It’s been a long time since I have posted to my blog, because things have been so busy at work and at home, but I feel I have to comment on this.

In case you haven’t been following the news, Dr. George Tiller, who was known for providing late term abortions, was killed this Sunday. He was shot to death while sitting in church.

Now, you may know my position on abortion, which is that it’s a necessary evil (there’s a clever little epigram that says conservatives need to recognize abortion is a necessary evil, liberals that it’s a necessary evil), so we should take steps to reduce the need for them. But I’m also committed to the stance that–for most cases outside of severe deformity of the fetus, or imminent danger to the mother’s life–the later the operation is performed, the more unconscionable it becomes. Still, he didn’t deserve to be killed.

Bill O’Reilly (whose word you should always take with a grain of salt, if not a whole salt lick) would have us believe that Tiller was killing babies right before their heads breached the birth canal, and was calling it “late term.”

I guarantee you he wasn’t. And for a guy who bills himself as ‘No-Spin,’ O’Reilly sure got people spun up over ‘Tiller the Baby Killer.’

Granted, O’Reilly wasn’t directly responsible for inciting the man to murder Tiller, but the baby-killing meme that he gives platform to is dangerous, and his singling out of Tiller is despicable.

As you may or may not have noticed from the little “Reading Desk” gadget I added to my sidebar, I have been reading a book called Supercapitalism, by Robert Reich. This book is outstanding, and it has drastically changed my perception of what’s wrong in our economy.

Anyway, below, I have reproduced an excerpt from the book, wherein Reich opines on employment linked healthcare. I typed it by hand, so please excuse any typos.

Finally, not only are corporations unfit to decide what is socially virtuous, but under supercapitalism they are often unable to deliver services that are inherently public. Pushing them to do so begs the question of whether the responsibilities would be better undertaken by the public sector. The campaign against Wal-Mart charged in full-page advertisements that “Wal-Mart’s low pay and meager employee benefits force tens of thousands of employees to resort to Medicaid, food stamps, and housing assistance. Call it the ‘Wal-Mart Tax.’ And it costs you $1.5 billion in federal tax dollars every year.” The problem with this logic is that America had already decided to provide Medicaid, food stamps, and housing assistance to the poor–even if the poor are also working. It seemed more efficient for these benefits to flow from government, and for employers to alert their low-income employees of the availability of them, than for the private sector to provide them as conditions of employment. If we wish to change the rules an require private employers to pay wages and provide health benefits sufficiently high that no employee has to rely on government largesse, we should seek to do that through the democratic process. But it makes little sense to chastise one employer–even one as large as Wal-Mart–for playing by the rules.

A major theme in the book is that corporations are money making machines; that’s their purpose, and that’s their design. It’s therefore foolish to rail against them when they engage in socially irresponsible behavior like cutting benefits and externalizing costs to the public at large–we shouldn’t expect anything different. The solution is to use our power as citizens of a democracy to impose social responsibility, through legislation, not market choices, as you’re about to see…

Should the rules be altered, as Wal-Mart’s critics advocate? What would be a worthy political debate, but we’re not having it. I, for one, think the minimum wage should be raised to be about half of the average worker’s hourly pay. That was the ratio in the Not Quite Golden Age[*], and it seems to me a reasonable compromise. But Wal-Mart’s critics also want Wal-Mart to provide employees with good health insurance coverage, which, in my opinion, is no longer a responsibility employers should take on.

Bear with me for a moment, because this is just the sort of issue the nation ought to be debating but that the focus on Wal-Mart obscures. The reason employers got into the business of providing their workers health insurance in the first place, remember, was because it is a form of payment that avoids being taxed. This made it attractive to both employers and employees in the Not Quite Golden Age, before medical costs skyrocketed and competition intensified. Even though employer-provided health care has diminished since then, in 2006 it still constituted the biggest tax break in the whole federal tax system. According to recent estimates, if health care benefits were considered taxable income, employees would be paying $126 billion a year more in income taxes than they do now. In other words, employer-provided heath care is a backdoor $126-billion-a-year government health insurance system that’s already up and running.

But it’s a crazy system. You’re not eligible for it when you and your family are likely to need it most–when you lose you job and you income plummets. And these days, as we’ve seen, no job is safe. Why add to family anxieties by ending eligibility for this backdoor government health insurance just when an employee is shown the front door? The system also distorts the labor market. It prevents lots of people from changing jobs for fear they’ll lose their health insurance, or won’t get the benefits they do now. And it invites employers to game the system by seeking young, healthy employees who pose low risks of ill health, while rejecting older ones who are likely to have more costly health needs. The system also encourages employers to try to push married employees onto their spouse’s health insurance plan so that the spouse’s employer bears the cost.

