NPR Commentator Ken Harbaugh's "Most Soldiers Return from War Just Fine" (NPR, All Things Considered, 12/6/07) misses the point

Email response to a story heard on NPR:

Commentator Ken Harbaugh's "Most Soldiers Return from War Just Fine" (NPR, All Things Considered, 12/6/07) misses the point and comes dangerously close to glorifying war.

As a psychiatrist who spent several years in the VA system treating veterans from every conflict from World War II to the Iraq, I can assure Mr. Harbaugh that the idea of a generation of traumatized veterans is no myth. The fact that none of his friends seem traumatized by war is anecdotal and misleading. Comprehensive studies conducted by the military and the Department of Veterans Affairs have shown that about a third of those exposed to heavy combat suffer from posttraumatic stress disorder. Many are ashamed of their symptoms, so may not confide them even to close friends, and others do not develop the disorder until years after the trauma.

War, particularly in its industrialized, high intensity, mass casualty modern form, is toxic to the human central nervous system. No one claims that 100% of soldiers are permanently traumatized by their experiences. In small doses, with proper support, training, and rotation, combat will not permanently traumatize most of those exposed, but repeated tours in a hostile foreign land with no clear front lines or rear areas is a recipe for a psychiatric public health disaster.

The fact that someone is proud of their service says nothing about whether they were traumatized. In fact, survivor guilt is more often the rule than the exception.

Mr. Harbaugh engages in some well-intentioned stereotyping of his own, when he implies that a veteran suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder could not be employed, out of jail, or grateful for having served.

As a West Point graduate, I am deeply appreciative of many aspects of military service, but let us never forget the words of President Carter that war, although sometimes a necessary evil, is always evil. I agree that caring for the traumatized veteran is a high moral imperative, but not starting unnecessary wars in the first place is an even higher one.

Mr. President, We Can't Afford NOT to Insure Our Children

October 6, 2007: Mr. President, We Can't Afford NOT to Insure Our Children

President Bush vetoed a bipartisan bill expanding healthcare coverage to 10 million children. The president believes denying healthcare to children today is preferable to the possibility of government-run healthcare for everyone tomorrow. His stance betrays two flawed economic assumptions: 1.) that government and corporate bureaucrats are not already heavily involved in running the healthcare system; and 2.) that shifting the government involvement from protecting corporate profits to guaranteeing universal access would lead to economic and medical disaster.

American healthcare is delivered via an uncoordinated patchwork quilt of public and for profit systems. Medicaid covers the very poor. Medicare covers the old and disabled. Managed care companies choose from among the employed healthy who are wealthy enough to pay premiums but not sick enough to require much treatment. The children Mr. Bush feels we cannot afford to insure are among the 47 million Americans who fall into the enormous gaps between government and for-profit systems. CEO William McGuire was paid $124.8 million because his company, United Health Group, could cherry pick from mostly healthy employed Americans. Since healthcare insurance is ultimately a zero sum game, in a very real sense, those $124.8 million represented thousands of denied pap smears, mammograms, cancer treatments, vaccinations, or denied new or renewing patients. Shockingly highly paid CEOs represent an enormous government-created transfer of wealth.

It is no coincidence that drug company lobbyists on Capitol Hill outnumber lawmakers. Big pharma knows the source of its extraordinary profit margins is no invisible hand. Americans pay a third more for the same medications as do Canadians or Europeans even though many of those medications were created with taxpayer-funded research and development because our government guarantees and enforces drug company monopolies for several years after a drug is launched. The premium we pay represents a de facto government subsidy to drug companies, enforced with taxpayer-funded courts and policing agencies and possible because of the absence of a Walmart-like agency with the economic muscle to negotiate lower prices for all of us. (Indeed, the bill creating Medicare drug benefits expressly forbade the government from negotiating lower prices at all!) Intellectual property rights should be protected. But as the President misleads us with talk of "government-run healthcare," let's not forget that we've already got it. I believe the government should protect patients as zealously as it protects patents.

