I don't believe in [the divinity of] Jesus but I do believe in Bono...

 In a very compelling, short video, Bono, the lead vocalist of U2 talks candidly about his spiritual and religious beliefs.  
I don't believe in Jesus, but I do believe in Bono, so I found the video compelling. However, Bono is a far more brilliant musician than he is a religious historian (or even demographer of contemporary religious affiliation because far fewer than half of the planet is Christian).
Bono, like so many today, misuses the word messiah. It means anointed ones (all Jewish kings were anointed ones) and more loosely messenger, but is not at all synonymous with divinity. When Jesus was asked who he was, he repeatedly described himself as "bar nasha" (son of man).
Bono argues that because so many people cannot be so wrong for so long, modern Christians must be right. This would only be true if the popularity of an idea makes it true, or if we have few or no examples of wildly popular ideas that were later shown to be wrong. We bled people for centuries to get the bad humors out and thought the Earth was flat and a few thousand years old, but that doesn't mean these ideas were correct. Billions believe in astrology but this does not make it true.
Also, this same reasoning could be applied to the billions of people who adhere to non-Christian faiths, some far older than Christianity. Since there are far more non-Christians than Christians, does this mean that they are right and Christians are wrong (modern Christians claim exclusivity so some hybrid reality is not admissible)?
Christianity reached Europe and Ireland not so much because of its compelling narrative but because it had become the exclusive religion of the Roman Empire shortly before it collapsed. All other competitive belief systems and their followers were systematically hunted down and killed or forced to convert. We simply don't know how many people in Europe, if free to do so, would not have renounced the faith of their fathers for this Mediterranean import because they were not free to do so. Throw in a public burning or two, torture a few dissenters to death, and you have yourself a totalitarian theocracy that held huge swathes of Europe in its grip until the Enlightenment.
At any rate, Bono is assuming, as many modern Christians do, that his conception of who Jesus was and what he represents has been accurately portrayed, faithfully transmitted and translated, and that he has had an opportunity to be exposed to alternate hypotheses and seriously consider them. Bono's faith was not something that occurred to him through divine revelation but was passed along to him as an accident of geography. Were his parents Hindu or Ireland a predominantly Muslim country, I might be impressed with his reaching out and finding Christianity spontaneously and by choice, but there is a certain inevitability to what he considers a miracle. Again, it could be true that people in Western and Northern Europe and their former colonies are correct and that billions of other human beings, most people on the planet, are incorrect, but then this argues that god is not universal and transcendental but regional.
Bono has a right, as do all of us, to imagine god or gods in our own way, to choose saints or intermediaries that personalize an otherwise unapproachable, distant deity, but my point is a simpler one: Jesus never said he was divine. None of those who knew him claimed that he was divine. Paul (who never met him) did not believe he was divine. Half of the first few centuries of Christians did not believe he was divine.
It's very possible, of course, that he was divine and simply failed to mention it, but this seems a rather glaring omission for what  modern Christians especially of the evangelical variety consider a core tenet of their faith.
And by the way, even if Jesus did claim divinity (he didn't), this does not mean that he was right. It doesn't mean he was lying or even delusional either. Many men throughout history, even great teachers (which I believe he was), have simply been wrong.

Do Atheists Really Lack Faith? And Why is Mediterranean Monotheism the Default Hypothesis?

