How Steve Bannon Sees the World and Why He Almost Certainly Is Full of Shit - Analysis of a 2014 Talk He Skyped Into the Vatican

This transcript from a talk Bannon Skyped into the Vatican in 2014 is perhaps the most fleshed-out (no pun intended, given the accompanying pictures) articulation of his world view.  It's a dark one, full of resentment, rage, and fear.  And it now guides the policies of our government, or at least the executive branch.

Bannon, like the neocons before him, probably is a bright guy.  He can weave thoughts into themes more articulately than his boss.  He has a vivid imagination and can thread a single variable through different historical periods, using it as an explanation of everything.

But his elaborate worldview is long on theory and short on empirical facts.  But like the neocons, he believes that he can theorize his way to a better world once other people fight all the nasty little wars that his theory says must be fought.   What he lacks in actual data, he makes up for in self-confidence, which in his case verges on the grandiose. 

He isn't an academic theorist.  In fact, he has no advanced academic credentials beyond a 1976 bachelor's degree in urban planning from Virginia Tech and a master's degree in national security studies from Georgetown University School of Foreign Service and his Harvard MBA. 

No one would listen to Bannon or care what he thought if he wasn't rich.  But he didn't get rich like George Soros by putting his money where his mouth was, making large bets that paid off because of his geopolitical wizardry.   He didn't get rich like Bill Gates by creating a new product that transformed the world. 

No, Bannon made a mint by his stake in a television sitcom called Seinfeld.  You might have heard of it.  It's been famously described as a show about nothing and that is part of its genius.

So now a man who made his money from a show about nothing (which he did nothing to create but simply got shares as part of another deal his company was privy to) feels he has much to tell us. 

He plowed some of his loot into Breitbart, a far right media outlet that hawks theories considered too outrageous even for Fox, running headlines such as the following:

"BILL KRISTOL:  REPUBLICAN SPOILER, RENEGADE JEW"

"WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION REPORT:  TRANNIES 49 X HIGHER HIV RATE"

"SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVILS:  THE PLOT AGAINST ROGER AILES - AND AMERICA" 

"THERE'S NO HIRING BIAS AGAINST WOMEN IN TECH, THEY JUST SUCK AT INTERVIEWS"

  

"GABBY GIFFORDS:  THE GUN CONTROL MOVEMENT'S HUMAN SHIELD"

"PLANNED PARENTHOOD'S BODY COUNT UNDER CECILE RICHARDS IS UP TO HALF A HOLOCAUST"

"BIRTH CONTROL MAKES WOMEN UNATTRACTIVE AND CRAZY"

"THE SOLUTION TO ONLINE 'HARASSMENT' IS SIMPLE: WOMEN SHOULD LOG OFF"

"HILLARY CLINTON'S MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD PROBLEM"

TRUMP 100% VINDICATED:  CBS REPORTS 'SWARM' ON ROOFTOPS CELEBRATING 9/11"

"WOULD YOU RATHER YOUR CHILD HAD FEMINISM OR CANCER?"

"POLITICAL CORRECTNESS PROTECTS MUSLIM RAPE CULTURE"

   "Deep and loving regard for women and our femininity is a purely Anglo-Saxon concept"

"THE VETTING - EXCLUSIVE - OBAMA's LITERARY AGENT IN 1991 BOOKLET:  'BORN IN KENYA AND RAISED IN INDONESIA AND HAWAII'"

"#BLACKLIVESMATTER STOKES GLOBAL CHAOS"

"HOIST IT HIGH And PROUD: THE CONFEDERATE FLAG PROCLAIMS A GLORIOUS HERITAGE"

  

Bannon's Apocalyptic Worldview

"I believe the world, and particularly the Judeo-Christian West, is in a crisis."

This crisis is because capitalism has lost "the underpinnings of the Judeo-Christian West in our beliefs."

As a result, our time "will be looked at almost as a new Dark Age."

He sweeps through the bloody 20^th century, somehow twisting World War II in a struggle between "Judeo-Christian West versus atheists," a stunning charge, since the Third Reich, with which the Vatican he was addressing had made a Concordat, seeing Hitler as a bulwark against atheistic communism, was in fact defeated by that atheistic Soviet system with which we allied ourselves.   The Holocaust, the Christian attempt to cleanse Europe of non-Christian elements, namely Jews, was - in Bannon's mind - reworked as an expression of atheism.  Which is stunning since Hitler, unlike Stalin, wasn't an atheist and relied heavily on the support of German Christians which he largely got.   "Let us thank God, the Almighty," proclaimed Hitler.  "That he has blessed our generation and us and granted us to be a part of this time and this hour."  He had Gott Mit Uns (God With Us) on his soldiers' uniforms.   One can call National Socialism many things, but atheist isn't one of them. 

So after presenting this "Judeo-Christian" Goodies versus atheistic Baddies struggle, Bannon goes on to divide capitalism into Good Capitalism ("an enlightened form of capitalism" based on Judeo-Christian principles) and Bad Capitalism (the sort of soulless capitalism he saw in which workers are viewed as commodities).

He believes strongly that the "21^st century, … I believe, strongly, is a crisis both of our church, a crisis of our faith, a crisis of the West, a crisis of capitalism."

Never mind that plenty of the most successful AND charitable capitalists today are atheists, including Warren Buffett, Bill and Melinda Gates, and George Soros, or that Andrew Carnegie, one of the greatest capitalist philanthropists of last century, was also atheist. 

As an atheist, Mark Zuckerberg built Facebook and gave massively to charities.  He claimed recently that he is rediscovering the importance of some religion (he is Jewish by upbringing), but his company's most phenomenal growth occurred when he was not religious, disproving the thesis that religion is required. 

Not that it proves anything, but Bernie Madoff, an Orthodox Jew, and Jordan Belfort, the so-called "Wolf of Wall Street" was also Jewish, seeming to disprove the idea that "Judeo-Christian capitalism" is immune from harming people or always "enlightened."  The Vatican itself that Bannon was addressing in 2014 was embroiled in a massive international banking scandal.    And Christian scandals are too numerous to list.  Some highlights:
Jim Bakker and Tammy Faye Bakker's Praise the Lord ($158 million stolen, leading to a 45-year prison sentence), Jimmy Swaggart, and Ted Haggard.

And if Christian affiliation of corporate CEOs is supposed to make them more moral, less greedy, and less likely to view their employees as commodities, it's hard to make that case with CEOs averaging 300 times the average worker's earnings and 770 times minimum wage earners.   Nor did Christian affiliation prevent scandal, as was the case with Enron's CEO Kenneth Lay. 

And if only Jews and Christians need apply in Bannon's mind, he must explain why Coca-Cola is doing so well despite being headed by Muhtar Kent, a Muslim. 

Why was the first country that recognized the United States as a country Morocco, a predominantly Muslim nation?

If the premise of an argument is wrong (that capitalism must be associated with Judeo-Christianity to be good), then the conclusion (that secularism or - even worse - a lurch toward Islam will be the death knell for Western civilization) could only be true by accident.

