation of the Golden Rule, seems alien to those who have not experienced it, even dangerous.  Suppose religion is like language - if you don't learn it at a young age you either never will or will always struggle with it?
Suppose indeed.  I think this is the main fear of most religious traditions and why there is such a sense of urgency about getting kids enrolled in their Sunday schools and Bible camps and doing it early.   Religious institutions whose livelihood depends on marketing to the next generation know that churches and temple would probably empty if only consenting adults, their minds unbiased and free to choose any religion or none at all, were to be first exposed to the central claims of these belief systems.
Imagine approaching the idea of choosing a religion as an educated adult.  Even if you narrowed the possibilities down to some variation of Christianity, you are far from done.
Becoming a Christian is a bit like ordering a coffee at Starbucks:  you have a perplexing menu of choices.  First, you have to choose which side of the arguments of the Council of  Ephesus in 431 you most agree with (to determine if you want to join the Assyrian Church).  Then you should review the Council of Chalcedon in 451 to determine if you want to join the Oriental Orthodox.  Most Christians are not affiliated with those two, so if you believe there is safety in numbers, you then come to the next big divide East or West, Orthodox or Roman Catholic.   Each excommunicated the other, so you better choose correctly.   If you choose West, then you have to choose pre- or post-Reformation.  Pre-Reformation is easier since you really only have one choice (Catholicism) but there are some variations on that theme we can ignore for now.  If you go down the Reformation or Protestant path, well you've got several geographical variations and their offshoots to choose from, including German (Lutheran), Swiss (Calvin), or English (Episcopalian or Anglican).  But it gets even more complicated, since those offshoots had offshoots, and you can also choose Baptists, Quakers, Mennonites.  There are also Jehovah's Witnesses, Anabaptists, the Mormons (fundamentalist or reformed).  In fact, there are about 38,000 different denominations of Christianity, most of which do not recognize any of the others as valid, many of which have engaged in brutal warfare over the years in an attempt to annihilate the other.   So choose wisely.  I know those odds - 1 in 38,000 don't sound encouraging, but at least we need not consider the majority of the world that is non-Christian, such as all the different denominations and sects of Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Chinese traditional, African, American, Asian, and European indigenous religions, Sikhism, Juche, Spiritism, Baha'i, Jainism, Shinto, Cao Dai, Zoroastrianism, Tenrikyo, Neo-Paganism, Unitarian-Universalism (which can include any of the above), and Rastafarianism.
Oh, and by the way, you don't have to choose at all.  Many don't and lead perfectly happy, balanced, ethical lives.

The sheer diversity of human faith, many of which claim to be the One True Faith, should give any thinking person pause.  They can't all be right anymore than all children can be above average.  And the assumption that any religion is the One True Faith, evidence of an omniscient, omnipotent god has to explain why the vast, vast majority of those created by god do not adhere to that religion.   All healthy, sane people will recoil instinctively from burning flame, experience sexual arousal, hunger, and thirst.   We are hard-wired to respond to universal, cross-culturally robust truths.  We don't need a priest to tell us water will slake our thirst or an imam to tell us not to step off a high cliff.  Those things that matter are deeply ingrained in our central nervous system and universally evoked with minimal or no cross-cultural variation.   The capacity for religious truth is clearly NOT universal or cross-culturally robust.  The burden of proof rests with those who argue that an all-knowing, merciful god created us mainly to worship and adore him why he did not make such an important issue (the most important according to religious fundamentalists) as obvious and idiot-proof as fear of heights or fire, or desire for sex or food.   A candle here and now has the power to teach, instruct, and persuade.  Our capacity to feel that pain and respond to it has tremendous survival value.  It is beyond absurd to assume that something as important as choosing the one correct choice of the menu of choices above would be shaped by the prospect of a theoretical postmortem punishment that would be as useless as it is cruel and gratuitous.  