"Everyone, atheists included, can benefit from meeting people with different beliefs — or lack of beliefs" concluded a recent NPR story on atheist displays in a San Diego park.
Why is atheism always framed as a "lack of beliefs" (or sometimes a "lack of faith").  A scientist who conducts an experiment and has a negative result (such as finding Drug X is no more effective than placebo at treating Y) does not lack faith; she simply has ruled out one more hypothesis in which to place her faith, thereby honing in on those that are more worthy.  We don't define modern physicians by what they don't believe in (as "those who lack faith in humoral theory" for example). 
And only in religion would anyone claim that the failure to prove that Drug X is effective must mean therefore that Drug Z21753912789a4361.2 Version 4 MUST by default be effective (and the only drug that is effective).  Nonsense. 
The default hypothesis in science is the null hypothesis, the idea that something does not work or is no more effective than placebo.  (As Karl Popper made depressingly clear, scientists never prove anything, only fail to disprove it.)  Why is it that the default hypothesis for so many in Europe and the United States is that god is a single Jewish male with a strikingly Northern European visage in a toga floating in the clouds who visited Palestine about 2,000 years ago and hasn't been seen since?  It's such an extraordinary, bizarre claim or set of claims.  Of course, this does not mean the claims are incorrect - the fact that light is both a particle and a wave is pretty weird but turns out to be true, as best as we can tell - only that they should not be the DEFAULT, the go to explanation if other explanations cannot be proven, as though this explanation was itself proven. 
Technically, there are no atheists (agnostics is the more scientifically correct term) anymore than there are scientists who have successfully proven that a drug works.  But this is a very narrow, philosophical distinction that is unhelpful on a day-to-day basis.  I cannot prove that my seat belt will save my life on any given trip, but you damn well better believe I buckle up.  So although no one will ever be able to disprove - in a Popperian sense - all of the god hypotheses that societies have generated, it is fairly easy to prove that the null hypothesis (there is no personal god and if there is, his existence was almost certainly not restricted to Palestine during .0000000574% of the Earth's existence) is close to infinitely more likely. 
Here is another thought:  all except for the most tolerant of mystics are atheists to all gods except their chosen ones.  Monotheists such as Christians (side-stepping the idea whether the Trinity and the tens of thousands of saints are multiple gods) are atheists to all gods but one.  Some of us go one god further. 

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

Does God Really Act Through Tornadoes? Really?

Sometimes the god imagined by fundamentalists has less compassion and logic than Timothy McVeigh. Sure, god could just come down, make an appearance, and TELL us (using his inside voice) if he's mad about something we are doing.
But no. In their minds, he has to blow something up, kill a bunch of children, destroy a town, that sort of thing, then leave us all fighting over what it all means, if anything. Considering that most of us don't try to read metaphysical nonsense into natural phenomena, he would be wasting his time.


And if you were god, would you choose someone like Pat Robertson or the Westboro Baptists to channel your message? I mean, he's god. He could probably afford several minutes of Super Bowl advertising or something. He could even move the Super Bowl to like ... now if he wanted to and make us all watch it. Even if Janet Jackson performed again. But a tornado? That's such an Axial Age thing to do.
And if god is trying to terrify 310 million people by killing 24, does this seem like something an omnipotent deity having a temper tantrum would limit himself to? Americans are living longer, healthier lives than ever. Life expectancy at birth only a century ago was about 47. Now most of us can comfortably plan to live into our 80s if we treat ourselves right and look both ways before we cross the street. If god acts through wanton destruction as the fundamentalists allege, then why are we living so long, so comfortably, and with such interesting things to do?

Why Evil Happens ... According to Fundamentalists

 

With all the talk of the power of intercessionary prayer in Oklahoma including televangelist Pat Robertson's claim that those killed didn't pray enough and the unwillingness of tornado survivors to move because of their certainty in a god of rebuilding, I had to put this together.  If intercessionary prayer worked for a survivor, then by definition, it must have failed for a victim (and of course one day will fail perhaps years later when that victim eventually dies of something despite prayers to the contrary).  This view implies that some prayer's are right, others wrong, or perhaps some transmitting at full signal, others hardly at all.  Either way, inherent in this metaphor is a certain capricious cruelty to a deity who seems to disproportionately shower good stuff on people whose complexion most resembles that of the girl on the left while neglecting or abandoning so many others who look more like the other two.   

At any rate, fundamentalists have no way of explaining why such a prayer-hungry deity would spare the life of an atheist and her child (the bible is quite clear that children and their children's children are to be punished for the incorrect worship of their parents), as  CNN's Wolf Blitzer discovered somewhat awkwardly, even if Glenn Beck is convinced this was a liberal plant, part of a larger conspiracy against his view of god. 

Who is More Harrased - the IRS or the Far Right Groups Who Specialize in Harassing Women and Their Providers?

So far right, anti-choice groups claiming religious tax deductions and credits to finance their lobbying are angry that the IRS is actually certifying whether those deductions and credits are legitimate:

Please explain how all of your activities, including the prayer meetings held outside of Planned Parenthood, are considered educational as defined under 501(c)(3). Organizations exempt under 501(c)(3) may present opinions with scientific or medical facts. Please explain in detail the activities at these prayer meetings. Also, please provide the percentage of time your organizations spends on prayer groups as compared with the other activities of the organization.

