What's the diff?

I've long believed that a "Christian Republic" would look an awful lot like an Islamic Republic. Evangelical Christians would have you believe they'd be very different places. So, is it Christianity vs. Islam, or is it really fundamentalism against all?

Let's see what Pat Robertson has to say about his rivals, the Muslims:

"If we don't stop covering up what Islam is ... Islam is a violent -- I was going to say religion, but it's not a religion, it's a political system, it's a violent political system bent on the overthrow of the governments of the world and world domination," Robertson said. "You're dealing with not a religion, you're dealing with a political system, and I think we should treat it as such, and treat its adherents as such as we would members of the communist party, members of some fascist group."

Totally different from Christianity, right? Well, not so different from a brand of Christianity espoused by Rick Warren:

"For the past 18 months we have been on a stealth, secret mission - project - around the world. We've been sending members out, actually over 4500 members somewhere overseas, over the period of the the last few years, going out to do what we're gonna call the PEACE plan.... ....Friends, this is going to be a revolution. You see, over the years as we've been training these 400,000 churches around the world, we've built a network, and there are literally tens of thousands of other churches waiting to do what Saddleback has been testing the last few years. What is the vision for the next twenty-five years? I'll tell you what it is. It is the global expansion of the Kingdom of God. It is the total mobilization of this church and the third part is the radical devotion of every believer. Now I choose that word radical intentionally. Because only radicals change the world. Everything great done in this world is done by passionate people. Moderate people get moderately nothing done."

Let's hope his vision is unrealistically grandiose.

You just keep on judging.

In a piece in “Politico,” discussing Sarah Palin and her son Trig, Ben Smith reports that Gov. Palin has become a star in pro-life circles. The following caught my eye:

“And those people, says Greg Mueller, a veteran anti-abortion political operative and former spokesman for Pat Buchanan, are getting a powerful message. ‘She’s going out there as a pro-life woman to say that there’s great joy in special-needs kids — and that we shouldn’t be aborting them.’”

I do not deny that most parents love their special-needs children—my parents certainly loved my autistic sister—but let us not romanticize life with family members with physical or mental disabilities. That life is most often excruciating.

My sister had severe problems, and for most of her life, there were no professionals or facilities to deal with people like her. My mother toiled in vain for many years trying to find any situation where my sister would fit in.

Rather than institutionalize her, my parents kept her at home. Her behavior was uncontrollable. If she thought it was mealtime, and mealtime was actually hours away, she would call for her food unceasingly and tirelessly until it came. If my mother went out of the house, my sister would yell for her until she came home. Often during the night, she would awaken screaming, and would scream for hours, preventing anyone from sleeping.

Life with a special needs family member, at its worst, I am trying to say, can lead to post-traumatic stress disorder and thoughts of suicide for the rest of the family. Let’s not depict it as warm and fuzzy.

When my sister died, I could only wonder what such a life meant.

I do not know whether, if my mother had known what my sister’s impact on her life would be, she would have aborted her. Perhaps not.

Knowing what I know, I would do it in a second.

A question directed at noone in particular...

If you lie to defend your position, and you become aware that you are lying, wouldn't the smart thing be to change your position?

If you've been searching, I hope this helps.

God's will be done!

"God's will be done" is the believer's escape hatch from the question, "Why didn't God answer your prayer?" Believers will tell you that God answers all prayers, but that sometimes the answer is "No." There are many ways to wiggle out of skeptics' questions about religious matters, but I've just heard about a really great website that asks the very difficult question (for believers, anyway), "Why won't God heal amputees?"

Certain diseases have medical cures; sometimes diseases go away by themselves. Believers often attribute the healing of these diseases to God and prayer. When someone has been gravely ill, and, despite great odds, gets well, it's easy to believe a miracle has occurred. But has it? What about conditions that medicine and nature cannot cure, such as a missing limb? As the website points out, there is not a single case on record of miraculously regenerated limbs. I'll leave it to the believers and the author of http://whywontgodhealamputees.com/ to hash over the question of just what God has against the limbless.

