Questions About Faith Etc.

Dad's Cancer

2009-06-25T10:07:00.005-05:00

It's funny how life will throw you ups and downs. It's amazing how we can control some things and have no control over other things. God grant me the serenity to accept the things.....
Rule Number 1: Some things can never be changed.
Rule Number 2: People cannot change Rule #1.

On Saturday morning I received a call from my 74 year-old father. He had a very somber tone on the telephone. I knew something was wrong. I thought immediately of my mother, who had been in frail health last summer. I was wondering if something happened to my brother Scott or sister Sarah. Then the words came out in their usual physician precision, but they had an air of somber like I've never heard uttered before. Dad said he had cancer, a malignant growth had been detected starting on his ear, which was previously thought to be basal cell stuff, harmless. He proceeded to state that there was a 1.6 percent of this kind of thing developing into a malignant problem. I could tell he was tearful as he spread the news, but I knew he needed to be honest with himself and to us. Tears started to well up as I asked him more about the condition. He said he didn't know how far the nodes had spread and that there was still hope of a recovery, but also pointed out that scenario may not be as positive depending on what they find.

As he was telling me this, I started thinking of all the good talks we have had, and the good times on the sailboat and the constantly receptive father he has been in my life. The only problem during my childhood is that I didn't consult with him enough. I thought of the limited time, that he may not see my son Ryan graduate and most probably will not see him get married, that he will be sad that his grandchildren's lives will forever be question marks to him and that he could only hope for the best. I told him that we would all support him and be positive and hopeful no matter what. I said I was worried about Mom and that I hoped she was able to cope with the news. Dad was the primary caregiver for Mom when she had the stomach problems last summer. Who would Mom turn to without Dad there, a frightening thought. After our tearful 25 minute call I found myself being very thankful for my father's positive outlook on life and in so many words I had told him that. Dad is so much a part of my life. From an early age he took interest in me. I remember watching the Green Bay Packers with him in the family room on our old Zenith black and white TV and talking about our idol, Bart Starr. We used to watch this show called "The 21st Century" with Walter Cronkite and dream about how great the future would be. (there is Dad's positive outlook shining through!) He would give me ideas to ponder like: Part of life is pain, and it's our mental outlook which is most important. Life gives back what you are willing to put into it. In life we are often defined by our performance, not only our thoughts but how we follow through with actions. The biggest thing with Dad was not his words of wisdom. He is a doer. Actions speak louder than words, walk the walk and talk the talk, etc.

I am also impressed by his love of politics, especially being a JFK democrat, politics which I share with him today. Dad said he crushed when John Kerry lost the 2004 election but was equally elated when Obama won in 2008. I shared his elation.

Dad is an Horatio Alger story. He was the son of a mailman, a gentle man named Carl, but who was known as Jack. (Grandpa Jack to me) Dad has his Dad's gentle kindness but combined with an intense desire to make himself the best he can be, to compete and show the world what he can do. Dad would tell me how he would stand up and put his books on the upper bunk bed in college and study so he wouldn't fall asleep. They called him "Johnny High Pockets." in high school because he wore suspenders with his pants stretched up past his waist. Humble and kind Johnny made quite a success of himself and told me a few years ago, that if he would have lived his life over again, he wouldn't change a thing.

I love you Dad.

Jeff

ps. Dad is scheduled to see specialists at the Mayo Clinic next week to get a Pet Scan, chest film, some chemistry tests, ENT will do biopsy of lymphnodes, including sentinel node biopsy. They will inject some sort of dye to determine where the trouble spots may be. We are all a little on edge but cautiously optimistic. And I might add, we are all somewhat in denial that such a giant could be so mortal.