Bannon's Prediction

But let's ignore Bannon's sloppy, one-variable explanation of the past and see what he has to say about the future.  It's pretty grim.

"We’re at the very beginning stages of a very brutal and bloody conflict," he insists.  This conflict will require "people in the church" (meaning Christians) to "bind together" and form a "church militant, to really be able to not just stand with our beliefs, but to fight for our beliefs against this new barbarity" (by which he means Islam).  If not, then Muslims will "completely eradicate everything that we’ve been bequeathed over the last 2,000, 2,500 years."
This is a very curious statement since Christian hadn’t yet been invented 2,000 years ago and countless empires have come and gone since then.  The Roman Empire adopted Christianity as its only legal religion state religion then collapsed shortly thereafter, badly undercutting his thesis that what the world needs now (and always) is more Christianity. 

In fact, the Roman Empire collapsed and Europe plunged into the Dark Ages without any help from Evil Islam, which wasn't to be invented until 610, two centuries after Rome's collapse (variously dated as anywhere from 410 to 476). 
Bannon argues that capitalism is a force for good that has contributed greatly to Western Civilization which I tend to agree with.  The synchronous rise of the limited liability common stock company, markets to trade those shares, and the explosion of wealth in the West cannot be merely coincidental.   Stocks, like the development of paper money and modern banking, made it possible to spread risks and rewards over a much larger group of people, all of whom benefited over time from the industry and risk-taking of a few. 

But Bannon is on thinner ice when he argues that capitalism "taken away from the underlying spiritual and moral foundations of Christianity and, really, Judeo-Christian belief" is inherently bad, both for the reasons cited above (non-Christian, non-Jewish businesses both thrive and do great good) and also for the sleight of hand all Christian propagandists use, namely conflating morality and goodness with religious affiliation, implying that Christianity has a monopoly on morality.   A business leader who follows the teachings of Christ literally would liquidate his business and distribute his wealth to the needy, but that's hardly an intelligent way to run a business or a society (and Jesus was many things, but an economist wasn't one of them - the field really wouldn't be developed as such until the publication of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations in 1776). 

He argues against "state-sponsored capitalism" such as what "you see in China and Russia", conflating it radically different systems with "crony capitalism." 

Let's get one thing straight:  there is no such thing as pure capitalism, that is, the unsupported, unregulated free hand of commerce matching buyer and seller, customer and vendor.  From the first stock exchange in Amsterdam to the largest ones in London and New York today, the state has heavily been involved not only in regulating how stocks are listed and traded, but in backing up the profitability of the private companies traded with the public navies and armies of the states in which they are headquartered. 

So all capitalism is at some level "state-sponsored"; the question is simply one of degree (and perhaps competence and transparency).  There is nothing inherently wrong with a government subsidizing soybean farmers or sugar companies, even sending in the marines from time to time to make sure that a revolutionary government doesn't nationalize valuable assets that would interrupt an American fruit company's profitability, let's say.  The real issue is how transparent and accountable such actions are and whether all stakeholders, including those living under brutal dictatorships multinational corporations want to prop  up, have a voice in deciding these things. 

Bannon is correct when he condemns the "brutal form of capitalism that is really about creating wealth and creating value for a very small subset of people," that "doesn’t spread the tremendous value creation throughout broader distribution patterns." 

And I have to admit I was glad to see that he condemns just as strongly the soulless "Ayn Rand or the Objectivist School of libertarian capitalism", a favorite of the current Speaker of the House, by the way. 

Capitalism, to work well and humanely, must have constraints.  Yes, these can come from a shared ethical system by its participants, but how well has that really worked out?  What is absolutely needed is strict regulation that penalizes cheating and exploitation and gives massive rewards, such as preferential tax treatment, to companies that share their wealth created with their workers as well as they do with their top corporate officers and shareholders. 

Bannon's criticism of capitalism that "really looks to make people commodities, and to objectify people, and to use them almost" isn't unique to crony or libertarian capitalism and if Judeo-Christian affiliation were an effective antidote, I haven't been impressed in with any empirical evidence of this (and Bannon, like most sweeping theorists, doesn't feel compelled to provide any). 

Bannon unfairly lumps Marx in with the more soulless capitalists.  I don't think that Marx viewed workers as commodities; much of his theory was formed in revulsion to the appalling working conditions of human beings corporations of his time viewed as commodities.  Marx's antidote - the abolition of private property and class through an inevitable evolutionary process (later distorted into a revolutionary process by Lenin) - was as unworkable and ultimately brutal as the worst forms of capitalism Bannon condemns, but both Bannon and Marx are trying - however imperfectly - to solve the same problem. 

Bannon bemoans the "immense secularization of the West" without ever providing data or exploring why the greatest gains in poverty reduction, universal healthcare, and the rise of the middle class all occurred in a Europe that had become decidedly more secular.  Put another way, centuries of domination of Europe by the Christian church had produced nothing except absolute monarchs and wretchedly poor peasants.   There is an INVERSE relationship between Christian affiliation and the exploitation of workers as commodities.  It may be true, true, and unrelated (perhaps the rise of the printing press led to a more educated public that was able both to improve its own economic circumstances and reject the more absurd claims of parochial religion simultaneously) but for Bannon's argument that returning to a more religious society would be a good thing must first explain why this time it would be different.  

Bannon laments that the "overwhelming drive of popular culture" is to "absolutely secularize" young people, especially millennials.   This is unfortunate since "we are in an outright war against jihadist Islamic fascism. And this war is, I think, metastasizing far quicker than governments can handle it… That war is expanding and it’s metastasizing to sub-Saharan Africa."
Bannon here confuses a competition of ideas - how should one organize one's society? - with an actual war.  What's fascinating here is that those who clearly find something appealing about ISIS and fundamentalism in general are far more in agreement with Bannon than with me.  I cheer secularization and the move away from the superstitions and cruelties inherent in Mediterranean Monotheism.  Bannon and ISIS supporters lament them.  I believe not only that state-mandated religion as an organizing principle (theocracy) is not necessary to having a moral and just society but often makes such a society far less likely. 

Why You Can't Win An Idea of Ideas With High Explosives

The reason it's critical to distinguish between a shooting war and a war of ideas is that a military solution can resolve the former but is impotent against the latter.  Indeed, if all it took to defeat Islamic fundamentalism needed was a show of strength, a few invasions and occupations, thousands of air and drone strikes, and the killing of a few hundred thousand people, then Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, and Yemen should be among the most peaceful and secular places on Earth.

Bannon's error is the same ones that neocons made, namely that we are facing a cartoon-like, monolithic enemy that doesn't represent want hundreds of millions of people want, but is some sort of universally recognized, illegitimate evil that can be toppled with a barrage of smart bombs, cruise missiles, and drone strikes.   The neocons made this assumption about Saddam Hussein, a brutal secular leader whose brutality against Islamic fundamentalism is perhaps understandable - there was no al Qaeda or ISIS when he was in charge - whose toppling they were convinced would lead to an outbreak of Jeffersonian democracy.  Instead, it led to civil war in Iraq then in neighboring Syria, sectarian division, death squads, and an influx of a more brutal form of transnational fundamentalism to fill the void left by the collapse of a secular Arab nationalist. 