Since the government is heavily involved every stage of health-care delivery in this country, let's stop the posturing and figure out how to make it work for us rather than against us. Those who believe free markets do no wrong and governments nothing right should pack their bags for Zimbabwe.

The brewing battle over healthcare is really not between advocates of free markets versus supporters of government intervention. Instead the fight is about what the role of an already heavily involved government should be. Currently most of the activity of the government is directed toward enhancing the profitability of the managed care and drug companies. Is it so outrageous to demand that our government shift its focus to protecting the taxpayers who support it while advancing universal access to healthcare, at least among our children?

Currently, those without insurance have no advocate. There is simply no agency, private or public, who takes ownership of this growing problem. To continue to insist that the status quo should work in theory despite mounting persistent evidence that it does not work in practice verges on psychotic. If the current mix of public and for profit insurers could deliver healthcare efficiently and rationally, they would have long ago. 47 million Americans, 90% of them working, 50% of them children, would not lack health insurance. Infant mortality, vaccination rates, and life expectancy at birth would not be markedly worse than those of countries with universal health coverage. There would not be the scandalously higher mortality rate among those without insurance. We would not pay so much more - 16.5% of GDP in 2006 - on healthcare but get so much less.

Let's not forget that access to healthcare, unlike access to a luxury car or a larger home, is ultimately a matter of life and death. We can forgo luxury expenditures; we should never forgo healthcare for our children.

President Bush fears something sinister about a government spending as much on children's health as it spends in 9 weeks in Iraq. The president who successfully frightened Americans into believing that Saddam Hussein had to be stripped of weapons that he did not have failed to convince us a fully funded public health system would be an apocalypse. He failed because most American families experience in practice the system he seems to know only in theory. If the President spent a day in a public health clinic, or even in my psychiatry private practice, he would understand the futility of giving tax credits to the poor who pay no taxes. There is something almost comical about a president expecting those denied private insurance to find solace in his promise that the government will not provide it either.

The apocalypse of American healthcare is now, not in the form of a government bureaucrat deciding healthcare but a profit-driven managed care bureaucrat denying it. The exact details of any solution are less important than our commitment to get it done. It is hard to envision any proposal that would not heavily involve the federal government, at least as a referee. Get over it.

My modest proposal: expand Medicare to cover all American citizens. As a private practice psychiatrist who accepts all major private plans as well as Medicare and Medicaid, I generally elicit surprise when I tell people that Medicare is one of the best plans to work with. They were among the first to go electronic, and they pay promptly and well. You would never know it from Bush's misinformation, but Medicare is far more efficient than any private system. The Medicare administrative costs of about 2% are comparable to the administrative burdens of most national health systems. This is in contrast to private plans' administrative costs of 15%-25%, including compensation of top executives, lobbying, marketing and advertising. The fact that Medicare can deliver healthcare to the old and disabled at a fraction of the cost of private plans means that if the risk pool were expanded to the young and the healthy, the economy of scale savings would be enormous, driving down administrative costs even more.

If universal coverage is too much to swallow, why not at least expand it to cover our children? If those under 18 and over 65 were guaranteed healthcare, we could always work on those in the middle later. Families relieved of the burden of finding and maintaining continuous private insurance for their children would experience huge premium savings on their family policies. Those who develop chronic and persistent illnesses before age 18 could seamlessly shift into a Medicare disability policy as adults. Such a change could end overnight our failed for profit managed care experiment.

Bush misrepresents Medicare and other public programs such as the S-CHIP program he vetoed, confusing government-refereed with government-run. The Veterans Administration is a government-run, centrally planned bureaucracy. Medicare and Medicaid, on the other hand, simply pay a benefit, or supplement a private policy; the benefit can be taken to any participating provider. Such a system offers far more choice than a for profit plan which restrict choice to contracted providers (some pay for out-of-network services, but usually at a steeply discounted rate). The President is simply wrong when he says that Medicare restricts freedom; to the contrary, it allows optimum matching of client to provider and introduces market forces and competition to regions currently carved up by HMOs and managed care companies.