It’s also an upside down system. The lower your pay, the less coverage you’re likely to have. Even if Wal-Mart is pressured into providing more health insurance for its lowest-income workers, this wouldn’t change the overall pattern across America. Workers in the lowest-paying jobs don’t generally get any health insurance from their employers. The higher your pay, the more health coverage you get, with top executives and their families getting gold-plated plans guaranteeing top-notch medical attention for just about every health-risk imaginable. As a result, our current $126 billion backdoor government health insurance system mainly benefits upper income people.

[Emphasis added]

That seems like a knock down argument for socialized medicine to me; in a sense, we’re already paying for it! By making it an explicitly socialized structure, we’d only have things to gain. Direct oversight of the system would guarantee that we weren’t subsidizing care for the super rich, and we could be sure we were doling out coverage to those who need it most. Decoupling healthcare from employment would increase job mobility because employees would be more confident to switch jobs knowing they wouldn’t lose health coverage. Moreover, taking healthcare decisions out of the hands of sticky fingered business managers would make the system fairer, as well as free them up to do what they should be doing: running a business.

–

I highly recommend this book. It’s enlightening, and empowering, and it’s not that heavy.

*The Not Quite Golden Age is the name Reich uses to refer to the seeming boon times of the ’50s.

Back when I was a creationist (I still shudder admitting that) I was a big fan of a man who called himself ‘Dr. Dino.’ Dr. Dino had a website with free videos, where he explained how evolution was false, how the geological column resulted from sediment settling out during Noah’s flood, and how the freemasons were a satanic cult that laid out the streets of Washington DC in the form of a pentagram. I thought the guy was a genius.

Turns out, Dr. Dino, whose real name is Kent Hovind, wasn’t a doctor at all. He got his degree from a Cracker Jack box known as Patriot University, and he was pretty much full of shit. The so called “Hovind Theory” of creation, which held that dinosaurs were just plain old lizards whose growth was unhampered by UV rays due to an imagined layer of ice that used to float around in the upper atmosphere, could be dismantled by a three minute visit to Talk Origins.

These days, Kent is doing time for tax evasion, but his son Eric has taken up the sword with his new website CreationMinute.com. It’s essentially a rehash of the same old tripe his dad was peddling, but now with fancier graphics + handsomer front man! It doesn’t hurt that Eric lacks his father’s demeanor of “at any moment I’m going to bolt screaming across the room to molest the nearest child.”

Anyway, go check out his idiotic website, and watch him talk about the Big Bang, throwing around the words “something” and “nothing” like he knows what they mean. Oh, and he recently posted a new video about the Grand Canyon. I love it when creatonists talk about the Grand Canyon. It’s always something to the effect of “hmm…isn’t the Grand Canyon strange? It seems to me that it’s evidence against the entire theory of geology and that the God of the Jews is real.”

If you do go, follow the link from Pharyngula, because PZ Myers is trying to win an iPod touch.

The White House spent close to ten years of my salary to take a picture of Air Force One.

I’m speechless.

Who signed that check? I’m sure it was someone who sits at a desk all day, making barely more than I do, stamping their boss’s signature on checks for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

What does that person do when they go home at night? How do they swallow their dinner knowing that they spent 8 hours shoveling taxpayer money into a furnace in quantities best measured in tens of salaries?

If you tally up all the various taxes we pay (income, social security, sales, etc.) our effective tax rate is close to 50%. The French pay 50%, but it in return they get medical care, retirement, housing subsidies, welfare, and free college. Here, we get pretty pictures of the president’s jet. I think it’s time for a taxpayer revolution.

Lock up your daughters, shoot your sons!

Note the source: Christian alarmists. If they knew anything about population demographics, they’d know that first generation immigrants have a sky-high birth rate, but that after the first round makes it through the established public school system, they assimilate pretty nicely. They lose their culture, and they stop breeding like rabbits. I wouldn’t worry about this too much.

It is, however, one reason to adopt conversational intolerance to irrational faith. If we keep playing the “my faith is off limits” card, guess who’s going to be using that line of defense in the near future: Muslims. The new Muslim majority. Therefore, it’s actually in the interest of Christians to have a secular state well separated from the church. We should use this video as a reminder of that.

This essay is in response to an article found at Plasma Pool, and is cross posted.