Bannon, I think, is asking the wrong question.  Instead of assuming that 2 of the 3 Mediterranean Monotheistic faiths (Christianity and Judaism) are Goodies and the other (Islam) not only all Baddies but illegitimate, not even a "real" religion (something Bannon feels he can measure), perhaps we should ask ourselves why young men and not a few women find something so compelling about Islamic fundamentalism that they prefer it to more moderate forms of Islam or to Western imports such as secularism (which Bannon also condemns, illustrating the universality of the impulse in times of crisis to seek comfort by immersing yourself deeper into your culture's religion, even accepting some brutality if that is the price for maintaining order or exploitation by foreigners). 

My sense is that Islamic fundamentalism will mellow out only when people like Bannon shut up and stop giving it credibility.   Troops from predominantly Christian countries and one predominantly Jewish country occupy or patrol the airs and seas of dozens of predominantly Muslim countries.   Troops of no predominantly Arab country returns the favor.  The idea that a region so torn apart by invasions and occupations from non-Muslim forces poses an existentialist threat to the "Judeo-Christian" West as Bannon calls it, ethnically cleansing in his mind the 2% of Americans and 10% of French who are Muslim, is patently absurd.

Islamic fundamentalism, like any fundamentalism (like Bannon's blended economic-religious fundamentalism), is born in an environment of fear and crisis.  Address the fear and the fundamentalism will mellow.

But let's be clear:  it isn't our job to determine what religion, if any, a country or region chooses to adopt.  The relatively modern, secular, republican state is a novel Western invention that might not be exportable to the rest of the world.  Bannon himself illustrates several dangers of this secular model. 

If we backed off, got out of the game of determining what sort of government a country should have, let countries make their own history (while working hard through international organizations Bannon hates like the United Nations to give parties to conflicts a forum to settle their issues and stop the bloodshed), my bet is that ISIS would be either marginalized or transformed, , à la Hezbollah, the PLO, or the IRA, into a political organization.  Until and unless people are confident that they can achieve their ends through a fair and transparent political process that takes their concerns seriously, they will turn to violence, especially terrorism that is always and everywhere a tactic of the weak and marginalized. 

Bannon Has No Understanding of Islam

Bannon engages in the crudest stereotypes of Islam-  the religion that oversaw the development of our numbering system, the number zero, decimals, algebra, mapmaking, the compass, and that passed on to the West Chinese inventions such as gunpowder and paper - when he expresses astonishment that ISIS has "a Twitter account up today" in which it announces its intention to turn "the United States into a 'river of blood' if it comes in and tries to defend the city of Baghdad."  If Bannon doesn't understand that poetic hyperbole is part of contemporary boasting and imagery in that part of the world - think of the "mother of all battles" Saddam Hussein promised - then he really hasn't been paying attention.   A weak organization vying for power with many others will no doubt project its desire to unleash a "river of blood" but how has that been working out for them so far?  4 hours of gun carnage in the United States kills as many Americans in a typical year as are killed by ISIS. 

And check out the critical qualification:  if we "defend the city of Baghdad."  In other words, if we continue to be belligerents in the bloody sorting-out process that followed our brilliant idea to remove Saddam Hussein from power without any idea who should follow him, then ISIS will fight back, and not just on the battlefield.  Why would this be surprising?
Bannon raises his hysteria a notch, promising that ISIS violence "is going to come to Europe. That is going to come to Central Europe, it’s going to come to Western Europe, it’s going to come to the United Kingdom."  At the time, there had been some attacks on French police, synagogues, and a particularly brutal shooting at a French Jewish school, but these were linked to French military operations in Africa, not the Middle East.   Europeans didn't need to be lectured to by an American about terrorism or the threat of Islamic fundamentalism, in other words. 
And the question isn't whether Europe would suffer some deaths and disruption from terrorist attacks, perhaps a few spectacular in their audacity and cruelty, but whether Europe should fundamentally change the character of their society, its openness and commitment as a sanctuary for those fleeing war and terror, in order to try - probably unsuccessfully - to stamp out all politically inspired violence on the Continent.

Also, why is Bannon only concerned about terrorism in the West?   As a Catholic lecturing other Catholics who at their best insist that every life is sacred, Bannon seems to be implying something uglier, that some lives don't matter quite as much.  Since the vast, vast majority of victims of Islamic-inspired terrorism are Muslims killed in the countries from which Bannon now doesn't want them to escape, why is he silent on these deaths?  Why is it OK for hundreds of thousands to die in the Middle East and North Africa if that is the price to avoid a few dozen deaths in Israel, Western Europe, and the United States?  In what "Judeo-Christian" ethical system is this right or just? 
"And so I think we are in a crisis of the underpinnings of capitalism, and on top of that we’re now, I believe, at the beginning stages of a global war against Islamic fascism."  Bannon clearly doesn't understand the prosperity and trade in the Ottoman Empire when Christian Europe was still bogged down in its feudalistic feces, doesn't understand the critical role that the importation of the Hindu-Arabic numbering system from the Arab world in the 1200s played in the rise of modern banking and capitalism.  He continues to talk about capitalism as though it were a uniquely Western development (and an unalloyed good), a "highest flower … spreading its benefits to most of mankind." 

Our Founders Were Not Active Christians

Bannon states, with no evidence to back it up, that those who spread these benefits "were active participants in the Christians’ faith, and they took their beliefs, and the underpinnings of their beliefs was manifested in the work they did."  Then how on earth can he explain the economic success of the United States, founded by Deists and atheists who were highly suspicious of Christianity and friendly toward Islam?  

John Adams, for example, described "the Christian religion" as "the most bloody religion that ever existed."  

Why did Benjamin Franklin argue that lighthouses are more useful than churches, that the religious knave is the worst knave of all, and that "too much of it [religion] is worse than none at all"?

Bannon then peppers his strange stew of half-baked historical inaccuracies and half-truths with something that really doesn't blend well at all:  populism. 
Bannon comes from a blue collar background and like many bright people propelled from a working class union home into the upper echelons of elite capitalism such as Harvard Business School and Goldman Sachs, he no doubt harbored simmering resentments that reflected the extraordinary gulf separating his father's world and the self-styled Masters of the Universe with whom he worked.  

He speaks with reverence of the "middle class, the working men and women in the world who are just tired of being dictated to by what we call the party of Davos." 
We?  How is it that men such as Bannon and Trump get away with claiming membership among the unwashed masses, the poorly-educated whites who might as well live in a different country from them, their lifestyles and access to opportunity and privilege are so dramatically different. 

And how does a man who headed Breitbart, an extreme rightwing publication whose stock in trade is conspiracy theories disproven by real news outlets with actual journalistic standards, get away with claiming not to be among "conspiracy-theory guys." 