Please. I am sure that women presenting for breast exams and pap smears feel far more harassed by these extremist groups than the groups feel by the IRS. And asking a question is not harassment - it's what regulatory agencies such as the IRS do. It's their job. I get pieces of paper from them every year asking questions about various returns, usually questions I can answer with a phone call or mailing them a photocopied document. Sure, it's not fun having someone asking if you really deserve that tax deduction or credit or there are plenty of tax dodgers out there, and frankly I have a bigger problem with subsidizing someone else's religion in effect with my tax dollars. But that is another issue. You can't ask for the tax exempt status then cry "religious persecution" when the agency in charge of making sure your claim is valid does its job. If you want to pray personally in your home or church or even in the middle of your algebra exam, no one will ever stop you or question you. But if you want me to pay for your to pray, well, expect a few raised eye brows and some pesky forms to fill out.

In the Beginning Man Made God... a Very Brief History of Religion With Pictures

And then another man made a competing GOD and the problems got worse.

The first man told the second man that his god was bigger and better.



No, said the second man.  Your god is false and my god is very, very made that you made yours.

I didn't make it, said the first.  He was ... um ... always here.  I have this really old book (that I didn't write - I SWEAR!) to prove it.

You're just making it up, said the second man.  I have this even older book.  And my book says it's the ONLY book and that all other books are FALSE.

That's funny, said the first man.  My book says the same thing.  But it says that your book and your god are even FALSER.  In fact, my god is so awesome, he doesn't even let us make pictures of him.  So there.

Hmm, said the second man.   I will pray and pray and pray to my god to destroy you and all who think like you do so that all doubt will be removed.

- That's not very nice.

- I never said my god was nice, just really, really powerful.  And I didn't make him up.  I swear.

- [Waiting] OK, so where is the lightning bolt or whatever?

- Umm, I don't know.  Oh wait!  It says here that my god will wait until you are dead to punish you.
Then you'll REALLY regret having doubted me - I mean god.



- Oh, how convenient.  Why doesn't he just zap me now?  asked the first man.

- Because... because that would make it too easy.  Then people would just believe him because he revealed himself.  He likes them to choose blindly, hoping they get it right.  If they don't, look out!

- You're just making that up!

- No, really, it says here in this old book that other people wrote a long time ago.  Therefore it must be true.

- How do I know you just didn't write that book yourself? Or that people a long time ago wrote it down wrong?  Or were just making it up?

- They wouldn't do that.  People in the olden days didn't lie.  Things that happened long ago must be true.

- I don't believe you.  I am going to go celebrate my god in my way.

- But you can't.



- What do you mean, I can't?

- You will make my god really mad.  You MUST worship him.  I - I mean HE - insists!

- My god will get even madder if I don't worship him.  Renounce your god for mine!

- No, you renounce YOUR god for mine!  screamed the first man.

- Be reasonable - one of us is going to have to renounce a god.  Why not renounce yours?  He's false anyway.

- I can't renounce something that doesn't exist!

- Blasphemer!



... and with that, the second man killed the first man to prove how just and powerful his god was.

And they rounded up his followers, friends, and family, offering them a chance to repent and accept the One True Way which was now capitalized to show how Big It Was.



Yet, even with help from the community of the faithful, many could not make the final stretch and bring themselves to embrace the One True Faith.



So they and their animals were burned alive.



And all the people saw and were amazed.  When they were asked if they now believed, they ALL now said yes.  And the first religion was born.



Amen.

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.

Contraception is about women's health, not the imposition of religious beliefs on all employees by religious-affiliated employers