When Bush, a heavy recipient of pharmacy and health insurance campaign donations, speaks of the threat of squeezing out private insurers I wonder if he would have opposed the development of the light bulb because of its impact on the candle industry, or fought the polio vaccine because of its economic threat to iron lung manufacturers. A healthcare system exists not to protect one favored group of workers but to serve patients. Determining the optimum mix of private or public systems should be driven by what works, not who works.

No doubt, we could help many of the for-profit bureaucrats and claims processors get jobs in an expanded Medicare program. Some might even become healthcare providers in the countless clinics that would spring up as millions of previously uninsured or under-insured Americans took their new benefit to the physician of their choice. Consumers and providers will vote with their feet, responding to market incentives and differences in quality of care. Providers will have a strong incentive to provide excellent care and customer service since their patients will no longer be constrained by insurance to see only a limited number of physicians. Hospitals and clinics could downsize their billing departments, reducing overhead and ultimately fees. Emergency rooms, currently the only place where the uninsured cannot be denied care, could focus on those truly in crisis.

Corporations should embrace universal healthcare. Aggregate profits should soar as the liability for current and future healthcare is shifted from individual corporations and shared fairly by all of society. As earnings rise, so too should stock prices, fueling a tremendous bull market. General Motors could focus on making cars instead of providing healthcare, and would no longer be at such a competitive international disadvantage. Many lawsuits motivated by the uninsured desperate to get someone to pay their medical bills would disappear, reducing litigation and insurance costs. Millions of Americans stuck in dead-end jobs could leave if insurance were de-linked from employment. They could start businesses or return to school. Our entire society would benefit from the new outburst of labor mobility as millions of Americans moved into optimally-matched positions. Millions of Americans dependent upon Medicaid or Medicare disability could re-enter the workforce confident they would not lose their healthcare as a punishment for appearing too functional.

If we can afford to spend a trillion on the invasion and occupation of Iraq without suffering a collapse of our society, then we can certainly afford another $30 billion to insure 10 million more children. After the initial transitional costs, the savings will be enormous. Delaying what is probably inevitable only compounds the ultimate total cost. Not paying upfront for the universal healthcare of all Americans is about as economically wise as making a minimum payment on a large credit card bill; short-term cash flow is improved but long-term liabilities snowball.

Since universal health-care coverage is a tough sell in, let's at least agree to cover our most vulnerable citizens. No child should ever go without health insurance, at least not in a wealthy country such as ours. President Bush believes we cannot afford to insure poor children; I believe we cannot afford not to. Indeed, how we treat the least among us is the ultimate measure of the strength of our country. As the bumper sticker says, freedom isn't free, but either is healthcare. Let's stop the ideological posturing and misinformation campaigns and get to work.

On Conspiracy Theories

I agree that certain individuals today and throughout history have had a disproportionate impact on how decisions are made, resources allocated, rules favoring one group or another are tweaked or modified or overturned. Many are unelected and many work behind the scenes. The Federal Reserve Board is a good example.

However, I also believe that there are constraints in the equation even among the most powerful. Louis XVI was an absolute dictator but was murdered by his own people. Napoleon rose to power and declared himself emperor and established an empire that continues to influence us today (the legal code of Louisiana, for example). Mao murdered millions and had a centrally planned economy but the heirs of his system find even they have had to make some modifications after 1989 that the early leaders would have never dreamed of. They didn't do this because they wanted to but because they had to. The people demanded it and even an absolute monarch must at some level heed the will of the people.