Letter to Christian Friends Updated

2009-03-25T20:28:00.000-06:00

I will try to organize my thoughts as clearly as possible as to not offend the good Christian intentions and purpose of the Stephen Ministry. It is not my intention to be playing with fire here for my own intellectual benefit, but for the elucidation of key ideas and points to bring us to a stronger agreement on what is at stake here.Growing up in a non-religious home has left me hungering for a spirituality I’ve never had before. When I was a child, we attended the Unitarian Universalist Church for a year or two and that was it. As an adult before I was married, I attended the Unitarian Society in Minneapolis, finding some spiritual sustenance in the breadth and the meaning of the sermons and from some fellowship. When married, I followed my wife’s wishes to the Lutheran Church, thinking there were many ways to find spiritual salvation and what people call the wisdom and word of the Lord.Many questions have stopped me from fully immersing myself in Christianity. Questions like: If there is a God, who created God? What about infinite space and time? What does the Bible say about space or is it too earth centered? Is the Bible stuck running in place in an anti-Copernican-like geocentricism which waits not for reason but for ignorant and arrogant believers? What is the purpose of life? To question with reason or to live in happy ignorance that there is some great Santa in the sky that will save us all, that Jesus will come down during a nuclear holocaust and save us all? A good faith should not, it seems, be involved in simple minded answers but the awesome complexity of the stars, of time and space and E=mc Squared. Isn’t something like the Krebs Cycle, the infinity of the night sky full of stars or the miracle of photosynthesis just as beautiful as something like Christ’s face or the manger scene. It seems that Christianity is afraid of the some of the questions--- that is what troubles me. It seems like I shouldn’t be afraid to mention the name Carl Sagan or Stephen Jay Gould in a Bible study group that truly has an open mind about spiritual exploration. There are many ways to find beauty and sublime peace of mind, including in science.One can argue that it’s all about the interpretation of the Bible that is important---that it’s only how we see it for ourselves. But we also have to be awake to the fact that the Bible was written a long time ago and is in some sense a dinosaur, out of date and in desperate need of revision or a complete refashioning. Where does the holy word come from and couldn’t new portions be written and edited today? What would be more practical today in the age of the internet and space travel? What would be a good book for all of the races?There is a much bigger question to answer than who believes in the best religion. The real question is how we survive as a human race. To go in the direction of trying to answer that. we must stop warring between different religious factions and realize our own human decency and commonalities between us. There is a sense that the egos of the different religions all thinking they are the best are detrimental to human progress. Instead of colliding egos, we must concentrate on the goodness in all of us. War will continue to be strongly embedded in the character of mankind as long as we keep wearing spiritual chips on our shoulders. Organized religion needs to become more flexible and compassionate to the human struggle in order for it to be useful enough to save humanity.There is no question that religion has greatly enhanced the lives of millions of people across our fragile globe. People have thanked God for helping them through alcoholism, cancer, divorce and natural disasters. What I am very agnostic about is whether there is a God that has a personal interest in each and every one of us. You see sports stars thanking God for a home run or a touchdown. When you think of it, why would the king of all creation be concerned about a sports contest? There would be much more pressing matters for a deity of mankind. If there is a God does he just care about the Earth or the entire Universe? During early human inquiry, it was widely believed that the sun revolved around the Earth. Science helped us understand that the Earth revolved around the sun. We may yet learn that if there is a Lord that he/she doesn’t exclusively care about just for the Earth but for creation across the Universe. Many of the most intelligent scientists have stated that there is a good chance of life on other worlds. The most intellectually honest atheist would probably concede that we are infinitely important and not important given the sacredness of life and the infinite vastness of everything around us. Existence is a paradox. To meditate upon the Infinity of space and time and the infinite smallness of molecules makes me shudder in amazement. That is enough for me even there if there is not a God. The best way to characterize it is to say that there is infinite meaning in my world even without a deity. I admit I don’t know how to define a God as defined by many, but that there may be an entity beyond the five senses that exists and works through us in unknown ways. It is not scientifically knowable so I cannot describe it. I can only speculate about the “moreness.”As atheist writer Richard Dawkins explains, to pretend to know something and not know it is something short of intellectual honesty. He takes it further by saying that a Christian saying he/she is saved and nonbelievers will go to hell is the height of arrogance and cruelty. A Christian will feel sorry for those who do not believe because they will not go to “heaven.” What is heaven? I do know that extremist Muslims who flew the plane into the Twin Towers in 2001 thought they would get dozens of virgins in heaven if they did this destructive deed. The real question is: How much of a subtle destructive deed is belief in something so strongly that you are willing to calmly let others go to hell for your heaven? Strange indeed.Faith and reason are like apples and oranges. I'm just trying to get a clearer intuitive path to a healthy spiritual direction. I'm not saying I'm not spiritual.My father, a much more ingrained athiest than myself says he is jealous of people who have faith, who can make that leap joyfully and with a full heart. My father's mind will not let his heart take the huge jump. I empathize with Dad but think he may not be letting the whole spirit in. It's funny how I get a wonderful feeling when I hear the Smokey Robinson classic song "Tears of a Clown." It started when I was ten years old. Every time I hear that tune, I go back to that point in my life of innocence and newness. You could call that spiritual, I guess. Same thing happens when I take a bite of strawberry ice cream. I get this spiritual feeling that I cannot explain. It seems to take me back to when I was three years old tasting my first every spoonful of the stuff. This is something I tell very few people. I told my wife about the strawberry thing and she laughed. As one friend used to say to me once in awhile..."Crazy kid." (ha)I will mull over this which was recently shared with me by my friend Mike in West Virginia..."To those who believe in God, no explanation is necessary. To those who need an explanation, none will suffice." This is where faith and reason collide. You cannot reason somebody out of something they were not reasoned into in the first place.In many ways I feel like Robert Frost in the poem "The Road Less Traveled." (life can confusing) I feel sometimes like I'm daring to go against the grain of organized religion to see things in my own way. It can be scary at times too.Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveller, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same, And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back. I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-- I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the differenceHere is a quote from an Amazon review of Michael Behe’s book “Darwin’s Black Box” which asserts that evolution cannot be correct because of the sheer complexity of the natural world, a dangerous call to throw one’s arms up and give up, sacrificing one’s powers of reason to the supernatural because the answer is just too tough. I think any God would want us to keep searching for answers to the puzzle he has put in front of us. Within the biochemistry of living cells, he argues, life is "irreducibly complex." This is the last black box to be opened, the end of the road for science. Faced with complexity at this level, Behe suggests that it can only be the product of "intelligent design."I feel it is dangerous to abandon reason and take the leap to believe whatever we want to. When reason is gone, then everyone is right, because no one is at the helm of reason. When reason is gone from the equation, we give the Jim Jones’s and the Waco people carte blanche to create their own irrational systems which lead in the long run to destructiveness of the human race. I think that any good God would want us to embrace reason with all our heart and soul, and humility. Dawkins argues that religion is the ultimate arrogance---that we are saved but someone who disagrees will suffer the infinite fires of hell. What about mentally handicapped people? Are they damned to hell if they don’t follow the rules of religious political correctness to the nth degree?? These questions just seem to be hanging out there and are not being addressed by the pious crowd. This rigidity of thought caused by a lack of reasoning ability in the brains of those who cling to fundamentalism is dangerous for the future of the world in my opinion. How many different ways can I say that? Religion can cause people to be comforted to a great degree, but ultimately it is the people who are doing the comforting in a humane and reasonable fashion.Behe’s assertations seem to me to be implying that we need to throw natural selection out of the window. And if, as he contends, that some intelligent aliens started Earth as sort of an experimental colony, then how do you explain who created the aliens? There is an infinite pattern of questions that (pardon the expression) evolve out of Behe’s direction here. Just saying…OK…..there was a creator and that’s it, gives power to those unreasonable folks who will say “See I told you. We were right all along!” To ask questions is all we can do with our brains which are the most evolved form of life on the planet. Let’s use our brains’ most highly evolved functions instead of going back to pacify more primitive regions associated with faith.I have more doubt about Behe’s claims when I hear about his the university he teaches at (Lehigh) putting a disclaimer on Behe’s website:“While we respect Prof. Behe's right to express his views, they are his alone and are in no way endorsed by the department. It is our collective position that intelligent design has no basis in science, has not been tested experimentally and should not be regarded as scientific.”Richard Dawkins says of Behe:"He's a straightforward creationist. What he has done is to take a standard argument which dates back to the 19th century, the argument of irreducible complexity, the argument that there are certain organs, certain systems in which all the bits have to be there together or the whole system won't work...like the eye. Darwin answered (this)...point by point, piece by piece. But maybe he shouldn't have bothered. Maybe what he should have said is...maybe you're too thick to think of a reason why the eye could have come about by gradual steps, but perhaps you should go away and think a bit harder."With science there is a humility about the ultimate and complex questions. With religion, there is often arrogance about those questions.Another professor talks about Behe’s assertions:"Professor Behe’s concept of irreducible complexity depends on ignoring ways in which evolution is known to occur. Although Professor Behe is adamant in his definition of irreducible complexity when he says a precursor “missing a part is by definition nonfunctional,” what he obviously means is that it will not function in the same way the system functions when all the parts are present. For example in the case of the bacterial flagellum, removal of a part may prevent it from acting as a rotary motor. However, Professor Behe excludes, by definition, the possibility that a precursor to the bacterial flagellum functioned not as a rotary motor, but in some other way, for example as a secretory system."Going down the road of unreason certainly is a dangerous path. I’m finding reviews of Dawkin’s book “The God Delusion” interesting.A large portion of the religious reviewers of this work have obviously never read it, as they have restated objections to his arguments which he deals with in a far more elegant manner than I ever could. I respect your right to hold religious beliefs, but your arguments have been dealt with by Dawkins, yet you can still raise them, apparently with no knowledge of any of Dawkins' arguments. Please! Read the work before attacking him for his beliefs! Please! Raise intelligent points! Don't simply spout the faulty arguments he has already dealt with!Dawkins says, “I am hostile to fundamentalist religion because it actively debauches the scientific enterprise. It teaches us not to change our minds, and not to want to know exciting things that are available to be known. It subverts science and saps the intellect"Hey, guess what? You cannot fight reason with unreason. It will lose every time. You cannot just shake your Bible at me and expect me to say it is just because it is. There has to be something more than that to argue. Just believe and everything will be alright. I think people who criticize Dawkin’s book don’t like it because they have to really think when they read it. It’s far from an easy read but infinitely rewarding in my opinion.I hear things like, “Give up all of your control and God will be in the driver’s seat.” That’s kind of a scary proposition----that we can let go of the steering wheel. What if we crash? My father, who is a psychiatrist, counseled a woman who got in a car accident because she let God take the wheel. A father of an autistic son in Fond du Lac didn’t worry too much when his son wandered off down a busy street thinking that God would take care of it and if he died it was just God’s will. Comfortable thought for him perhaps, but not very logical or rational. This man’s comment bothered me.Taking the leap of faith is difficult and I’m not so certain I want to attempt it. I want to cling to reason. People who reason and use logic a lot are not cold hearted. I think this is a common misperception. Just like the geek, nerd or someone with Asperger’s Syndrome is ostracized for behavior not conforming to the norm, real conscientious thought and discussion about religion and its role in society is tossed off by adversaries as inappropriate and not what people want to talk about. People on their wavelength are simply shut off like a bad radio or TV station. Dawkins is most likely taking harsh criticism from the non-thinkers, from people who would rather watch “Dog Eat Dog” or chant “Jerry…Jerry” along with their TV sets than watch a thoughtful show on public TV about science, history or politics. It’s the mentality of the non-thinkers versus people who like to think. The ultimate battle is against a worldview that would rather bask in ignorance and some arrogance versus the people who roll up their sleeves and aren’t afraid to ask the really, really tough questions.Tonight I will go to church with my wife. I very much appreciate and respect Debbie’s ability to have faith, to solemnly believe she will go to heaven without any doubt. There is something magical about that that I’m a bit jealous of. How can one completely abandon reason to embrace a loving God with no questions asked. Maybe some of my religious friends will think I will go to Hell for questioning religion, but if they are true friends they should be infinitely compassionate in relating to my own special spiritual journey.When I go to church, I will happily participate in the hymns. There will be at least a half-dozen of them! A hymn has a way of getting me into such a joyous mindset. I like the melodies and the deep conviction on the faces of the believers. I feel good for them that they have found a mindset that is comfortable that helps them overcome life’s downers and travails. It may very surely be seen as a form of brain washing, but I guess a clean brain is close to godliness. My grandmother used to say she felt “cleaner” after going to church. I don’t doubt she did. We can wash our hands of all of the day’s problems and just keep it simple and contemplate a relationship with salvation, or what we conceive of what salvation is.I also like the part when people move about and shake one another’s hands. We greet each other and recognize the God within each other. This is a principle of goodness in action. That is something I DO BELIEVE IN---that if there is a God he works through other people. People can say the most profound things at certain times which makes me sometimes hunger for the hope of there being a messenger connecting that thought from the person that comes directly to us. That there is a possibility that a human thought is divinely inspired is kind of a cool idea. But, there is no scientific proof that any of that is happening. So why think about it? It is fun to use our brains, to be alive and to think of all of the possibilities. If objective and rationale Carl Sagan thought a lot about extraterrestrial life, then I can have the luxury of thinking of the .0000000000000000000000000001 percent chance of receiving a divinely inspired thought.I am a little troubled by the fact that religion is so deeply ingrained in the human psyche that it cannot be surgically removed like a tumor. But, then again, why can’t it peacefully co-exist with superior forms of thought? After all, humans exist with lower forms of animals and are able to live together peacefully. Look at all the useful and positive compassion that comes from members of the Humane Society. Why can’t people with differing thought patterns admit their differences and accept and be infinitely compassionate? That’s one great thing about Jesus. He preached this infinite compassion for the poor. That is a wonderful direction to go in if we are to survive as a species in the long run.Reviewer Harvey Ardman sums up my feelings very nicely:There are or might be moments when I am jealous of those capable of faith. I would love to believe, when a loved one dies, that he or she is going to a better place and that we'll meet again some day. What a lovely, comforting thought. Would that it were true, or that I could believe it. But I don't--and it makes this life and every moment in it more valuable to me. I once asked myself how a person totally unfamiliar with religion, might choose among the world's offerings, might decide to adopt one of the world's thousands of religions. I could find no way. They all claim they're right and all the other religions are wrong. But are any of them right? Now I'm thinking similar thoughts about God. I saw a website recently that compiled the names of all of the gods, worldwide and throughout history. They found 3800 different gods or supernatural beings. If I were inclined to believe, which one would I choose and why? Richard Dawkins points out that we're all atheists. We don't believe in Zeus, Thor, Apollo, Odin, etc., etc., etc. He just goes one god further.There is also the question of abortion. At what point does a soul become embedded in the a mother’s womb? When is it completely unethical to consider abortion? Author Sam Harris presents a critique of the pro-life belief that “a soul (person) is created at the instant of conception. Is an additional soul created when a 100-cell blastocyst occasionally divides to become identical twins?Humanist writer Paul Kurtz says in his book “Affirmations” that good conduct and wisdom in living can be combined in a person to make him or her a decent person with or without God. When I look at humanist values in “Affirmations” I hear ideas like “taking care of the Earth for future generations,” “transcending divisive parochial loyalties based on race, religion, gender, nationality, creed, class, sexual orientation, or ethnicity to work together for the common good of humanity,” “the cultivation of moral excellence through rationality,” “nourishing reason and compassion in our children,” “supporting the disadvantaged and handicapped so they will be able to help themselves,” “enjoying life in the here and now and developing our creative talents to the fullest,” and “choosing hope over despair.” It seems that too often religion chooses the laying on of guilt rather than the building up of hope.The concept of skeptical inquiry is a good one. People should not just accept ideas at their face value because that is the way “they are supposed to think.” Children should be taught critical thinking skills in school, not just how to conform. It seems like the people who need religion the most are the ones who have religion as part of their lives. Those who can stand independently, at a higher level of moral reasoning, do not have to lean on the parent in the sky we call God.The leap of faith is a very tough hurdle. A reviewer of the writing of Christopher Hitchens says:“Anyone of intelligence would not believe because "taking it on faith"means believing in something without evidence, substantiation or support. Therefore, those who profess such belief do so without intelligence! Moreover, by implication, such a person cannot be critical of someone who "believes" in, say, the most absurd thing the imagination can concoct, say, the tooth fairy or the Easter bunny. It is time to take the next step in evolution and jettison the mystical explanation ("god") now that science has finally progressed and triumphed.”Another writer who likes Hitchen’s rational view of the world states:“Today's typical "justification" for religion involves charitable or humanitarian work - obviously this says nothing about the veracity of the belief systems involved. All religions must, at their core, look forward to the end of this world; atheists, on the other hand argue that this world is all we have and that it is our duty to make the most of it. It is one thing, per Hitchens, to believe that the magnificence of the natural order strongly implies an ordering force; quite another to say this creative force cares for our human affairs, and it is interested in with whom we have sex and how, as well as the outcome of battles and wars (and even athletic contests). Even accepting Jesus' birth, it still does not prove he was more than one among many shamans and magicians of the day. Einstein took the view that the miracle is that there are no miracles.”Is Christopher Hitchens just an arrogant ego-maniac commentator or his he helping us look in a new brave and brilliant direction? I think the latter.“People who are generally well read are much less likely to take to a fundamentalist reading of the Bible, whereas it is my observation that for many people who do adhere to the literal truth of the Bible, it is possibly the only book they have ever read, and so have no critical reading skills whatsoever.”Anonymous Here we go again with the concept of critical thinking skills, or are we talking about pure intelligence here? Should we follow blind faith or reasoned discussion based on critical thinking skills? The answer seems obvious. Follow the intelligence. Following a God with an unclear definition makes about as much sense as voting for a president with a 95 IQ instead of one with a 195 IQ. Let’s get out of the stone ages and find new ways to find awe and wonder. We can find feelings of wonder and amazement and humility just by looking at the Big Dipper on a clear summer night. The fact that it is not all explained for us makes it even more wonderful I think.I believe that the human race is attempting to evolve past destructive thought patterns. My hope is that we will choose reason over antiquated ways of looking at the world. Just like war must be abolished, “good” versus “evil” type thinking must also be abolished if we are to survive on the Earth. But, the troubling question is, “Is religion far too embedded in our biology?”Gabriel Michael, a Yale divinity student who wrote an impassioned article about his deep concern about rabid atheists who are preaching physicalism, is actually practicing faulty thinking, He appears to shut out any possibility of comparing the patterns of thought coming from scientists and from theologists and postulating about the details. Scientists and theologians have radically different world views, and we cannot just push this aside as if it were the politically correct thing to do at the Yale Country Club. As I see it, Michael wants to have it both ways, to have the philosophy of science and of faith peacefully co-exist, when one is obviously a more advanced form of thinking than the other. What he calls evangelical atheism is actually so close to the truth that it hurts. He says I quote:Evangelists for atheism who link their philosophical positions to science end up doing that same science a great disservice by fueling the fire of fundamentalism here and around the world. Calling them evangelists is warranted, because if their true goal were the propagation of the acceptance of science, they simply wouldn’t focus so much on non-scientific implications. Instead, they spread their various gospels, pander to the popular hobby of religion-bashing, and even invoke a persecution complex — you can purchase a “Scarlet Letter” T-shirt at richarddawkins.net. In reality, though, Dawkins and his cohort are mostly preaching to the choir. In this argument, both sides lose: Reactionary religion marginalizes itself in the face of the modern scientific world, and evangelical atheism helps to produce more of the very enemies it most despises.I guess if everybody was nice, we could abandon reason and everyone would live in ignorant bliss. Is that what you want Mr. Michael? You are simply afraid of the scientific method and how faith is endangered by reason.I also believe in the concept of ahimsa, the principle of non-violence which motivated Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi. I believe in sort of a karma that develops when ahimsa is practiced optimally. I see a bit too much violence in the Bible for my own comfort level. Even though Christ is portrayed a very peaceful man---some of the stories of the Bible seem to contradict his passivism. That is a contradiction that is interesting and definitely worthy of much more study.I think we should all be more tolerant of different world views. It disturbed me to hear that a classmate of my 12 year-old son Ryan told him he was going to hell because he didn’t believe that Jesus was his personal lord and savior. Ryan was hurt by that and I tried to explain to him that his friend was probably taught that in church, that he was not being tolerant of those who question. Ryan proceeded to tell me that he believed that each of us makes our own heaven or hell right here on Earth. (Pretty bright for his age I think.) When I was Ryan’s age, my friend Bobby Weber told me I would go to hell if I didn’t believe in God. I remember asking him if being a good person was enough. He replied, “No, It is not enough. There is much more to it than that.” About 3 days before my Uncle Charlie died I tried to express to him about how Christmas gave me a sublime and mystical sense of hope. He said, “I don’t believe any of that Jeffrey.” I said I respected that and I knew he respected my inclination to fully search out my own spirituality. Deep in my heart I DO NOT believe that kind and generous Uncle Charlie is going to hell. Charlie was a great person, always willing to give me advice when I needed it, always willing to help in any way he could. If there is a God that would send him to hell, we live in a cruel world. I’m not at all convinced, though, that we do live in a cruel world. There is much beauty and truth to reach out to. We can create our own heaven on Earth, and it is totally up to us.I have a continuing debate with my good friend Craig S. ho is avout believer. Craig is a person of excellent character who cares deeply about other people and about the Earth.Dear Friend Craig,you said:Creationists, of course, have not the slightest problem with naturalselection...creation and evolution are actually both outside therealms of science and, to know this, you need to know what scienceis...neither "process" is currently observable, testable orrepeatable. I have a problem with a statement saying that evolution is faroutside the scientific realm. Evolution is science and God is faith.They are two different things as far as I'm concerned. Becauseevolution is not testable directly doesn't mean we cannot use carbondating, fossil discoveries to sharpen our pool of evidence toapproximate the best possible understanding given our humanlimitations. It is arrogance to think we have all the answers. Whatreligion says is..."We can stop thinking now. Let's throu up ourhands because this world is too scary and complicated." That is acop out I think. Let's use the reason we were given biologicallyand use it to the utmost limit. We only use 5 percent of our brainsright? Religion may be an outdated part of the cortex. Logical rflection is the advanced part in my opinion. You quoted this:I am also talking about the appearance of life startingfrom inanimate chemicals. When I am talking about evolution, I am nt speaking of natural selection." This statement also doesn't make sense. When one speaks aboutevolution one has to speak of natural selection. It is the principleupon which it is based. It's like saying, "When you are talkingabout culinary arts, you cannot talk about recipes." Of course Iknow where he is going. He is trying to make a deeper point...thathe is in touch with some sublime insight, that science must beinadequate given the conversion from inanimate life to animate life. What if there were 10 to the Google Plex years to get this done, itmay have happened this way. Humans cannot not grasp the concept ofinfinite time or space. It's with science that we humbly take thesteps, not with gross generalizations. If there is a God, I thinkhe would want us not to assume but to make one great discovery afteranother, walking not running.What about the scientific method of carefully testing hypothesis anddisregarding if there is the slightest inconsistency? Science isthe best method we have given our limited five senses. Having faiththat there is a creator and that nothing more needs to be looked intomeans we can just throw up our arms and say "God is in control." What is the purpose of Free Will then? I’ll stick with science because it’s the best we can do to understand the world and how it works. I would rather have a cardiologist perform heart surgery on me rather than a priest. The cardiologist has science on his side. Let's continue the debate. This is fascinating. Your Friend, Jeff---- Original Message ----From: csather To: jeffdeb@milwpc.comSubject: RE: Yale Daily News - Popular anti-religion creates falsedichotomyDate: Sat, 26 Jan 2008 16:47:47 -0600Dear Jeff,In the book, "In 6 Days - Why 50 scientists believe in Creation"there is a statement by one of the scientists, "Creationists, of course, have not the slightest problem with naturalselection...creation and evolution are actually both outside therealms of science and, to know this, you need to know what scienceis...neither "process" is currently observable, testable orrepeatable. Please note that when speaking of evolution, I amtalking of the appearance of new (not rearranged) geneticinformation. I am also talking about the appearance of life startingfrom inanimate chemicals. When I am talking about evolution, I amnot speaking of natural selection." The man who wrote this is Dr.Stephen Grocott, who holds a BS in Chemistry and a PhD inorganometallic chemistry from the University of Western Australia. He holds 4 patents, has published about 30 research papers. He is anelected fellow of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute.This book is quite interesting, and points out the patently falsestatement by Dawkins about scientists not subscribing to creation.All 50 contributors have an earned doctorate from a state recognizeduniversity in Australia, the US, the United Kingdom, Canada, SouthAfrica or Germany. If Dawkins is wrong about this statement, howmany other statements are being made on his faith that God does notexist? It takes faith to believe in either proposition.CraigThis is what it all comes down to. It’s looking up into the night sky full of stars and becoming infinitely humble looking at the mystery of it all. In theological terms, every day is a miracle. The fact that we can live, love, think, care for one another share a laugh or a smile, that we can evolve toward peace using our minds. That is a miracle to me, that I was born during this time of history. That is fascinating to me.Are most with the atheist world view lacking compassion? A fair question. Most probably misinterpret atheists who have a deep sense of compassion and ethics. Some use the atheist label for themselves to express anger against overly religious parents or wrongs done in their lives such an aborted fetus, an uncle who died suddenly, or relatives dying in a car accident. I believe atheism can be a superficial reaction to authority or a carefully reasoned philosophy. The later I respect infinitely more.I think a lot of us are just plain uncomfortable with the idea that we evolved from apes and from lower forms of life. We cringe at the amoral laws of nature and that we came from that random primordial soup. Can we see the logic in why God would have designed snakes, scorpions or spiders. Charles Darwin said of wasps:"I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living body of caterpillars."But as Darwin would remind us, the evolutionary process has produced wonderfully designed creatures, and that there are always new mysteries to uncover. We take the good with the bad, but what a wonderful mystery this Earth is. So much to discover with so little time. Some Christians who are mad at Dawkins say that evolution will always be a theory because we will never be able to directly observe what happened millions of years ago. One reviewer of Richard Dawkins wrote this:It is the grandest insult to human knowledge - to suppose that we have to observe something visually in order to know it sends us straight back to the Dark Ages. You can ask questions of this kind all you want and nothing will ever constitute a sufficient answer if you have already supposed that the answer must be mystical in some way.Again, you cannot reason someone out of something they were not reasoned into in the first place. Science uses exact terms and definitions in debate and the debate is rational. Faith uses inexact terms in debate and the discourse is often times irrational and directionless.This sudden intuitive dawning, this ah-hah experience at the age of 48 that I appear to be experiencing brings some mixed feelings. I feel like I have lost an innocence after having faith in a protector in the sky just a short time ago. The death of my Uncle Charlie is bringing on a feeling(stronger than ever) that an unexamined life is not worth living. To examine life to its fullest is to search out the most important question. The most important question right now is the God question, one we as humans seem to be the most conflicted about. I too am deeply conflicted about this question. Reading Sam Harris, Carl Sagan and Richard Dawkins gives me hope in the rationality possible in the human race but also brings a sense of longing for spiritual belief, more than ever. It’s like a void that needs to be filled with something, but with what? This Amazon reviewer talks about how his life has gone into a sort of depressive tail spin after reading Dawkins. He talks about how his once pure spiritual outlook has been “battered.” It is interesting that he admits that Dawkins is “too convincing” in his arguments against supernaturalism:The book renders a God or supreme power of any sort quite superfluous for the purpose of accounting for the way the world is, and the way life is. It accounts for the nature of life, and for human nature, only too well, whereas most religions or spiritual outlooks raise problems that have to be got around. It presents an appallingly pessimistic view of human nature, and makes life seem utterly pointless; yet I cannot present any arguments to refute its point of view. I still try to have some kind of spiritual outlook, but it is definitely battered, and I have not yet overcome the effects of this book on me.Richard Dawkins seems to have the idea that religion and spirituality are not only false, but ultimately unable to give a real sense of meaning and purpose in life. Their satisfaction is hollow, empty, and unreal, in his apparent view, and only a scientific understanding of life can give a real, lasting sense of wonder and purpose.Iwould question this. While I am not sure what (if anything) there is spiritually, I know that a scientific view of life cannot offer the slightest hope of life after death, and since we're all going to die and most of us don't want to, this is a crippling drawback to the kind of scientific vision Dawkins wants us all to have. If there is nothing beyond death, no spiritual dimension to anything, and everything is just a blind dance of atoms, I fail to see how this by itself can give one a real sense of purpose, however fascinating the dance that Dawkins describes - and it *is* fascinating; let there be no mistake about that.Because of this, I have the curious feeling of dichotomy about Dawkins' book that it is certainly fascinating on one level, but that I cannot give even qualified emotional commitment to the outlook on life that seems to lie behind it. I would in the end rather have the hope of something wonderful and purposeful that only some spiritual outlook can offer, even though it may be a deluded fantasy, than the certainty of a scientific vision that eliminates any possibility of long-term hope, that condemns us to an empty, eternal death of nothingness in the end. This scientific view may be completely rational; but rationality is not the only important consideration to shape our outlook on life.Anyone who has a narrow religious view of life, who is absolutely sure their religion is completely right, would be best off avoiding this book like the plague - it probably won't change their views, but they will quite likely get very upset and outraged. And anyone with an open-minded spiritual view had better at least be prepared to do a lot of thinking, and perhaps be willing to change some of their views, because this book *will* challenge almost any spiritual or religious viewpoint I can think of - whether it is of the open-minded or dogmatic sort.Some critics of this book have found its reasoning unconvincing, its materialist reductionism too superficial and shallow. But, from my perspective, the problem does not lie here; the problem with the book is that it is *too* convincing, that it is *entirely* convincing. The book makes it very difficult to continue to believe in anything that contradicts its basic premise, but which might be more comforting, and might give a greater sense of hope and inspiration, and provide a real sense of purpose in life.Such have its effects on my life been that, in my more depressed moments, I have desperately wished I could unread the book, and continue life from where I left off.It has been said that each of us has a God-shaped hole inside, and that we spend most of our lives trying to fill it with the wrong things. I firmly believe that God-shaped hole is there, that we have inner longings of a wonderful sort almost impossible to describe in words. Whether a God exists to fill it, I do not yet know. But what I am sure of is that, as wonderful as Dawkins' view of nature and of life may be on its own level, it will not fill that God-shaped hole.The question is---what to do with that spiritual hole. I say, fill it with wonderment about the natural world, be thankful for every single day, every single hour you are on the planet. Whatever this is, it’s more than kind of neat Just think of the scientific discoveries that await us having to do with time, space, genetic memory, etc. etc. The emperor has no clothes and conventional religion cannot begin to answer our questions anymore.I’ve started a book by John Updike called “In the Beauty of the Lillies.” It is about a pastor who is losing his faith and cannot in good conscience go on preaching, because it is not what he feels in his heart. To the chagrin of his wife, he says he wants to quit the church. His life is in a tailspin because he cannot face the possibility of being a fake to himself, thinking that any meaningful life has to be grounded in truth first and foremost. This is a sort of the bind I feel like I’m in right now, to be true to myself or politically pacify my family.“A Letter to Christian Nation” inspired me to write this essay. Here is an interesting comment about the book by a reviewer:The author's points about embryonic stem cell research and creationism in the public schools are extremely important for anyone who embraces modernity and progress. While a handful of other authors attempt to feebly argue the ridiculous idea that modern science was produced by Christian thinking, Harris explains what should be obvious -- that religion is now, and has always been, a serious impediment to science. Some people are currently trying to force public schools to teach our children that their ancient creation myth -- a fantastic story for which there is only contradictory evidence -- is a good viable alternative to evolution, a well established scientific explanation of human development for which there is a mountain of supporting evidence. These same folks also wish to impede embryonic stem cell research, which could potentially result in cures and treatments for numerous human diseases and afflictions, simply because their prudery-inspired anti-abortion agenda has forced them into the absurd logical conclusion of contending that a 3-day-old blastocyst in a petrie dish is a full fledged person possessing the same rights as anyone reading this sentence. Now, these religious opponents of progress will insist until they're blue in the face that they're not against science. But watching them make every attempt to stop the advance of very important science like stem cell research and evolution while at the same time insisting that they support "real science" is like watching an obese man deny that he has a weight problem while he dines on a bucket of fried chicken.There are many very real contradictions in religious thought, because it is not logical. It is not rational.I find scientific statements like this fascinating….A sugar cube of neutron-star stuff on Earth would weigh as much as all of humanity!There is so much we don’t know about our universe. Why isn’t the Bible more humble and why isn’t marvelous universe addressed in this book of knowledge? There is no evidence of intellectual curiosity in the Bible. Maybe we need a new book. Why isn’t Michael Behe more humble when he throws up his hands and says everything is irreducibly complex? In “The Origin of the Species,” Charles Darwin wrote:"If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find out no such case. No doubt many organs exist of which we do not know the transitional grades, more especially if we look to much-isolated species, round which, according to my theory, there has been much extinction. Or again, if we look to an organ common to all the members of a large class, for in this latter case the organ must have been first formed at an extremely remote period, since which all the many members of the class have been developed; and in order to discover the early transitional grades through which the organ has passed, we should have to look to very ancient ancestral forms.”Albert Einstein once said, “The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed out candle. “ He also differentiated between types of atheists, saying, “What separates me from most so-called atheists is a feeling of utter humility toward the unattainable secrets of the harmony of the cosmos.”In his book “The End of Faith,” Sam Harris says,“Our willingness to ignore reason and scientific facts as we maintain our beliefs, not based on sound science and reason, will lead the world into more peril because these beliefs not only legitimize intolerance, but they have also invaded most aspects of political and secular life and threaten to become apocalyptic in a world with weapons of mass destruction.”Harris, who is now working toward a Doctorate in Neuroscience, seems genuinely concerned about the ability of mankind to save itself through rational means, inferring that no supernatural God is going to bale us out of current problems we have like over-populuation, terrorism, poverty, disease and pollution.A Mensa study in 2002 showed a very strong correlation between intelligence and the choice to have fewer religious beliefs. It found that the higher the intelligent or education level, the more probability that the person will not clinging to some preset religious rules for one’s own salvation. Studies also proved recently that there is no evidence that prayer helps people. A double blind study was done and it found that the lives of people in hospitals who were prayed for did not improve appreciably and sometimes got worse. The people who were not prayed for did not show any deviation from any normal curve of recovery and other health variables. Now, here is the very ironic point. Religiously inclined people tend would probably be chomping at the bit to interpret information that let’s say would prove that Jesus’s birth could not be tracked to any sexual intercourse before hand. Say that science was able to analyze the body of Jesus’s mother and determine that she could not have received sperm from any male contributor in order to give birth. The religiously inclined would flock to the evidence. As Richard Dawkins infers, one cannot see a fundamentalist Christian stating that it is “just science, I have enough proof in my own mind to know it is true.” Something tells me that they would not ignore the evidence and that Pat Robertson would have it as a top story on his 700 Club, using science to prove his hazy points. Ironic. Truly ironic.Jerry Coyne recently wrote in the Guardian magazine:“Why is God considered an explanation of anything? It’s not. It’s a failure to explain, a shrug of the shoulders. An ‘I dunno’ dressed up in spirituality and ritual. If someone credits something to God, generally what that means is that haven’t a clue, so they’re attributing it to unreachable unknown sky fairy. Ask for an explanation of where the bloke came from and odds are that you’ll get a vague, pseudo-philosophical reply about having always existed or being outside nature. Which of course, explains nothing.”I have used the argument with deeply ingrained and somewhat militant atheists that there could be something outside of the five senses that we are not perceiving that could be true. But they counter with the argument that how can we know anything outside the realm of science? Good point. We can only speculate. We can speculate that there is a gigantic teapot that steams away up in the sky ruling all of our sub conscious experiences. There could be a huge banana in the sky that peels off pearls of vitamin-laced molecules of wisdom. You can make up anything if you don’t have logic. That’s the serious problem mankind is faced with here. Logic is our only way out even though we can speculate beyond logic.What’s so dangerous about belief in irreducible complexity or intelligent design is that we give up using our brains(which are most ironically the most highly evolved tools we have to reflect and logically analyze this beautiful diversity we have here on Earth.) I think if there is a God(oh, there I go again) he/she would want us to use every single cell of our brains to comprehend this complex and wonderful, beautiful world. Traditional faith, you are going in the wrong direction. Let’s appreciate the marvelous complexity of the one-celled animal or what salt looks like under a microscope or the colors of the rainbow. Even the religious could be taught to appreciate the 10 to the googleplex power of biologic beauty that has been dumped on us in our very very very short lives here on the planet. There is no time to waste reading and exploring all one can to get in touch which what we could call “the miracle of just being here.” Where? On Earth of course! We are living in heaven right now. Let’s wake up and smell the coffee.Let’s for a moment bring the anthropic principle into the mix. At face value, it would seem that this would bring in more ammunition for the ID inclined. But the relativism which is inferred by it, only deepens my scientific curiosity. The fact that life could have evolved in a google-plex number of combinations lights the fire of my imagination perhaps like Douglas Adams was awe struck by the world beyond God. With our limited scientific minds, we are given the chance to figure things out. Truly amazing.This morning I prepared for a meeting with my Stephen minister. I picked out about a dozen Bible verses out of about 90 on a Christian calendar that I got from Miles Kimball. The key was finding things that were meaningful to me. I picked out several that really struck me as having some meaning that was applicable to real life. Words of the Bible must not be taken literally, but highly figuratively. It’s what it means to you and how a person can shape the ultimate life path. My song “Beyond Belief” to my wife Debbie has a line about meeting in heaven. It is figurative. I don’t really believe that I’m glancing at Debbie at the pearly gates. It means that in the infinite time there is a chance of anything. My mind is open to the remote possibility that we may see each other again.I picked out some psalms the other day and gave my interpretation to each one and then my Stephen Minister Tim and I had a very spirited discussion about their meanings.This is the day which the Lord has made; we will rejoice and be gladin it." Psalm 118:24 Be happy about each day, each minute for that matter on Earth. Thisis a very special experience...more special than you would everimagine. Rejoice and enjoy the entire experience! Live each dayto the fullest. That's the idea."And the angel said unto them, Fear not; for, behold, I bring youtidings of great joy, which shall be to all people." Luke 2:10 Don't forget about the great potential for giving that all peoplehave, that angels can be seen in the eyes of almost everyone in theright circumstances. Good things happen and good does notdiscrimminate between the lucky and the needy. We can all recognizeand take solice from our angels of mercy."For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shalllose his life for my sake and the gospel's, the same shall save it." Mark 8:35This simply means keep the spirit alive. The old future is gone,but it is up to us to shed the old unproductive ways and develop lifehabits that make sense for the long run. The Christian would say tobe come more completed in his/her faith. We are losing our oldselves in favor of the newly evolved self. New ways to interact andto think and to act. We are hopefully improving until the day weare 80, 90 or 100. If we save our life for our own sake withoutintegrating with a combination of our fellow human beings then it'sall worth nothing. We must be highly integrated in helping. Wemust learn to tap into the energy that enables us to rush ahead withlife with a high level of meaning and momentum and not wallow in selfpity when down or over involve ourselves with our own ego when up. Share the joy with others and your life will mean infinitely more."And walk in love, as Christ also hath loved us, and hath givenhimself for us an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweetsmelling savor." Ephesians 5:2 To walk in love....what a beautiful thought. For truth alone withoutlove wiil perish and love without truth is naive. To hear infinitelove and truth will propel us to greater heights and help us touchthe face of God. You will encounter the slings and arrows ofmisfortune when taking the hard road, but it will all be worth it ifwhen a higher purpose is embraced. Each person must choose his/herown spiritual path, but must be highly integrated with goodness andrighteousness. Have the courage to take your own brave. That iswhat that is saying to me."A scorner seeketh wisdom, and findeth it not, but knowledge is easyunto him that understandeth." Proverbs 14:6 Have a good attitude and important life wisdom and knowledge tends tostick. Wisdom accumulates on wisdom and becomes infinitely morepowerful and yes I guess you could say closer to God, whatever yousee him/her as."Where no counsel is, the people fall; but in the multitude ofcounselors there is safety." Proverbs 11:14 I'm not sure what this one means. Maybe Tim or Craig can help me with this one. Maybe it means we have the responsibility to choose good friends who can be great counselors in the time of need."And they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of thefirmament; and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars forever and ever." Daniel 12:3 Sharing wisdom is as true and beautiful as the stars in the sky. Reach out with faith and it becomes infinitely more meaningful andpowerful."Seek the Lord, and his strength: seek his face evermore." Psalm 105:4 Seeking out the face of goodness; that has a very spiritual meaningfor me. We are continually looking for God in others. Seek thegreatest truth and beauty every minute of our lives. We must allfollow our own roads to spiritual truth. It is truly the road lesstraveled. A Christian would always believe that the power of God isalways with him or her. That one is never alone----what a powerful feeling."For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world,and lose his own soul." Mark 8:36 This is a powerful one for me. If we don't follow our ownconscience...that angel on our shoulder, then we are doomed to do thepleasureable thing, but not necessarily the correct thing. Life isseries of decisions. Jesus always has patience even when we fall offthe ladder. Worldly prizes don't mean anything in heaven. My purpose for writing this is to attempt to examine severalimportant passages in the Bible, throwing most out but keeping theprecious. Hold onto the precious ones dearly. I write this as Iprepare to meet with my Stephen Minister at Starbucks today. I continue to ask a lot ofquestions and Tim is very patient with my spiritual development. Oh, by the way, What exactly is spiritual development?Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around –Leo Buscaglia.Ryan(who just turned 13) decided to join us for church yesterday. It was an amazing turn around for Ryan who has rejected taking in the experience for some time. I have always emphasized the fellowship aspect of church to him and maybe he is realizing it will not kill him to experience something that Mom highly cherishes. Ryan willingly participated in sharing the peace and even in reading verses and singing part of the hymns. It was a grand effort from Ry and I deeply respect it. We talked to one of the church leaders(Paula Draves) after the service and Ryan was very appropriate with our friend. Does religion fill a gap in the brain, a need that needs to be satisfied whether God exists or not? Or is it more about love of this life in this world and the intense need for friendship. I like the talking before and after the service and of course, the sharing of the peace. It is about the “Namaste” of the experience. This is the word that Tim and I were trying to remember as we savored our caramel coffee at Starbucks. According to Wikipedia, Namaste means:Namaste is one of the few Sanskrit words commonly recognized by Non-Hindi speakers. In the West, it is often used to indicate South Asian culture in general. "Namaste" is particularly associated with aspects of South Asian culture such as vegetarianism, yoga, ayurvedic healing, and Hinduism.In recent times, and more globally, the term "namaste" has come to be especially associated with yoga and spiritual meditation all over the world. In this context, it has been viewed in terms of a multitude of very complicated and poetic meanings which tie in with the spiritual origins of the word. Some examples:"I honor the Spirit in you which is also in me." -- attributed to author Deepak Chopra[citation needed]"I honor the place in you in which the entire Universe dwells, I honor the place in you which is of Love, of Integrity, of Wisdom and of Peace, When you are in that place in you, and I am in that place in me, we are One.""I salute the God within you.""I recognize that we are all equal.""The entire universe resides within you.""The divine peace in me greets the divine peace in you.""Your spirit and my spirit are ONE." --"That which is of the Divine in me greets that which is of the Divine in you.""The Divinity within me perceives and adores the Divinity within you".The concept of Namaste means that we infinitely respect what is in others, the beauty they perceive and the hopes, dreams and innocence that still exists in their soul. In a recent Deepak Chopra book, he talks about the rose. If we perceive a beautiful rose, our senses send signals to make it real in our mind. So literally, much of the beauty of that rose exists in our mind. It brings up the argument of how much of the world’s beauty is perception and how much is actual reality. A religious person may say the beauty of the rose is a gift straight from God. Of course, give our complex brains some credit, right? But, Namaste, means to respect the infinite worth in all living things, especially the God that exists in the world’s most highly evolved creatures, human beings. It is a concept like Namaste that can be extremely powerful in the world. It has the potential to counteract what is worst in human beings, like war, arrogance, greed, and selfishness. It has the potential to help us see the tremendous potential in each of us to achieve peace instead of conflict, elevating our quality of life in every way on this fragile planet of ours. If I remember correctly, it was the great Gandhi who used this when greeting everyone, respecting the very best everyone brings to life.He that hath a numerous family, and many to provide for, needs agreater providence of God. --Jer. Taylor.Providence is such a powerful concept, that implies that the greatlife force has a sort of empathy for us and that we are being watched and cared for. This is what makes athiesm so dangerous, that we riskbursting the bubble of people who happily and confidently believethat there is something greater and that there is a force of somekind protecting the good, the righteous and the ethical. It seemslike a gigantic mystery, but there is certainly no scientificevidence for this being true---but it is something that many "feeldeep in their hearts and souls." Hard core athiests would callprovidence a delusion a simple trick we are playing on our own mindsto feel safer or more protect ourselves. Hard core athiesm has the potential to bring on some very heavy andpossibly dangerous paradigm shifts in the minds of the believers,maybe some huge let downs. I guess my only advice is that we must bevery courageous in the hour of our extreme uncertainty. God is nothing you can prove by science. A good friend of mine recently recommended a book called "A Case for Christ" by Lee Strobel. As one reviewer said of the book, "Some of Strobel's points, I think, are irrefutable: Jesus did exist, his life is muchbetter documented than that of any figure of the same era and he didnot merely swoon on the cross, but actually died there.However, I found some of the key arguments for his divinity,resurrection and miracles less than convincing. For instance, one ofthe scholars interviewed, J. P. Moreland, argues that the bestcircumstantial evidence for Jesus's resurrection is the conversion of"an entire community of 10,000 Jews" to Christianity within fiveweeks of his crucifixion. This is all the more striking, he says, asthe Jews' extremely resilient beliefs and religious practices havesurvived over the millenia." It seems like some directionless tripto prove some literalism of the Bible's events from a man hell-benton making a point. Not real journalism at all I don't think. Itsmells like a heavy dose of pseudo science! I have just picked up "The Blind Watchmaker" by Richard Dawkins fromthe local library. I like the way Dawkins writes when compared tohis overly pious and serious minded counterparts. It's more eloquent and poetic where people like Behe and other right winger evangelicals posing as scientists seem to always be straining to make a point andtalk in less exact terms. Like the writing of Stephen Jay Gould, Bill Nye, Isaac Asimov or Carl Sagan it is easier to digest because it is not so pretentious. It doesn't try too hard to be goodwriting, if you know what I mean. Since life is too short and Ihaven't finished the book yet, I will go to just the 5 star reviewsof the Dawkins masterpiece. This reviewer was impressed with Dawkins' honest and direct writingstyle: "It's pretty obvious that a fair few people criticising this bookhave not read it - and have no intention to. Or if they have attempted to read it they simply haven't grasped the most basic concepts. General assumptions that a pro-evolution stance is just an"opinion", or that evolution is "just a theory" (a complete misunderstanding of the meaning of the word in a scientific context),or statements like "given enough time, dirt can turn into people."show that clearly.One person even takes one of the central aims of the book - where Dawkins takes Paley's watchmaker analogy and attempts to show how a complex object like an eye could evolve byselection - and berates Dawkins because because he apparently doesn'tgrasp the fact that because a watch or computer has a designer, thatlife must have a designer as well! Awe-inspiring. If I remember healso accuses Dawkins of circular reasoning! The whole case of the book is that this "it's all chance" thing isprecisely the opposite of what Darwin and Wallace said. As Dawkinswrites in the prologue "The trouble with evolution is that everyone*thinks* they understand it". If one thing should be taken from thisbook, it is the realisation that Natural Selection is *anything* butchance. I used to think I understood evolution. I did Biology as anelective at university but I didn't really begin to understand thesubtleties and elegance of the theory until I first read this book 10years ago. It's genuinely one of the milestone books of my life - and not because I already had an opinion before I read it - unlike the creationists." A reviewer of Sam Harris's book "Letter to a Christian Nation" isprobably firing on all cylinders when he says,"Letter to a Christian Nation" is a call to everyone of faith to move past their belief systems and progress toward a future world where humanity can solve its most pressing problems using intellectual honesty and without having to resort to irrational and superstitious lines of reasoning (or lack thereof)."Let's think about that term---intellectual honesty. We need to behonest with ourselves and others if true communication is to takeplace right? If we hide in delusion using words that we alone havemeanings for, then we never connect with each other. I think weshould ponder what this "intellectual honesty" means to us and whatvalue it should play in our lives. As the reviewer implies,"irrational and superstitious lines of reasoning" only get us further into trouble. We need to interact with each other on clearly defined and honest terms and I don't think religion always lets us do that.