Simply presenting this menu to children (most of whom are never told there are other choices, or if so, that they have any validity) undermines the whole premise of most religions:  the presentation of a universal explanation for how the world was created, where we came from, why we're here, and where we are going.
But most religious classes are not informing as much as selling.   The sheer number of choices people make would be Exhibit A in the case against anyone having a monopoly on holy truths.  It strikes me as dishonest and manipulative to present these things to children as fact.   I have witnessed a number of Sunday school classes and Bible camps and have yet to see one that honestly presents a historically or even logically consistent case for Christian belief.
This brings up another pet peeve - that most who thump the Bible most forcefully have not actually read it (and if they did, they would probably stop believing it, much less thumping it), but that is not my main gripe.  We cannot all be historians, amateur or professional, and reading both the accepted sacred texts of Mediterranean Monotheism and historical works about how they were written, edited, translated, and in some cases purged, takes a tremendous amount of work.  For people with day jobs who just want to pass a little tradition on to their kids, it seems like a tall order.
But I think we can start with some humility.  We can use the words "I don't know" more, and admit that 99% of religious affiliation is geography.  If we really believe god will punish us forever and ever for what we believe, then we are saying that god is essentially punishing us for where we born, a geographical fact over which we have no control.   It is possible we live in such a random universe, but if so we might as well enjoy our lives and stop groveling so much.
We can tell our children (they will find out anyway) that all religious traditions have done some shameful things, some are doing them now, and anyone who says he is infallible is lying.   We can admit that we don't have all the answers and never will.  No one does.  We can say that we may all believe certain things to be true, but belief is a complicated thing with many inputs, including heritage, conscience, and personal life experience.  Beliefs change with time, both societally and individually, and that's OK.  In fact, in no area of our lives except religion is changing your mind to reflect new ideas and experiences seen as sinister.  It's what adults do, even if it means that we have to admit we were wrong or mistaken.   There is no shame in this.   The fact that some people rationalize bad things does not mean that reason is always to be mistrusted anymore than the fact that some people justify bad things for religious reasons does not mean that faith is always to be mistrusted.
However, given a choice between the two, since there is so much disagreement about articles of faith, especially metaphysical ones, and since we must still use reason to determine which of the many articles of faith apply in a given situation, let's make sure our reasoning skills are fully honed and never completely abandoned or disparaged.  The ancient Greeks believed, perhaps naively, that to know virtue was to do virtue, and that virtue and balance would lead inevitably to happiness.  Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, despite the legendary scholarship each tradition has spawned directly or indirectly, have at their heart a conflictual, sometimes overtly hostile relationship to knowledge.  (What was the name of the tree whose forbidden fruit Adam and Eve munched on - the tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil?)

Doubt is part of the human condition.  As Graham Greene said, to doubt is to be alive.  It is what spurs us to be curious and to grow.  Certainty breeds complacency and hypocrisy.  Those who are certain about anything, whether in philosophy or physics, probably don't understand their field very well.  Reality does not lend itself to simple explanations, although our mind finds such explanations comforting.
No religious or philosophical belief system has a monopoly on truth.  This does not mean that all things are OK because they are not.  All religious belief systems, at their core, believe in some form of the Golden Rule.  Don't hurt.  Don't kill.  Don't lie, cheat, or steal.  As Rabbi Hillel the Elder once put it when asked to explain the Torah to a skeptic while standing on one foot, "Do not do unto others as you would not have them do unto you. That is the whole of the Torah: go and learn it."

The world is much older and our place it in much smaller than those who wrote the books we call the Bible could possibly imagine.  The fact that Biblical authors were so far off in their estimates of the age of the Earth (many millions of orders of magnitude), and so confused about the order that things must have been created (there could be no light before the light-generating objects such as the sun were created, for example, and the sun is one of many stars, so could not have been created first) indicates that the Bible cannot be taken literally.

My hats off the scribes of our time able to fit the most eloquent of retorts onto the smallest of t-shirts.

This does not mean of course that the Bible, however imperfectly it was written down, does not reflect in some way the words or thoughts of god, or that there is a god at all, but it does mean that it must be judged as one of many possible sources to wisdom and goodness.   The fact that it sets itself up as infallible then stumbles in the first few verses does not inspire confidence.  
If we are to read the Bible as poetry, fine, but the Bible itself commands us not to.  This is the ultimate Catch-22:  to take the Bible with all of its glaring inconsistencies and scientific inaccuracies evident to a reasonably educated middle schooler (but imperceptible to an agrarian, semi-literate, pre-scientific Mediterranean target audience) seriously, we must ignore large chunks of it including its commands not to ignore a single word of it!
Why not just start from scratch instead of twisting ourselves into a logical and ethical pretzel, trying to make ourselves fit a belief system that may have been appropriate for a world that believed women were inferior, slavery was inevitable, and the earth was only 7,000 years old, but clearly has long outlived its service as any kind of Life Owner's Manual.
The fact that its tone is often exclusivist, authoritarian, and dismissive of any other belief systems, enumerating villages and ethnic groups for destruction who have long since disappeared anyway, makes me wonder why we should accept such a transparently human document (or more accurately collection of documents, some of which are quite poetical and lyrical) as a moral anchor.  When people such as Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin say they want to use this book as the basis of our country, I can only hope that they have not read it (if they have, I fear for our country).

If Beck is right, Jesus was just a progressive activist.