My view is that this tug of war between the few and the many, between the rich and the poor, the owners of capital and the workers has been playing out since the most primitive cultures developed surplus income, and with it, the ability to accumulate wealth. The history of ancient Greece, Rome, and the more recent conflicts in Europe over the past 200 years between the liberals (advocates of representative parliamentary democracy) and conservatives (monarchists of one form or another) seems a messy, noisy struggle over how best to organize a society. I believe several different formulae work. For now the liberals have won in the West, but the Chinese hybrid model or a Singapore model may be demonstrating it is at least a viable alternative.

Rupert Murdoch may buy papers, but ordinary people have to read them. The oligarchs may declare their currency must be at a certain level by fiat, but clearly traders around the world may have different opinions. We may want to cut interest rates to goose the economy, but there are real world consequences in terms of the dollar, inflation, etc. The small group of people you feel is in charge of the world may desire to punish Iran, but Russia clearly is not interested in going along with this plan. They may want to punish China, but China helps buy a billion dollars of our debt every day. They may want to be greeted as liberators and plant Jeffersonian democracy in Iraq, but the Iraqi people clearly have other ideas about the matter (and they are prevailing despite all the power and high technology and concentration of power we enjoy).

If the oligarchs completely ruled everything, the world would look much more like Europe in the 1200s than the West today. We would not have Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, the 5-day week or the 8-hour workday, OSHA, the FDA if the owners of capital, who gain nothing directly from these programs and would gain quite a bit from their elimination, if the wealthy few were entirely in charge. True, they got their tax cut, a massive transfer of societal wealth away from the poor to the richest 1% and their war, which was fought disproportionately by the poor, and they managed to convince Americans that the estate tax (the "death tax" as they called it) was a populist issue. But they could not manipulate the 2006 thumping and have little power over the 2008 one to come.

Conspiracy theories implicitly assume that there is one set of levers to control the engine of state and that whoever has their hands on the levers is a unified group with a uniform agenda. History strikes me as much more messy than that. As Kurt Vonnegut said, we are all just farting around down here and anyone who tells you differently is lying.

Our current system, the product of liberal democratic movements mostly in Western and Northern Europe, is at once fragile and strong. The fact that the many have a voice means that voice can be manipulated, and the current occupants of the White House demonstrate that manipulation can be executed with breathtakingly bold effectiveness. But even viewers of Fox News eventually get wind of an external reality, a relative in New Orleans or a friend in Iraq or a surprise jump in their family health insurance deductible, and they usually get it. A little slow on the uptake, but they do get it. That is the strength of our system, that despite all the lobbyists and the secret energy meetings and the sidestepping of laws and oversights, in the end, ours is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Governments, particularly popularly elected ones, do a lot of stupid things that most certainly do not always represent most of the people, but on balance they usually end up getting it right.

If 200 years ago, I had said that one day slaves would be free, blacks could vote, women could testify in court and even vote themselves, that Senators would be directly elected and even 18 year-olds could vote, anyone alive would have called me a fool and a visionary. If I had said there would be an income and an inheritance tax and a social security safety net for the old, poor, and disabled, most reasonable people would have said never.

But of course all those things happened and I think we can continue to surprise ourselves with what we can do under an Obama-Clinton administration. Just a thought.

Even a Small Boost in the African American Voter Turnout Would Drive Republicans From Office

8/28/07

To: NPR, All Things Considered

Re: "Would a Run by Obama Boost Black Voter Turnout?" All Things Considered, August 23, 2007

Last week, you aired a piece during which a political analyst disagreed with Senator Obama's comments that if African Americans turned out in higher numbers, that Mississippi, Georgia, and South Carolina would be Democratic states.

If one uses the 2004 exit poll data supplied by CNN, however, it's quite clear that because African American voters show such a strong Democratic preference (by an 8:1 margin), even a small increase in African American turnout would carry the day for Democrats.

Let's assume that in the 2008 election the racial preferences mirror those of 2004, a conservative assumption since 2004 was pre-Katrina and the war in Iraq had not yet melted down into the debacle it has now become. Many whites (who voted for Bush by a 58:41 margin) are no doubt disillusioned with Republicans, and Katrina solidified the notion, fair or not, that Republicans do not represent African American interests as well as Democrats.