I don't know how long the website has been up, or how long the line of argument has been around. Now that I've heard it, it seems so obvious that I imagine that the question is as least as old as the scientific method. Funny thing is, I've been around almost 60 years and have never heard the question asked before!

I haven't yet discovered any one person to credit the website to, just an organization called "God Is Imaginary."

Conservative Bible Project

I would direct your attention to The Conservative Bible Project:

http://conservapedia.com/Conservative_Bible_Project

You have to hand it to conservative Christians. Through the miracle of redefinition, they can wiggle themselves out of any tight spots they find themselves in. We’re all already familiar with their efforts over the years to rewrite the history of science to confirm their beliefs. Now they have embarked on a truly radical venture: rewriting the New Testament!

Yes, they’ve decided that they don’t like all that stuff about forgiveness and giving to the poor. They are in the mood to smite their enemies, not to love them. As much as they would like to call themselves Christians, and would like ours to be a Christian nation, Christ’s teachings need a little tweaking. What these folks really would like to do is to strip away from Jesus all that makes him Jesus, and roll back morality to its Old Testament condition.

Indeed, it would probably be easier to say, “Oops! New Testament? Big mistake!” But of course, that would leave conservative Christians in a real pickle. They’d all be Jews. Conservative Christians don't want the New Testament, but they still need Jesus. Unbelievers like me have long said that we create God in our own image. But I really wasn't expecting so blatant an example.

A lack of imagination

The problem with Libertarians is that they don't seem to realize that in a free society, the strong trample the weak. Or perhaps they imagine themselves as among the strong. In fact, in their totally free society, the tramplers are few, and the tramplees are many.

Libertarians think that their only possible trampler is government. The problem with Libertarians is their lack of imagination.

What's up with all this craziness?

Crazy people seem to be coming out of the woodwork, saying crazy things, acting like children at town halls, coming to conclusions that seem contrary to all logic and evidence. Faced with rational argument and facts, they simply shout their opponents down. It's quite a spectacle, and I've never seen it on such a large scale before. What's going on?

In the past year, two very significant upheavals have occurred that, to some people, must seem to threaten the very solidity of the ground they walk on.

First, after eight years of Republican rule, with their attendant unfettering of the free market, the economy collapsed, demonstrating that the free market is not all it's cracked up to be. That must be a jolt to the true believer, if indeed he has made the connection.

Second, and this upheaval is truly a huge one: the U.S. elected a black man president (and could very well have elected a woman instead). Until last year, it seemed certain to anyone living in this country that the election of a black president was years away. Barack Obama has been president now for several months, and many people are still in denial about it. Their world has been turned upside down. The certainty that white men were firmly in charge has been shattered. In the United States, where our representatives are elected and the transfer of power is peaceful and smooth, it's easy to overlook a social revolution when it happens. This spectacle of people's irrational behavior is a gauge that shows that part of the population is shaken to the core.

"Balance"

The mainstream media strives for balance whether it's warranted or not. Lately they've been lumping Keith Olbermann in with Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Bill O'Reilly. Since they don't seem to have been overly bothered by the right wing loonies before, are their sudden attacks on "angry white men" really just a way of bringing Olbermann down, casting doubt on his integrity?

There is a huge difference between Keith Olbermann and the others: Olbermann is not a liar.

"Bias"

From Dahlia Lithwick's article on the Sotomayor hearings:

Sen. John Kyl, R-Ariz., warns that the judge's statements "suggest that she may allow, and even embrace, decision-making based on her biases and prejudices."

And no white male would ever do that, eh?

Found: The Great American Novel

If you Google "great american novel," and go to that entry in Wikipedia, you'll find, among other things, a list of books that have been proposed for that title. To that list, I'd like to add Robert Coover's "The Public Burning." The burning referred to is a fictionalized version of the execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg--as a public extravaganza in Times Square. Large parts of the story are narrated by a fictionalized Richard Nixon.