I’d like to thank Mr. Finley and Mr. Hilke for their willingness to have this exchange. As much as our opinions may differ, I believe it’s important that we keep them open to discussion; I have encountered far too many people who would avoid topics of import for fear of confrontation.

From their response to my essay, it is apparent that their respective faiths are more nuanced and malleable than many today. Their appreciation for science is admirable, and their brand of belief is almost entirely unobjectionable to me. To be sure, if every believer comported himself as they do, I would likely not be complaining. However most believers do not. Moreover, I firmly believe that most believers cannot and will not. So the question becomes: knowing that a certain amount of extremism invariably accompanies any system of religious irrationalism, do the handful of benefits we gain from religion outweigh its negative aspects? I submit that they do not.

While I reject the claim that “lead[ing] fulfilled lives with only an awe of the natural universe … is not a realistic vision for everyone,” I do not seek to provide a manifesto for the abolition of religion, or even advocate it per se. It is my goal to explore the issue at hand, and at most, propose a new standard of discourse to which rationalists can hold themselves.

I shall begin by addressing the contention that religion and science are exclusive spheres of inquiry, which can peacefully coexist. Steven Jay Gould, in his 1999 book Rocks of Ages, provides a name for this line of argument: the Non-Overlapping Magisteria principle, or NOMA. Gould is of the view that science and religion occupy different realms of human experience — what he calls magisteria — the former being primarily concerned with material observation, and the latter, with the immaterial. He maintains that they do not in principle, and therefore should not in practice, say anything about each other.

For the discerning believer, it is quite possible that these magisteria do not overlap. However, for most people, they do — quite frequently in fact. Practical Christian doctrine* makes many material claims about the world, which science can test. For example, that a man could live inside a whale, that rabbits chew cud, that placing striped sticks in front of breeding livestock will cause them to bear striped young, that the world was flooded 5000 years ago, and that we are all descended from one family who survived that flood. Central to Christian doctrine is the belief that a virgin can conceive, that the sick can be healed by sorcery, and that a cold corpse can spring to life. Material claims, all. So excuse me, but it appears your magisterium is overlapping.

Granted, one who is committed to the principle of NOMA, as Finley and Hilke may be, should be willing to reject these intrusions, or admit that they are figurative or allegorical stories. However, if you surrender the only substantive claims a religion makes, you must also admit that you are only left with the issues for which you can offer no more insight than I: the existence of an afterlife and/or universal morality. Here we are on equal footing, so I find it wildly and offensively presumptuous that the religious would declare knowledge of the unknowable. Frankly, there is no reason any one of these fantasies should trump another — they are all at their core masturbatory, self-aggrandizing hallucinations. But if it feels good, and it isn’t hurting anyone, why can’t I do it? My reflexive response is that you can’t build a healthy worldview on a platform of lies and delusions, but why not, if it engenders no palpable menace?

This leads me to a question Finley and Hilke raise, a rebuttal commonly heard from apologists: if I keep it to myself, who does it hurt? I tend to agree with this position; I have no right to tell you what you may believe on the most personal level. But my concern is that religion isn’t content to remain personal, it inevitably jumps the boundary from personal to interpersonal. Before their essay is through, Finley and Hilke manage to praise religion as a “source of simple but crucial rules for societal interaction.” Tell me, of what use is a rule if it others cannot be held to it?

Religion as Moral Code is a common criticism thrown in the face of atheists, and it needs refutation. Morality is a societal construct, and it exists regardless of spiritual dangling carrots, or threats of eternal punishment. Ethical codes are arguably the most remarkable development of human society, but there is no need to build them an altar, so to speak. This seems to me as nonsensical as an obsessive compulsive who believes unspeakable harm will befall him if he fails to turn the doorknob thrice before leaving the house. We know his ritual has nothing to do with his continuing safety, yet he is too afraid to break free of the habit. Allow me to rephrase this argument as a question, if god were disproved tomorrow, would you take to stealing VCRs and raping indiscriminately? If yes, please stop reading this and head to the nearest psychiatrist. If no, fear of god is not the root of morality.

In fact, those who believe are usually less well behaved than those who do not. It is well attested that, besides drug or alcohol abuse, religiosity is the best indicator that a father will abuse his children, that prison populations are more or less entirely composed of believers, that conservative Christians are more likely to divorce than atheists, and that religious states generally consume more pornography; the state with the biggest appetite being Utah. If “moralizing force” is to be entered as evidence in a debate about the benefit of religious belief, it would seem to fall squarely in the stack of reasons not to believe.