He bemoans the fact that "there are people in New York that feel closer to people in London and in Berlin than they do to people in Kansas and in Colorado," but why is this either surprising or a bad thing?   If you're a finances guy, you're going to have contacts in major financial cities, and it just so happens there aren't that many in Kansas or Colorado.   He walks to the brink of an old anti-Semitic slur here (Jewish financiers were often accused of being international in their outlook (and therefore of questionable patriotism)).   He adds to this ugly stereotype by accusing them of having "this elite mentality that they’re going to dictate to everybody how the world’s going to be run." 

So let me see if I have this straight:  a man who made a fortune by being among those elites when the pieces of the pie were being handed out, a man who was enriched not through his labor but through the success of a silly television show, is lecturing the rest of us about how we should be more "Judeo-Christian" and less elitist? 
He admits with a shrug and a misleading past tense that right-wing parties "have had some aspects that may be anti-Semitic or racial" but claims that "over time it all gets kind of washed out." 

He levels the charges against Wall Street insiders both causing the 2008 crisis then benefiting from the bailout, something many of us can agree on, but why on Earth would he and Trump be undoing the Dodd-Franks legislation that would make a repeat of that economic meltdown less likely?  Why wouldn't he be advocating for more financial regulation and transparency, as well as accountability for those who engage in malfeasance, instead of less? 

He claimed that the United States had never recovered from the crisis, was seeing "2.9% negative growth" and was in "very, very tough shape," the sort of alarmist language his boss was to use on the campaign trail 2 years later, when it was very clear that that negative growth was aberrant and that the economy continued to expand through the present (February 2017).  In fact, the unemployment rate would fall by another third to a nadir of 4.6% from where it was when Bannon predicted economic gloom and doom in 2014 (when it stood at 6.6%). 

At this point, Bannon dives off the board into that weird mix of cruelty and economic idiocy that passes for tough love Christianity in Trump country.   After telling us that capitalism without the ethical underpinnings of Christianity would lead to people getting screwed, he then tells us that people screwed by capitalists should never have been helped to avoid bankruptcy and financial collapse.  "For Christians, and particularly for those who believe in the underpinnings of the Judeo-Christian West, I don’t believe that we should have a bailout. I think the bailouts in 2008 were wrong."
I can understand opposing the exact form the bailout took, but the idea that economy should be denied a critical lifeline when it was at risk of facing a Depression Era catastrophe seems both cruel and thoroughly un-Christian.  Jesus commanded his followers to essentially engage in a lifetime of bailouts of men, women, and children less fortunate than yourself.   He said nothing against providing critical liquidity or short-term deficit-spending to avoid a recession or depression. 

"I certainly think secularism has sapped the strength of the Judeo-Christian West to defend its ideals, right?"
No, wrong. 

Bannon, borrowing a style of argument from Gore's Inconvenient Truth, claims that "we have to face a very unpleasant fact … that there is a major war brewing, a war that’s already global. It’s going global in scale, and today’s technology, today’s media, today’s access to weapons of mass destruction, it’s going to lead to a global conflict that I believe has to be confronted today. Every day that we refuse to look at this as what it is, and the scale of it, and really the viciousness of it, will be a day where you will rue that we didn’t act."
Got it.   You think we are at war.  Is this news to anyone who has been involved in the fight against Islamic terrorism?  Really?  Here's a hint that it's not:  a president once called this the Global War on Terrorism.   That president wasn't George W. Bush, by the way, but Clinton. 
Now here is why obsessing over one particular threat can get you in trouble.  Bannon, using language that is eerily similar to that of Trump, whose campaign he managed while high level contacts were clearly established with Russia, says that Putin, although brutal, might be a useful ally in what Bannon is convinced is the existentialist, End Times, apocalyptic show down with ISIS.  Using the same moral relativism that allowed us to side with and support brutal dictators during the Cold War just as long as they helped us fight the greater evil of Soviet Communism, Bannon says that even a thug and murderer like Putin might be a useful ally.  Putin, Bannon says, is "an interesting character" and also "very, very, very intelligent." 

He admitted that "Putin and his cronies are really a kleptocracy, that are really an imperialist power that want to expand" but there is no time for morality or even logical consistency (forget what I just said about the evils of crony capitalism) because the ISIS is so scary.  "I really believe that in this current environment, where you’re facing a potential new caliphate that is very aggressive … we have to deal with first things first."
So the United States doesn't have the resources or time to fight ISIS and continue sanctions against an expansionist Russia. 

Perhaps he thought he wasn't dire enough or clear enough, so Bannon repeated it again:  "Because it is a crisis, and it’s not going away. You don’t have to take my word for it. All you have to do is read the news every day, see what’s coming up, see what they’re putting on Twitter, what they’re putting on Facebook, see what’s on CNN, what’s on BBC."
And if you can't believe what's on Twitter or Facebook, what can you believe, no what I mean?  And how is it that CNN and the BBC can be used to support an argument by a man who would later condemn these organizations as "fake news"? 

"See what’s happening, and you will see we’re in a war of immense proportions."

This impressionistic, vague argument ("bad things are happening and are reported in the news and people say things on social media, so we must be involved in a Clash of Civilizations") should be booed out of existence.
I'm not sure exactly what Bannon is advocating - a Fortress Europa-Americana that pulls up the drawbridge on men, women, and children fleeing the violence he says he deplores?  Escalating military action against ISIS?  - but the burden of proof is on him to show where in the past building walls ever helped a country or civilization.  General George S. Patton, who knew a hell of a lot more about geography, history, and military strategy than Bannon does, scoffed at defensive fortifications as monuments to stupidity.    What Bannon is advocating is a strategy that has never worked in the past, another Maginot Line that is sure to prevent an invasion (how did that work out?).  When the Roman Empire got to the point where it had to build wall, such as Hadrian's in England, it was the beginning of the end.   Sections of the wall remain, but the Roman Empire collapsed shortly after it was built. 
As for military action against an ideology, how do you do that exactly?  How does a 500 pound bomb dropped on a shelter in Aleppo prevent an American from buying an automatic weapon and plenty of ammo, then walking into a night club in Orlando, Florida? 
Bannon is actually asking us to take his word for it and frankly, his word is worth less than his boss's.   Not because he's lying - although he has a long history of this through his publication - but because he is wrong.  Serious, impassioned, well-intentioned men make mistakes all the time.  They get tripped up over an assumption or overlook a variable that conflicts with their sweeping thesis.  They fall in love with their own ideas.  They drink their own Kool-Aid and become so confident that they are willing to risk the lives of millions to see what happens. 

The neocons did this in Iraq in 2003.  

The anticommunist crusaders did this in Vietnam in 1965. 

Hitler and Napoleon both did this in Russia (in 1942 and 1812, respectively). 
The British, Russians, and Americans all did it in Afghanistan (none learning from each other's experiences, each convinced that This Time Is Different). 

I just don't trust people with their Grand Explanations of Everything.  Life and history are messy and multivariate.  People like Bannon who got filthy rich in one area want us to think that the ability to choose a winning sit-com predicts the ability to settle a thousand-year-old pissing contest between different Abrahamic faiths. 