Movie Reviews

2009-03-15T09:37:00.005-06:00

Race to Witch Mountain

“I will get you to your destination, because that is what I do.” Which mountain is that?Dr. Alex Friedman, a discredited astrophysicist UFO expert, enlists the help of Jack Bruno, a Las Vegas cab driver, to protect Sara and Seth, two young siblings with paranormal powers, from the clutches of an organization that wants to use the kids for their nefarious plans. It turns out that the kids are extraterrestrials and that in order to prevent an invasion of Earth, Jack the cabbie must help them reach their spaceship which is buried within Witch Mountain."

Movies like this are rediculous. I really don't buy a movie that is so scientifically implausable. What a silly story. I don't buy the premise that a UFO expert has any creditibility at all anyway. And anybody with paranormal powers? The only slight concilation would be "The Rock." It's a script consistent with his intellectual ability.

Confessions of a Shopaholic

Shop until you drop addiction, or toxic asset? A cautionary tale for the bill collector is onto the scent.Rebecca Bloomwood is a sweet and charming New York City girl (cute as a button) who has a tiny, little problem that is rapidly turning into a big problem: she's hopelessly addicted to shopping and drowning in a sea of debt ($16,000). When she shops, “… the world seems better.”While Rebecca has dreams of working for a top fashion magazine, she can't quite get her foot in the door -- that is, until she snags a job as an advice columnist for a new financial magazine published by the same company. Overnight, her column becomes hugely popular, turning her into an overnight celebrity, but when her compulsive shopping and growing debt issues threaten to destroy her love life and derail her career, she struggles to keep it all from spiraling out of control -- and is ultimately forced to reevaluate what's really important in life. Yes, and there is a little romance at play here as well.

Wow, this looks silly. Making crass materialism look like innocent fun. This silly superficial character how gets a silly superficial job (and probably laughs just like Ann Coulter). When is cute little Rebecca going to get over being 11 years old and join the world of reality? Oh, but she is so cute. She looks like a Republican cheerleader I used to know. Isn't it cute that the movie has a nice little moral lesson that will let little Rebecca evolve from an 11 to a 12 year-old, all in one movie! This is movie is pandering to the uneducated; the director should know better.

Last House on the Left

It is only a movie, a very nasty movie.The night she is to arrive at the remote lakehouse of her family, Mari Collingwood and her friend Paige are kidnapped by Krug, a prison escapee, his lover Sadie and his brother Francis. Brutally raped, terrorized and left for dead, Maria’s only hope is to make it back to the house of her parents John and Emma. Unfortunately, her attackers unknowingly seek shelter from the authorities at the one place she could be safe and are taken in by her parents. When her family becomes aware of the horrifying story, suppressing their rage they lure the killers into a trap. Can they succeed, and will their vengeance make the three strangers curse the day they came to the last house on the left?

I wouldn't want my 14 year-old son to see this movie. even though he would say, "Cool Dad!" He is addicted to "24" and that is enough that he idolizes Jack Bauer, HA. "24" does allow us to talk about it together, but I'm sort of divided on it. Back to the movie, this is as the "R" warning says, "R for sadistic brutal violence including a rape and disturbing images, language, nudity and some drug use." Sadistic brutal violence. There are much better movies out there, and until my son sees the subtle evil going on in these movies, there is no convincing him. As an adult, I hope he will learn to discern on a higher ethical plane, but until then..... Please don't go to this movie, but I know the mainstream(including a lot of Christians) will be salivating over it, completely controlled by the Id of Hollywood. Sorry for the Freudian slip Craig.

Taken

Former government operative Bryan Mills begins the longest 96-hours of his life -- and the hunt for the fearsome organization that has taken his 16 year-old daughter Kim. Mills had only recently given up his government career as what he calls a “preventer” to be near Kim, who lives with Bryan’s ex-wife Lenore and her new husband in Los Angeles. To make ends meet, Bryan joins some former colleagues for special security details (like guarding a pop diva), but most of his time and energy are spent re-connecting with Kim. Bryan’s familial goal is nearly derailed when Kim requests his permission to spend time in Paris with a friend. All too aware of the dangers that could lie ahead for Kim in a foreign land, Bryan says no, but Kim’s disappointment leads him to very reluctantly relent. Bryan’s worst fears are realized when Kim and her friend Amanda are suddenly abducted in broad daylight from the Paris apartment at which they’ve just arrived. Moments before Kim is dragged away by the as yet unseen and unknown assailants, she manages to phone Bryan, who begins to expertly piece together clues that will take him to the darkness of Paris’s underworld, and to the City of Light’s plushest mansions. He determines Kim and Amanda have been taken by Albanian traffickers, who kidnap unassuming young women and, usually within 70 hours, ship them away forever. Bryan Mills will now face nightmares worse than anything he experienced in black ops -- and let nothing and no one stop him from saving his daughter. Once the central characters are introduced, “Taken” morphs into a highly-charged brutish and loud action movie driven with frenetic energy.

Taken has that "24" energy, that paranoia that makes you believe that the "evil" is superintelligent and that beating it is nearly impossible. The suspense formula( which is usually predictable in general) proceeds getting people killed in the process, but justifying the warlike behavior of justifiable homicide. It plays with us by pushing the envelope of justifiable homicide. In a recent show of "24", Jack Bauer says that innocent life sometimes needs to get snuffed out in the cause for freedom. The same rationale that calms the unformed consciences of Iraqi soldiers no doubt propells the confidence of the warlike, justifying their warlike impulses.

Quotes to Remember

2009-03-13T22:26:00.002-06:00

I found a great website for atheist quotes. Bill I think you would like these:

http://www.wonderfulatheistsofcfl.org/Quotes.htm

I thought this one was cool too:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_atheists

And some quotes on God and religion from Woody Allen?

"If only God would give me some clear sign! Like making a large deposit in my name at a Swiss Bank." Selections from the Allen Notebooks," in New Yorker (5 Nov. 1973)
"Not only is God dead, but just try to find a plumber on weekends."
In his autobiographical movie, Stardust Memories, Allen's character is called an atheist. He responds "To you, I'm an atheist. To God, I'm the loyal opposition."
"As the poet said, 'Only God can make a tree' -- probably because it's so hard to figure out how to get the bark on."
"How can I believe in God when just last week I got my tongue caught in the roller of an electric typewriter?"
"If it turns out that there is a God, I don't think that he's evil. But the worst that you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever."
"I do not believe in an afterlife, although I am bringing a change of underwear."
"The chief problem about death, incidentally, is the fear that there may be no afterlife -- a depressing thought, particularly for those who have bothered to shave. Also, there is the fear that there is an afterlife but no one will know where it's being held." The Early Essays," Without Feathers (1976)
"I do occasionally envy the person who is religious naturally, without being brainwashed into it or suckered into it by all the organized hustles."
"Death will be OK, as long as I'm not around when it happens."

Find more atheists' quotes on this link:

http://www.atheistempire.com/greatminds/index.php

Oh, and one more:

http://leftofzen.com/quotes-atheism/2008/01/14/

And for something completely different. Have you ever had your feelings hurt?

Nine Things to Remember When Your Feelings Get Hurt

If you were a sensitive child chances are you are now a sensitive adult. Everyday events may affect you differently than someone who is less sensitive. Other people do not understand this many times and will tell you that you are just being "too sensitive". How we feel each day can have a powerful effect on our self-esteem. Maybe they are just being "too insensitive". To effectively cope in our world you must remember these things:
Remember that what people say to you or about you is really about them and has nothing to do with you
If someone says something to you that hurts your feelings tell them that you did not like how they spoke to you
See if sometimes you are misunderstanding what someone else says to you
Realize that many people talk just to have something to do and don’t even know they are being insensitive
Stay away from people who have been hurtful to you in the past
Spend time building you your self-esteem
Focus on your own interests and beliefs and do not become involved with other people’s opinions Celebrate the fact that you are sensitive. You are most likely also a very creative person.
Look for other people who are also sensitive and form friendships and alliances with them. They will understand how you feel and be better friends to you in the long run
Many people will tell you that you are being too thin-skinned and should just let insensitive comments roll off you “like water off a duck’s back”. But only you know how you feel and you will feel better if you acknowledge your emotions and feelings. We all have an emotional guidance system that lets us know at every moment how we are feeling. Look for situations where you feel good and avoid those that make you feel bad. You are a special, unique being that deserves to feel joy and happiness as much of the time as you possibly can.

My Brother In-Law the Christian??

2009-03-13T06:59:00.003-06:00

My brother in-law, who is a Christian, sent me this.

I need your advice on how to react to it.

Here it is:

Official Announcement:

The federal government today announced that it is changing its emblem from an
Eagle to a CONDOM because it more accurately reflects the government's political stance. A condom allows for inflation, halts production, destroys the next generation, protects a bunch of pricks, and gives you a sense of security while you're actually being screwed!

He then says, "Damn, It doesn't get more accurate than that!"

It is scary that Bill actually thinks this is funny. Wow. How world views can be different. How do I diplomatically tell Bill that I totally disagree with him? His most likely response will be, "Oh, I'm just having a few laughs. Don't get so uptight." Wish me luck :)

Hitchens vs. Wilson

2009-03-09T20:30:00.003-06:00

This article from Christianity Today gives you a flavor of what the chemistry is like between Chris Hitchens and Douglas Wilson when they go on their Christianity Versus Athiesm tours.

Day 1, October 29, 2008
Last year, Christianity Today hosted a lively online debate between pastor and author Douglas Wilson (my father), and Christopher Hitchens, popular author and leading atheist. Both authors have a flair for the humorous and the literary, and the popularity of their debate led to its publication as a book (from a Christian publishing house). Is Christianity Good for the World? was released last month, and now both authors are on the road, debating and discussing the topic in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. Because of the uniqueness and value of their exchanges, a documentary film crew is following them, led by MTV music video director Darren Doane.
As for me? I'm tagging along. Day one was remarkable. The two men met in the morning over coffee, debated in a town hall-style encounter at the King's College in the Empire State Building, signed copies of the book in the Union Square Barnes & Noble, and then divided for different events of different flavors in the evening. Hitchens debated Rabbi Wolpe in Temple Emanu-El — said to be the largest Jewish house of worship in the world — while my father addressed the atheist clubs of Columbia and NYU in an event called "Stump the Preacher Man."
But to be honest, the most interesting moments have all been outside the formal events — discussions over meals, in cabs and elevators. Both men share a love of poetry (over lunch, they gave an antiphonal recitation of "Jabberwocky"), a love of the English language and the well-turned phrase, and have spent a good ten minutes spouting favorite lines from the British writer P. G. Wodehouse to mutual laughter. And both men have a respect for each other — though clearly not for their conflicting opinions of God and the nature of the world.
At the King's College debate, Hitchens professed disdain for the biblical admonition to "love your enemies," calling it total nonsense. And yet, as he appears in Christian forums, wrangling with a Christian man, that is exactly what he is experiencing firsthand. The exchanges are heated. No punches have been pulled, and no one is pretending like the gulf between atheism and Christianity is anything but dark and profound. Yet underlying it all, there is an affection shown to him that is just as profound.
Hitchens said he wanted all his enemies destroyed. Wilson countered with qualified agreement, saying that God destroys all his enemies, but doesn't only destroy them in the traditional way, as understood by man, but also destroys his enemies by making them friends.
Next, the two will debated "Beauty and the Existence of God" at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia.

The morning began with New York City heaving its traffic in the normal way. With cameras tagging along, Hitchens and Wilson found themselves a coffee shop and settled into conversation. But before long, they were shuffled into a cab, and were off grid-locking their way to a heliport, a chopper to Philadelphia, and a debate at Westminster Theological Seminary.
The Phillies had won the World Series the day before, and it was evident everywhere in the city—even in Van Till Hall, the venue for the debate. Phillies jerseys, tees, and caps were crowded in beyond the room's capacity. Both men were given Phillies hats beforehand and Wilson produced his early on, promising the audience that he would put it on if he began to lose the debate (as a sure-fire way to win back the crowd).
After two days of travel and laughter, agreement and disagreement, meals and missed meals (in plenty and in want), the men began their debate with a stronger mutual rapport than the previous day. They both drew laughter from the audience throughout the discussion, but also regular laughter and acknowledgement from each other.
Substantively, Wilson began by claiming that if you deny the existence of God, you banish any standard of beauty or aesthetic criticism from the world. Nothing is more beautiful than anything else. In response (and ironically) Hitchens waxed eloquent about the marvels of reality. He became positively poetic as he paid tribute to stars and black holes and what he believes to be the inevitable destruction of our planet (at the hands of the Andromeda Galaxy).
But he didn't stop at poetry. When describing the Event Horizon of a black hole, he ceased to sound like a rationalist and began to sound more and more like a mystic—referring to the transcendent majesty of the thing itself (as it is imagined by some modern scientists) and reveling in the sci-fi idea of being able to simultaneously see both the past and the present, standing and ceasing to exist at that brink where space and time and light descend into darkness. It was odd, coming from the empirical rationalist, and he seemed unable to believe that in Christians, such thoughts (or visions) would stir up the desire to worship and obey the Artist behind such astonishing art.
Christopher Hitchens and Douglas Wilson both marvel at the same creation, and they turn to the same words and poetry to describe that creation and its effect on them. The difference, and never so stark as in this debate, is that one man reacts into extreme gratitude and thankfulness for the marvels of reality, while the other struggles to prevent that reaction, but is unable to even check his use of religious language and vocabulary in doing so.

Legislature Doesn't Want Dawkins in His State

2009-03-06T12:58:00.003-06:00

3/6/2009

State Rep. Todd Thomsen has filed a resolution to keep Richard Dawkins out of Oklahoma. Well, not the whole state. Presumably they would not try to arrest the good professor if he wandered across, say, the Arkansas border. But he does want to keep Dawkins off the grounds of the big university there. From House Resolution 1015 (RTF file):
. . . the Oklahoma House of Representative strongly opposes the invitation to speak on the campus of the University of Oklahoma to Richard Dawkins of Oxford University, whose published statements on the theory of evolution and opinion about those who do not believe in the theory are contrary and offensive to the views and opinions of most citizens of Oklahoma.
Well, since most Americans don't accept the fact of evolution, it surprises me not one iota that the majority of Oklahomans do not either. But what on Earth could be Thomsen's reasoning here? What is the basis upon which he objects to hearing from someone who thinks differently than he? Perhaps there is a clue in the language of the resolution:
WHEREAS, the University of Oklahoma is a publicly funded institution which should be open to all ideas and should train students in all disciplines of study and research and to use independent thinking and free inquiry; and . . .
...um...
WHEREAS, the University of Oklahoma has planned a year-long celebration of the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin and the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s theory of evolution, called the “Darwin 2009 Project”, which includes a series of lectures, public speakers, and a course on the history of evolution; and . . .
[Head scratch]
. . . THAT the Oklahoma House of Representatives encourages the University of Oklahoma to engage in an open, dignified, and fair discussion of the Darwinian theory of evolution and all other scientific theories which is the approach that a public institution should be engaged in and which represents the desire and interest of the citizens of Oklahoma.
So in the name of tolerance, free inquiry, and open debate we want to...prevent...free...inquiry...and...open...debate. Got it. According to the resolution, Dawkins demonstrates "intolerance for cultural diversity and diversity of thinking," so the solution for Rep. Thomsen is to rub out an example of diversity of thought. Nothing could be more representative of diversity of thought in Oklahoma than atheism! I'm going to guess that Mr. Thomsen is not grasping the irony of this. Thomsen, a football playing alumnus of the university in question, was responsible for another resolution that would undercut the authority of the State Textbook Committee, allowing for the infamous stickers that would "disclaim" about evolution's "controversy." (If anyone has a link to the actual language of that resolution -- HB 3375 -- I'd appreciate it.) He is also a local coordinator of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, which touts on its website:
Influence...FCA uses athletes and coaches to reach youth and adults with the adventure of following Christ.
No mistaking their intentions there! I particularly like the inelegant and blunt choice of the word "use." But hey, that's their thing.I have to admit, if this resolution goes anywhere within the State House, I'll be a little surprised. I know there is some antipathy toward atheism in Oklahoma, but if they applied this "ban" across the board, there would be very few biologists left in Oklahoma's centers of learning.But I think the thing that troubles me most about this whole thing -- Thomsen is the chairman of the Education Committee. Shudder.It's a shame that he's taking this odd position, even in light of his religious views, because in the things that I have gleaned about him since learning of this, he does seem to be a guy who is genuinely concerned about the quality of education in the state. Just a little hung up on some specifics regarding content, I suppose. I'll be watching this to see where it all goes.