I found an excellent retort to some recent "war on religion" editorials written when President Obama did not grant religious-affiliated employers the right to refuse insurance coverage of contraceptives for female employees.  Lobbyists for corporate religion's right to discriminate against employees (who in a free country may be of many faiths or none at all) are angry they are not allowed to violate the new healthcare law mandating certain minimum health insurance coverage. 
The idea of the law was exactly to prevent this sort of discrimination, sometimes based on cost, sometimes rationalized on religious grounds (a curious point since the Bible and every extant sacred text of all major religions is silent on oral contraceptives, diaphragms, condoms, spermicides, and all of the other reliable, safe, effective contraceptives that have been developed and perfected thousands of years after those books were written).   
Lobbyists for the Catholic church, who until the 1960s had no fixed teaching on contraception, seem most vocal now about their relatively recent interest in gynecological issues (curious for an organization that excludes women from its most powerful positions, all held by celibate males).  They equate having to provide coverage for others with being forced to use that treatment yourself.  Nonsense.  As with abortion, if you don't like the idea of contraception for whatever reason, don't use it.  But that does not give you the right to make that decision for your employees or to create an undue financial burden for those women who happen to be employed by you. 
If one must discriminate against employees who are not necessarily adherents to your faith in order to practice your faith, then yours must be a strange sort of faith.  I have read every word Jesus of Nazareth allegedly spoke and never once do I recall him saying a word either about contraception or discriminating against female employees.   From the spirit of what he taught, an expansion of the Golden Rule articulated a bit earlier by Rabbi Hillel, one could make an argument he would have been on the side of the women in this issue.   Doing unto others as they would have them do unto you leads you to a fairly clear decision here, since it seems unlikely that the men advocating for this decision would want someone to be carving out portions of their health care coverage others happened to disagree with.  
At any rate, such misogynistic discrimination has no place in a secular democracy where the rule of law should trump sectarian or ideological biases.  
If one's faith and its teachings are so compelling, women who are adherents of that faith will not take advantage of the benefit, so its existence is theoretical.  But it should be up to the woman and her doctor, not to a priest or bishop, what she puts in her body.  Most American Catholics disagree with the Vatican's teaching on contraception in theory and practice.
It is difficult to believe that there are pockets of our society that are still arguing about a woman's right to contraception, especially when so often those groups are also vehemently opposed to a woman's right to obtain a safe, legal abortion. 
At any rate, by law an employer is not entitled to privileged clinical information with some vary narrow exceptions (a pilot's visual acuity evaluation comes to mind).   There is no reason why a manager working for a corporate religion or religion-affiliated corporation should have a right to dictate, deny, or compel an explanation of a medical treatment of an employee.  It is frankly none of his business.
I have argued many of the same points, but it is nice to see them summarized with links for more information, so I am pasting the entire press release:

Hey Media: It’s about the Health of Women and Families (2/2/2012)
There has been a lot of press on the recent announcement by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that it was finalizing the rule requiring coverage of all FDA-approved contraceptives with no co-pays or deductibles, and a lot of it hasn’t been positive.  Most of the focus has been on the fact that the Administration chose not to expand the exemption for certain religious employers.
Take Michael Gerson’s and E.J. Dionne’s recent op-eds, for example. Both of them admonish President Obama for not expanding the religious exemption to entities like religiously-affiliated hospitals and universities, and Gerson says that the rule covers “abortifacients” which is just wrong. He also concludes that the decision on the final rule means that “war on religion is now formally declared.” The way these two see it, it should have been a no-brainer to expand the exemption. But wait just one minute, is this all the rule is about religious institutions versus the Administration? Is there anything else that maybe we should be considering when analyzing this rule?
Oh right…. the tremendous health benefits of contraception. Oddly and sadly, these health benefits are blatantly ignored in all of the negative commentary (Dionne tips his hat just a bit by vaguely referring to how the rule protects “women’s rights”). So it got me thinking, maybe they just don’t understand the health benefits. Maybe I should take a moment to explain just how critical contraception is as a preventive health service. So Gerson, Dionne, and all of the others who ignore the real issue at stake, please take notes.
Sometimes women can have cysts on their ovaries (one woman’s story is in a great NYT article). Many times a woman won’t even know about the cysts until one bursts, causing horrible pain. So what to do to deal with these awful cysts? Contraception to the rescue! Birth control keeps the cysts in check, preventing future ruptures. So that’s kind of a big deal. OK, what else? Oh, right, contraception helps women time pregnancies, which both lowers the risk of adverse perinatal outcomes and prevents a range of pregnancy complications. What does this actually mean? First, being able to space your pregnancies apart decreases the risk of lower birth rates, preterm birth, and small-for-size gestational age. We’re talking about healthy babies here, folks. Not to mention healthy women. Timing a pregnancy can also be critical to women, as it can prevent a range of pregnancy complications like gestational diabetes, high blood pressure, and placental problems. These are real, tangible benefits of contraception. They matter, and the op-eds and articles that completely ignore them are insulting to women and families.
So why ignore these obvious health benefits? Any why focus only on the religious freedom of corporate entities (not churches, mind you, they were already exempted under the interim rule) when they’re already employing people of all religions, all with their own individual consciences? Why not focus instead on the fact that expanding this exemption would excuse discrimination against women? And, if this were really about the violation of “institutional conscience”, weren’t employers’ “consciences” already violated when they paid salaries to female employees who subsequently used them to pay for contraception? Why is the health insurance coverage of contraception any different from paying a woman her salary? Oh my, what a slippery slope they are on.
And, even more critically, the op-eds also seem to keep ignoring the fact that this rule is not about requiring someone to take contraception. This is about covering contraception in health insurance plans. A woman uses her own moral compass to decide whether to use contraception. (And women resoundingly come down on the side of contraception. In fact, 99 percent of all women and 98% of Catholic women use contraception at some point in their lives. The conscience here is the woman’s, not some corporate entity.  
So, please take a moment and let the Administration know that you appreciate and support the final rule. Give them a hearty ‘thank you,’ and let them know that contrary to what the op-eds and pundits say, America stands with women’s health!