Good luck with that. 

Is Atheism Irrational?

February 11, 2014
This is the #1 emailed New York Times article at the moment, essentially an interview with Alvin Plantinga, an emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, a former president of both the Society of Christian Philosophers and the American Philosophical Association, who believes in god and tries to explain why he believes the 62% of his philosopher colleagues who are atheists are not only wrong, but irrational (believing something for which they lack evidence and reason).  It's clear that philosophy has gone downhill since the time of the Enlightenment when it peeled away from science (most Enlightenment philosophers were also heavily steeped in mathematics and science, something sorely lacking from those who study humanities today, for the most part).
Speaking of science, close to 100% of physicists - arguably those closest to studying the mind of god if there is one and grappling with eschatology - are atheists.
The modern American Christian theistic argument is quite specific, quite radical, and therefore quite easy to disprove. The good philosopher interviewed here does not seem to be aware of this, or perhaps is ignorant of the principles of probability and joint probability in general.
In general, the more specific a prediction the less likely it is to be true. For example, it is far more likely that Jane will be a librarian than that Jane will be a librarian working at a university library which itself is far less likely than the prediction that Jane will be a librarian working at a university library in New York City.
The broadest theistic argument is that there is some sort of god, or higher power, or original force that created the universe. Let's call this G.
This hypothesis is far more likely than the hypothesis that there is a god and only one god (monotheism). Monotheism is up to infinitely less likely than polytheism or agnostic polytheism (the belief in one god while not making any bet about the existence of other gods). Let's call this hypothesis MG for the two conditions M (mono) and G (god).
The joint probability that there is one and only one god is equal to the probability that there is at least one god times the probability that there is only one god. Both conditions must be true for this hypothesis to be correct. We don't know the probability that there is a god but we can work out roughly the odds that the god chosen by Christians is god by dividing by the numerator of all possible gods. Since this number is theoretically infinite, or close to it, let's instead divide by only the number of gods currently believed in by anyone on the planet. This again is a huge number, and there are doubtless many deities in isolated communities unstudied by anthropologists, but let's use the Hindu number of about 330 million gods since the others are rounding errors in this estimate. So, it is at least 330 million times more likely that there is more than one god than that there is one and only one god.
Again, the Christian theistic argument adds multiple additional conditions. This single god is male. Ignoring for a moment the possibility of androgynous or sexless gods, what is the probability that god has a penis? If we were created in the image of god and 50% of us have penises, then the probability god has one too is 50%. So the condition that god exists, is alone, and has a penis is half as likely as the probability that god exists and is alone which in turn is 330 million times less likely than that god exists and is not alone.
But there is more. The Christian theistic argument states that god has a name: Yahweh and was worshiped by a single people in a single place and time between several thousand to 2,000 years ago. The math can get very complicated here, but for simplicity's sake, let's use the world's relative Jewish population today as the probability that this people and only this people had a visit from god. According to the Pew Research forum as cited in the Economist in 2012, about 2 out of every 1,000 people on earth are Jewish.
So the probability of god being a single male Jewish god is equal to the probability that
   - he is a he (50%) x
  -  probability he is single (1 / 330 million) x
  -  probability he is Jewish (2/1,000).
Let's call this hypothesis YMG and it's probability works out to 1 in 660 billion.

But Christians don't stop there. They layer in more conditions to this already astronomically unlikely prediction. Their god has another name because their god Yahweh impregnated a Palestinian teenager named Mary and had a son who had both godlike and human properties. His name was Jesus, and he lived almost exactly 2,000 years ago, mostly in Palestine. This complicates things quite a bit. We have to ignore the probability of an angel impregnating a teenage girl, something that no one has witnessed before or since (in fact, we are very much left to a single biblical author translated from the Septuagint was by Christians to their advantage in the last decade of the 1st century during the Synod of Jamnia (Jabneh),in Palestine,changing the Hebrew word Aalma (young woman) to the Greek word parthenos (virgin) which changed chapter 7, verse 14 of Isaiah to

  Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel

Ignoring the probability of a chain of authors all copying and translating with true fidelity, or the probability that Isaiah would have agreed, had he been asked, that Jesus of Nazareth was what he was talking about all along, let's just get on with it, asking what the probability of any individual being a god would be, ignoring all the metaphysical leaps of faith and logic that would get us to an immanuel (literally "god in man").
About 200 million people were alive in Biblical times, so the probability that any one of them was a god would be 1 in 200 million. Multiplying this by 1 in 660 billion gives us the odds of god being a single Jewish male named Jesus of  
   1 in 132 thousand million billion or
   1 in 132,000,000,000,000,000,000
   1 in 1.32 x 1020.

There are other specific claims made by Christianity, but these are the main ones. Each additional condition's probability must be multiplied by the probability of the Jesus Hypothesis (JYMG), reducing it further.
So how likely is this?  Consider that the odds of winning a typical 6/49 lottery where 6 numbers are chosen from a range of 49 is 1 in 13,983,816. So you are roughly 10 trillion times as likely to win the lottery as you are to correctly bet on a single god named Jesus spawned from a male god named Yahweh (who in some sort of circular way was both father and son, but I digress). You may like those odds; I don't.
If you point out that   1 in 132,000,000,000,000,000,000 is not technically zero, so I still have not disproven that God exists, he is male, alone, and named Jesus, then consider this.  The next time you fly a plane, remember that the probability it will crash are about 1 in 11 million. So if you have rock solid certainty in the existence of a single male god named Jesus then you should be 8.3 trillion times as certain your plane will crash - please don't fly!
The modern Christian's insistence that we either prove the non-existence of god or embrace the existence of a male god named Jesus spawned from a Jewish god named Yahweh 2,000 years ago in Palestine through angelic insemination (as thought those are the only two options) is an absurdly high bar we apply to nothing else.
We take medications, fly planes, drive cars, cross bridges that have a far, far, far higher probability of killing us without making the ludicrously overconfident prediction that this particular flight or car trip will kill us. 
How did Mediterranean Monotheism become the default hypothesis? There may very well be some kind of overarching intelligence or force or spirit that moves the heavens in ways we can't understand, blah blah blah, but this does not mean this spirit has a penis, dresses in a toga, or takes sides in football games if called upon with just the right earnest verbal formula (best mixed with incense and candles).
 
"If You Don't Know There Are An Even Number of Stars... You Must Believe in Jesus"
OK, he didn't quite say it that way.   This is what Mr. Plantingea said:

No one thinks there is good evidence for the proposition that there are an even number of stars; but also, no one thinks the right conclusion to draw is that there are an uneven number of stars. The right conclusion would instead be agnosticism.