Who's Your Guide? Nonreligious Conscientious Objectors?

2009-03-02T23:49:00.001-06:00

by Karen Frantz

Published in the Humanist, March/April 2009

On September 2, 2006, Agustin Aguayo--an army specialist who had gone AWOL the day before while his unit was gearing up for deployment to Iraq--emerged from hiding to engage in an unlikely activity.
“I’m about to turn myself over to the MPs,” he told his wife, who videotaped his statement while the two sat in a parked car beside an army military police station (you can find the video on YouTube.com) “It’s 8:32. And I don’t know what will happen. I think I’m just going to stay here all day or part of the day and someone from the unit will come by and pick me up.” He then added a message to his twin daughters, who were eleven at the time: “Hi Raquel, Hi Becky. I love you guys and I miss you guys always when I’m not with you… take care of each other, take care of yourselves. I’ll be fine. And we’ll be together again.”
Aguayo faced a court-martial and prison time for going absent without official leave and avoiding deployment. But after a year of military service he had developed a profound moral objection to what he was doing and realized that he could no longer stand to be a part of war.
An agnostic who believed in a higher power, Aguayo was raised by a father who was a Jehovah’s Witness and an extreme pacifist. Aguayo grew up with reverence for people like Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. and always favored nonviolence. He enlisted in the U.S. Army partly as an avenue to medical school.
During his training in arms and military operations he began to feel a “crystallization” of belief--and this belief was causing him anguish and guilt. He knew he couldn’t use a bayonet against anyone. He knew he could never shoot someone. As Aguayo would later recount in an official military document:
The more I was indoctrinated the more I realized it was not me. My upbringing, my training, and my personal beliefs had all become conflicted…..I have always had strong feelings about war. I didn’t like the idea of people killing each other. However, it wasn’t till I joined the army that those “feelings” changed into full-fledged objections. I realized after I joined that I could not hurt, injure, or kill anyone under any circumstances.
And this new crystallization of belief was so strong that he’d sooner go to jail than act against it.
He was a conscientious objector.
Aguayo’s story might have ended that day with the military police. It might have ended years before when he had applied for a discharge from the military. Yet the nightmare continued long after he turned himself in on September 2, 2006. Because although Aguayo met many of the requirements of a conscientious objector according to military policy, he failed to meet one important non-official requirement: his belief system wasn’t Christian.
Aguayo wasn’t court-martialed that day. Instead the army told him he was going to Iraq whether he liked it or not--even if he had to be forcefully carried onto the plane. Soon after, Aguayo went AWOL again.
A HISTORY OF SUCH SCRUPLES
The history of conscientious objection in the United States is one that fluctuates between progressive and repressive. Massachusetts became the first colony to pass legislation protecting “non-resisters,” followed by Rhode Island and Pennsylvania. At the beginning of the American Revolution, George Washington exempted “those with conscientious scruples against war” from the draft. During the Civil War, both the Union and the Confederacy allowed conscientious objectors to buy out of the draft. In World War I members of “a well-recognized sect or organization …whose then existing creed or principles forbid its members to participate in war in any form” were granted conscientious objector status. And in World War II objectors were allowed to serve as noncombatants or to volunteer with the Civilian Public Service camps. However, despite these accounts, objectors to war were often treated harshly. At best, they were considered cowards. At worst they were punished--cruelly. During the Civil War, some objectors were starved, others hung by their thumbs. In World War I many draft resisters were arrested and imprisoned, the vast majority of them receiving life sentences and some sentenced to death.
Despite a tradition of exemption for those who belonged to pacifist religious groups, those who were of no religion, non-traditional religion, or even simply of a non-pacifist faith were generally denied conscientious objector status. Only slowly did that change. In World War II the definition of a conscientious objector was broadened to include those with “religious training and belief,” expanding the definition to include adherents of non-pacifist faith. And then in the 1965 Supreme Court case, United States v. Seeger, the Court ruled that an individual’s understanding of his or her own beliefs was relevant in determining qualification for conscientious objector status. Thus, those who didn’t have any formal religious training were now eligible to qualify, as well as adherents of “nontraditional” (read: non-Christian) religions--Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism. Finally, in 1970, during the height of the Vietnam War, the Supreme Court ruled in Welsh v. United States that “depth and fervency” of beliefs qualified a soldier for conscientious objector status, regardless of whether those beliefs were religious in nature.
Current U.S. military policy allows conscientious objectors (COs) to either apply for transfer to a non-combatant post (known as class 1-A-0) or to be discharged from the army (class 1-0). The application process is long and tedious--applicants must fill out a written questionnaire that explains the nature of their beliefs. (Because the United States currently has an all-volunteer army, an emphasis is placed on proving a change in belief system after joining the military, and the burden of proof lies entirely upon the applicant.) The case is then assigned to a range of officials for review, including a military chaplain and an investigating officer. The application is then kicked up the soldier’s chain of command until finally a review board either approves or denies the application. If an applicant is denied they must return to their unit and resume their former duties.
As defined by current military policy, conscientious objection is “a firm, fixed, and sincere objection to participation in war in any form or the bearing of arms, by reason of religious training and/or belief.” (DoD 1300.6) Although this policy allows room for moral objection manifested internally rather than through religious training, there remains a burden of proof.
Agustin Aguayo had stopped loading his weapon. It was in 2004 and he was in Iraq serving as a medic. He was put on guard duty--after he had already applied for discharge as a conscientious objector in February of that year. His conscience was weighing on him heavily.
He had been assigned an investigating officer: Captain Sean Foster. After Aguayo and other witnesses testified at his hearing, Foster recommended that CO status be granted. “It seemed clear to me that PFC [Private First Class] Aguayo is absolutely sincere in his stated beliefs that he is opposed to ‘war in any form’,” Foster wrote. “PFC Aguayo’s stated beliefs that he is internally incapable of participating in any form of war without being in a constant state of personal moral dilemma is absolutely sincere.”
The application went through the chain of command. Aguayo’s company commander recommended approval, but the next four officers to review the application disagreed, recommending disapproval. Many reasons were given, including the assertion that the timing of his application--just before his deployment to Iraq--was questionable. But there was also contention around the nature of Aguayo’s beliefs. The staff judge advocate who reviewed Aguayo’s application wrote:
PFC Aguayo’s convictions do not appear to be sincerely held…PFC Aguayo did not identify any specific ways he has altered his behavior to accommodate his beliefs. Although practicing a religion is not a requirement for CO approval, PFC Aguayo has not discussed any equally significant source of his beliefs other than he was raised in a kind and respectful family.
The Department of the Army Conscientious Objector Review Board (DACORB) then conducted the final review. They denied his application in July 2004. He was to stay with his unit in Iraq.
In August 2005 Aguayo tried again. He petitioned the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia for a writ of habeas corpus, arguing that he had never been given the chance to rebut the negative recommendations from his commanding officers, as is standard regulation. Aguayo was allowed to revise his written application and the army agreed to have the DACORB reconsider.
In the revised application, Aguayo explained his beliefs more thoroughly and how his beliefs had changed in training:
As the trainings progressed I knew I could not stab anyone with a bayonet…And when I felt the earth tremble beneath me after firing an M-16 I felt and I now know there’s no way I could point it at someone and shoot…My convictions are strong and are deeply rooted based on my upbringing, morals, and the experiences I have had in the army.
His application was again denied in January 2006. DACORB stated that Aguayo did not present “clear and convincing evidence” that he was a conscientious objector.
In March 2006 Aguayo tried a final time with an amended habeas corpus petition in the district court--again to no avail. But this time DACORB filed a memorandum listing the reasons why he was denied, which included (but weren’t limited to) the opinion that he “lack[ed] the religious foundation; the underpinning that supports conscientious objector beliefs” and that he didn’t “[provide] any significant source of his beliefs; conscience or moral views that would warrant conscientious objector status.”
So two years after first filing his application, Aguayo learned that the reason he didn’t qualify as a conscientious objector--even though he was utterly sincere in his moral objection--was because he didn’t arrive at this belief through “traditional” channels.
The difficulties some nontheists and adherents of non-Christian faiths face when claiming conscientious objector status haven’t been well publicized. Perhaps the most famous case was that of boxer Muhammad Ali during the Vietnam War, when he claimed military service was irreconcilable with his Islamic faith. The draft board, in similar fashion to Aguayo, found Ali’s beliefs to be insincere and sentenced him to prison. (The era was not kind to Muslims in general--hundreds were sent to jail because their faith wasn’t accepted as a basis for CO status.)
Perhaps the only way to understand how it was that a man who would rather go to jail than go to war, a man who even refused to carry a loaded weapon in Iraq, was found to be insincere in his moral aversion to war is by considering the emphasis on religion in the process of applying for CO status, and the fact that there is no objective, equally applied standard for determining sincerity. Christians in the military far outnumber those of other faiths or no religious faith at all, and non-theists are especially challenged in that they must prove their beliefs or worldview constitute a similar place in their lives as do the beliefs of traditionally religious soldiers.For example, a nontheist might have to demonstrate that they engage in activities similar to attending church to prove a place for belief in their lives. But to someone who is religious, any activity that is not church may be a very poor substitute. An example of this might be seen in Aguayo’s case--the military chaplain who was assigned to assess his application wrote, “PFC Aguayo seems to be sincere in his beliefs…It is difficult to assess the depths of his beliefs because they rest solely within his own thinking and personal values without the support of background, family, or faith group.”
Then there’s the case of Specialist Katherine Jashinski, who enlisted in the Texas Army National Guard in 2002 and filed for CO status in 2004. The army denied her request and ordered her to report for weapons training. Jashinski refused and, in a public statement at Fort Benning on November 17, 2005, explained:
When I enlisted I believed that killing was immoral, but also that war was an inevitable part of life and therefore, an exception to the rule.… After reading essays by Bertrand Russell and traveling to the South Pacific and talking to people from all over the world, my beliefs about humanity and its relation to war changed. … I developed the belief that taking human life was wrong and war was no exception. …The thing that I revere most in this world is life, and I will never take another person's life. Just as others have faith in God, I have faith in humanity. I have a deeply held belief that people must solve all conflicts through peaceful diplomacy and without the use of violence. Violence only begets more violence. Because I believe so strongly in non-violence, I cannot perform any role in the military. Any person doing any job in the army contributes in some way to the planning, preparation or implementation of war.
In May 2006 Jashinski pled guilty to refusal to obey an order. She was sentenced to four months jail and received a bad conduct discharge. She was released and discharged two months later.
It should be noted, however, that nontheists and nontraditionalists are certainly not the only ones who bear the burden of proving their sincerity. Likewise, those of a Judeo-Christian tradition may also come up against difficulties when trying to demonstrate their sincerity to a military officer of the same religion--one who simply might not understand how their own faith could allow for conscientious objection to war.
Nevertheless, it stands to reason that non-traditional and nontheist COs likely face a higher burden. The Center on Conscience and War, a nonprofit anti-war organization founded in 1940 to defend the rights of COs, reports that non-Christians “statistically have a greater difficulty submitting and proving their sincerity to a chain-of-command…who self-identifies as Christian.” And one successful CO I spoke with told me that he believed he had an easier time discharging from the military because he was Christian (and white). Whether due to misunderstanding or due to prejudice, other faiths or a lack of religious faith may simply make little sense to the Christian majority. And, frankly, it’s no secret that prejudice against nontheists and non-Christians is present in the U.S. military. One need only look at the tribulations of PFC Jeremy Hall, who endured discrimination, alienation, and even death threats for his atheist views.
BECAUSE HE BELIEVES HE’S A CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTOR
It was after Agustin Aguayo turned himself in and learned he would be sent back to Iraq instead of being court-martialed that he fled once again, jumping out of a window on a military base in Germany. He resurfaced on September 26, 2006, holding a press conference in Los Angeles, California, where he spoke out against war and then turned himself in again.
This time Aguayo was sent into confinement at Coleman Barracks in Mannheim, Germany. While he was there, the circuit court of appeals in Washington, DC, upheld the original denial of Aguayo’s habeas corpus petition. On March 6, 2007, Aguayo was court-martialed and convicted of desertion and missing movement. Although he was facing up to seven years for the offence, a judge sentenced him to just eight months. Aguayo’s attorney, David Court, said:
I believe that Agustin in his closing comments was compelling enough that the judge probably came to the conclusion, he thinks he’s a CO regardless of what the army says and because he believes he is a CO that’s why he did what he did . . . It appeared that at the end the issue was: what is the punishment for a conscientious objector who follows his conscience and not the dictates of the Uniform Code of Military Justice?
Aguayo was released from Mannheim on April 18, 2007, and his general court-martial went through an automatic appeal process as is procedure in a bad conduct discharge. His appeal was eventually denied by the circuit court of appeals, and a bid to the Supreme Court was denied on March 17, 2008.
Conscientious objection is a contentious issue, particularly given that we have an all-volunteer force. Many people argue that conscientious objectors are in fact soldiers who realized they got in over their heads when they discover what’s involved in combat. Others think that if “easy outs” are provided from the military we put our country at risk when we face security threats.
However, the fact remains that current military policy does allow for conscientious objection, and therefore it should be applied impartially. Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Wiccan, humanist, atheist--these labels shouldn’t matter when it comes to applying for CO status. What should matter is the sincerity of a moral objection, if we are to allow any moral objection in the first place. It isn’t fair for a Christian CO to have the process made easy, while a non-Christian CO might be denied discharge because she quotes Bertrand Russell instead of the Bible or because he is unable to cite sufficient (read: supernatural) sources.We live in a pluralistic society that, by definition, should recognize equality between allfaith and non-faith. And when it comes to assessing a conscientious objector, our military should take pains to make sure an emphasis is placed on having faith in that individual--rather than whether or not they agree with that individual’s faith.

Karen Frantz is the policy and advocacy associate at the American Humanist Association.

The God Particle --- Truth or Silly Fiction?

2009-03-02T10:04:00.001-06:00

By CHRISTOPHER POTTER

If the hype is to be believed, scientists may be mere weeks away from answering one of the most mysterious questions of existence: Why is there anything at all?
The long search for the so-called "God particle" may soon be over. And if it is, there will be Nobel Prizes all round for everyone in on the discovery.
Until recently, it had been assumed that this elusive particle (assuming it exists at all) would be found by an international team of scientists working on the world's most expensive experiment, taking place in Europe at a huge complex built across the French and Swiss borders. But that experiment has run into problems, giving a much smaller American team based in Batavia, Ill., the chance to beat the Europeans to the punch.
But what is the God particle? And if we find it, will it have been worth the time and effort?

We live - as Madonna reminds us - in a material world. What then, we might ask, is the material of the material world made out of?
As you no doubt learned in school, science has discovered that everything in the universe - whether a worm or a star - is made out of a modest number of different entities called elements. These 94 naturally occurring elements come in a smallest amount called an atom, which literally means something that cannot be divided. For a while, it seemed as if the atom were the smallest part of the fabric of the material world.
But further investigation of the world of small things revealed that atoms are not uncuttable after all, but made out of yet smaller particles. By 1932, it was known that all atoms are made up of three particles, the electron, proton and neutron. The material world was reduced from the 94 differences of the elements to just the three differences of these subatomic particles. To scientists, who are in search of the utter simplicity and symmetry of nature, this was a pleasing discovery.
It would, however, have been naive to suppose that the search would end here. Two-and-a-half millennia earlier, ancient thinkers had realized that there can be no end to the search for elementary particles. Even the smallest particles have to be made out of something else. If the search is to arrive at a destination, it is clear that there has to be something peculiar about the world of small things.
Indeed the world at these smallest sizes is so different from the world that we see around us that we need a different set of principles to describe it. This description is called quantum mechanics.
Quantum mechanics tells us that, rather than fade into nothingness, the world becomes more and more energetic as we look at ever-smaller parts of it. If we peer at a tiny region of space we see that it is not empty but boiling with particles that pop randomly into and out of existence for tiny parts of a second. This description of reality is certainly puzzling, but we can take comfort that even that great American physicist Richard Feynman, who said that no one really understands quantum physics.
By the 1950s, dozens of these "elementary" particles - those smaller than protons and electrons - had been discovered. The Italian physicist Enrico Fermi was heard to say to an inquisitive student: "Young man, if I could remember the names of these particles, I would have become a botanist." This was not a happy state of affairs, and yet still the particles proliferated. By the 1960s, it began to seem as if even the physicists themselves could not take them quite seriously. Feynman named one particle the parton, after Dolly Parton. American Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann named his discovery the quark, after the sound (according to the novelist James Joyce) that a seagull makes.
*
Even the most powerful microscopes cannot see these elementary particles. Instead, we use devices called particle accelerators, machines that smash particles into each other. The idea is simple. Smash two particles of the same mass and energy together, and the resulting crash delivers twice as much energy at the point of impact; occasionally, another particle comes into brief existence from out of nothingness.
The story of the universe begins with a Big Bang - a very hot and dense spot of radiation of almost no size that expands rapidly. That patch of light has been expanding and evolving for about 14 billion years. It has evolved into all the structures of matter we find in the universe, including observers like ourselves who tell this story.
If our current scientific description of the universe is reduced to a single statement, it is that the universe is a patch of light that evolved.
Particle accelerators recreate the conditions of the universe as it was close to the Big Bang. But scientists are left with a mystery. How did the light at the beginning of the universe acquire mass and become things like quarks and then atoms and then gas and rocks and us? The God particle may hold the key to this mystery.
The God particle's real name is the Higgs boson, named for the English physicist Peter Higgs, who, in the 1960s, was one of the first to predict its existence. To date, scientists have not managed to bring this particle into the world of observable things. But it is thought that it first existed about a tenth of a billionth of a second after the Big Bang and created a field of energy. This field had the property of conferring mass onto some of the massless particles out of which the early universe was made. The Higgs boson changed a universe of radiation into a universe in which some particles have mass and some of them don't. The Higgs boson tells us how light became stuff.
It was a New Yorker and Nobel Prize winning physicist Leon M. Lederman who first called it the God particle. Later, given all the fuss about whether it exists or not, he said he wished he'd called it "the goddamn particle." Finding the God particle is in principle easy. Insert enough energy into a small enough region of space, and it should appear as a spike of energy in a suitable detector. The passing existence - it exists for about a trillionth of a second - of such a particle is a glimpse of the universe as it was almost at the moment of its origination. (I won't say creation, that would be teasing and suggestive.) Putting energy into space may be easy in principle, but in practice putting in enough energy to find a particle as evanescent as the Higgs boson is technically very challenging indeed. The difficulty is in getting particles to travel fast enough, and to hit each other head on. Here we reach the limits of our current technical abilities.
Not surprisingly, the search for the God particle has required the construction of the world's largest machines. Currently, the largest machine in the world is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), located near Geneva on the border between France and Switzerland. It is in part a circular tunnel over 16 miles long and 30 yards underground encased by 9,300 magnets placed at intervals along its length. The magnets are cooled to minus 456.34 degrees Fahrenheit, within a few degrees of the coldest temperature possible in the universe.
The project - also the world's largest experiment - employs over 5,000 scientists, many of whom will attempt to interpret the data received at four detectors housed at opposite compass points around the tunnel. The LHC cost an estimated $10 billion to construct (in the days when $10 billion was a lot of money), paid for mostly by Europeans but with an American investment of more than half-a-billion dollars. An American plan to build what would have been the world's largest collider (the Superconducting Super Collider) in Texas, housed in a tunnel 54 miles long, was canceled by Congress in 1993 after the projected costs spiraled; $2 billion had already been spent and 14 miles of tunnel dug.
Like all particle accelerators, the function of the LHC is straightforward: to accelerate and smash protons into each other. Protons are whisked around the tunnel, making over 11,000 circuits a second, given little nudges by the magnets so that their speed gradually accelerates to within 99.99% of the speed of light. Two beams of protons circulate in opposite directions, eventually focused so that they collide with each other at the four detector points, which must then record the results of over 600 million collisions per second.
A billion people around the world watched on television on July 10, 2008, as the LHC was switched on for the first time. It was a surprisingly lighthearted affair given the daunting size of the venture, not to mention the rumors flying around the Internet that the machine was going to create a black hole that would annihilate the Earth. It's true that when the LHC is fully operational, it will create black holes, but no scientist is alarmed by this prospect. The blackholes will be minute - subatomic sized - and benign.
But only nine days after it launched, something went wrong. An electrical fault caused a rupture in one of the magnets, which led to an explosion. On Sept. 19, there was a mechanical failure, and the LHC had to be turned off again. The LHC is not expected to be switched on again until July at the earliest.
While the LHC is out of action, the world's largest operational collider is the Tevatron in Illinois. It was due to be put out of commission in 2010 because of the LHC's superior power. Ironically, it is currently running at the peak of its power and efficiency. The Tevatron team now believes it has a very good chance of detecting the Higgs boson within the next two years. In fact members say they may already be seeing evidence of it. Eight recent collisions could be evidence of the Higgs emerging from the void. But eight out of thousands of millions of collisions is not enough evidence to be conclusive.
If the Higgs does exist, it will take the stage slowly, and shyly. The Higgs will be a sensation, but hardly an overnight one.
*
Will the search have been worth it? It's an appropriate question during a recession. It's true that we are unlikely to see any immediate and obvious technological benefits even if we discovered the Higgs boson tomorrow. But then what immediate technological benefits came out of the space race of the '60s and early '70s? Mankind didn't go to the moon for the incidental benefits of the non-stick frying pan and the invertible ballpoint pen. It went to expand humanity's potential.
Science insists on our commonality. DNA analysis shows us that everyone alive today shares a mother who lived in Africa some 150,000 years ago. Our DNA also shows us that we are descended not just from apes but from slime, a story that takes our descent back some 3 billion years. But the story does not stop there. We are, as poets often remind us, made of star dust. In turn, the stars themselves are clouds of hydrogen gas that condensed and ignited. And even further back in time, before there was any hydrogen gas, the universe was once - for the merest moment in time after the Big Bang - a curious landscape in which there was a field of energy made out of Higgs bosons.
The story of science as we understand it today can now trace our descent - and the descent of all things - back to the origins of the universe. Surely that makes science the greatest story ever told. In a world filled with divisiveness of all kinds, how wonderful to be reminded that we are all in this together.