The question then becomes: what proportion of the voters would have to be African American for the Democrats to carry the day? As it turns out, only 20% of votes cast and counted must be African American (80% white) for the Democrats to squeak by with 50.4% of the vote. [For simplicity's sake, I am ignoring other racial groups since the piece mainly focused on black-white politics, but the mathematical principles would remain the same.] If 30% of the voters are African American, then the Democrats would win 55.1% of the vote. If the 40% of Mississippians who are African American vote, even if every white citizen voted, the Democrats would win 59.8% of the vote.

Sadly, African American turnout has historically been much lower and the probability of an African American vote being correctly counted is much lower than for a white American, but if every American voted and every vote counted, it would be very hard for a single Republican to hold onto office, particularly in the South. [This makes it clear why every single "voter fraud" case the Justice Department pursued was always in the direction of decreasing the probability net-net of an African American vote being counted. The Republicans, whose Presidential candidate lost the popular vote in 2000 and barely squeaked into office in 2004, are scared to death of effective universal suffrage.]

Your intro to the piece implied the South had been Republican for decades. Not true. When I moved to Georgia in 1996, it was solidly Democrat. The Republican makeover of the South was a recent phenomenon, and like the Republican-dominated era during Reconstruction, it can be reversed.

- Mark Vakkur, Atlanta

From CNN:

VOTE BY RACE	BUSH			KERRY		NADER
TOTAL	2004	2000	2004		2004
White (77%)	58%	+4	41%		0%
African-American (11%)	11%	+2	88%		0%
Latino (8%)	44%	+9	53%		2%
Asian (2%)	44%	+3	56%		*
Other (2%)	40%	+1	54%		2%

History and Current Events Home Page

For a more complete compilation of clipped articles, musings, and assorted facts gathered over the year on a range of topics from military history to communism to civil rights to religion, visit http://www.vakkur.com/hx/history.htm.

God's Press Conference: "Don't Kill Each Other Anymore - Ever!"

It's a real sign of the times when the fake news is the most reliable or at least the most direct. In the dark days after 9-11, this was one of the most eloquent pieces I read as a direct rebuttal to the fundamentalist religious impulses that seemed to be behind the attacks. This press conference did something that few commentators in the West have done, challenging us all to see that murderous self-righteousness maybe many things, but it is inconsistent with the teachings of most if not all world religions, certainly all of the Mediterranean monotheisms.

from www.theonion.com 9/24/01

NEW YORK—Responding to recent events on Earth, God, the omniscient creator-deity worshipped by billions of followers of various faiths for more than 6,000 years, angrily clarified His longtime stance against humans killing each other Monday.

"Look, I don't know, maybe I haven't made myself completely clear, so for the record, here it is again," said the Lord, His divine face betraying visible emotion during a press conference near the site of the fallen Twin Towers. "Somehow, people keep coming up with the idea that I want them to kill their neighbor. Well, I don't. And to be honest, I'm really getting sick and tired of it. Get it straight. Not only do I not want anybody to kill anyone, but I specifically commanded you not to, in really simple terms that anybody ought to be able to understand."

Worshipped by Christians, Jews, and Muslims alike, God said His name has been invoked countless times over the centuries as a reason to kill in what He called "an unending cycle of violence."

"I don't care how holy somebody claims to be," God said. "If a person tells you it's My will that they kill someone, they're wrong. Got it? I don't care what religion you are, or who you think your enemy is, here it is one more time: No killing, in My name or anyone else's, ever again."

The press conference came as a surprise to humankind, as God rarely intervenes in earthly affairs. As a matter of longstanding policy, He has traditionally left the task of interpreting His message and divine will to clerics, rabbis, priests, imams, and Biblical scholars. Theologians and laymen alike have been given the task of pondering His ineffable mysteries, deciding for themselves what to do as a matter of faith. His decision to manifest on the material plane was motivated by the deep sense of shock, outrage, and sorrow He felt over the Sept. 11 violence carried out in His name, and over its dire potential ramifications around the globe.