Now, that short description gives a person plenty to think about, but the experience of reading the novel is overwhelming. "The Public Burning" is an ambitious novel about an America that's not as pretty as we'd like to think it is; this America is personified in the character of Uncle Sam, a combination huckster and superhero, who helps our country in its battle with the shadowy Phantom, representative of Communism and anything else that's scary in the big bad world. The character Richard Nixon is remarkably true to the real person of the same name, but perhaps more open, more fleshed out. If I have any doubt about "The Public Burning" living past our era, it's that future generations will have gone without having experienced Nixon. But I don't think the book's life hinges on a knowledge of the real Tricky Dick.

Coover is a fearless author. If you read this book, you'll be amazed by where he's not afraid to go. This isn't a book for the starry-eyed.

Stephen T. Johns

My deepest condolences to the family and friends of U.S. Holocaust Museum guard Stephen T. Johns. He died protecting knowledge and truth.

When rational argument fails

Back when I was in high school, my racist friend Phil announced to me that he was joining the KKK.

"Phil," I said to him, "I don't think you can get in if you're a Catholic."

Phil had an anger problem, which he barely controlled at this moment, and snarled, "The Klan doesn't hate everybody. Don't be so narrow-minded!"

That's an old trick of the bigoted, accusing the broad-minded of narrow-mindedness. Rush just paid the same compliment to Sonia Sotomayor.

When one's political opponent is a liar, how is one to answer?

Warning!

I'm posting this to warn all and sundry that some of you may not get Christmas presents in 2012. This will come about because some of your loved ones may believe that the world will end on December 21 of that year. Some nonsense about a Mayan calendar prophecy.

No sooner had I finished reading Ron Rosenbaum's Slate article on this subject (May 22), than I read the following in Erasmus's The Praise of Folly. Coincidence?? You decide.

"The next to be placed among the regiment of fools are such as make a trade of telling or inquiring after incredible stories of miracles and prodigies: never doubting that a lie will choke them, they will muster up a thousand several strange relations of spirits, ghosts, apparitions, raising of the devil, and such like bugbears of superstition, which the farther they are from being probably true, the more greedily they are swallowed, and the more devoutly believed. And these absurdities do not only bring an empty pleasure, and cheap divertisement, but they are a good trade, and procure a comfortable income to such priests and friars as by this craft get their gain."

Don't be fooled. If I'm lucky enough to be alive, I'll be having a party on December 22, 2012.

Why things are the way they are...

Erasmus, in The Praise of Folly, observes that, "[S]ince the Stoics define wisdom to be conducted by reason, and folly nothing else but the being hurried by passion, lest our life should otherwise have been too dull and inactive, that creator, who out of clay first tempered and made us up, put into the composition of our humanity more than a pound of passions to an ounce of reason; and reason he confined within the narrow cells of the brain, whereas he left passions the whole body to range in."

There you have it. A pound of passions to an ounce of reason.

Double betrayal

When 9/11 happened, Americans were horrified and terrified. In the following days, we mourned our dead. Then came the day when Bush announced that, instead of just bringing Osama bin Laden to justice, we would fight a war on terror. That is, we would root out terrorists wherever they were. I don't consider myself politically brilliant, but I knew from that very moment that Bush meant Iraq. Using the American people's rage and grief to trick us into a war that the members of his administration planned in advance was a cynical betrayal of the people he was supposed to protect.

The second betrayal, using torture to get false information linking Iraq and al Qaeda, is a betrayal of everything America stands for. Years ago, I joined Amnesty International when I heard about the torture in Argentina of Jacobo Timerman. I was thankful that I lived in a country that would never use torture. It was a matter of pride.

Proud Americans, where is the rage?

Pie

A friend of mine subscribes to the Bigger Pie theory; that is, if everyone doesn't have pie, the solution is not to cut up the pie more equitably, but to let the haves keep their pie, and trust them to make a bigger pie. The theory goes that, with the bigger pie, everybody gets pie.

I say, Never underestimate the ability of the upper classes to eat more pie.

Who are these people?

I repeat myself, but I must once again wonder at people whose willingness to believe a thing is inversely proportional to the amount of evidence for it.

Dear President Obama...

Do you think we could dispense with calling America "the Homeland"?

Thank you.