Christopher Potter is the author of "You Are Here: A Portable History of the Universe" (Harper), out this week.

2009-02-21T15:10:00.004-06:00

Farewell to a Much-Misunderstood Man(John Updike preferred to be wrong on account of the right reservations than right because of the wrong ones.)

By Christopher Hitchens

Most of the celebrations and elegies for the great John Updike were abysmally bland, praising him as the bard and chronicler of the great American middle (middle-class, middle-minded, and so forth). One obituarist got it more nearly right, saying that Updike seemed like a paragon of the bourgeoisie to some while appearing as a worrying outrider of sexual liberation and subversion to others. A lot depends on how you first come upon an author—at my English boys boarding school in the 1960s, a copy of one of the early Rabbit works (Rabbit, Run) was passed around the dormitory with its covers ripped off as a "hot stuff" illicit text. To this day, I hardly dare go and look it up, but at one point "she" was apparently acting as if she wanted to turn herself inside out, while "he" could feel something like the inside of a "velvet slipper." Oh, sweet Jesus, what was all this? I burned and yearned to know, just as Alexander Portnoy might have done, and was amazed later to discover that both Updike and Philip Roth were considered to be literature in the United States.
Another apparent obstacle in the way of a full appreciation of Updike was his unabashedly WASP-like stance and character. This was never more awkwardly on show than in his much-neglected essay "On Not Being a Dove," which at first glance makes him the least '60s person on record, even while trying—always the worst combination—slightly too hard to be hip:
I went to meetings and contributed to the NAACP and even lent a black man we slightly knew some money that he never repaid—I was all for people getting a break, if the expense to me wasn't inordinate.

This wasn't the way that most people chose to remember that decade, and Updike had landed himself, in addition, with the almost one-man commitment among the literati of being a supporter of the Johnson administration in Vietnam. The essay bears rereading today because, even if it doesn't contain any reasoned defense of the war itself, it does in a mild but brave and ultimately irreducible way insist that the United States is superior to its enemies, both foreign and domestic, and can therefore still be right even when it is in the wrong. (Asked how a "writer" should take a side on the war, Updike at first wished to say that the opinions of writers were of no more value than any other, yet ended by saying that "in my own case at least I feel my professional need for freedom of speech and expression prejudices me toward a government whose constitution guarantees it." So, either don't try to conscript writers, or don't mess with writers who can use understatement to such effect.
On the sole occasion that he and I met properly and had an interview and a conversation, I was mainly interested in the "race" question. Updike had just published Brazil, his first step outside the boundaries of the United States since The Coup in 1978. Both novels dwelt upon exoticism and miscegenation, and the former had seemed to me when I first read it to contain a hint of prescience about the burgeoning Islamist loathing for America. (Read, if you will, the windy and scary diatribes of Updike's Hakim Ellellou, theocratic and military dictator of the land of Kush. They seem to raise the curtain on future screeds.)
Well, said Updike, with his usual and indeed as far as we know utterly unfailing geniality. His opinions on all such matters had undergone a bit of an update since 1978, and indeed since 1968. Of course he wasn't really a WASP to begin with—there can't be a more essentially Dutch name than Updike—but he added with typical diffidence that two of his children had married Africans and that he now had some genuinely "African-American" grandchildren. He appeared highly diverted and pleased by this thought, and I notice that the first edition of his memoir Self-Consciousness, containing that original anti-'60s essay, is dedicated "To my grandsons John Abloff Cobblah and Michael Kwame Ntiri Cobblah." These names, which I would guess to be Ashanti/Ghanaian, make one wonder if President Barack Obama missed an opportunity, and we all missed an experience, in not inviting the whole Updike clan to be present while one of the country's finest writers could still give us an "invocation."
Perhaps Updike was too ill by then. And something seemed to have gone wrong with his confidence toward the end. His 2006 novel, Terrorist, was a failure of nerve as well as a failure of style, making an absolute hash of the profile of a supposedly "home-grown" suicide-murderer in New Jersey. And his all-important "Talk of the Town" piece for The New Yorker about Sept. 11, 2001 (not reprinted by the magazine, I noticed, in its memorial salad of his best contributions this week), came as close as making no difference to saying that this assault on our civil society was not an event that was really worth fighting over. How incongruous of him, after maintaining for so long that Vietnam was a just war, to be so wavering and so neutral when a true crisis came along. And yet perhaps not so incongruous for a man of wry and reserved delicacy and elegance who would prefer very slightly to be wrong on account of the right reservations than right because of the wrong ones.

My Christian Friend's Worries

2009-02-19T17:31:00.003-06:00

A friend of mine, who is a Christian says he is worried about something called the "black swan" event. He has even bought a pistol and many rounds of ammunition in anticipation of chaos if it totally breaks out. I think I should make it clear that my friend is not crazy and he had purchased the pistol for target practice. Is this a realistic assessment by my friend or is he acting on his own beliefs that Armegeddon will break out. This is a little troubling because my friend from Milwaukee is one of the most peaceful people I know. Should I try to quell his worries saying the end of the world is not near, empathize but not generally support his feelings? What do I do?

Other notes:

I think that there is too much money being spent on guns and ammo. This is a truthout column by Annie Miller:

But I'd like to ask the fiscal conservatives: What about your support, year after year, of a monstrously bloated Pentagon budget?
The Iraq war and subsequent occupation, a "pet project" of the Bush administration and consistently financed by most members of Congress, will very likely cost the American taxpayer more than $3 trillion dollars by 2010, when interest on the debt and much-needed veterans benefits are factored in to the costs of the war. Even former President Bush, as reported in the Wall Street Journal in December 2008, acknowledges that increased military spending during his tenure in the White House has contributed to the federal budget crisis.
And just how much has the increase been? In the past eight years, U.S. military spending has nearly doubled; when nuclear weapons spending and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are factored in, the U.S. taxpayer will be footing a Pentagon bill of an estimated $711 billion in 2009 -- approximately $2,300 for every person living in the United States. $711 billion is roughly equivalent to what the rest of the world spends combined on military spending. There is no indication that President Obama plans to cut the military budget any time soon; in fact, he may be requesting some increase.
So what about wasteful Pentagon spending? The moral implications of spending half of every discretionary U.S. tax dollar on "defense" aside, it would seem prudent for the fiscally minded to scour the Pentagon budget to clean up and dispose of wasteful and unnecessary programs. Rep. Barney Frank, chair of the House Financial Services Committee, has spoken out repeatedly about the possibility of shearing 25 percent from the military budget, and has outlined some programs cuts to get there. Where is the support of fiscal conservatives for this proposal?
For those who believe our defense budget makes us safer: An ever-increasing military budget does little but provide security to Congressional incumbents and military contractors. According to the Center for American Progress and its recently published Unified Security Budget, 87 percent of security resources in the 2009 federal budget are being spent on the military. Only 8 percent are dedicated to homeland security, and a paltry 5 percent to non-military engagement. As the old saying goes, "When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail."
National security cannot and should not be defined in terms of our capacity to wage war abroad. National security is when the most vulnerable among us have access to adequate education, health care and housing; when we address the very real and growing threat of climate change; and when those Americans who want to work can support their families with a living wage. It will be achieved when we invest abroad in programs that address the root causes of terrorism including poverty, access to food and clean water, and education. It will be achieved when we make nuclear nonproliferation a priority, and lead the world in helping secure loose nukes and fissile materials, and begin serious negotiation of the abolition of nuclear weapons.
The stimulus' $787 billion is a great deal of money. However skeptical I am about the prospects of the package succeeding in any measurable way, I'd rather have my tax dollars go to "pet projects" that may staunch the bloodletting of American jobs than wasteful Pentagon programs whose primary purpose is to find effective and creative ways to kill human beings.

Dawkins Talks About Darwin

2009-02-16T14:16:00.003-06:00

Oxford University's former Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, Richard Dawkins, is one of the world's staunchest defenders of the theory of evolution. He is the author of The Selfish Gene and a well known atheist tract, The God Delusion. So how does he assess Darwin's ideas on the 200th anniversary of his birth?
The BBC World Service's Owen Bennett Jones spoke to Professor Dawkins.
RD: "Charles Darwin really solved the problem of existence, the problem of the existence of all living things - humans, animals, plants, fungi, bacteria. Everything we know about life, Darwin essentially explained."
OBJ: "Did he make any mistakes in your view?"
RD: "Yes he made some mistakes. He lived in the middle of the 19th Century, and, obviously, we know a lot more now than he knew. In particular, he got genetics all wrong. Nobody in the 19th Century knew much about genetics, and so naturally Darwin got that wrong. But given that, it's remarkable how much he got right."
OBJ: "But people say modern discoveries in genetics, actually confirm what Darwin was saying...?"
RD: "Very much so, yes, and it's amazing how far ahead of his time he was."
He's controversial amongst people who don't know anything, but if you talk to people who are actually educated, he's not really controversial
Richard Dawkins
OBJ: "Right, so can you explain that to us? Basically, modern genetics confirms the principle, but he got the detail wrong, is that it?"
RD: "Yes, you need genetics in order to make Darwinian natural selection work. It depends upon genetics. Darwin didn't realise how much it depended upon what you could call "digital genetics" - the idea that a particular gene, you either have it or you don't.
"In Darwin's time people thought it was a bit like mixing substances - you've got some male substances and some female substances and you mix them together, and you got child substance. It's not like that at all.
"It's digital. You either get a gene or you don't. Nowadays with DNA of course we know that it's really like computer code, it's like reels and reels of computer tape. And little did Darwin know, he actually needed that for his theory to work.
"But nevertheless he got it astonishingly right. So you could almost say he nearly forecast digital genetics - although he didn't."
OBJ: "Do you believe his belief is compatible with a belief in God?"
RD: "Many people do, because there are plenty of clergymen, bishops, theologians and things who of course go along with evolution. They have no choice; the evidence is overwhelming. I personally think it's rather difficult, but that's my personal opinion and you'll find plenty of clergymen to disagree."
OBJ: "Because Darwin is now a very controversial figure, particularly in the United States?"

RD: "He's controversial amongst people who don't know anything, but if you talk to people who are actually educated, he's not really controversial. There's no controversy about the fact we are cousins of monkeys, cousins of cows, cousins of aardvarks. That's completely non-controversial among anyone who knows anything about science."
OBJ: "Did Darwin lose his faith?"
RD: "Yes, Darwin lost his faith gradually. As a young man he was destined for the church. He was training to be an Anglican clergyman at Cambridge [University], and then gradually throughout his life he lost his faith, partly because of personal tragedy - losing children and things like that, and partly because his science led him to see the superfluousness of a creator. He never described himself as an atheist; he ended up describing himself as an agnostic - the term which was coined by his friend T H Huxley.

Mexico Vacation WOW!

2009-02-09T13:21:00.002-06:00

Having a great time in Mexico. I had a Mexican guitar player serenaded Debbie last night at a place called MARGARITAS right across from LOS ARCO MOTEL. Song called Sienti Bieno or something like that. Weather in the 80's. Beautiful days. People are interesting, everyone trying to sell us timeshares. They get pretty aggressive. hotel stays are down here, which makes them more aggressive.
Debbie and I have taken many beach walks. people try to sell you stuff on the beach like hats, blankets, jewelry, etc.
First night, went to a great place on the beach called PONCHOS. ALOT of music and fun. The waiters all know my mother and father in law and they are showing us around to their favorite places. Great to have built in tour guides.
First night it was hard to sleep. Disco across the street blaring until 6am. Yikes. When in Mexico, do as the Mexicans!
Today we are going to the market. Got our pesos today at the bank. exchange rate is 14 pesos for a dollar.

We'll bask in the sun for another five days and then it back to winter in the midwest, to reality.

Bienos Dias,
Jaifa

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

2009-02-03T11:33:00.003-06:00

My brother went to see one of the brightest men in America last night.

Here is the article he sent me:

Face of space Tyson laments Americans' scientific illiteracy

PJ Slinger\ — 2/03/2009 8:27 am \

Neil deGrasse Tyson is one in a million.He said so himself."There are six-and-half billion people on this planet, and there are 6,500 astrophysicists, so that makes each of us (astrophysicists) one in a million," Tyson said Monday night at the Wisconsin Union Theater as part of the UW's Distinguished Lecture Series.It's too bad there aren't a lot more like Tyson, who kept the packed house enthralled with his charisma, knowledge and off-the-cuff humor for more than two hours.Tyson is the 21st century face of space, a mantle previously held by the late, great Carl Sagan. Tyson is director of the Hayden Planetarium and the host of PBS' "NOVA ScienceNOW" program, aimed at educating a new generation of Americans in science.And that is no small task.Tyson pointed out numerous examples of scientific illiteracy in the U.S., including a general lack of understanding and a belief in silly superstitions.On the screen behind him he showed a photo of the inside of an elevator in a tall building, and how there was no button for the 13th floor."We are supposedly a technologically advanced country, and yet people are afraid of the number 13?" he said.And since he was speaking on Feb. 2, Tyson showed a picture of the groundhog Punxsutawney Phil, who supposedly tells the weather future on whether he sees a shadow."Groundhog Day," Tyson said. "Sure, it's innocent fun. But it's a remnant, a celebration of our climatological ignorance."And ignorance is unfortunately the rule, not the exception, when it comes to science knowledge in the U.S., he lamented.He began the lecture with a list of scientific ideas that people assume to be true, including that the sun is yellow, that the North Star is the brightest object in the night sky and that total solar eclipses are rare. He pointed out how the entire list was false, but that because of scientific illiteracy, people tend to believe them because they seem right.He went on to describe each of the fallacies, pointing out that the sun is white, not yellow, that the North Star is the 49th brightest object in the sky and that total solar eclipses happen once every two and a half years."We hold presidential elections every four years, and you never hear them say, 'We have a rare presidential election coming up.'"Tyson, in Wisconsin for the first time, took the audience once around the universe and back home, touching on everything from science, math and world history to, yes, journalism. But at the heart of it all was the fact that scientific literacy in the U.S. is woefully deficient.Tyson pointed out the need for scientific literacy and how it seems to have fallen by the wayside over the past generation or so. He showed photos of the broken levees after Hurricane Katrina, the fallen interstate bridge in St. Paul, the aftermath of two trains that collided, among other photos of devastation wrought by a lack of scientific knowledge and understanding."That's not the country I grew up in," Tyson lamented. "We've stopped dreaming."Tyson showed how the elemental makeup of the universe is nearly identical to the makeup of the elements here on Earth, which he says is a pretty good indicator that we have no special place in the universe. It only makes sense, he said.As he neared the end of the lecture, he brought the audience on a trip through larger and larger numbers, which he called the "Cosmic Perspective." From one to a thousand to a million, a billion, a trillion … all the way up to a sextillion.That's 10 to the 21st power, or, written out: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. That's how many stars are in our observable universe. And our little planet orbits just one of them.Does this make Tyson feel insignificant?"Not at all," he said. "The universe is in us."

I love that philosophical question. When we hold a rose in our hand, Is the beauty of the rose coming from itself or from us? Is it our perception of the rose or is it the rose itself that is important? Is the world all inside us? There wouldn't be a world without us to perceive it, right, but there has to be a world. Of all people, Deepak Chopra does a pretty good job of describing the rose's beauty being inside us. Very interesting.

10 Ways to be a Great Parent

2009-02-03T09:17:00.002-06:00

Be a good role model. Children learn from examples their parents set.
Be respectful of your child's thoughts, feelings and suggestions.
Make your child feel loved with words of praise and with hugs and kisses
Keep your word. If you break it, apologize and make it up to the child.
Encourage your child's creativity. Ask questions to encourage imagination and curiosity.
Build your child's self esteem by recognizing and showing appreciation for all genuine efforts.
Stay involved. Know what's going on in your child's life, both at school and with friends.
Discipline fairly, firmly and with love. Focus on the behavior not the child.
Establish family traditions and make time to do fun things together.
Think positively. By expecting the best, you empower yourself and your child to solve problems and achieve goals.

Other Notes:

Yesterday I started a podcast with my 13 1/2 year old son at thoughtsfromwisconsin.podbean.com --- It's fun. Even though it was a rough draft podcast, it was a great way to find more ways to get to know this very special individual, my only typical son. I would highly recommend a podcast as a way for you and a significant other, son, nephew, etc. to get to know each other better. Sign up for a free podcast at www.podbean.com

Hope you have a great week :) I will not be posting probably next week because we will be visiting Mazatlan, Mexico 2/7- 2/15. A well deserved vacation I think. My wife agrees :)

Strange Story from China

2009-02-02T08:49:00.000-06:00

AUTHORITIES in eastern China have a new way to deal with residents who complain: checking them into a mental hospital and force-feeding them drugs, it was reported yesterday.
Authorities in Xintai, a municipal region in Shandong province, had forced at least 18 people with grievances, ranging from police brutality to property disputes, into a mental hospital, the Beijing News said.Chinese residents with complaints directed at local governments often travel to "petitions and appeals" offices (also called "letters and visits" offices) in provincial capitals and in Beijing after they have failed to resolve the problem through lower channels. Sun Fawu, 57, a retired miner from Dagouqiao village, was force-fed drugs and given injections during more than 20 days at the Xintai mental hospital in October, the paper said. "My head was always dizzy and I could not stay up," Mr Sun said. He had asked for compensation over spoiled farmland caused by coal mining. He was released only after signing a document saying he was mentally ill and "would not petition again". Checking petitioners into the hospital was in part economics, an official said, as cash-strapped local governments could ill afford to send them to Beijing."Every time we have to send three or five people to Beijing, and pay their food and accommodation, it's not a matter of pennies," the paper quoted one official, Chen Jaifa, as saying.An Shizhi, head of the letters and visits office in Xintai's Quangou township, said officials were under pressure to keep petitioner numbers down."If petitioners bypass local authorities, the head of both the (Communist] party and government get punished," he said.

The Brilliance of Jonathan Schell

2009-01-29T22:38:00.003-06:00

OBAMA AND THE RETURN OF THE REAL

by: Jonathan Schell, The Nation

President Barack Obama faces many challenges, including an economy in crisis and two wars in the Middle East, as he begins his administration.

I see the work of gods who pile tower-high the pride of those who were nothing, and dash present grandeur down.
- Euripides, in The Trojan Women, referring to the fall of Troy