There are many stories in the Bible that are useful.  We should be kind to the widow and the orphan and the outcast.  We should share with the poor and give clothes and shelter to the homeless.  All of these messages are found throughout the Bible.
But there are many messages that are downright harmful, clearly a product of a much more brutal and superstitious time.  Extensive references condoning and supporting slavery, cruelty toward children, or subjugation of women come to mind.  And what possible ethical lesson is there in a man murdering his son or his daughter (or being willing to in the first instance) simply because he heard a voice telling him to? If we are reading these stories to our children for some kind of moral instruction, don't they have a right to know if we would kill them if we got it in our heads that that is what god wanted us to do? And if so, shouldn't the next call be to child protective services or the police?


"You've got to be kidding me... NOW you tell me... It was just a TEST? ... YOU explain that to my son then."

Westboro Baptist Preacher Was Abusive, Son Recalls, But Is Not All Terrorizing of Children With Images of Hell Abusive?

This article on the son of the Westboro Baptist preacher (the one who picketed military funerals) is sad, but isn't there something inherently abusive in even milder variants of this horrific, apocalyptic view?  Perhaps this sadistic father would have been just as sadistic wherever he was raised, but something about religion, particularly Mediterranean Monotheism, makes some otherwise compassionate, sane people do cruel things, and rationalize their cruelty.  The ideas and their institutionalized method of intergenerational propagation are inherently hateful and dangerous.  As an adult who was not indoctrinated religiously as a child - thanks, Mom and Dad - I can look with a certain objective distance at these images of God the Torturer-in-Chief and smile, but children exposed to them at a young age do not have that luxury.  I could never embrace such strange ideas as an adult - no sentient, educated human being could - and I think religious leaders know this, which is why they are so eager to enroll kids in Sunday school and Bible camps.  I respectfully request that they stop, or at least that we stop turning our children over to them for this systematic indoctrination.
It is interesting that Jesus never mentions hell at all in the book of John and in other books mentions it less than some of his loudest followers do.  Stygiophobia - fear of hell - was not invented in the middle ages, but it was certainly honed and perfected then.  The Western half of the Christian church was trying to consolidate its grip on political life in Western Europe and what was left of the Roman Empire post-collapse (a collapse that interestingly enough occurred shortly after its decision to adopt Christianity as the official state religion, making what had been an informal, subversive religion into a corporate one complete with all the trappings of power and central authority). "Outside the church no salvation" was a very powerful motivator for peasants who might otherwise hold onto their native faith or donate less of whatever they had left over to the local priest's latest renovation project. Fear of hell created a thriving market in indulgences - essentially Get Out of Hell Free cards.   (Whatever one feels about Transubstantiation, the ability of Rome to turn worthless paper into cold hard cash approached the miraculous.  It was a scam, a self-perpetuating delusion that may have continued to this day were it not for the Reformation - sparked in large part by outrage over indulgences.)
As the compassionate teachings of Jesus of forgiveness, pacifism and social justice were squeezed out by images of fire and brimstone, morphing Jesus the forgiver into Jesus the judge, drawing on the authoritarian, murderously jealous spirit of Yahweh (whose laws Jesus in all fairness said he had come not to replace but to enforce), those fighting over the right to be his only legitimate representative here on earth became as cruel in behavior as they were now in creed.
Torture had always been part of Mediterranean life - amputation, eye-gouging, stoning, and even being put to the fire were all biblically-condoned punishments - it is unclear how literally those commandments were followed and with what zeal.   Punishment was probably a haphazard, tribally-based affair, with an occasional sacrifice made for public order or to redress a particularly egregious crime.
But in Christian Europe, torture was refined and honed and used for new ends.  Most biblical punishments were meted out for violations of orthopraxy - literally, correct actions - such as stealing or working on the sabbath.   Christian European authorities were much more concerned with violations of orthodoxy - literally, correct thinking or belief.   It was no longer enough to make an outward show of obedience to the priest, lord, or king.  You had to also demonstrate that you really believed in the one correct interpretation of whatever village or province you happened to find yourself.  A literal belief in and dread of the Devil, as a walking, talking creature (a belief up to 40% of Americans still hold apparently) led to demon-sightings and witch-huntings.   Fantastic claims about Jews wanting to drink the blood of Gentile children - claims that still circulate in parts of the world unfortunately in the form of the Elders of Zion - led to horrific pogroms and in some cases mass murder.  It was no accident that Christian Europe invented the first ghetto at that time (so named after the region in Venice where the Catholic authorities ordered the Jews to move).