- National Women's Law Center 2/4/12

You Cannot be Pro-Life but Oppose the Environmental Protection Agency

Tuesday September 6, 2011

Either President Obama is playing a much deeper game than I appreciate (always a possibility) or he has completely caved to the Republicans when he recently over-ruled the EPA. 

Let's face it:  the Far Right will never give President Obama credit for what he does, so he should stick to first principles.  Most Americans do not realize, for example, that President Obama in effect lowered taxes, by preventing the Bush tax cuts from expiring on schedule, and proposed a deeper set of budget-balancing cuts (with no new taxes) than the measure ultimately adopted.  He doesn't get  credit for playing nice with the schoolyard bullies who still call him a socialist, Muslim, Kenyan-born, black-power-advancing, government-growing, tax-and-spend liberal (not that those are all bad things, but the maddening thing is that none are true).  

President Obama is a milquetoast right of centrist who is drifting further to the right in an attempt to appease people who will never invite him to play their reindeer games.  He did not get the memo but the all-white Tea Party did not take to the streets 28 days into his administration mad, mad, mad and wanting to "take their country back" because of anything he did or proposed to do.  They are simply furious about who he is, a black man with a D after his name, even though the daylight between his policies and the white guy who handed him two wars, a recession, and a set of disastrous, budget-busting, non-economy-growing tax cuts on his way out of the White House is at times indistinguishable.  

Obama risks losing his base in a calculated move to pre-empt Texas commercials about all the Texas coal-burning plants that would have to close (or so they claim) to comply with stricter EPA rules they knew were coming but somehow never bothered to make the necessary changes.  As with the budget, it was a game of chicken and Obama blinked.  

The spectacle of a few thousand Texans unemployed, rolling blackouts (during record heat waves and out-of-control forest fires) is probably a gift Obama would rather not give to Perry and the Texas fossil fuel industry.   Rolling back the regulations' implementation until at least after the election was a wise move politically but a stunningly retro move environmentally.  The EPA estimated that the regulations due to go into effect in 2012 would have prevented 34,000 premature deaths a year.  As long as those bodies are not seen falling from towers in lower Manhattan, it's almost impossible to get a television-addicted American audience to be moved into action.   Why save a life when your power bill might go up a nickel a day, or you might be forced to turn your thermostat up 2 degrees in summer and down a couple in winter?  Jimmy Carter was ridiculed for suggesting such a thing a few decades ago.  He wasn't wrong, just early.  

I wish President Obama would get out ahead of these fossil fuel apologists and pre-empt their arguments.  He should be making any or all of the following points:

• The EPA is a pro-life agency.    Sensible regulations of the emissions of pollutants and carcinogens saves far more lives than futile attempts to prohibit abortion.  (Why futile? Consider the experience in Latin America where abortion rates are higher despite almost universal prohibition, and of Western Europe where rates are lower despite far fewer restrictions than in the United States.)  Put bluntly, you cannot be pro-life and anti-climate.
• Protecting the environment and energy independence are national security issues.   It makes no sense to send young men and women halfway across the world to protect our access to our energy drug of choice when we could enter a program of recovery and declare our energy independence both by decreasing demand and diversifying supply away from non-renewable sources. 
• Protection of the environment and sustainability are religious mandates.  Sustainability should resonate with evangelical Christians (as it is beginning to among some such as Jim Wallis), Obama should remind Americans of faith.  It is a strange and narrow belief system that respects only fetal life, but has such scant regard for the health and safety of post-natal life, or of life in rivers, streams, and oceans, god's creation (according to every major religion) toward which we must show responsible stewardship, not mercenary disdain.  Not a word in the Bible commands us only to do what is right if it does not threaten job creation, or asks us to balance the life of a child against another shekel of potential profit.  There is nothing wrong per se with making a materialistic argument, but let's not cloak it in Judeo-Christian, Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist clothing.   I cannot speak with authority for those adhering to  Baha'i, Jainism, Shinto, Cao Dai, Zoroastrianism, or any of a few thousand indigenous belief systems, but I do know that those of us who are the spiritual equivalent of independent voters find the utilitarian calculus life versus profits to be deeply troubling and morally offensive.  If human life really is sacred, then it cannot and should not be pitted against the marginal inconvenience of tuning down a thermostat or putting on a sweater.  
• Government should not be protecting one industry (fossil fuel corporations and their lobbyists) over another (millions of green jobs we can not even imagine yet).  When the government forces companies to pay the true cost of the air they pollute, then yes, all things being equal, the price of each unit of energy using fossil fuel technology will rise from where it had been when the companies were using our rivers, oceans, and atmosphere as a free dumping ground.   The fossil fuel industry, which last time I checked was plenty profitable, chooses to pass that cost onto consumers or to fire workers or close plants, so be it, but if their model is not economically viable once externalities are eliminated, then that is the free market talking.  They also have another option:  pay their top executives less or return less money to shareholders, or some combination of the above.  The fossil fuel industry is presenting us with a false dichotomy anyway, threatening massive job layoffs and rolling blackouts unless they can continue to use our resources without paying for them.  Many rice plantations in the South collapsed and the cultivation of cotton became less profitable after plantation owners were forced to pay their workers but this does not mean that the government should have refused to end slavery simply because the cost of this new regulation would have economic consequences.  Many candlestick-makers went out of business when the light bulb was invented but does this mean the government should have manipulated the market to protect the candlestick industry as the coal industry wants the government to do now (failing to price something like air or water that has definite value but cannot be efficiently priced without a referee in the game is just as manipulative as artificially increasing the price of something the government does not want you to buy, such as imported goods hit with tariffs or light bulbs slapped with fines).   I don't know what percentage of the economy should be oil, natural gas, coal, solar, wind power, geothermal, or pure research, but let the marketplace decide.  Ironically, the marketplace cannot decide if we continue to act as if water and air are free, in effect subsidizing the fossil fuel industry which gobbles up or pollutes these things over competition that does not.  
• Those who think we should not innovate, adapt, and grow are Luddites and defeatists. The status quo fossil fuel shills are convinced that America must fail where the Japanese, Europeans, and even the Chinese (finally) are making major breakthroughs.   Why do Republicans think Germans are so much smarter than Americans?  Why have they already declared defeat before even entering the arena?  The rest of the world is not waiting.  If we hesitate, they will eat our lunch. 

I hope President Obama can come out swinging.  Part of me is thinking he is getting all the ugly stuff out of the way early before his campaign really kicks off, but when he goes on the attack against those who have said so many untruths about him, I hope he can choose not just to engage but to frame the debate. 

Ten Commandments Upgrade 2.0

Background

As is true with most things, before discussing the Ten Commandments, it's helpful to at least read them.  Only 14% of all Americans could list them (although 25% could list the ingredients of a popular hamburger).  In another poll, 78% could not name 2.   Even some politicians who made the most noise about posting the Ten Commandments prominently were unable to name them, as were 68 of 200 Anglican priests.

The so-called Ten Commandments were the first 10 of 613 commandments or mitvot that all good Jews had to follow.  Since 10 is easier to remember (and follow) than 613, these first 10 have been emphasized from the time of King Josiah to the present.  

There is a long tradition of reducing a complex, legalistic, often contradictory set of rules to a few that can be followed and obeyed.   Centuries before PowerPoint, teachers have recognized the importance of a few, easy-to-remember bullet points.

Rabbi Hillel famously reduced it to one:  don't do unto others as you would not have done unto you (the rest is details).  

Jesus, when asked which of the commandments one had to follow, said five plus a variant of Rabbi Hillel's teaching:

And Jesus said, 

    ‘You shall not murder; 

    You shall not commit adultery; 

    You shall not steal; 

    You shall not bear false witness; 

    Honour your father and mother; 

        also, You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’

    

        —Matthew 19:16-19

The Ten Commandments themselves can be divided into 5 that are specific to a particular religion (Judaism) and 5 that are universal behavioral or civic commandments:  

I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.