The inauguration of Barack Obama, "whose father less than sixty years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant," is both a culmination and a beginning. The culmination is the milestone represented by the arrival of a black man in the office of president of the United States. That achievement reaches back to the founding ideals of the Republic - "all men are created equal" - which have been fulfilled in a new way, even as it resonates around a world in which for centuries white imperialists have subjected people of color to oppression. The event fully justifies the national and global jubilation it has touched off. This much is truly accomplished, signed and sealed.
The beginning is, at the very least, the beginning of post-George W. Bush America, and fact-tempered hope rather than joy must be the keynote. In this context, the event is like a candle that has been lit in a dark and gusty room. How high its light will blaze is anything but clear. For the election of this unreasonably talented and appealing man occurred together with a remarkable array of crises, of which the economic one is only the newest. A man and an hour: a familiar matchup. A lot has been said about the man. Analyzing the makeup of the new administration has become the new Kremlinology, and a good deal of ink has been spilled pondering whether the avatar of "vision" has opted instead for the status quo, whether the fresh breeze from the hustings has already stagnated in the swamps of the capital, whether a bold campaign platform is being traded in for mainstream governance. And it is true that a centrist drift has been unmistakable. Joe Biden as vice president, Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, Robert Gates as defense secretary and Larry Summers as chief economic adviser - these are hardly fresh faces. The $275 billion tax cut as part of the stimulus plan was not calculated to please the Democratic "base." Yet other appointments, especially those to environmental posts, have suggested a more venturesome presidency. And public expectations are high: nearly 80 percent of the people are hopeful about his presidency.
But what of the hour - the broad shape of the new world that Obama and all of us will face? If only the economic crisis were involved, the path ahead would have something of the known and familiar. Economic cycles come and go, and even the Great Depression eased up in a little more than a decade. But this year's crisis is attended by - or embedded in - at least four others of even larger scope. The second is the shortage of natural resources, beginning with fossil fuels. Oil prices have fallen sharply from their peak of last summer, but does anyone doubt that when the economy bounces back those prices will rise with it?
A third crisis - less on the public mind, perhaps, because it is so old it is taken for granted - is the spread of nuclear arms and other weapons of mass destruction. The problem is not so much an arms race (though Russia has just announced a step-up in its production of intercontinental ballistic missiles and the Defense Department is bent on modernizing the US arsenal) as arms seepage, arms osmosis, owing to the deadly know-how that is spreading from brain to brain in a kind of virtual pollution.
A fourth crisis is the ecological one, comprising global warming, the wholesale human-caused annihilation of species, population growth, water and land shortage, and much else. Like nuclear danger, the planetary ecological crisis threatens something that has never been at stake before our era: the natural foundations of life on which humans and all species depend for survival. Economic and military ups and downs are for a season only. Extinction is forever.
Cutting across all these crises is a fifth that will be of immediate concern to the new president: the failure of the American bid for global empire and the consequent decline of American influence abroad. The roots of the American will to empire go deep into history but reached full flower in the Bush administration. The bid has run aground in the sands of Iraq and in the mountains of Afghanistan, among other places. Even in the unlikely event that Obama escapes those quagmires without precipitating new fiascoes, the appetite for military takeovers of other countries (an idea already thoroughly discredited more than a generation ago in Vietnam) is going to be dead for a long time. The world is not going to be run by the Pentagon, and everyone knows it. The downfall of overambitious, overreaching empires is an old tale. Yet if the other crises on the agenda are to be addressed, the world must be run somehow or other. The reason is not that anyone loves world government but that the problems present themselves on a global basis and will not yield to provincial solutions. The American decline thus creates - or perhaps merely accentuates - a global political vacuum. It will not be enough to mouth the words "cooperation" and "multilateralism." Something more muscular, something more definite, will be required. (In this effort, by definition a common one, the United States must of course play a significant role.)
The Gordian Knot
The contemporary crises are interwoven, forming a kind of Gordian knot. The world does not have the luxury of dealing with them seriatim. Consider the relationship of the collapsing economy to the collapsing environment. Joseph Stiglitz has noted that economists are wondering if the graph of the economic crisis will eventually prove to be V-shaped or U-shaped; but he argues that it will prove to be L-shaped. Indeed, there can be neither a V, a U or any other upward-turning graph if the remedy does not include a green revolution and a sustainable-energy program. A dirty recovery, even if possible, would be worse than no recovery. It would be the quickest path to a bigger bust. The upturn cannot in truth be "re-" anything - short of revolution - for the just-crashed "successful" economy, excellent as it was in producing cheap goods, was also producing environmental catastrophe. (Paradoxically, the recession, by cutting back on fossil-fuel use, may have done more to ease global warming than electric cars or solar panels could have done in a comparable period.) Environmentalists have long observed that if China tries to reach Western standards of living along the automotive, carbon-gushing Western path, the planet will be cooked to a cinder in short order. Now we are all in a sense in the Chinese boat. China can't have the economy we so recently had, and we can't have it again either. We'll all have to have something quite different.
The same is true of US military power, discredited by the Iraq and Afghanistan quagmires. Additional follies of this sort also have become unaffordable. To the extent that America is to be powerful in the twenty-first century, it will have to be so by cultivating a quite different sort of power.
At a glance, this tangle of crises might seem merely to be the result of a colossal accident - a world-historic pileup on the global thruway. Yet in addition to being interconnected, the crises have striking features in common, suggesting shared roots. To begin with, all are self-created. They arise from pathologies of our own activity, or perhaps hyperactivity. The Greek tragedians understood well those disasters whose seeds lie above all in one's own actions. No storm or asteroid or external enemy is the cause. Today, the economic crash is the result of investment run amok: the "masters of the universe" are the authors of their own (and everyone's) downfall. The nuclear weapons that threaten to return in wrath to American cities were born in New Mexico. The oil is running short because we are driving too many cars to too many shopping malls. The global ecosphere is heading toward collapse because of the success, not the failure (until recently), of the modern economy. The invasion of Iraq was the American empire's self-inflicted wound - a disaster of choice, so to speak. All we had to do to escape it was not to do it. Here and elsewhere, the work of our own hands rises up to strike us.
All the crises are also the result of excess, not scarcity. Too much credit was packaged in too many ways by people who were too smart, too busy, too greedy. Our energy use was too great for the available reserves. The nuclear weapon overfulfilled the plans for great-power war, making it - and potentially ourselves - obsolete through oversuccess. The economic activity of humanity - the "throughput" of productivity, to use James Gustave Speth's term for the sheer quantity of natural stuff processed by the economy and dumped back into the ecosphere - was too voluminous to be sustained by fragile natural systems. The environmentalists' word "sustainability" applies more broadly. The collateralized debt obligations, the oil use, the spread of WMDs, the military pretensions of empire: all are "unsustainable" and crashing at once. Taken together, the crises add up to a new era of limits, which now are pressing in on all sides to correct overreaching.
All the crises (but especially those that are endangering the ecosphere) involve theft by the living from their posterity. It's often said that revolutions, like the god Saturn, devour their children. We are committing a slow-motion, cross-generational equivalent of this offense. My generation, the baby boomers - ominously nicknamed "the boomers" - has been cannibalizing the future to provision the present. Though we are not killing our children directly, we are spending their money, eating their food, cutting down their cherry orchards. Intergenerational justice has been a subject more fit for academic seminars than for newspaper headlines. The question has been, What harm are we doing to generations yet unborn? But the time frame has been shortened and the malign transactions are now occurring between generations still alive. The dollars we have spent are coming directly out of our children's paychecks. The oil we burn is being drawn down from their reserves. The nuclear weapons we cling to for a dubious "security" will burn down their cities. The atmosphere we are heating up will scorch their fields and drown their shorelines. A "new era of responsibility" must above all mean responsibility to them. If it is true that all the crises are part of this larger crisis, then the economic crisis may simply be the means by which the larger adjustment is being set in motion, in effect dictating a forced march into the sustainable world.
All the crises are characterized by double standards, which everywhere block the way to solutions. One group of nations, led by the United States, lays claim to the lion's share of the world's wealth, to an exclusive right to possess nuclear weapons, to a disproportionate right to pollute the environment and even to a dominant position in world councils, while everyone else is expected to accept second-class status. But since solutions to all the crises must be global to succeed, and global agreement can only be based on equity, the path to success is cut off.
Finally, all the crises display one more common feature: all have been based on the wholesale manufacture of delusions. The operative word here is "bubble." A bubble, in the stock market or anywhere, is a real-world construct based on fantasies. When the fantasy collapses, the construct collapses, and people are hurt. Disillusion and tangible harm go together: as imaginary wealth and power evaporate, so does real wealth and power. The equity exposed as worthless was always phony, but real people really lose their jobs. The weapons of mass destruction in the invaded country were fictitious, but the war and the dying are actual. The "safety" provided by nuclear arms is waning, if it ever existed, but the holocaust, when it comes, though fantastical, will be no fantasy. The "limits on growth" were denied, but the oil reserves didn't get the message. The "uncertainty" about global warming - cooked up by political hacks and backed by self-interested energy companies - is fake, but the Arctic ice is melting anyway.
A New Stance Toward Reality
One day someone will undertake a comprehensive study of how all these bubbles grew and why they were inflated at the same time. It will be a story of a crisis of integrity of the institutions at the apex of American life. It will recount how the largest government, business, military and media organizations, as if obedient to a single command, began to tell lies to themselves and others in pursuit of or subservience to wealth and power. Individual deceivers must arrange their untruths by themselves, by flat-out conscious lying, self-deception or a combination of the two. Huge bureaucracies have wider options. Banks, hedge funds, ratings agencies, regulatory agencies, intelligence services, the White House, the Pentagon and mainstream news organizations can grind inconvenient truths to dust, layer by bureaucratic layer, until the convenient lies that had been wanted all along are presented to the satisfied money- or war-hungry decision-makers at the top. The study of these operations will be a story of groupthink; of basic facts relegated to footnotes; of wishes tweaked into facts; of deepening secrecy; of complex models, mathematical or ideological, used to supplant, not illumine, reality; of new offices created to draw false new conclusions from old facts; of threat inflation; of the sinking careers of truth-tellers and the rising careers of truth-twisters. It would be interesting, for instance, to compare the creation of the illusions of the real estate bubble with the creation of the claim that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. In both cases contrary facts were readily available at the base of the system but were filtered out as the reports went up the chain. For a somewhat contrasting, top-down model, the White House method for suppressing the truth about global warming within government agencies is instructive. In that case, the science was duly gathered but often squelched at the last minute by political appointees editing the reports.
A concluding chapter of the study will note that the rudiments of a new stance toward reality began to be articulated. Its motto can be the famous comment a senior Bush adviser made to writer Ronald Suskind, whom he belittled as belonging to the "reality-based community," which, the adviser said, believed that "solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." But that was no longer true, for "we're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality." Over at the American International Group, the recipient of $152.5 billion in federal bailout funds, then-chief Maurice Greenberg was saying much the same thing in happier days: "This is never going to get any better than it is today. We're so big, we're never going to swim against the tide. We are the tide." In short, the relationship between observation and action had been reversed. Reality was not the field of operation in which you acted, and whose limits you must respect; it was, like a play or movie, a scenario to be penned by human authors. Fact had to adjust to ideology, not the other way around.
Obama, of course, cannot wait for such a study to appear. He must batter his way out of the various bubbles and lay his hands on what is real immediately. It will not be easy. His election has done part of the job, but the mists of illusion still hover over the land. Fantasies of wealth and power, not to speak of superpower, die hard. Happy hour is more pleasant than the morning after. For bubble thinking was projected beyond the deluded institutions to national politics as a whole. The falsehoods that led to war, the fact-averse ideology that inspired the bid for empire, the investments based on fictitious ratings and the denial of the evidence of global warming: none of these grew in a vacuum. They were supported or tolerated or insufficiently discredited by the media and other organizations that inform and constitute the mainstream. The credit and debt booms were national, corporate and personal, symptoms of a nation living beyond its means at all levels. The facts of global warming, it is true, were increasingly accepted by the public - but not by the president it put in office, and there was little appetite for measures, like a gas tax, to cut back carbon emissions. As global warming intensified, the iconic American vehicle of the era was the gas-devouring, pseudo-military Hummer - an imperial auto if there ever was one. The grandiose conceptions of American power found a ready audience, as reflected in election results. They linger still as troops shift, with Obama's blessing, from the unpopular Iraq quagmire to the better accepted Afghanistan quagmire.
In short, the mainstream, like a river that jumps its bed and ravages the countryside, has overflowed the levees of reality and carried the country to disaster after disaster in every area of national life: military, economic and ecological. These depredations have paradoxically led a groggy public to yearn for the stability that Obama's centrist cabinet choices seem to promise. But they know - Obama, who denounced the "dead zone that politics had become," told them in the campaign - that these appointees had a hand in creating the ills they are now charged with addressing.
"Reality" has bifurcated in a manner confusing to politicians and citizens alike. On the one side is political reality, which by definition means centrist, mainstream opinion. On the other side is the reality of events, heading in quite a different direction. If Obama makes mainstream choices, he is called "pragmatic." And it may well be so in political terms, as the poll results attest. But political pragmatism in current circumstances may be real folly, as it was on the eve of the Iraq War and in the years of the finance bubble preceding the crash. Smooth sailing down the middle of the Niagara River carries you over Niagara Falls. The danger is not that Obama's move into the mainstream will offend a tribe called "the left" or his "base" but that by adjusting to a center that is out of touch, he will fail to address the crises adequately and will lose his effectiveness as president.
The difference between merely political pragmatism and the real thing is illustrated by the recently ended career of George Bush. From 2001 until 2006, he and his party dominated politics. Karl Rove's dreams of a permanent Republican majority looked feasible. The values voters, the soccer moms, the Reagan Democrats and so forth were all lining up. But another key "constituency" - one that never appears in any poll result - was quietly turning against him. It was the constituency of the real. The adjustable-rate mortgages were heading south, the energy markets were nonplussed, the warlords of Afghanistan were restive and the skidding Greenland ice shelf was voting with its feet. These were the votes that undid him. To paraphrase the old saying, Bush won power but lost the world. In the short run, the arts of delusion and deception (including self-deception) can keep politics and reality apart, but in the long run the two must meet. And then it is politics, not reality, that must adjust. Euripides understood that, too.
Hence Barack Obama's victory on November 4. He must be clear-eyed as well as brave if he is not to squander it. In this era, political safety can spell danger, for himself and for the country and world. As he faces the Himalayan problems of the twenty-first century, he should look on his stratospheric approval ratings with a wary eye. They could mean that he is adjusting too much to the rogue mainstream and not adjusting it enough to the real world. For him putting aside "childish things" means a wide berth to the dead zone. Doing so will require a toughness, even a ruthlessness, that has nothing to do with bombing villages in faraway countries. No poll can tell him what trade balances are going to be or what the people of Afghanistan or the carbon molecules are going to do, but he would be wise to let them be his masters. The path of ruling through illusion has been tried and failed. It is not open to him. He should figure out what's wrong with America and the world, honestly and directly communicate his findings to the public, do his best to fix things and then let the results speak for themselves. It's a very simple prescription - but light-years away from anything that has been tried in the United States for a very long time.
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Jonathan Schell is the Harold Willens Peace Fellow at The Nation Institute and teaches a course on the nuclear dilemma at Yale. He is the author of "The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger."

Here are some reviews of this great author's latest book "The Seventh Decade"

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
kudos to Schell, again, November 18, 2007
By
Winslow Myers "Beyond War volunteer" (USA) - See all my reviews Since he published The Fate of the Earth, Jonathan Schell has shown himself to be the most cogent and unflinching thinker on the planet about the dilemmas of nuclear weaponry. He has evolved an elegant style that gets beyond the portentousness, perhaps unavoidable given the subject, of his earlier classic. But like The Fate of the Earth, The Seventh Decade is composed in a style of high responsibility, as if our lives were dependent upon the success of his arguments, which in a sense they are. This latest book is perhaps his best yet. In a kind of dividend of the main direction of his thought, he provides the clearest analysis I've seen of our government's ultimate rationale for the invasion of Iraq, set in the larger context of American global strategy. In a refreshing refusal to demonize Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, Schell calmly untangles their motivations from the record of events and policy statements, and shows why their larger strategy of total American military domination of the globe, while well-intentioned and even daring, has not only not worked to slow nuclear proliferation, but has actually accelerated it. Schell shows exactly why our post-9/11 American experiment with empire as a way to protect ourselves from both other nuclear powers and from terrorism contains built-in contradictions that doom our hegemonic intentions to inevitable failure. He returns to the bizarre but exhilarating moment of Reykjavik 1986, where Gorbachev and Reagan came close to agreeing to give up their nuclear arsenals altogether, as not only a tragic might-have-been but a model for future efforts. In the end, because Schell faces all the difficulties and complexities directly, this turns out to be a hopeful book about a terrifying subject: p. 14" "Not since the world's second nuclear bomb was dropped on Nagasaki has history's third use of a nuclear weapon seemed more likely." If only our leaders would take a quiet day to reflect alongside Schell! But they probably won't, unless we citizens get involved and ask new questions of presidential candidates, like: Is it realistic to think we can solve the nuclear dilemma by endlessly maintaining our double standard of nukes for the "good guys" and no nukes for the "bad guys"?

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
A Must Read For the Concerned Layperson and Expert Scholar Alike, December 25, 2007
By
Bruce Roth (Atlanta, Georgia) - See all my reviews I thoroughly enjoy reading Schell. He is a brilliant wordsmith and master of metaphor. Schell's keen insight added a new dimension to my understanding of the history of nuclear weapons and their proper role in our future security. There is nothing arcane in The Seventh Decade. It is filled with interesting, informative, and important lessons from history that Americans in particular must be mindful of in order to avoid sharing the fate of every previous great world power, and humanity in general must learn in order to avert causing its own doom. Bruce A. Roth Founder of Daisy Alliance (www.daisyalliance.org) Author of "No Time To Kill" No Time To Kill

7 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
Overemphasizes the Past, November 26, 2007
By
Loyd E. Eskildson "Pragmatist" (Phoenix, AZ.) - See all my reviews Schell is undoubtedly correct asserting that the threat of nuclear weapons has increased since 9/11 - the risk of Pakistan's weapons falling into terrorist hands is real, Iran's possible weapon-making is a frequent front-page news item, and North Korea continues to threaten. Schell also argues that the U.S.'s switch from diplomatic pressure to military action to enforce non-proliferation creates additional pressure for Iran and North Korea to continue their efforts; worse yet is the administration's refusal to take first use of nuclear weapons off the table. In addition, the Bush administration upset Russia just prior to 9/11 by pursuing "Star Wars" (SDI) and expanding NATO to include some previous U.S.S.R. areas, Japan is rethinking its "no nuclear weapons" policy in light of North Korea, and Taiwan is probably considering such as well due to China's continual threats and the U.S.'s unwillingness to offer iron-clad guarantees for Taiwan's security. Meanwhile, Brazil announced in 2004 that it was enriching uranium for power uses - a process that only needs to be extended to create atomic weapons, Britain is undertaking a $40 billion or so updating of its nuclear submarines and weapons, and the U.S. is also spending billions on its own updating. The shortcomings of "Seventh Decade" (of nuclear weapons) are that most of its pages are spent on actions 30+ years prior, it contains little if anything new, and it offers little in the way of recommendations.

Faith in Mozart and Updike

2009-01-27T16:42:00.007-06:00

When I got up this morning, I thought that I would write about Mozart and my love for his music. Appropriate because today is Mozart's birthday. I have recently been quite enamored with the genius of his music, lately becoming quite preoccupied with Mozart's piano sonatas(my late Uncle Charlie's favorite). One of my uncle's favorite books was "In the Beauty of the Lillies," a novel by John Updike which describes a pastor's severe crisis with faith. This afternoon I learned that Updike(my favorite author) died at the age of 76 of lung cancer. His writing was meticulous and marvelously descriptive. I found some very interesting interviews on Youtube. Here is John with Charlie Rose:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmRjgnGVJBg&NR=1

Here is an interview with the Boston Globe:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlD6DmWBU4o

Here is perhaps his last TV interview:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZexDdfd-lg

Jay Parini of The Guardian wrote this great piece about Updike today:

knew John Updike a little. When I was in high school, I sent him a letter asking about some aspect of his novel The Poorhouse Fair (1959), which I adored. He replied generously, with care and kindness. We corresponded occasionally, and met once for lunch in Boston. I saw him now and then at various literary occasions. He was a shy, slightly awkward, gentlemanly person, with a courtly and self-effacing manner that seemed out of place in the noisy and boisterous world around him.
He was also, of course, one of the luminous figures – with Bellow, Mailer, Vonnegut, Sontag, Snodgrass - of his literary generation. I have in my study a dog-eared row of Updike's novels, story collections, poetry volumes, and fat compilations of essays that stretches the width of the room. Year after year, from the delicate early stories and novels of life in small town Pennsylvania, through his countless adventures in other fictive arenas, Updike never ceased to produce books that found a wide readership and critical acclaim - although many shrewd critics, such as James Wood, offered cogent dissenting voices.
For my money, the best Updike lies in the early work that he set in Pennsylvania. I grew up nearby, in a small town, and 'identified' - as they say in high school classes - with his heroes. Nobody caught the special smell and taste of the air in that part of Pennsylvania, its quality of light, the appeal of its surrounding woods and undulant farmlands, as well as Updike did. Pigeon Feathers (1962) is perhaps still his best volume of stories in this regard. The Centaur (1963), too, is unforgettable as a portrait of high school life in the 1950s. Updike's father was a high school teacher, and he knew that world as well as anyone - from the inside out. The ennui and frustration of living in rural Pennsylvania suffuse Rabbit, Run (1960) and the remaining three Rabbit novels. The four of them, taken together, form a vivid tapestry of life of a certain kind, a certain era.
Updike hit the bestseller lists with Couples (1968), which caught the sexual amorality of the 1960s in wealthy suburbia with an almost visionary energy of perception. I reread this novel many times, marvelling at how the author lovingly evoked the surface details of life, and how he slowly but surly creative narrative momentum.
Narrative momentum was often a problem in his novels. I had trouble finishing them, especially toward the end. I wouldn't happily reread A Month of Sundays (1975) or Memories of the Ford Administration (1992); nor have I any urge to revisit S. (1988) or Brazil (1994).The last few novels did not tempt in the slightest, although I dutifully paid for and began each of them.
But Updike could be a fine critic, too. One always looked forward to his reviews in the New Yorker, as well as his essays on art in the New York Review of Books. I recall with genuine relish his early essays on Karl Barth, Borges, Nabokov, and others. And yet I doubt I shall revisit most of his criticism. (Great critics, I suspect, are rarer than great novelists or great poets.)
What I prized most about Updike, though, was his marvellous ear for a sentence. In the stories especially, he caught the shimmer of light on the grass, for example, with uncanny skill. He could describe a twitching face, a wrinkled elderly hand, a fond gesture of affection, with shocking ease. I doubt I shall ever forget the painful stories about a family coming apart in Problems (1979); 'Separating' is one story I've read again and again through the years, with increasing admiration.
My guess is that he will long be remembered as a master of the short story, the American equivalent of Maupassant. He will also be considered as a faithful reporter of his era, one of those writers who live fixedly in their own time, paying a kind of rueful but affectionate attention to its idiosyncrasies, its foibles, and its passing glories.

John, your gentile and perceptive spirit will be missed. Your literary brilliance will live on forever!

Back to Mozart, Garrison Keillor shared an interesting Writers Almanac segment today about Wolfgang Mozart, who died a pauper and was buried in a mass grave.

It's the birthday of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, born in 1756 in Salzburg, which is now in Austria.
Mozart's father, Leopold, was one of Europe's leading music educators, and he took Mozart and his sister on tours throughout Europe. Young Mozart began composing original work at age five. During a trip to Italy, Mozart amazed his hosts when he listened only once to the performance of a Gregorio Allegri composition and then wrote it out from memory.
Mozart moved to Vienna in 1781, and in 1782 he married Constanze Weber. The couple had six children, but only two of them survived into adulthood. Mozart continued to compose music, and he wrote his famous opera The Marriage of Figaro (1786).
No one knows for sure why Mozart died at age 35. Many people speculate that he died of mercury poisoning while being treated for syphilis. Others think he died from eating badly cooked pork. Some insist that Mozart was murdered by his rival, Antonio Salieri. Mozart was buried in a mass grave because the country was battling an outbreak of bubonic plague, not because his family could not afford a proper burial.
Mozart said, "When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer — say traveling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep — it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best, and most abundantly. Whence and how they come, I know not, nor can I force them."

That last quote is marvelous. Here is to great minds :)

p.s. The great writer Kurt Vonnegut was slammed by Fox's James Rosen in his obituary. I wonder how the mainstream will paint Updike? Interesting.

Is this fair and balanced??

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SiVasR2Gzo&NR=1

Bus Driver Shocked at Non Believers

2009-01-24T12:26:00.003-06:00

England (ChattahBox) – A bus driver has refused to drive his route, due to a collection of new advertisements by an Atheist organization, that has been putting it’s message across the sides of buses.
Ron Heather, a 62 year old Christian man, says he was horrified by the slogans, which he had been shocked to see plastered to the side of his bus.
“I was just about to board and there it was staring me in the face. My first reaction was horror. I’d heard about this silly campaign in London but I had no idea it was coming to Southampton.”
The messages started appearing after a collection of Christian slogans were plastered all over London, from subway stations, to bus benches, and were created by comedian Ariane Sherine, and activist Richard Dawkins. They read “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying, and enjoy your life.”

They got the Advertising Standards Association involved and they failed to take God's side:

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has said that an athiest bus poster campaign does not break the advertising code. The ASA comments follow complaints led by Christain Voice, an anti-gay evangelical movement that claim that the advert's claim that God "probably" doesn't exist was misleading.
There will not be an investigation and the case is now closed.
In a statement the ASA said it had "carefully assessed" the 326 complaints it received.
The ads have appeared on 800 buses across Britain.
"There is probably no God," they read.
"Now stop worrying and enjoy your life."
The £140,000 campaign also uses ad space on the London Underground and two large LCD screens on Oxford Street. It has been funded by leading humanists such as scientist Richard Dawkins and is the UK’s first ever atheist advertising campaign.
The ASA code of conduct requires advertising to be factually correct and some Christians claimed the statement should capable of substantiation to comply with the rules.
"Some complained that the ad was offensive and denigratory to people of faith," the ASA said today.
"Others challenged whether the ad was misleading because the advertiser would not be able to substantiate its claim that God 'probably' does not exist.
"The ASA Council concluded that the ad was an expression of the advertiser’s opinion and that the claims in it were not capable of objective substantiation.
"Although the ASA acknowledges that the content of the ad would be at odds with the beliefs of many, it concluded that it was unlikely to mislead or to cause serious or widespread offence."
A Christian fundamentalist preacher known for his homophobia had led complaints against the ad campaign.
Stephen Green, leader of Christian Voice, has protested at Pride events.
"The advertisers cannot hide behind the ASA's 'matters of opinion' exclusion, because no person or body is named as the author of the statement," he said last week.
"It is given as a statement of fact and that means it must be capable of substantiation if it is not to break the rules.
"There is plenty of evidence for God, from peoples' personal experience, to the complexity, interdependence, beauty and design of the natural world.
"But there is scant evidence on the other side, so I think the advertisers are really going to struggle to show their claim is not an exaggeration or inaccurate, as the ASA code puts it."
Mr Green claimed that the Bible would be immune from any questions of substantiation.