"I tried to put it in the simplest possible terms for you people, so you'd get it straight, because I thought it was pretty important," said God, called Yahweh and Allah respectively in the Judaic and Muslim traditions. "I guess I figured I'd left no real room for confusion after putting it in a four-word sentence with one-syllable words, on the tablets I gave to Moses. How much more clear can I get?"

"But somehow, it all gets twisted around and, next thing you know, somebody's spouting off some nonsense about, 'God says I have to kill this guy, God wants me to kill that guy, it's God's will,'" God continued. "It's not God's will, all right? News flash: 'God's will' equals 'Don't murder people.'"

Worse yet, many of the worst violators claim that their actions are justified by passages in the Bible, Torah, and Qur'an.

"To be honest, there's some contradictory stuff in there, okay?" God said. "So I can see how it could be pretty misleading. I admit it—My bad. I did My best to inspire them, but a lot of imperfect human agents have misinterpreted My message over the millennia. Frankly, much of the material that got in there is dogmatic, doctrinal bulls…. I turn My head for a second and, suddenly, all this stuff about homosexuality gets into Leviticus, and everybody thinks it's God's will to kill gays. It absolutely drives Me up the wall."

God praised the overwhelming majority of His Muslim followers as "wonderful, pious people," calling the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks rare exceptions.

"This whole medieval concept of the jihad, or holy war, had all but vanished from the Muslim world in, like, the 10th century, and with good reason," God said. "There's no such thing as a holy war, only unholy ones. The vast majority of Muslims in this world reject the murderous actions of these radical extremists, just like the vast majority of Christians in America are pissed off over those two bigots on The 700 Club."

Continued God, "Read the book: 'Allah is kind, Allah is beautiful, Allah is merciful.' It goes on and on that way, page after page. But, no, some [jerks] have to come along and revive this stupid holy-war [stuff] just to further their own hateful agenda. So now, everybody thinks Muslims are all murderous barbarians. Thanks, Taliban: 1,000 years of pan-Islamic cultural progress down the drain."

God stressed that His remarks were not directed exclusively at Islamic extremists, but rather at anyone whose ideological zealotry overrides his or her ability to comprehend the core message of all world religions.

"I don't care what faith you are, everybody's been making this same mistake since the dawn of time," God said. "The Muslims massacre the Hindus, the Hindus massacre the Muslims. The Buddhists, everybody massacres the Buddhists. The Jews, don't even get me started on the hardline, right-wing, Meir Kahane-loving Israeli nationalists, man. And the Christians? You people believe in a Messiah who says, 'Turn the other cheek,' but you've been killing everybody you can get your hands on since the Crusades."

Growing increasingly wrathful, God continued: "Can't you people see? What are you, morons? There are a ton of different religious traditions out there, and different cultures worship Me in different ways. But the basic message is always the same: Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Shintoism... every religious belief system under the sun, they all say you're supposed to love your neighbors, folks! It's not that hard a concept to grasp."

"Why would you think I'd want anything else? Humans don't need religion or God as an excuse to kill each other—you've been doing that without any help from Me since you were … apes!" God said. "The whole point of believing in God is to have a higher standard of behavior. How obvious can you get?"

"I'm talking to all of you, here!" continued God, His voice rising to a shout. "Do you hear Me? I don't want you to kill anybody. I'm against it, across the board. How many times do I have to say it? Don't kill each other anymore—ever! …

…

Upon completing His outburst, God fell silent, standing quietly at the podium for several moments. Then, witnesses reported, God's shoulders began to shake, and He wept.