Mr. Finley and Mr. Hilke will be reminded that their understanding of religion is privileged. Liberal theology is acquired, appreciation for science and evidence, instilled. It’s only through education and higher thought that fundamentalism is beaten back^†. Again, if all the religious believed as they do, I would have nothing to protest — I’m not in principle opposed to people stoking warm fantasies about what happens after death; even less so should they admit readily that their beliefs are indeed such. However, delusion, like fire, is not easily contained: some of us may be able to admire it safely behind the hearth, but others will surely be less vigilant, and it will consume them.

Exemplifying such imminently dangerous delusion is the fact that a majority in the US believes that Jesus will return within their lifetimes. As Sam Harris says, there are people in this country who, upon turning on the television and seeing Israel replaced by ball of fire, could not help but see a silver lining. Is this fatalism not dangerous? Is not the belief that this world will be destroyed and most of its inhabitants incinerated for eternity a severe impediment to forging respect for nature and human life? This is not a perversion of the Christian faith, this is an outgrowth of the irrationalism inherent to it. Finley and Hilke may try to distance themselves from this manifestation of belief, but I ask: if so much effort must be spent on getting the right interpretation of religion, why bother at all? Are murder, genocide, racial/sexual oppression, or, worst of all, a self-fulfilled prophesy of global annihilation acceptable risks to take to maintain a gelt belief in the supernatural?

This is all, admittedly, grossly hyperbolic, but in the last century alone we have seen numerous atrocities spring forth from the fetid loins of faith: suicide bombings, abortion clinic murders, Muslim sectarians drilling holes in one another’s heads, mass suicides, armed standoffs, continuing genital mutilation of infant boys and young girls, car bombings in Ireland, a protracted bloodbath in Kashmir, to name a few. All of these issue directly from religious conflict. If we should be so daring as to frame larger issues, like the Western conflict with the Middle East, or the holocaust — arguably the culmination of a millennium of ecclesiastically endorsed anti-Semitism — in religious terms, the cost we have paid for these fantasies becomes staggering.

Perhaps these terrible consequences only arise when the religion is abused. However it remains true that religion is a powerfully addictive drug. Its method of action: hallucination. Symptoms of overdose: persistent delusion, accompanied by sadistic, homicidal, and/or suicidal impulses. Most users manage to curb their dependency — these are the ‘functionally religious.’ But as with any dangerous drug, we do not just leave it to the judicious to espouse moderate usage.

To be clear, I do not advocate anything so radical as the illegalization of religion, this is obviously not a practical solution. I am merely insistent that belief be stripped of its privileged place in our discourse. Automatic deference towards someone else’s worldview is dangerous. As history has demonstrated, faith often becomes infested by other delusions. If we allow it a bulwark against the forces of rationality, what sinister miscreants might amass therebehind, scheming to lay waste to the prosperity of the age of reason? Abominations that might otherwise be apprehended and extirpated.

It remains the case that we do not need religion to be happy or good to one another. Consequently, as long as we can point to a single instance of harm caused by this edifice — and there is no shortage — any moral supplement, sense of community, or impetus for charitability that it educes is simply not worth it. Our collective unwillingness to wean ourselves from the belesioned teat of this monster does not constitute an argument to continue suckling.

* I use Christianity as an example only because it is the religion with which I am most familiar.

† Interestingly, in the United States, the expansion of science over the past century has been paralleled by the expansion of biblical literalism, which before the turn of the 20th century was quite rare. I submit that this is a kind of defensive posturing on the part of the religious; as science encroaches on their turf, they push back full force, with ever more furious delusion. I suspect this tide of loony will retreat in time, as it has done in other developed societies.

Check out my new post over at Plasma Pool.

This is a continuation of a previous post, in which I lay out my reasons for rejecting the a creationist god. Here I’d like to briefly address another problem I have with the concept of the Judeo-Christian God.

Scientific progress has sequestered modern Christians into a very narrow interpretation of god’s role in the universe — compared with the role he played in, let’s say, the first millennium. God is no longer the architect of the celestial spheres, he is a cosmic watchmaker, and he has stepped back to let his creation run its course. He rarely interferes.

However, the bible tells us of times when god did interact with man. What happened on these occasions? Well, in Genesis he is bested by a snake and two people successfully hide from him (3:5,3:9). Later on, he tells a man to build a boat, so he can flood the entire world, because he thinks that is the best way to destroy evil (Genesis 7:4). Some time after that, he gives us what are ostensibly the most important laws in the universe…carved on rocks (Exodus 20). Too bad the guy he gave them to lost his temper and broke them, so god made him carve them again (Exodus 32). Skip forward a bit, and he makes a wager with the devil about torturing a man (Job 1:9-12). Finally, the last time he really did anything of import, he nailed himself to cross, and cried out to himself “Why [have I] forsaken [myself]” (Matthew 27:46). And then he entreated himself to forgive us, because we know not what we do (Luke 23:34). Can you see where I am going with this?