It did not take long before the idea of temporal torture - perhaps to prevent eternal torture - entered into the toolkit of religious leaders who found themselves with the power of life and death over their trembling subjects.   After all, if you believe in hell and worship a god you believe creates most people only to torture them forever and ever, amen, then then surely the finite torture of the rack or the wheel or a strategically inserted red hot poker could be forgiven.  Perhaps it was even part of the divine plan; nothing like the screams of a broken, dying man to remind all the other parishioners of the price - temporal and eternal - of dissent from the One True Way.
If you really believe a Jew or Baptist or free thinker or Muslim is going to hell, why not give them a head start on all that pain they will be experiencing after death?  Why not make their torment instructional for others who still have time to repent and renounce the errors of their ways?
Such a legacy has never been fully renounced.  There has been no Truth and Reconciliation equivalent for any branch of Christianity as there was for the post-apartheid regime in South Africa.  I still hear some otherwise intelligent, compassionate people defend, apologize for, or downplay some of the worst abuses of Christianity.  
Until we stand up to these religious bigots and tell them to stop lying to each other and - most importantly - to our children, we are all doomed to repeat this cycle.
It's interesting in the article when the abused preacher's son was asked if there was a baby to be thrown out with the bathwater, he could not quite bring himself to imagine a world free of religious orthodoxy. I imagine religion is like alcohol, in the sense that it is a social lubricant that relaxes most people who can use it in moderation, but a significant minority will abuse it, and become so intoxicated they will become murderous. Some will convince others to start wars, or open concentration camps because they get it in their heads that's what god really wants them to do.
Since we don't know when the next convulsive outbreak of self-righteous, religiously-based violence will occur, and history shows us that these sorts of outbreaks sneak up on us, we must be always vigilant even against more innocent-seeming religious distortions of reality.
But it is dangerous to ignore the historical ugliness underpinning Mediterranean Monotheism, an ugliness that projected the cruel tribalism and petty racism endemic to that part of the world onto an angry god who sounds more in need of lithium than appeasement. Those who believe in predestination, such as the religious extremists who founded Massachusetts or the father of the article in question, correctly point out that such a god cannot really be appeased anyway. Only a tiny handful of those he created, if the sacred texts found in every hotel room and partially cited in Sunday schools and bible camps are to be believed, will be saved from eternal torture, mainly for the crime of having not chosen their parents better or perhaps because of an errant fruit-picking expedition in a garden several thousand years ago.  Original sin seems such a wimpy justification to impose such an apocalyptic world view on our children, so why do we continue to do so?  Is it because deep in our hearts, we are all holding back that tiny grain of doubt, that maybe the most lurid fantasies are correct and just in case, if we pay some lip service to this angry god, if we propitiate, we or our family might be saved.  It's Pascal's dilemma all over again, never mind that an omniscient god would know if you are faking something you don't really believe and perhaps punish you even more severely for compounding the crime of dishonesty - mouthing words you did not believe - with spineless groveling. It never seems to occur to anyone that perhaps god wants us to be honest, just, and true to our conscience, even if that is painful or takes us to some lonely places sometimes.   Monotheists - who by definition are atheists to all gods but one - are also unaware of what a massive, cosmic bet they are taking, and that if there is a monster or team of monsters in charge of this universe, perhaps they are more offended by those who worship the "wrong" deity than none at all.
The fact is that none of us knows what happens when we die, but if the track record of those who use the Bible to make predictions about things that we can actually go out and measure is any guide, we should all be deeply reassured.  Making absurd claims about something we can't possibly know about is tremendously convenient, since those who invented these fantasies do not have to risk anyone coming back and blowing their scam.   And as long as enough people here and now see all this hell fire and eternal torture stuff as harmless or even useful - it might make our kids floss and eat their vegetables if they thought god would burn them forever for not doing so - no one will call their bluff here and now.
I say we do just that, though.  I say we stand up to the bullies who want us to believe in their infallibility or else face eternal torture in the same way we would stand up to someone who makes a racist joke (except those talking about hell are usually not joking, unfortunately).   Remind them, if it's the case, that there are children in the room, and just as we would not talk about the torture scene of a particularly graphic film, so we should not expose them to this particular imagery, even if some of the adults in the room believe it's real.  In fact, BECAUSE some adults believe literally in hell, it would be even more disturbing to expose children, who are not in a position to know better, to this strongly held but deeply disturbing world view.  They have neither the logical nor the historical context to understand that hell was an idea created and propagated by men for very specific historical and financial reasons.  If hell is real, they will have all their adult lives to learn about it.  If it's not, then why torture the next generation?  They have no valid reason to be exposed to this apocalyptic cosmic vision anymore than they have a reason to be exposed to graphic sexual images.