A World Lit Only By Fire, William Manchester

To Jerry Falwell and all those who believe in a "veil of protection" being removed by God:

Consider this quote from William Manchester (A World Lit Only By Fire):

"Once he became Pope Alexander VI, Vatican partices, already wild, grew wilder. They were costly, but he could afford the lifestyle of a Renaissance prince; as vice chancellor of the Roman Church, he had amassed enormous wealth. As guests approached the papal palace, they were excited by the spectacle of living statues: naked, guilded young men and women in erotic poses… One [fete] known to Romans as the Ballet of the Chestnuts, was held on October 30, 1501… [According to Burchard's Diarium] After the banquet dishes had been cleared away, the city's fity most beautiful whores danced with guests, "first clothed, then naked." The dancing over, the "ballet" began, with the pope and two of his children in the best seats. Candelabra were set up on the floor; scattered among them were chestnuts, "which," Burchard writes, "the courtesans had to pick up, crawling between the candles." Then the serious sex started. Guests stripped and ran out on the floor, where they mounted, or were mounted by, the prostitutes. "The coupling took place," according to Burchard, "in front of everyone present." Servants kept score of each man's orgasms, for the pope greatly admired virility and measured a man's machismo by his ejaculative capacity. After everyone was exhausted, His Holiness distributed prizes - cloaks, boots, caps, and fine silken tunics. The winners, the diarist wrote, were those "who made love with those courtesans the greatest number of times." [p. 79]

This sort of activity, unthinkable today, is part of the church's legacy. The point is not that papal leaders were any more depraved than the rest of society - they probably weren't, although they were certainly more wealthy and powerful.

It is also important to remember that the church forbade the teachings of Galileo (and in his time all the teaching of Copernicus) until 1822! In other words, the church was wrong - patently and openly and demonstrably wrong - in its belief in a geocentric universe and took about 300 years to admit its error. It was also wrong about the age of the earth, the time it took to create it, and a number of other technical issues, but my point is that if they were wrong about these issues (as they later admitted), could it be possible that they are wrong about birth control, family planning, and abortion? We have a precedent for the church taking a stand - a very harsh stand punishable by death at the stake - then later admitting (unfortunately far too late for its victims) that it was wrong.

Religious leaders throughout history have modified what they considered to be unforgivable sins. Why should now be any different? Sir Thomas More, whom catholics view as such a paragon of virtue (standing up to King Henry VIII did take courage), thought that reading the Bible in English was a damnable offense. He would have had William Tyndale burned to death for heresy for translating the Bible to English. If he were alive today, he would think any modern catholic should be condemned to hell for reading the Bible in English. You would have argued with him about this the way you argue with me about abortion and no doubt, he would have been as unyielding.

Consider this quotation from historian William Manchester (A World Lit Only By Fire):

"In argument [More] was bitter, vituperative, given to streams of invective. And although as a writer he celebrated religious tolerance in his Utopia, in practice he was a rigid Catholic, capable of having a servant in his own home flogged for blasphemy. He believed that heretics, atheists, and disbelievers in a heareafter should be executed, and as chancellor he approved such sentences."

Adultery in medieval times was also a capital offense, but of course only if women were found guilty.

Cesare Borgia as pope probably had an incestuous affair with his 17-year-old daughter, as he later acknowledged when he legitimized her child via a secret bull. (Earlier, to the sound of open laughter, the canonical judges declared her intacta - a virgin - although she was clearly 6 months pregnant at the time.) He may have arranged the murder of his brother, Juan.

In the name of Christ, millions (adjusted for today's population levels) perished in the petty religious wars that raged through Europe. The Roman Inquisition was particularly cruel:

"The Roman Inquisition, reinstituted in 1542 as a pontifical response to the Reformation, became an even crueler reign of terror [than the Spanish Inquisition]. All deviation from the Catholic faith was rigorously suppressed by its governing commission of six cardinals, with intellectuals marked for close scrutiny. As a consequence, the advocates of reform, who had proposed the only measures which might have healed the split in Christendom, fell under the dark shadows of the hereticators' suspicion. No Catholic was too powerful to elude their judgment… Pietro Carnesecchi, who had been the pope's secretary was cremated in a Roman auto-da-fe. [burned alive] … Possession of Protestant literature was a felony; advocacy of heretical ideas was a capital offense; and informers were encouraged by assigning them, after convictions, one-third of the condemneds' goods. Trials were conducted by a special commission, whose court came to be known as … the burning room. In less than three years, the commission sentenced sixty Frenchmen to the stake. Anne du Bourg … suggested that executions be postponed until the Council of Trent defined Catholic orthodoxy. [French King ] Henry [II] had him arrested… He meant to see him burn, too, but … the King was killed in a tournament. [pp. 201-2]

And of course the Spanish Inquisition was also savage:

"Torquemada's methods reveal much about one of the age's most unpleasant characteristics: man's inhumanity to man. Sharp iron frames prevented victims from sleepig, lying, or even sitting. Braziers scorched the soles of their feet, facks stretched their limbs, suspects were crushed to death beneath chests filled with stones, and in Germany the very mention of die verfüchte Jungfer - the dreaed old iron maid - inspired terror. The Jungfer embraced the condemned with metal arms, crushed him in a spiked hug, and then opened, letting him fall, a mass of gore, bleeding from a hundred stab wounds, all bones broken, to die slowly in an underground hold of revolving knives and sharp spears…

Jewry was luckier - slightly luckier… If the pogroms of the time are less infamous than the Holocaust, it is only because anti-Semites then lacked twentieth-century technology. Certainly they possessed the evil will. In 1492, … Spain's Jews were given three months to accept Christian baptism or be banished from the country. Even those who had been baptized were distrusted; Isabella had fixed her dark eye on converted Jews suspected of recidivism - Marranos, she called them; "pigs" - and marked them for resettlement as early as 1478. Eventually between thirty thousand and sixty thousand were expelled. Meantime the king of Portugal, finding merit in the Spanish decree, ordered the expulsion of all Portuguese Jews. His soldiers were instructed to massacre those who were slow to leave. During a single night in 1506 nearly four thousand Lisbon Jews were put to the sword. Three years later the systematic persecution of the German Jews began." [ p. 35]

You should probably multiply these figures by several thousand to make them proportional to the population of the time.

Yet God did not condemn European society to poverty and misery; far from it - He (if one uses such a puppet master model) raised Europe and its progeny, the United States in particular, to levels of unprecedented wealth, not just in materialistic things, but in intellectual achievement, technological prowess, and scientific discovery. If anyone deserved punishment for their collective sins, it was surely medieval Europe, but if that punishment is waiting, God sure its taking his time.

This is not to say that civilizations won't fall and decline. I just don't think it has anything to do with the intervention or lack thereof of some heavenly hand.

God killed far more infants from disease through the beginning of this century than man ever did through abortion. Who knows how many died throughout Europe because of the church's misappropriation of capital and continued opposition to the scientific method.

My own belief, for all its worth (and in my belief system what you or I think or believe is not that important), God speaks to us, if at all, through the language of mathematics, science, and economy. There are certain rules for us to follow, and if we follow them, we prosper. If we don't, we starve and live short, miserable lives. The fact that we have a longer life expectancy by far that at any point in human history, that we have a higher quality of life than ever before, that we have freed ourselves from the astonishingly high infant mortality and maternal mortality of the pre-scientific, church-governed age, is prima facie evidence that we are doing something right, and, if one is to endorse the belief that God rewards societies that are following his laws or whatever, that we must be pleasing him or her.

At any rate, the number of abortions has been going down in the United States; why were we not hit with a terrorist attack in 1980, when the 1,297,606 abortions worked out to a rate of 359 per 1,000 live births, than more recently, when the rate dropped to 314 per 1,000 live births (1,221,585 total in 1996) if this attack has anything to do with abortion?

If you view abortion as death, it is one of only many causes of death. The fact that our population is growing, and has surged even since mid-century, means that our birth and survival rate must exceed all causes of death combined.