Where to begin...
We know stars exist.  We can see them, measure them, even determine their chemical makeup.  All people in all cultures of whatever faith or none at all have seen and can count them.
We know that there are far more than one star in the sky. With the naked eye, you can see about 2,000 from anywhere you stand, about 6,000 if you bothered to travel the planet and count them in all seasons and latitudes.
We also know that all things countable fall somewhere in the set of natural numbers {1,2,3,4...} and that there is a 50% probability of any natural number being even or odd.  
We know no such thing about gods. We cannot say with certainty that there is a set of gods {Yahweh, Jesus, Zeus, Poseidon, Mars, Athena, Diana, Thor, ...} and that the disproval of one ipso facto proves the other.
What we do know is that if god exists, no two human beings have ever agreed on what he looks like, whether she has feet, is really tall, can fly, gets jealous, marries humans, starts wars, or makes volcanoes erupt. 
The biggest predictor of how you envision your god is where you live. Gravity, light, and heat don't work that way. All cultures understand that you should avoid cliffs, lightning, and fire because these are not abstract constructs unseen by any mortal.

Take It Away, Al
I close with the words of perhaps one of the smartest atheists who ever lived:

I don't try to imagine a personal god; it suffices to stand in awe at the structure of the world, insofar as it allows our inadequate senses to appreciate it... 

I do not believe in a personal god and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly... The idea of a personal god is quite alien to me and seems even naïve.."

The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation, no matter how subtle, can (for me) change this.
For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them.

- Albert Einstein

Hitler, Christianity, and Antisemitism

Hitler, Christianity, and Antisemitism

The point of this post is not to bash Christianity in general or Catholicism in particular, only to remind us all of the dangers of mixing religiosity, nationalism, and a mythological revisionist history of our own past.
One of the uglier or more embarrassing parts of history is that Hitler was raised Catholic (as was Mussolini and Franco) and the Vatican cut a deal with him (the 1933 Concordat) figuring he was preferable to the alternative (communism, which made no attempt to hide the fact that it would abolish the church if it came to power).  The Concordat demanded that "Before bishops take possession of their dioceses they are to take an oath of fealty" to the Third Reich:

Before God and on the Holy Gospels I swear and promise, as becomes a bishop, loyalty to the German Reich and to the State of . . . . I swear and promise to honor the legally constituted government and to cause the clergy of my diocese to honor it.

In fact, the Holocaust was really only distinguished by the Christian-inspired pogroms that preceded it by its industrial thoroughness. A year after the pope had declared the first Crusade, for example, one third of Europe's Jews had been murdered. The church gave us the term ghetto (I went to visit the original ghetto in Venice).
For all its brave stand against Hitler in the 1940s, Britain had expelled all Jews from England in 1290 and did not allow their limited readmission until the 1600s (according to the London Imperial War Museum, which had a display on their checkered history when we visited). In 1370, first Kermesse held in Brussels to commemorate the entire Jewish population of Cologne being burned alive. Of course, we all know about (or should) the 1492 Edict of Expulsion leading to Jews being expelled from the Iberian Peninsula or forced to convert. Conversos were also known as Marsanos (pigs) and deeply mistrusted and persecuted. 13,000 conversos were killed by the Inquisition during its first 12 years.
I could go on and on, but if you look at the grand sweep of history with a Western church that had a prayer for the "perfidy of the Jews" in its mass until Vatican II, the question is not why the Holocaust occurred but why it did not occur earlier. Without the fertile soil provided by centuries of accusations of Deicide and ridiculous charges that Jews engaged in rituals that required the blood of Christian children (which is why in most ghettos they were forbidden to leave during Christian holidays as well as after dark), Hitler's lunatic charges of a world Jewish conspiracy would have made no sense and been thoroughly rejected.
Here are a few quotations (there are many more) in which Hitler cited god as many right wing nationalists tend to do, blending national mythology with religiosity (never mind that Mediterranean Monotheism was an import or that Jesus was Jewish):

Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.

[... until] the faint-hearted cry, "Lord, deliver us," which our patriotic associations send up to Heaven today would be transformed into an ardent prayer: "Almighty God, bless our arms when the hour comes. Be just, as Thou hast always been just. Judge now if we deserve our freedom. Lord, bless our struggle.

The National Socialist State professes its allegiance to positive Christianity. [1934]

Let us thank God, the Almighty, that he has blessed our generation and us and granted us to be a part of this time and this hour.

In the two [sic] Christian creeds lie the most important factors for the preservation of the German people.

Apologists will claim - with much merit - that Hitler wasn't a "real" Catholic because he murdered so many people (including many Catholics who resisted despite the Concordat which ordered them to cooperate with the Third Reich). This is a bit like the argument made post-9/11 that the hijackers and al Qaeda were not "real" Muslims. While true, this after-the-fact redefinition does not help us going forward. It is as absurd as Will Rogers' quip about stock selection:

The way to make money in the stock market is to buy a stock. Then, when it goes up, sell it. If it's not going to go up, don't buy it!

Choosing leaders who are Adherents to Religion X, but then not choosing them if they happen to commit mass murder or other atrocities after you choose them is not helpful.  Redefining their religious adherence after the fact creates a circular logic system similar to the following:

1.  All Christians (or Muslims or whatever religion you choose) are good.
2.  If a Christian does something bad, he is not really a Christian.
3.  Therefore, all Christians (since the bad ones are excluded) are good.

Hitler identified himself as an adherent, he was recognized by his coreligionists at the time as an adherent, and the highest authority of Catholicism, the Vatican, recognized him and his government as legitimate and to be cooperated with.  As far as I know, Mein Kampf was never placed on the list of prohibited books (although Galileo's Dialogues that argued a heliocentric universe was until the 19th Century).  

Ryan on President Obama's war on religion 11-05-2012

Ryan claimed that Obama's vision was

a path that grows government, restricts freedom and liberty and compromises those ... Judeo-Christian, Western civilization values that made us a great and exceptional nation in the first place. 

Actually, the values that our country was founded on were secular Enlightenment ideals, a reaction to the religious fanaticism that had torn Europe apart in the centuries before. It's perhaps a geographical quibble but Judaism and its offshoot Christianity are more Eastern than Western.   Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Epicureans, and Pythagoreans can all correctly be described as Western but they were suppressed or destroyed when Mediterranean Monotheism was imported and imposed upon the West in the form of Christianity.  What the United States achieved it achieved in spite of not because of religious zealots which the founders wisely protected us from.

Ryan went on to say "President Obama used his health care plan to declare war on religion, forcing religious institutions to go against their faith" and said that he believed the contraception clause was the worst part of Obamacare which represents a "threat to our religious freedom."

This is a very strange position which ignores the reality that President Obama bent over backwards to appease religious lobbyists, offering them a means of opting out of the contraception requirement, something Ryan and other right wing religious advocates always seem to forget.  It seems Ryan is far more interested in a fight than in solving a problem - how to offer women of all faiths the full gamut of healthcare options available to women who don't work for religiously affiliated corporations without upsetting some of the men running those corporations, men who allege that denying women copayment-free access to contraception and IVF is a form of religious expression.  

It's also odd that Ryan who repeatedly and loudly describes himself as pro-life feels that the most offensive thing about a healthcare reform is being forced to offer contraceptions without copayment, even if aborting that reform would help perpetuate the status quo in which one American dies every twenty minutes for want of health insurance.   Remember we are not talking about abortion or euthanasia or capital punishment over which intelligent adults disagree but contraception - a settled issue since 1918 and something used by 99% of Catholic women to time their births or treat a host of other conditions from uterine fibroids to severe PMS to acne.