1. You shall have no other gods before me.

2. You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them or serve them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.

3. You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain; for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain.

4. Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work; but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; in it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male or female slave, or your cattle, or the sojourner who is within your gates; for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and hallowed it.

5. Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land which the Lord your God gives you.

6. You shall not kill.

7. You shall not commit adultery.

8. You shall not steal.

9. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.

10.  You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.

Problems with the Ten Commandments

So what is the problem with posting these Ten Commandments written a couple thousand years ago in front of the court houses of a modern, tolerant, democratic, pluralistic society?  

The question almost answers itself.  

First, the historical, ethnic, and religious specificity and exclusivity of the first five of the commandments make them not only inapplicable, but offensive in a secular society with no official state religion and that includes citizens who worship many gods, other gods, or no gods at all.   It would be wrong to assume all citizens are either Jewish or Christian, and although the Koran has a similar set of commandments virtually identical to these Ten, the selection of this particular formulation from the Torah connotes religious preference for one or two Abrahamic traditions over the third, violating the Separation Clause of the Constitution. 

Second, the Second and Third Commandments clearly violate First Amendment free speech protections.  One man's "graven image" is another man's holy icon.  How could such a law be defined, much less enforced?   Not only does this forbid the manufacture of such images, but explicitly forbids their worship, even in the privacy of one's own home.  This would be a clear violation of First Amendment guarantees of religious freedom.   Prohibiting speech, even speech as mildly offensive as the phrase "Oh, God!", flies in the face of our freedom of expression.  

Third, part of the Second Commandment is not a commandment at all, but a threat issued by a "jealous God" not just against those who would worship "graven images" but against their great grandchildren ("to the third and fourth generation") which clearly undermines our Constitutional rights to be held accountable for our behavior only, not that of our great grandparents.  The idea of collective, genetically-endowed punishment is deeply offensive to the rule of law and our Western tradition.  

Fourth, as the Orthodox in Israel have discovered, enforcing a Sabbath is deeply problematic in a modern society.  How can one safely staff emergency rooms, protect crops about to be damaged by hail, or rescue people at sea if all labor must cease on Saturday?  And which Sabbath would be enforced, the one referred to here, or the later Christian variation (Sunday)?  

Fifth, the Commandment to unconditionally honor your father and mother would clearly be inappropriate in the case of rape, incest, or parental neglect or abuse.  Since many of those involved in the court system disproportionately suffered from these things, institutionalizing a blind obedience to genetics over the rule of law or ethics could undermine justice, even if subliminally.  Some parents quite frankly should not be honored and many children unfortunately must be protected from or even separated from abusive or neglectful parents.  

Sixth, we have a long tradition of outlawing behavior, not thoughts or feelings.  Coveting or desiring something maybe undesirable for many reasons, but it is not criminal and a Commandment against it gives the state an implicit right to regulate something it should not and cannot control - the desires of its citizens.  If I steal my neighbor's flat screen television, I have broken the law, but no modern court should be in the business of telling me I cannot look longingly at it.  Also, the listing of my neighbor's "wife" along with his slaves, animals, and other property reflects a misogynistic Biblical view of women as chattel, possessions of her husband, a view completely incompatible with the society in which we live and the family law that views all citizens regardless of gender as equal.      

Finally, the explicit references to slavery, something abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment, show how badly dated and incompatible with the United States Code these Commandments are.   We live in a world in which slavery and religious intolerance, even though both exist in some form, elicit almost universal revulsion.   The Ten Commandments were written in a society that legalized and encouraged both. 

A Badly Needed Upgrade

Societies evolve.  Degradation of women and the ownership and sale of other human beings, as well as capital punishment for eating shellfish or talking back to your parents have gone the way of witch hunts and alchemy.  If we absolutely must reduce morality to ten easily remembered and universally accepted (however imperfectly followed) points, why not upgrade those parts of the Judeo-Christian Ten Commandments that clearly were historical artifacts of the men who wrote them?  

Many alternatives exist, including those cited by Richard Dawkins.  None is perfect and need not be.  That's not the point.  The idea is to find a few cross-culturally robust, metaphysically independent ethical norms. 