A taste of how the other half lives

In the Slate blog "The XX Factor," Kerry Howley reports on the ongoing problem of failed companies' using government bailout money for executive bonuses and other questionable expenses. In the matter of Citigroup's decision to buy a Sub-Zero refrigerator, Howley writes the wonderful sentence,

"But when you accept heaps of the public's money, you agree to run your company in constant fear of what is derisively referred to as 'populist outrage.'"

Populist outrage, they call it. I hope that some of these execs, undergoing the public scrutiny that comes with this corporate welfare program, feel just a little of the shame that a mother is made to feel when she goes to the grocery store and has to pay with a handful of food stamps.

Science!

Disclaimer: I work as a contractor for NASA.

My, it was nice to see that Barack has proposed a budget increase for NASA, and not only because I make my living working there. The President's budget demonstrates a return of respect for science that's been lacking for the eight years of darkness.

Let's hope that not only will science receive the funding it deserves, but that it will also cease to be politicized by people who would rather believe strange things, for which there is no evidence, than things that have been demonstrated to be true.

What the Right can't take from us

The Right wants everything for itself--the flag, "values." One thing they'll never have (in public, anyway) is the word "fuck." That word belongs to the artists and hippies.

Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!

Makes me feel free.

I advocate its liberal use.

What is to be done?

We all know communism was a miserable failure. But when Marx et. al. thought it up, they were not trying to screw up, they were responding to real social problems. Communism is gone, but the problems are still here.

Now what? My thought is a world-wide labor movement. Any other ideas?

Axiom

The more government spending works, the more the Right denies it.

What science can teach religion

We've become accustomed, in this country of late, to having some religious believers try to determine what should be put in science books, and try to tell scientists how to practice science. I'd like to, not in any mean-spirited way, but sincerely, put the shoe on the other foot. The way in which some people practice religion, by taking every word in the Bible as divinely inspired truth, puts these believers in a precarious situation. That is, every new fact discovered by science threatens some passage in the Bible. My suggestion to these people is, if their particular belief is so susceptible to erosion by newly discovered facts, their practice of religion may leave something to be desired.

Think of it this way, if you will. Science welcomes new facts. If a new fact contradicts what was previously thought to be true, science changes. Would religion not be improved if practiced that way? Religion begins as an attempt to answer Life's biggest questions: Why are we here? Why do we die? What does anything mean? I would suggest that not only the Bible, but other books, give us a tiny part of the big picture. I would also suggest that, over thousands of years, our understanding has grown beyond some things contained in the Bible, and that it is perfectly reasonable and proper to let those things go. That way, religion grows the way science grows; that way, religion is not threatened by the new.

Na-na, hey-hey, good-bye!

Actually, good-bye is too good a word. Some have complained that the inaugural audience booed George W. Bush, and sang Na-na hey-hey, good-bye. Impolite! they said.

After what Bush did to this country, the booing was too mild a response. Where were the fruit and vegetables? Where were the shoes? And for the last eight years, where were the torches and pitchforks?

It's tempting to blame Dubya alone for the failure of the neo-conservative agenda, and that is what the Republicans will do as they regroup from this disaster. But, really, Bush was the necessary result of neo-conservatism, which is intellectually and morally bankrupt. They will never produce a candidate who can govern. Let's hope they never produce another candidate who wins an election.

My So-Called Wisdom

There's an old joke about an adult offspring saying to his father, "Dad, the older I get, the smarter you get." The joke is usually told rather smugly by the father. But, at fifty-eight, something I've learned is that an old man's wisdom is completely useless to the young person we're trying to impart it to. Youth is a time for doing, rather than reflecting on why you shouldn't.

I recently found a quote in Naguib Mahfouz's Palace of Desire that agrees with my opinion. Keep in mind, though, that the quote is from a very young character.

"Be careful not to mock youthful dreams, for that's a symptom of senility. People afflicted by this disease term their sarcasm 'wisdom.'"

A Modest Proposal

You know how those pesky Intelligent Design (formerly known as Creation Science) folks are always trying to sneak religion into public school science classes and textbooks? They really are a nuisance, aren't they? I wonder how they'd feel if the shoe were on the other foot? I'm calling on scientists everywhere (the nervier ones, anyway) to start invading churches and tell them how to teach Sunday school.

You heard it here first.