At any rate, talk of war is as dishonest as it is deliberately inflammatory.  Wars involve killing people, seizing real estate, violence, and shock effect. Anyone who has experienced actual war should be offended by this use of martial metaphors to score cheap points in an argument that is essentially a question of accounting, actuarial risks and benefits, and access to healthcare.

Declaration of Religious Independence - A Proposal

The Declaration of Independence was a response to interference by King George III in the affairs of American life. Today we face a similar threat from the religious right. The Declaration of Independence was a set of grievances against King George; I believe we need a similar declaration against the attempt, usually not so subtle, to impose an extreme religious view point not widely shared on all Americans. Presented herewith is a proposed Declaration of Religious Independence. Nothing in this document would have been controversial among the Enlightenment thinkers our founders considered themselves - with some justification - to be. - MV

Declaration of Religious Independence

We hold these truths to be self-evident:  

That no issue is more divisive among otherwise intelligent, compassionate, reasonable men and women than religion;

That in a pluralistic society of many faiths including none at all, our founders were wise to create a secular republic rather than a theocracy;

That if the founders intended a theocracy, they would have mentioned god - even once - in the Constitution.  Had they intended a Christian theocracy, they would have mentioned Jesus Christ - even once - in the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, or any of the Federalist Papers (as it turns out, they did not);  

That when George Washington and John Adams wrote that the United States is "in no way a Christian nation" they meant that we are in no way a Christian nation and not something else;

That Article VI of the Constitution forbidding any "religious test" as a qualification for any office or public trust means just that;

That the only legitimate role of government in religion is to have no role except to protect the rights of all citizens to worship freely or not at all as their consciences see fit unless when to do so will materially harm or endanger their fellow citizens;

That questions of metaphysics such as the existence of god or gods and what to call him are deeply personal matters over which intelligent people have the sacred right to disagree;

That despite our differences over unprovable metaphysical questions, we can agree on certain universal ethical principles the fruits of which are tangible and real. These include honesty, humility, kindness, charity, forgiveness, and fairness.   

That the core ethical teachings of all religions and secular belief systems, however imperfectly, hold a common ideal of ethical reciprocity - do unto others as you would have them do unto you, and do not do unto others as you would not have them do unto you.

That government should never have the power to uphold or protect one religion over another since the power to show preference today is the power to persecute tomorrow.  

That those chosen for high office should be judged based on what they do rather than what they say they believe.   Men and women who engage in good behavior have no need to tell us they are good; their actions speak for themselves.  The launching of an unjust war or the execution of an innocent should never be excused because the person engaging in these acts claims to be acting on divine authority.  

That we all have the right to believe or follow a divine authority or six or none at all, but those who believe that  loyalty to an unseen deity trumps loyalty to their constituents or the Constitution should disclose this up front and not take vows they cannot keep to uphold and protect a Constitution they hold subordinate to other documents not ratified or endorsed by the people;

That there is a difference between choosing personally not to engage in a particular behavior and banning that behavior for all citizens of all faiths at all times.  Law-makers who personally would never eat pork or seek an abortion should not  attempt to to impose kosher dietary laws or abortion prohibition simply because of their religious affiliation or belief.   They represent their constituents not their own personal beliefs, and their primary loyalty as government officials must be to the Constitution not an unelected foreign official who has no authority over the American legislative or judicial process.   

That public bullying or intimidation of lawmakers of a particular faith by unelected officials of that faith has no place in a nation of laws.  If an archbishop does not wish to give communion to an elected official if he represents his constituents, he should discuss this private matter with his parishioner, not hold a press conference to intimidate others into obedience.

And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence or none at all, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

Santorum and the Sexual Revolution - Excerpts from Charles Blow's Excellent New York Times columns

This was another great editorial by Charles M. Blow.  I took the liberty of inserting my two cents' worth regarding Santorum's outrageous comments about women, gynecology, evolution, and homosexuality.

Santorum and the Sexual Revolution
By CHARLES M. BLOW
Published: March 2, 2012


...



Santorum seems to have an unhealthy fixation with, and passionate disdain for, the 1960s and the sexual freedoms that followed... It’s instructive to recall a speech and question-and-answer session he gave in 2008 to a course on religion and politics at the Oxford Center for Religion and Public Life in Washington.... Santorum ventured off onto sex:

“It comes down to sex. That’s what it’s all about. It comes down to freedom, and it comes down to sex. If you have anything to do with any of the sexual issues, and if you are on the wrong side of being able to do all of the sexual freedoms you want [sic], you are a bad guy. And you’re dangerous because you are going to limit my freedom in an area that’s the most central to me. And that’s the way it’s looked at.”

Next a commenter falsely claimed that my colleague Maureen Dowd “said that the Republican Party is trying to repeal Woodstock.” It was a misrepresentation of a 1998 column she had written about the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. What she actually wrote was:

“Since Watergate, there has been a pendulum of partisan revenge. And, right now, Republicans want their payback for Watergate, for Bork, for Iran-contra, even for Woodstock. Like Kenneth Starr, the Republicans are attempting to repeal the 1960s.”

But let’s not let facts slow us down. Santorum, predictably, deflected back to sex:

“Woodstock is the great American orgy. This is who the Democratic Party has become. They have become the party of Woodstock. They prey upon our most basic primal lusts, and that’s sex. And the whole abortion culture, it’s not about life. It’s about sexual freedom. That’s what it’s about. Homosexuality. It’s about sexual freedom. All of the things are about sexual freedom, and they hate to be called on them. They try to somehow or other tie this to the founding fathers’ vision of liberty, which is bizarre. It’s ridiculous. That’s at the core of why you are attacked.”

While explaining what he saw as a shift in the Democratic Party away from “blue-collar working-class folks with traditional values” Santorum said:

“What changed was the ’60s. What changed was sex. What changed was the social and cultural issues that have huge amounts of money because if you look — I haven’t seen numbers on this, but I’m sure it’s true — if you go socioeconomic scale, the higher the income, the more socially liberal you are.  [1]  The more you know you can buy your way out of the problems that sexual libertinism causes you. [2]  You have an abortion, well, I have the money to take care of it. If I want to live an extravagant life and get diseases, I can. ... You can always take care of everything. If you have money, you can get away with things that if you’re poor you can’t.” [3]

The questions finally got around to asking about sex directly, much to Santorum’s delight, I’m sure. To one of those questions Santorum answered in part:

“Sex is a means. Evolution is a means.# And the aim is a secular world. It’s a, in my opinion, a hedonistic, self-focused world# that is, in my opinion, anti-American.” [4]

Santorum may now cloak his current views in Catholic fundamentalism and Constitutional literalism, but, at their root, they are his reaction to, and revulsion for, the social-sexual liberation that began in the 1960s.