What did a blogger says on the Daily Echo?
Pressure group Christian Voice has questioned the campaign but the Methodist Church said it was a ‘good thing’ to engage people in debating the deeper questions of life. good old methodist and they got it right its good to have an open debate, because there is no god or gods its all man made.

Well, people should not be afraid to engage in such questions. It may help bring people together when they realize we are all in this together, with or without divine pampering.

And here is Richard Dawkin's comments on all of this:

OXFORD, England -- All they are saying is give atheism a chance. Earlier this month, 800 buses rolled out of depots across Britain plastered with advertisements cheerfully informing people that "there's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life."
Sponsored by the British Humanist Association, the campaign is the brainchild of a comedian who had seen Christian messages on buses, looked up the Web sites of the organizations behind them and found warnings that, as a nonbeliever, she was destined to go to hell.
The campaign's highest-profile backer was Richard Dawkins, a biology professor at Oxford University and the author of "The God Delusion," a defense of scientifically based atheism that became a bestseller in Britain and the United States. Dawkins pledged to match donations to the campaign up to $8,250 -- a figure that was quickly reached.
Passionate but gentlemanly, with a professorial air, Dawkins spoke recently with the Los Angeles Times in his Victorian-era home in Oxford.
Question: Were you surprised that so many individual donors responded to the campaign to mount bus advertisements? Answer: I'm surprised and delighted but also somewhat embarrassed.
The original target was 5,500 pounds (about $8,250), which I offered to match and we thought that we'd be lucky to get. . . . It would have been enough for buses for a brief period in London. What happened was huge numbers of people gave small sums -- 10 pounds, 15 pounds. ... The final figure is something like 130,000.
That's why I said I was embarrassed, because that is too much money to spend on a bus campaign. ... I was actually in favor of diverting the money to something else, which I thought the donors would approve. But other members of the group felt that (as) the money had been given for the bus campaign they were legally obliged to spend it on that campaign.
The campaign's Web site quotes you in "The God Delusion" as saying that even the declaration "There is no God" is a statement of faith, and that "reason alone could not propel one to total conviction that anything definitely does not exist." Doesn't that make you more of an agnostic than an out-and-out atheist?
I don't think that total atheism is a totally rational position. Anyone that definitely says there is no God -- you can't rationally say that any more than you can say there are definitely no unicorns, there are no dragons, there are no fairies. ... To the extent that I'm an "a-fairyist" or an "a-unicornist," I am an atheist.
The bus advertisements tell people to "relax" because there is no God. But now is a time of economic stress for a lot of people who might derive some comfort from their religious beliefs. Isn't this an insensitive moment to deprive people of that comfort?
Yeah, it probably is. When this slogan was dreamed up, not by me ... that was before this economic crisis. I wasn't happy even then with the slogan because it seemed to me to have a whiff of hedonism about it. I think I'd have preferred something like, not "Enjoy your life," but "Spend your life doing good," or something more high-minded.
Do you see any redeeming values in religion or a belief in God?
You can find individuals who are religious who are also good people, and even people who do good things motivated by religion. I suspect you'll find a lot of missionaries all over Africa and New Guinea and places who are doing good in one form or another. But I don't think there's any general reason, any logical pathway, that goes from being religious to being good. ...
Q: For those people who are willing to give up religion and belief in God, what would you recommend as a substitute worldview? A: As a worldview, scientific rationalism. Q: As also a way of answering moral questions? A: Religion should not be a way of answering moral questions either, and to the extent that it is, it should not be relied upon.
Nobody should get their morals from the Bible or the Koran. It's true you can find good bits in the Bible. But how do you decide what are the good bits? The answer is on non-biblical grounds. So we have some non-biblical way of deciding that. ...
The scientific way of thinking and reasoning can also be deployed in moral reasoning. ... Science can't tell you what's right or wrong, but it can help you think more clearly in your reasoning about what's right or wrong.
Q: There are some scientists who don't feel that science and religion are mutually exclusive. Do you see any way to reconcile the two? A: The very fact that there are individual scientists who are religious means that somebody can reconcile them. I think it's hard to reconcile.
When you meet a scientist who claims to be religious, you want to ask them exactly what it is they believe. Many of them turn out to be religious in the Einsteinian sense: They have a sort of reverence for mystery, for the wonder of the universe, the deep mystery of the base cosmos, those kinds of things. It doesn't mean they believe in any kind of conscious, supernatural intelligence. It most certainly doesn't mean that they believe in any sort of creature who can hear your prayer and read your thoughts and forgive your sins. ...
A few of them actually believe in the resurrection and the virgin birth. They're a complete mystery to me. I think they must divide their minds.
Q: How do feel your books have been received in America? A: Very good. Sales have been terrific. It makes me wonder whether America's religiosity has been exaggerated.
I go there quite a lot, and my impression increasingly is that there are two Americas, and it's almost pulling apart, like two species. And it's not just a regional thing; it's not just red states and blue states. ...
You go to a town, whether it's an intellectual center like New York or San Francisco, whether it's somewhere like Kansas or Oklahoma, and even in the places where you don't expect it, there are plenty of people there who are intellectuals who feel, perhaps, beleaguered. And when somebody like me comes into town to give a talk, they flock in, and I get huge audiences, very enthusiastic.
And they tend to say to me in the book signing afterwards, nearly over and over again, I get thanked. "Thank you for coming to Little Rock," or whatever it is. "I finally realized there are other people like me in this town." They go to the auditorium and they find themselves surrounded by like-minded people.

So it's time to make up your own mind on this. More importantly, don't forget to be compassionate and honest when you relay your feelings to others about this. My toughest challenge will be with my wife because she is a believer who feels sorry for me because I have too many questions. My son is caught in the middle. I still go to church, but for the fellowship and the positive encouraging atmosphere.

Hope

2009-01-20T08:48:00.003-06:00

I'm listening to Woodward and Bernstein on MSNBC and they are talking about the hope of a psychic shift in the country and that Barack Obama's enthusiasm may bring about this sense of renewal.

A poem I wrote this morning while thinking about the inauguration:

hope

we are looking for hope
hope that makes us smile
hope that makes us dream
hope that comforts us

we are looking for love
love that fills the void
love that fills the heart
love that gives us peace

we are grasping for peace
a peace of mind that lasts
a kind of spiritual map
a kind of kindness that lasts

i am looking for promise
i am looking for optimism
i am looking for positive change
i am looking for a better world

god speed barack obama

Ayn Rand Etc.

2009-01-17T22:33:00.004-06:00

Watch this interesting Phil Donahue episode from the 1970's.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GS6vxb4H3M

This is very good. Guest Ayn Rand(best known for The Fountainhead and other great books) explains why belief in the promise of heaven may decrease the probability in a belief in doing all we can now to make THIS life better and more meaningful. If we can rationalize that it doesn't matter on this Earth what we do, then we can get into a dangerous area. What also bothers Rand is religion's preoccupation with some sort of end of the world scenario. Of course, Christ comes to save us all in the event of a nuclear holocaust. I wouldn't bet on it. I think we are responsible for our own actions here on Earth.

Here is what one Amazon reviewer said of Rand's "For the New Intellectual,"

For The New Intellectual, by Ayn Rand, is one of the better philosophy books I have read. It is comprised of the title essay, and 3 chapters dealing with Rand's three best novels: We The Living, The Fountainhead, and Atlas Shrugged. In the title essay, Rand makes an excellent case for the need of a new breed of intellectuals. Her objectivist philosophy ties in well with the writing, lending the power of reason and logic to her sometimes extreme statements. Of the final three chapters, I found the treatment of Atlas Shrugged to be the most impressive. Rand gives commentary on many of the great speeches and conversations from the book, ending with the amazing "This is John Galt Speaking" speech. While her comments are short, they lend insight into what she intended the different pieces to portray to the reader, and what they mean to her. On the whole, I think 'For The New Intellectual' is a pretty good book. Only the first 50-60 pages are her philosophical writings, but the rest of the book is a valuable tool for anyone who is a fan of her novels. I would recommend 'For The New Intellectual' to anyone interested in learning more about the objectivist philosophy and anyone who has read her novels.

or this review:

This is definitely the best book I read in a long time. Ayn Rand's Objectivism philosophy is fascinating to anyone that loves freedom, capitalism, and reason. This is not a book that any closed-minded socialist-like thinker should read (i.e. people that believe in increased federal government control over our lives). This book rightfully criticizes the intellectuals of the 20th century that promoted socialist programs and even socialism itself. Ayn Rand was a real thinker that reminded me of how great this country was and still could be if we return to what we were when this country was created by our democratic, capitalist, and intellectual founding fathers. I am looking forward to the Atlas Shrugged movie that is in the making.

Definitely a woman with her own mind. Kind of interesting that she had sort of an anti-liberal bias. I'll have to read up more on this philosophy of objectivism. Seems to fit in nicely with the Dawkins, Dennett and Harris crowd.

Looking forward to the Obama inauguration. A lot of people have faith in this man and the whole world is watching. Expect a tremendous speech on Tuesday. :)

Farwell to Bush

2009-01-14T11:31:00.002-06:00

Did you catch George W. Bush on Larry King last night? He and Laura talked in the comfortable confines of the library in the Whitehouse. How comfortable is George around books? Really.

It was a nice folksy interview, but Bush didn't want to touch on the hard questions like capturing Bin Laden or the true character of Dick Cheney. This song is from one of my favorite musician/poets John Gorka

Brown Shirts

Brown shirts here in the White House
Brown shirts up on top of the Hill
Brown shirts can you hear them marching I swear they are marching still
Brown shirts for the good of the country
Brown shirts pride all over the land
Brown shirts give us law and orders
You'll know when you raise your hands
Brown shirts is this how it all started?
Brown shirts oh no worse than their kids
Brown shirts sure they're tough on the bad guy
Though they made him what he is

Bridge: Brown shirts Brown shirts They're a little more subtle now
Brown shirts than the "house painter" man
Brown shirts speak of God as their witness
But they would kill Jesus again
Brown shirts here in the White house
Brown shirts in their black limousines
Brown shirts over here in the New World
With fresh red unspeakable schemes

This song summarizes my feelings about both Bushes.

Let's Not Elect Any More George Bush Types as President

2009-01-08T00:02:00.004-06:00

This article was written before Obama won the election, but speaks loudly about how incompetent George W. Bush really is. I got motivated to write this post after my Mom sent me an article in http://www.truthout.org/ about this same theme. I find most interesting how they talk about Bush being sort of a privleged bully spoiled by wealth. They also delve into the Myers Briggs take on his personality. Very interesting. What are your thoughts bloggers???

We've seen America at its best and our government at its worst. Millions of Americans are beginning to realize where they fit in our democracy under Republican governance: nowhere.
—John Kerry (speaking of the Katrina disaster)

America has not always been fortunate in its statesmen. Arguably, in fact, the majority have been mediocrities, elected only because electoral politics are not about identifying and selecting the most capable leaders, but rather about identifying and selecting the most politically acceptable representative. There have, however, been a few great presidents, as well as a good many lousy ones. A strong case could be made that Bush is the standout incompetent among the failures; but that's not the case made here. Rather, our interest here lies in trying to understand what has made for such gross incompetence in the Bush administration. If we can keep these issues more in the forefront of our minds in the next election, we might be able to avoid the next Bush before he (or she) gets to the primaries. And that would be a very good thing.

"I trust that God speaks through me. Without that, I couldn’t do my job.”— George W. Bush

Why is George Bush president of the United States, despite his manifest unsuitability for the job? One explanation would be this: he was socially promoted. Social promotion occurs in the schools, of course, when parents or teachers are concerned that the negative social impact of being held back a grade in school because of poor academic performance would outweigh the benefits of repeating a grade. Among the wealthy, and especially among the politically-connected wealthy, social promotion of various kinds occurs because it's simply unthinkable that among the elite there could be any mediocrities, let alone failures. Politicians such as George Bush senior, now long past the days of his own lackluster presidency, are something like the fathers of high school football athletes reliving a lost (or never existent) glory. Their sons have to be stars because nothing less will satisfy their own dreams of greatness by proxy.
In the midst of a family dynamic of inflated expectations insert one mediocre male. Rear him to tales of family greatness. Bring him up in an environment where want and need are utterly unknown. Give him every advantage, and isolate him from the remotest possibility of failure. Send him to elite schools where his sense of superiority is further reinforced, and then hand him every professional success on a silver platter. What sort of individual will you end up with? The material of great leadership, or something else altogether?
When dealing with anything as complex as a human being, good answers to questions such as these can be hard to find. Some individuals rise far above the expectations we may have for them, despite their circumstances. Others fall below even our lowest expectations. Much seems to depend upon native character and aptitude; but when there is little native character or aptitude, then the results sometimes really are rather predictable. And so they apparently were with George junior: a spoiled, arrogant, and irresponsible adolescent grew to become a spoiled, arrogant, and irresponsible adult. Actions and their consequences have no reality for him. How could they? The human toil and the exhaustion of natural resources that lie at the root of most contemporary wealth do not have a human face or any physical reality for him. Why would they? And so Americans woke up one morning in the wake of a massive hurricane to discover the unthinkable: George Bush, surrounded by the flattery of sycophants, as hopelessly lost in the face of disaster as an adult human being could possibly be, barring a childhood spent on a deserted island.
So a first generalization to be drawn might be this: when considering a child of privilege for a leadership role, one might do well to ask "Has native aptitude or life experience done anything to season this person, and raise them above a hopelessly superficial and shallow understanding of the realities of life?" If the answer is "no", then don't vote for that child of privilege. Children of privilege can amuse themselves with many more harmless pursuits than the misadministration of the presidency of the United States.
Now, it has long been recognized that those with a hunger for power are not necessarily those whom it would be most desirable to endow with it; and there is, to a lesser degree, a parallel recognition that those who most lust after wealth are those most likely to be crippled by its attainment (think, for example, of the myth of King Midas). In the former case, the power is typically sought as an adornment of the ego, and recognition of the responsibility that must accompany the exercise of power is disdained. In the latter case, those apt to attain wealth are likely to be narrow and selfish to begin with, and the attainment of wealth often acts to further reinforce these traits by isolating the individual from the economic and social realities that everyone else must deal with.
Rather ominously, a majority of US politicians are quite wealthy; and, obviously, the majority have a lust for power.
Interestingly, we can today go far beyond the truth of these insights, thanks to some progress in the psychology of personality, to attain yet deeper insight. It happens that we now know something about the sort of person who lusts after power.
A number of studies have grown out of a personality assessment tool known as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). More specifically, MBTI research has show that one personality type (known as ESTJ) is especially drawn to wealth and power . Unfortunately, ESTJs tend to make poor choices for a leadership role, and can't really be trusted to do the right thing with wealth, either. Bush, unfortunately, is an ESTJ, so far as that assessment can be made in light of known traits.
Let's see why that's an especially bad thing in a president.
To begin with ESTJs are extroverted. Unless carefully coached, extroverts tend to:
Act, then think
Talk more than listen
Prefer breadth to depth
That is, the extrovert is apt to make fast but poor decisions because there tends to be little intellectual depth behind his choices. Bush, of course, is an extrovert, and is famous for "trusting his gut", another way of saying that there's no thought or wisdom behind his decisions. (He is also well-known for being a "C-student" and for having no interest in reading).
Next, Bush is a "Sensor." Sensors are strictly interested in what can be seen, heard, felt, smelled, or tasted. They have little imagination, and therefore are incapable of good anticipation and long range planning. (Note the excuses made for not anticipating the events of 9/11, and similar excuses made in the wake of Katrina. "Who could have anticipated this?") Sensors are also "traditionalists", who tend to look backward, clinging to the past instead of seeing the possibilities of the future. Thus, their thinking tends to be rigid and inflexible, and they are prone to be petulant and stubborn. At best, they tend to be limited to consideration of what is happening in the narrow present; and, as part of their lack of imagination, they like the very concrete. (Bush has a passion for numbers.)
Bush is also a "thinker" type, not in the sense of being an intellectual, but rather in the sense that he tends to be devoid of both empathy and compassion. (He has been carefully coached to present a different public persona, but is known to be cold, critical, and a crisp disciplinarian in private.) Caring deeply about other people doesn't come naturally to him. Bullying, however, does come naturally to the ESTJ. Malaysian academics who conducted a study of lawyers and administrators found that the most common personality type was the ESTJ (29%). Interestingly, the Australian recruitment firm, TMP Worldwide, found that 18 per cent of employees said they had been bullied - and that the worst offender was the legal profession, where 33 per cent of employees said they were experiencing bullying tactics from their bosses. Also interesting is the fact that lawyers are twice as likely as the general population to be alcoholics. (See this link.)
A young George Bush exhibits classic ESTJ behavior on the rugby field at Yale. (Photo first appeared at: http://www.progressiveliving.org/politics/week_2004_08_08.html)

Finally, Bush is a "judger." He tends to see things in terms of black and white, is inflexible, and authoritarian. Because judgers love to make decisions, extroversion is a poor trait to bring into combination with this trait. This is the sort of person likely to want thought police, with or without the excuse of terrorism. There can never be enough "law and order" for such persons, provided that they're the ones making the laws.
(Interestingly, all of these traits may well be in play in the adoption of political conservatism as a political orientation and religious fundamentalism as a belief system, but that's an essay for another day.)
So a second generalization to be drawn is this: beware any ESTJ in a position of authority, particularly a position of authority that requires vision and long-range planning.
To summarize: what we have in George Bush is a child of privilege who, as an ESTJ, lusts after power, but who lacks all aptitude for its exercise in a role such as the presidency, where aptitude for vision and long-range planning are essential. This worst of all personality types for such a role was powerfully negatively reinforced by the sociopathic tendencies that frequently arise in the families of the wealthy (attitudes of superiority, intolerance of criticism, and social , economic, and intellectual isolation). The result: among the most incompetent presidents in US history, and a catastrophe for both the United States and the world.

And one great quote from William Rivers Pitt(a guy I have interviewed on a conservative radio station) from the article Mom sent me:

Your greatness will be defined by how we rise to overcome and undo what you have done. Your greatness will stand forever if we never, ever forget the hard, bitter lessons you taught us. We are responsible for this republic, for our Constitution, and for each other. We are our brother's keeper. You taught us that by becoming our Cain. You nearly slew us, but here we stand, and we defy the place in history you would relegate us to. We defy you, and by doing so, we rise.

Amen Brother

John Lithgow

2009-01-03T22:53:00.003-06:00

One of my favorite actors is John Lithgow. His exceptional level of talent gives me great faith in the positive potential in human beings. Perhaps most commerically famous for his wackiness on "Third Rock from the Sun," the man has much more substance than what comes from the mainstream. His real genius comes from the live stage, broadway, his current play is "All My Sons," which transcends the tripe of the laugh track TV shows exponentially. Check out a great interview with Lithgow at Bill Moyer's site at:

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/01022009/watch2.html

Do you remember Lithgow from "World According to Garp" and the Twilight Zone airline passenger? He is one of the greatest actors in the world and can be mentioned along with greats such as Olivier, Stewart and Malkowvich. I was somewhat confused when John sold out to commerical TV and did the dumbed down Third Rock. He is much better than that----much much better.

Atheists Trashed by LA Times Opinion Piece

2009-01-01T10:16:00.001-06:00

This is from the LA Times today. A surprisingly biased opinion piece.

America’s most irritating atheist is at again. That tiresome Michael Newdow and a bunch of other anti-God types have filed suit to bar prayer and references to God at President-elect Barack Obama’s swearing-in on Jan. 20. Newdow also filed lawsuits to remove prayer from President George W. Bush’s inauguration ceremonies in 2001 and 2005, and you may also remember him as the crank who tried to get the phrase “under God” eliminated from the pledge of allegiance.
At least when he went after the pledge of allegiance in 2005 he could halfway make an argument that there is an expectation, particularly for school children, that it be recited regardless of a child’s beliefs. But the oath of office? That’s one person’s vow to make. Millions of people are not being asked to say it too (and in fact should politely keep quiet while he does it).
Named in the suit filed by Newdow, 17 other individuals and 10 groups, according to the Washington Post, are Chief Justice John Roberts, who will administer the oath; Saddleback church Pastor Rick Warren, who will give the invocation; and Rev. Joseph E. Lowery, who will give the benediction. Wow, this inaugural is shaping up to be one big religious hurly-burly. Liberals who support gay marriage are upset because of Warren will have a prominent place at the ceremony. Conservatives are upset because Obama will have a prominent place at the ceremony. And now atheists are upset that God will have a prominent place there, too. Obama wasn’t kidding when he said he’d bring everyone together.
But back to Newdow et al. If you don’t believe God exists, then why doesn’t it follow that phrases like “so help me God” have no meaning? And if that’s the case, then why does something meaningless matter? I have news for Newdow -- even if he managed to bar all religious references from public life it wouldn’t matter. The Soviet Union tried that; all it did was send religious fervor underground until communism ended and it came roaring back.
Besides, what would Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts be expected to do if Obama were to defy a ruling in Newdow’s favor, snatch away the Lincoln Bible and swat him on the hand? Scott Walter, the executive director of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, hit the nail on the head when he said in a statement:
Newdow's lawsuit over the inauguration is a lot like the streaker at the Super Bowl: a pale, self-absorbed distraction. And anybody who looks at it carefully can see there's not much there.

2008-12-30T17:26:00.003-06:00

My father sent me this opinion piece from Bob Herbert of the New York Times earlier today. He(my Dad) and I both have problems with George Bush's magical thinking, his failure to reason things out, his charismatic charm with little intelligence to back it up---a very dangerous combination indeed. I remember Dad worrying (or shall we say ruminating) about George Herbert Walker Bush and the possible World War Three that a mentality like that could be capable of.