We need not even start from scratch, since a few of Version 1.0 of the Big Ten are quite good.   In fact, the best of all religions - including Judaism and Christianity - can be boiled down to a few simple rules:

 - Treat others as you would be treated yourself.  Treat all human beings with dignity and respect.  Period.  If you own animals, treat them humanely and with the respect they deserve as our close relatives.  All other commandments follow this one.

  - Don't kill.  Don't cause pain to other sentient creatures unless you absolutely have to.  Don't rape, don't commit war crimes.  Avoid not just violent behavior but violent speech and metaphors.  

   - Don't steal.  If it's not yours, don't take it.  Don't own other people - parents do not own their children and husbands do not own their wives.  Slavery is the ultimate theft of another person's labor, freedom, and dignity.  

   - Don't lie.  Especially to children.  Don't say things you know not to be true.  Separate what you feel or want to be true from what you have actually experienced or witnessed.  Separate facts from speculations, reporting from editorializing.

  - Embrace doubt and honest questioning.  Question your assumptions, gather data, then form and modify your world view.  Never accept something on authority alone.  Trust but verify.   Be prepared to modify your world view if the weight of evidence says you should; there is no shame in changing your mind.  Approach spiritual questions with as much openness and honesty as you would approach other questions for which there are no concrete answers and over which intelligent people disagree.  Doubt and humility are  the beginning of wisdom, not its enemy.  Never let faith be a substitute for doing your homework.  

  - If you must cite religious texts, at least quote them accurately.  Don't misquote Jesus.  If you're going to thump the Bible, first read it.  

  - Tolerate criticism; never threaten or silence dissenters.  Understand that the Bible is a collection of orally transmitted documents translated multiple times and liberally edited by scribes and local authorities.  It's OK to pay some attention to the man behind the curtain.  Stop threatening those who disagree with you with torture or hellfire, whether directly or outsourced to a projected deity.

  - Let kids be kids.*  Don't impose your own beliefs on them, especially if those beliefs are potentially traumatic.  Even if you believe in hell, it will still be there when your child turns 18 - why the rush to terrify them at age 8?  Let children decide as adults what metaphysical beliefs if any they wish to adopt.  There is no such thing as a Christian or Muslim or Jewish or Hindu child.  If you expose children to one particular religious education or tradition, allow them to witness and experience the rich diversity of other beliefs and traditions also.  Never misrepresent your particular world view as having a monopoly on truth or risk losing all credibility when they find out that it doesn't.  Be humbled by the fact that no religious tradition comes close to claiming a majority of the world's citizens as its adherents, so whatever we believe, we are outnumbered!   

 - Do the simple good that is in front of you.   If you can't feed 100 children, feed one.  There is enough work to be done here and now to alleviate poverty, combat global warming, and simply raise our kids to be good human beings without tearing ourselves up over whether god exists, is one or many, is male or female, cares about us or doesn't think about us one way or the other, or has really big feet.  If god exists, he's probably not as petty and easily offended as we are. 

 - Seek happiness.  Suffering is inevitable, but misery is optional.  We often confuse pleasure and happiness, but whether we believe in one god or many or none at all, we can all seek and find happiness here and now, and help others to find happiness also.  Indeed, this may be our only real duty and is entirely consistent with the others.  

* This is the only "commandment" that is probably NOT shared by most world religious traditions, most of which start with the assumption of having a monopoly on truth and recognizing the need to indoctrinate children early to pass on this "truth" to the next generation.   I would argue, as does Dawkins, that if a truth is so self-evident and robust, it will be as true at age 21 as at age 4.  

That's it.  I'm sure there are others you can think of, and perhaps there are some here that will not meet with universal agreement, but I imagine most people, regardless of the specifics of one's geography or faith tradition (and the two are highly correlated), already try to live by several if not all of these.  

The main point is that we share remarkable moral and ethical principles that are not that difficult to codify.  We don't insist on making 1982 personal computers run 2011 software; why on earth should we force a society that has liberated women and emancipated slaves to twist itself into following without modification the moral injunctions of an agrarian culture and the religion it created?   Anyone who engages in the biblical "abominations" of eating shellfish, working on Saturday, or wearing clothes of a cotton-polyester blend (mixed fibers, forbidden in Leviticus) already upgraded whether they realize it not.  Why not take the upgrade one step further and make it explicit?