In fact, Santorum’s distaste for the sexual revolution of the 1960s leaks over into a deep dislike of everything that the 1960s represents. Santorum continued in the question-and-answer session:

“You’re a liberal or a conservative in America if you think the ’60s were a good thing or not. If the ’60s was a good thing, you’re left. If you think it was a bad thing, you’re right. And the confusing thing for a lot of people that gets a lot of Americans is, when they think of the ’60s, they don’t think of just the sexual revolution. But somehow or other — and they’ve been very, very, clever at doing this — they’ve been able to link, I think absolutely incorrectly, the sexual revolution with civil rights.”

Maybe that’s why he has such a dyspeptic reaction to the 1960 speech by John F. Kennedy, in which he said that “I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute.”

Santorum said that the speech made him want to throw up because it was an “an absolutist doctrine that was abhorrent at the time of 1960.”

Nothing could be more absurd. James Madison, “Father of the Constitution” and fourth president of the United States, wrote in 1822 that:

“Every new and successful example, therefore, of a perfect separation between the ecclesiastical and civil matters, is of importance; and I have no doubt that every new example will succeed, as every past one has done, in showing that religion and government will both exist in greater purity the less they are mixed together.”

...  The kind of conservatism that Santorum represents has been described as a war on women, but ... it’s [really] a war on sex beyond the confines of traditional marriage and strict heterosexuality in which women, particularly poor ones, and gays, particularly open ones, are likely to suffer the greatest casualties.

Endnotes (my response):

[1]  I am not sure this is true; the last time I looked at these numbers, people in the lowest quintile by income tended to vote disproportionately Republican, as did many of those in the upper quintile; in terms of voters, those who tend to vote Republican 55:45 are in the middle socioeconomically, but when you get the very top 1% of 1%, they tend disproportionately to vote (and support with their unlimited corporate donations) Republican.  What Santorum completely misses here is that education and income remain highly correlated, and as your educational level rises, you tend to vote Democrat more than Republican.  The typical Republican voter has some college, but did not complete a 4-year-degree.  But even this correlation is not fool-proof because those who did not complete college tend to vote Democratic even more strongly than those with doctorates.   At any rate, Santorum seems to view this as a.) all about sex; or b.) all about money.   He completely ignores the fact that he should find troubling that as people become more educated, they tend to find his worldview unpalatable.  The impoverished (who disproportionately include people whose education was interrupted) have a different kind of direct experience with the sorts of social issues Santorum and his party tend to ignore or mock.  I doubt very much a single mother who supports Head Start and nutritional assistance for her family is thinking all that much about "sex" or even abstract ideas of "freedom."  She is thinking about not being hungry and maybe whether her child will have a better shot at completing school than she did. 

[2]  This point would make sense if an abortion were much more expensive than giving birth and raising a child.  Of course it isn't; the medical costs and potential risks of childbirth are exponentially greater than those associated with an early abortion, where the vast majority of abortions occur.  Santorum, who in other spheres believes in the wonderful wisdom of the free market's invisible hand to solve all problems, is almost socialist in his desire for the government to take an intrusive, anti-free-market stand.  Morality aside, abortion is the ultimate free market solution:  for a small up front investment, it eliminates a potential future liability to taxpayers Santorum tells us are already too burdened by social services he would like to slash (poverty is a huge predictor of abortion, and a disproportionate number of unintended pregnancies if carried to term would grow up in poverty).  This is not an argument for it (contraception, used properly, which Santorum also opposes, is the Occam's razor in this Malthusian cycle), but Santorum is not arguing what is most economical, but what is most in line with what his church - for reasons having nothing to do with economics - teaches.  He has to choose between which argument he will use, but he can't have it both ways.   Empowering the government to force a woman to have a child she cannot afford or is not ready to raise means by definition that someone must pay for that child's education, nutrition, healthcare, shelter, etc.  Yet Santorum is clearly on record as saying he opposes all of these things (to be fair, he does not want the government to be paying for these things, but since private charities and food kitchens are swamped, and no other entity has the resources and economy of scale to efficiently oversee or deliver these  services, to cut off government funding for the poor is the economic and moral equivalent of cutting off funding for the poor, period).   So it's a very strange and self-contradictory moral and economic view of the world he has that focuses exclusively on poor pregnant women during their period of gestation (post-natally, he is unconcerned, even hostile to the poor).  

[3] I actually agreed with these first two statements until I realized he left out some critical words.  What he apparently wanted to say was, "[Acknowledgement of the reality of extra-marital] sex is a means.  [The teaching of] evolution is a means."  I disagree with those statements, as amended.  We have a duty to teach our children the truth.  It is irresponsible to allow religious or other ideology to withhold or distort scientific data and consensus in science class.  Perhaps on Sunday or in a religious history class, one could teach the opposition a minority of modern fundamentalists have with teaching these particular scientific topics, but to be fair, one should also include in such a course the long-term track record of the church when it has waded into the scientific arena, from teaching that men had fewer ribs than women (because Genesis said Adam's rib was used to created Eve) to teaching that the sun revolves around the earth.   It's possible they were wrong then and right now, but their long-term track record is far from fallible, to put it kindly.   I did not know that Santorum opposed geologists and paleontologists as much as he opposes physicians, women, and stem cell researchers.  Opposition to the teaching of accurate earth science is no longer a Vatican position, by the way; this idiosyncratic deviation is peculiar to American protestant fundamentalists. 

[4] I believe Santorum, like Rush Limbaugh last week when he called Sandra Fluke a "slut" for advocating for the right of all women to access a class of medications for whatever indication, is confusing cause and effect, smoke and fire.  Individuals make individual sexual decisions.  They always have and always will, sometimes with guidance from their church, but there is very little correlation between church affiliation and private sexual practice.  Governments and insurance companies and health care providers must concern themselves with what people in a group really do versus what Santorum believes they individually should do.  There is a huge difference obviously.   It seems difficult for the Limbaughs and Santorums of the world to grasp, but individuals may think beyond their immediate interests and needs.  Most morally developed adults understand that there is a huge difference between not making a choice for yourself (to smoke, to have sex, to have unprotected sex) and forcing all citizens all the time to make that same choice.  One person's reasonable regulation (in gun control for example) might be another person's tyrannical government overreach.  Furthermore, I might on principle support policies built to address behaviors that I personally think are bad, immoral, or even dangerous, since I am able to wrap my mind around the idea that failure to do so harms us all and does nothing to make the behavior less likely.  Those who support needle exchange programs are neither heroin addicts nor advocates of IV drug use.  Those who support safe, legal abortion or contraception access that makes abortion less likely are neither "pro abortion" nor "pro promiscuity" anymore than they are "pro unintended pregnancy."  

[5]   "Sex … is anti-American."  Very strange, especially considering that if none of our ancestors or immigrants' ancestors had sex, there is no way we would have exponentially grown to 310 million people.  Considering that his church bemoaned the "culture of death" that widespread use of contraception in Italy must mean (their population growth is negative), how much more of a "genocide" the population effects of a sexless America iterated generation-after-generation would create!