These are supposedly the actions of the creator of the universe: the most powerful, intelligent entity we can conceive of. And these are the ways he chooses to interact with his creation. Why didn’t he just strike all the evildoers dead, instead of drowning the entire world? It was surely in his power. Why didn’t he carve his commandments in diamond, or titanium, or better still, burn them into the back of our hands? Why is his final redeeming act to mankind so morbid and nonsensical?

If these are the works of the Ultimate Creator, it’s tragic that they are not examples of divine perfection, supreme logic, mind-blowing power, and universal comprehensibility. Instead, his whole plan is foiled by two hungry naked fuckers, and in order to save them from the punishment he devised, he has to torture himself to death.

I’m sorry, I just can’t swallow that.

In Florida, a woman has slain her son, and then herself. In her suicide note, she says ‘I had to send my son to heaven and myself to Hell.’

I wonder if she didn’t believe in heaven or hell, if she would have done this anyway. She reportedly had a history of mental illness, but surely, the religious crap she was being fed did nothing but fan the flames.

Crazy breeds crazy. Religion is one form of crazy. ‘Nuff said.

The first thing we notice about the world around us is that it’s self sustaining. Every observable effect has an observable cause: babies are born because eggs are fertilized; rain comes from clouds, which form from evaporated water; the sun rises and sets because the earth is spinning. These processes are no longer miracles because at no point do we need to assume an interventionist deity to explain them.

Not only does the world exist independently, but we don’t even expect god to intervene when we want him to. When I drop my toast, I don’t expect a little chariot of cherubim to intercept it before it hits the ground. I shouldn’t expect to wake up with straighter teeth if go to church enough. Alleged instances of god intervening on someone’s behalf can always just as easily be attributed to fortuitous chance. For example, he only cures diseases that might have gotten better anyway — he never heals amputees. If there is a god, he has apparently made the universe in such a way that it can exist independently, and without his continued tinkering.

This is why intelligent design is so unappealing to me. It admits that that natural systems are pretty much self contained, but at the same time, invokes a creator to explain certain special cases, like the bacterial flagellum, the bombardier beetle, or the blood clotting cascade. It’s inconsistent. I mean, if an omniscient, omnipontent god went to all this trouble to create a world that functioned without him, he could have accomplished it, right?

Presumably he could have, but creationists and design proponents seem to think we would be able to catch this guy with his finger in the pudding if we find examples of ‘irreducible complexity.’ These are places where conventional evolutionary explanations are purported to break down. One of their favorite examples is the bombardier beetle, an animal with a very strange defense mechanism. The beetle ejects two chemicals from its body to create a boiling hot spray that drives away predators. Design proponents say that since neither of the chemical components is of any use to the beetle without the other — the system could not be simplified and still be functional, hence irreducible complexity — this constitutes evidence for an all-in-one-go biological creation. Come on!

We have natural explanations for the hand, the eye, goosebumps, canine teeth, the spinal cord, mammary glands, feathers, flippers, egg laying, and camouflage, why wouldn’t evolution or physics explain a chemical reaction that happens on the back of a beetle?* If that were the case, we’d have to assume god stopped short of creating a pristine universe free of all supernatural influences, and just bitched out in a few places. This doesn’t really say much for god’s alleged omnipotence.

Imagine god, in the process of creation, working himself into a corner. “Shucks, I did all that work laying out the evidence for evolution — working in all of those details about common descent, features shared in lineages, the fossil record – but now I have to find a way for this bacterium to locomote. Oh well, they’ll never be able to see anything this small, so they won’t mind if I cheat a bit.” This is totally unsatisfying from both a scientific, and theological standpoint.

It makes no sense why god would make a clockwork this intricate, carefully avoiding leaving evidence of his agency, and then in handful of places, slip up or get lazy. However, a creationist/design proponent may come back with the old ‘god works in mysterious ways, that we may not understand.’ If they want to play it that way, then they should admit that they aren’t actually in the business of explaining things.

Personally, I think life is wondrous mainly because of things like the bacterial flagellum and the blood clotting cascade, which are so remarkably unlikely they must give you pause. That these seemingly irreducibly complex things have an explanation within the bounds of physics and evolution should be something to marvel at.

*Hint: It does.