Here is the opinion piece from Mr. Herbert:

You don’t hear much from him anymore. The last image most of us remember is of the president ducking a pair of size 10s that were hurled at him in Baghdad.
We’re still at war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Israel is thrashing the Palestinians in Gaza. And the U.S. economy is about as vibrant as the 0-16 Detroit Lions.
But hardly a peep have we heard from George, the 43rd.
When Mr. Bush officially takes his leave in three weeks (in reality, he checked out long ago), most Americans will be content to sigh good riddance. I disagree. I don’t think he should be allowed to slip quietly out of town. There should be a great hue and cry — a loud, collective angry howl, demonstrations with signs and bullhorns and fiery speeches — over the damage he’s done to this country.
This is the man who gave us the war in Iraq and Guantánamo and torture and rendition; who turned the Clinton economy and the budget surplus into fool’s gold; who dithered while New Orleans drowned; who trampled our civil liberties at home and ruined our reputation abroad; who let Dick Cheney run hog wild and thought Brownie was doing a heckuva job.
The Bush administration specialized in deceit. How else could you get the public (and a feckless Congress) to go along with an invasion of Iraq as an absolutely essential response to the Sept. 11 attacks, when Iraq had had nothing to do with the Sept. 11 attacks?
Exploiting the public’s understandable fears, Mr. Bush made it sound as if Iraq was about to nuke us: “We cannot wait,” he said, “for the final proof — the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”
He then set the blaze that has continued to rage for nearly six years, consuming more than 4,000 American lives and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. (A car bomb over the weekend killed two dozen more Iraqis, many of them religious pilgrims.) The financial cost to the U.S. will eventually reach $3 trillion or more, according to the Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz.
A year into the war Mr. Bush was cracking jokes about it at the annual dinner of the Radio and Television Correspondents Association. He displayed a series of photos that showed him searching the Oval Office, peering behind curtains and looking under the furniture. A mock caption had Mr. Bush saying: “Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere.”
And then there’s the Bush economy, another disaster, a trapdoor through which middle-class Americans can plunge toward the bracing experiences normally reserved for the poor and the destitute.
Mr. Bush traveled the country in the early days of his presidency, promoting his tax cut plans as hugely beneficial to small-business people and families of modest means. This was more deceit. The tax cuts would go overwhelmingly to the very rich.
The president would give the wealthy and the powerful virtually everything they wanted. He would throw sand into the regulatory apparatus and help foster the most extreme income disparities since the years leading up to the Great Depression. Once again he was lighting a fire. This time the flames would engulf the economy and, as with Iraq, bring catastrophe.
If the U.S. were a product line, it would be seen now as deeply damaged goods, subject to recall.
There seemed to be no end to Mr. Bush’s talent for destruction. He tried to hand the piggy bank known as Social Security over to the marauders of the financial sector, but saner heads prevailed.
In New Orleans, the president failed to intervene swiftly and decisively to aid the tens of thousands of poor people who were very publicly suffering and, in many cases, dying. He then compounded this colossal failure of leadership by traveling to New Orleans and promising, in a dramatic, floodlit appearance, to spare no effort in rebuilding the flood-torn region and the wrecked lives of the victims.
He went further, vowing to confront the issue of poverty in America “with bold action.”
It was all nonsense, of course. He did nothing of the kind.
The catalog of his transgressions against the nation’s interests — sins of commission and omission — would keep Mr. Bush in a confessional for the rest of his life. Don’t hold your breath. He’s hardly the contrite sort.
He told ABC’s Charlie Gibson: “I don’t spend a lot of time really worrying about short-term history. I guess I don’t worry about long-term history, either, since I’m not going to be around to read it.”
The president chuckled, thinking — as he did when he made his jokes about the missing weapons of mass destruction — that there was something funny going on.

This sounds like a Keith Olbermann diatribe, full of the critical logical arguments that should all cause us to pause and think----who is George Bush, really?

Israel Tears into Hamas, Bombs Rain Down

2008-12-29T18:02:00.005-06:00

On CNN tonight, they are covering the Israeli/Hamas conflict which seems to be getting worse by the hour. This issue is all the news is covering right now. Diplomacy will be very difficult under these circumstances. Where are the peacemakers when all of this violence is flailing out of control? How will the U.S. step into this? An initial statement by the White House says any chance of Hamas being taken seriously as an organization is decreasing quickly as bombs are continuing to come towards Israel. What will be Barack Obama's statement on this? How cautious will the statement be?

Do the people making war ever stop and think about how this will affect the children? It's a question worth answering. War is more emotional. It has little to do with reason and intellect.
That is why when the fires of war start it is nearly impossible to stop the chaos with reason, because it is deeply integrated into our primitive genetics. Love and peace are more difficult and probably further from the limbic system. (The limbic system is embryologically older than other parts of the brain. It developed to manage 'fight' or 'flight' chemicals and is an evolutionary necessity for reptiles as well as humans. Recent studies of the limbic system of tetrapods have challenged some long-held tenets of forebrain evolution. The common ancestors of reptiles and mammals had a well-developed limbic system in which the basic subdivisions and connections of the amygdalar nuclei were established.)

Hamas engages in magical thinking as evidenced by this statement in Wikipedia:

The slogan of Hamas is "God is its target, the Prophet is its model, the Qur'an its constitution: Jihad is its path and death for the sake of God is the loftiest of its wishes." Hamas states that its objective is to support the oppressed and wronged and "to bring about justice and defeat injustice, in word and deed." Hamas believes that "the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf (trust) consecrated for future Muslim generations until Judgement Day," and as such, the land cannot be negotiated away by any political leader. Hamas' covenant states that "so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences" are "in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement", stating "there is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad".

Israel and Hamas cannot reason together largely because of religion. That is truly sad. Saying there is no solution except for Jihad is sad. That leaves little room for the peacemakers. War must become extinct, but unfortunately not in my lifetime. Why does there have to be so much suffering in the world?

Anger and intolerance are the enemies of correct understanding.

Mahatma Gandhi

Other notes:

I've been thinking a lot lately about what it takes to have genuinely positive attitude. How about this quote from Mother Theresa?

Everytime you smile at someone, it is an action of love, a gift to that person, a beautiful thing.

This world can change, but it will take a lot of brave and good people to turn things around.

Simply Fantastic

2008-12-25T10:33:00.007-06:00

Check out http://www.livedaily.com/ Hit the LIVE SESSION icon on top and away you go :) The first three artists I sampled were simply fantastic. 3 out of 3, not bad. A lot of good young talent :) Ingrid Michaelson, Matt Costa and Gabe Dixon.....what can I say? Simply fantastic.

Then we find groups like Apollo Sunshine and Calexico(Joey Burns performs a live session). For more developed tastes, it's Tally Hall or Rademacher.

The acoustic mastery of Imaad Wasif and the brilliance of The 88.

There are soft and smooth sounds of Judith Owens and Rachael Yamagata. I have definitely hit the jackpot with this website.

BTW....I played Away in a Manger at Immanuel Trinity last night at the midnight service and it was received very well. Live performances bring out the best in me sometimes. Thinking about playing today at my folks Christmas, will bring the guitar to see what happens. Happy Holidays everyone!

Till next time.....

More Rick Warren Type Reasoning Refuted

2008-12-24T10:21:00.003-06:00

A Novel Response to Rick Warren

One of the interesting developments of the past several years has been what seems to be a more prominent place in American dialogues for the voices of non-believers. Best-selling books on the subject of atheism have emerged from Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchins. One of the interesting developments of the past several years has been what seems to be a more prominent place in American dialogues for the voices of non-believers. Best-selling books on the subject of atheism have emerged from Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchins. A humorous examination of religious belief was offered up in cinematic format by Bill Maher. All of this has more or less been part of rather uncharacteristically mainstream attention, much to the chagrin of self-labeled culture warriors.
Of course, despite the odd setback, like getting caught having solicitous, extra-marital, homosexual relations with your meth dealer, the evangelical movement is alive and well in America. Exhibit A: Pastor Rick Warren. In a recent video, philosopher Daniel Dennett offers some interesting responses to some of Warren's claims, including the claim that morality and a belief in evolution aren't reconcilable.
But, as he does in his book Breaking the Spell, he also posits some interesting premises of his own. Namely, that religion is a natural phenomenon and that there's something to be learned, something valuable, in understanding how and why it occurs in human culture. Furthermore, he asks us to entertain the idea of teaching all the facts of all religions in public schools.
Personally, I'm a big fan of this idea. It's one that I've brought up for years in discussions about religion in the realm of public education. After all, it's not discussion of religion that I take issue with. In fact, the discussion isn't really about keeping religion out of schools anyway. It's about whether or not we maintain the American tradition, given to us by the genius pairing of the Establishment and Free Exercise clauses, of not allowing a particular religion to become dominant in state affairs. Teaching religious philosophy and theology generally does not strike me as violating these principles.
However, as Dennett points out, religious leaders have not, so far at least, been very keen on this idea. To me, this is an indication that the discussion is not really about stamping out all discussion of religion, but rather about controlling that discussion and, most specifically, about whose faith becomes dominant in that discussion. Though proponents of teaching Intelligent Design, for example, frequently make a plea to "teach the controversy", it would seem that the global controversy of many competing religious ideologies is something they would rather not examine.

Obama Will Take the Environment Seriously

2008-12-24T10:18:00.000-06:00

Clean Air Act Anniversary
By Hank Kalet, December 15, 2008
Forty-five years ago this week, Congress enacted the first Clean Air Act, and after eight long years, we will soon have a President who takes the environment seriously.
Climate change is an international problem that will require an international effort to reverse decades of damage.
That is the lesson of the Clean Air Act, first enacted 45 years ago and updated several times since.
The original clean-air efforts were modest, directing states to develop clean-air criteria and offering grants to state governments to create air-pollution controls. The efforts, however, allowed for the creation of 50 different standards.
A 1967 law, the Air Quality Act, created a set of national criteria but not a broad national standard. Instead, a patchwork of regional regulations was put in place – an approach that former U.S. Rep. Paul G. Rogers (D-Fla.) said “was a notable failure.”
Pollution doesn’t stop at state borders or national borders.
That’s why we have to work with other nations on the issue and create international targets that all nations will have to meet and standards that all nations will have to abide by.
The 1997 Kyoto treaty, imperfect as it was, offered that. Ratified by more than 140 nations but not the United States, it required reducing emissions to pre-1990 levels by controlling emissions at the source and developing renewable energy sources.
The Bush administration, in refusing to sign the Kyoto treaty nearly four years ago, said it would have hurt American economic competitiveness, offering a rationale for doing nothing that the business community has have offered each time new environmental rules have been placed on the table.
Since then, numerous studies have shown that the threat of climate change is accelerating.
Fortunately, President-elect Barack Obama has made clear his commitment to address climate change.
His reported choice for Energy Secretary, Nobel Prize-winner Steven Chu, has devoted his career to alternative energies.
His reported choice to head the EPA, Lisa Jackson, aggressively took on polluters as head of the New Jersey environmental agency.
And by tapping Carol Browner, who headed the EPA for Bill Clinton, as head of U.S. climate change policy, Obama left no doubt that the United States is about to join the world community in taking on this global challenge.
It’s about time.
Hank Kalet is online editor for the Princeton Packet newspaper group. He can be reached at pmproj@progressive.org.

Even Richard Dawkins Celebrates Christmas

2008-12-24T09:23:00.002-06:00

Scientist and atheist Richard Dawkins has admitted he does celebrate Christmas - and enjoys singing traditional Christmas carols each festive season.
The writer and evolutionary biologist told singer Jarvis Cocker that he happily wishes everyone a Merry Christmas - and used to have a tree when his daughter was younger.
Dawkins, one of the most famous atheists in the world, was interviewed by Sheffield born Cocker when he stepped in as a Christmas guest editor on Radio Four's Today programme.
'I am perfectly happy on Christmas day to say Merry Christmas to everybody,' Dawkins said. 'I might sing Christmas carols - once I was privileged to be invited to Kings College, Cambridge, for their Christmas carols and loved it.
'I actually love most of the genuine Christmas carols. I can't bear Jingle Bells and Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer and you might think from that that I was religious, that I can't bear the ones that make no mention of religion. But I just think they are dreadful tunes and even more dreadful words. I like the traditional Christmas carols.'
Cocker, the former frontman for Britpop band Pulp, said he was also a fan of Christmas traditions.
'I am the same in a way,' he told Dawkins. 'I really like the kind of peripheral things about Christmas. I like the smell of tangerines and the smell of the tree and to pull crackers.'
Dawkins said his family had a typical Christmas celebration each year like so many others.
'We are not kill joys, we are not scrooges,' he said. 'We give each other presents and when my daughter was a bit younger we would have a tree. We don't now.
'We go to my sister's house for Christmas lunch which is a lovely big family occasion. Everybody thoroughly enjoys it. No church of course.
Dawkins, who pulled a cracker with Cocker on Tuesday's Today programme, said he drew the line at dressing up as Father Christmas.
And he said even as a child his questioning mind made him unpopular with other parents.
'My very first Christmas, maybe my second Christmas, there was a man called Sam who apparently dressed up as Father Christmas,' he said. 'All the children loved it, all completely fooled by Father Christmas being there.
'Eventually he said: 'Ho ho ho, it's time for me to go,' back to Greenland or wherever he comes from, so he left. Then I, the youngest of all of them, said: 'Sam's gone' and completely gave the game away to all the other children.'

Gena Stringer

2008-12-23T15:39:00.003-06:00

I discovered a new singer on the internet on youtube station. Her name is Gena Stringer.

http://www.youtube.com/user/genastringer

Her original stuff is interesting. Sort of Judy Collins like or Joni Mitchellish.

Check it out. I know you would like this Mike T.

Outreach to Rick Warren? You Decide

2008-12-23T15:14:00.002-06:00

This is a very scary video from Rick Warren. It shows how shallow he really is. I believe Barack Obama made a bad choice when he asked Warren to deliver the prayer at the inauguration.

Watch this short clip about proposition 8:

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/107914679?z00m=18624686&s_kwcid=rick%20warren2522141760

What did you think? I'm sorry to say it, but he is arrogant and somewhat dangerous. Why shouldn't gays be able to get married? What makes him more moral than gays? Marriage is between a man and a woman? Isn't that closed minded to say that just because it is tradition means it should be forever?

"We should let 2-percent of the population change something that has been around for thousands of years?" Yes, Rick. It's time for some true compassion. Have you ever had gay friends? Do you know of their struggles and how they go against the grain of society even though their biology tells them differently?

I'm alittle confused over Obama's inclusive rhetoric and his apparent lack of judgement in choosing who he associates with.

On the link above, you can send a letter to Obama's transition team saying how you disagree with his choice:

Dear President-Elect Obama and members of the Obama-Biden transition team:

I am deeply disappointed in your team's decision to choose Pastor Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at the inauguration in January. Pastor Warren is an outspoken opponent of gay and lesbian equality. Through his public support for California's Proposition 8, he sent a clear message that he believes loving, committed, gay and lesbian couples are second-class citizens in America.President-Elect Obama states that he "disagrees" with Pastor Warren on gay rights issues but that Pastor Warren's selection is a matter of "outreach." I couldn't disagree more. Equality for gay and lesbian Americans is not a simple matter of disagreement; it is a fundamental human and civil rights issue and not something to be glossed over and ignored. I strongly urge you to reconsider your decision and choose a faith leader who supports equality for all Americans to deliver the invocation at this historic inauguration.

Sincerely, Questions About Faith

State of the World 2009

2008-12-20T22:17:00.003-06:00

In the mail today, I received the "2009 State of the World" report from the Worldwatch Institute. In very precise terms they lay out the case for saving the world's environment. If we don't have a dramatic reduction in emissions by the year 2050, they say it's pretty much over for our grandchildren, great grandchildren, etc. We need more attempts like Kyoto(this coming year in Copenhagen) to try to get it right.

Here is part of the introduction of the new book:

The year 2009 will be pivotal for the Earth's climate. Scientists have warned that we have only a few years to reverse the rise in greenhouse gas emissions and help avoid abrupt and catastrophic climate change. The world community has agreed to negotiate a new climate agreement in Copenhagen in December 2009. Early that same year, Barack Obama will be sworn in as the 44th U.S. President. The United States, one of the world's largest producers of greenhouse gases, will have its best chance to provide global leadership by passing national climate legislation and constructively engaging with the international community to forge a new consensus on halting emissions.

Here is some more information about the book:

State of the World 2009 is far more than a book. It will be part of a two-year campaign to mobilize the world to combat climate change, focusing special attention on the Copenhagen climate agreement and working closely with Worldwatch's partners around the globe-particularly the key countries of China, India, and the United States. Target constituencies include legislators, business and finance leaders, the media, the development community, and the young people whose lives will be most affected by climate change. We plan to integrate the existing Worldwatch Web site with State of the World 2009 to create an online platform that will present more ideas than the book alone can carry. And we will encourage an active, ongoing dialogue about climate solutions that involves everyone from prime ministers and CEOs to citizens concerned about their children's futures.About the State of the World Series
About the State of the World Series
Worldwatch's flagship publication, State of the World, has educated a broad audience of students, journalists, policymakers, and concerned citizens about trends in sustainable development for a quarter century. The book has been published in 36 languages, and over the years it has authoritatively assessed issues ranging from population, energy, and agriculture to materials use, health, and trade policy. Topics are covered from a global perspective, with an emphasis on innovation and problem-solving. State of the World is recognized as a classic of environmental literature, having attracted luminaries from Kofi Annan to Mikhail Gorbachev to write forewords for the book. News media, policymakers, and NGOs worldwide cite the book for its cutting-edge analysis, reliability, and careful documentation of its arguments, all marshaled to speed the global transition to a sustainable world.
For more information, or to share ideas or comments about the project, please send an email to climateproject@worldwatch.org.

Let's take the lead and do something now before it is too late! Check out their website at www.worldwatch.org

Illinois Politician Embarrasses the Country

2008-12-09T23:40:00.003-06:00

It's too bad that we have so many embarrassing mistakes from US politicians. The Illinois governor and the play to play charges are very embarrassing, and proves the old point that absolute power corrupts absolutely. Why does Chicago have such a horrible reputation for dirty politics? Now of course, the media, especially Fox News is asking "What did Barack Obama know?" The Republicans would love to throw egg on Obama's face anyway they can.

All these dirty politics give Americans even less faith in their leaders, and of course we may deserve the leaders we vote for. Let's be aware of all the shenanigans going on and get rid of the clowns before they cause so much embarrassment. Here is a recent article on this top story:

The words on the recording sound as if they were uttered by a mob boss. Instead, the feds say, it is the governor of Illinois speaking.
The Senate seat "is a (expletive) valuable thing, you just don't give it away for nothing," Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich said Nov. 3, according to a conversation intercepted by the FBI.
Federal prosecutors Tuesday accused the 51-year-old Blagojevich of plotting to enrich himself by selling Barack Obama's vacant Senate seat for cash or a lucrative job for himself. In excerpts released by prosecutors, Blagojevich snarls profanities, makes threats and demands and allegedly concocts a rich variety of schemes for profiting from his appointment of a new senator.
"I want to make money," he declares, according to court papers. Blagojevich allegedly had a salary in mind: $250,000 to $300,00 a year. (He earns $177,412 a year.)
Even in this city inured to political chicanery — three other governors have gone to prison in the past 35 years, and numerous officeholders from Chicago have been convicted for graft — the latest charges were stunning. And not just for the vulgarity, but for the naked greed, the recklessness and the self-delusion they suggest.
What is mystifying is why Blagojevich spoke so openly and so brazenly. He knew the feds were looking into his administration for the past three years for alleged hiring fraud; one of his top fundraisers has been convicted, another is awaiting trial. He even warned some associates not to use the phone because "everybody's listening ... You hear me?"
Blagojevich also is no neophyte. He was baptized in the nitty gritty of Chicago Machine politics and confirmed in back-room bargaining and big money deals. He spent years climbing the ladder, first as a state representative, then a congressman and finally governor. He was boosted to power by his father-in-law, Alderman Dick Mell, a veteran Democratic ward boss and longtime stalwart of the once mighty Machine. The two became estranged in recent years.
And yet, in conversations recorded from late October to last week, Blagojevich seemed almost oblivious as he vented his frustrations about being "stuck" as governor, complained of "struggling" financially, and allegedly talked of using the Senate appointment to land a high-paying job in the private sector, or even an ambassadorship or a Cabinet post.
"It's about greed," said Don Rose, a longtime political strategist in Chicago. "He's got to be completely off his rocker to be talking like that at a time when he knows the feds are looking at him. ... He's out there like he's talking to his wife in bed."
He added: "I think this is beyond ordinary sanity. We're talking about something clinical here. This is beyond logic. It's beyond greed as we know it."
He also scoffed at the notion that Blagojevich had any chance of obtaining a post in Obama's Cabinet.
"I consider myself a student of corruption, but I've never heard of this kind of thing going on," Rose said. "The way he's talking about it is lunacy. ... `Maybe they'll make me secretary of health and human services.' Who's going to hire this guy?"
Paul Green, a political scientist at Roosevelt University, said: "If you're under so much scrutiny by an unbelievably dedicated U.S. attorney's office, why would you risk it all? This is a case less about politics and more about social psychology. ... A hard-nosed Illinois politician wouldn't even dream of doing this, considering the situation."
One of the most intriguing aspects of the story was that Blagojevich was elected as Mr. Clean, promising to clean up state government. His predecessor, Republican Gov. George Ryan, is behind bars for graft.
Blagojevich "had everything going for him," Green said. "He could have been the Serbian Obama. He was young, handsome, articulate."
In court papers, prosecutors said Blagojevich also tried to strong-arm political contributions in exchange for jobs and contracts, and tried to use his authority to get editorial writers from the Chicago Tribune who criticized him fired.
He also discussed getting his wife, Patti, who has been in the real estate business, on corporate boards where she could earn up to $150,000 a year.
Some of the most shocking conversations came in the days before and after Obama's victory, when Blagojevich seemed intent on capitalizing on his role in choosing the president-elect's successor in the Senate.
According to court papers, on Nov. 3, the day before the election, Blagojevich talked with someone identified only as Deputy Governor A about the Senate seat, and said: "If ... they're not going to offer anything of any value, then I might just take it" — that is, make himself senator.
That same day, he talked tough, and said he intended to "drive a hard bargain" to get what he wants.

Hopefully Americans will learn something by reflecting seriously on the dirty actions of this governor who remains under arrest today.

Honoring the Dead Gives Me More Faith in Humanity

2008-12-06T12:39:00.003-06:00

I had a chance to attend a funeral of a man this week who I didn't even know. William was a war veteran who was credited with saving lives. He was a musician and a great family man. I didn't know of him until Monday. His brothers and sisters talked about him, the stories about him playing Santa Claus, and the truth being revealed when someone saw "daddy's hand." I have to admit I shed a tear during the family speeches about their father. Right after these impassioned talks, it was my turn to play "I Can Only Imagine" up in the balcony(let the force of Koren Arisian be with me!) It was hard to make it through the song, but it was one of my best performances I think. Kris, the church organist, turned around after the performance and mouthed the words, "That was absolutely beautiful!" Compliments like that can last a long time. Time to hit the nursing home circuit or play the bar scene very soon. Stay tuned.

Whenever I have questions about faith, I turn to music and I find a great wealth of beauty and truth for my life and the lives of others. Long live Jeff and the Martin DXM!!

Thanksgiving is for Giving

2008-11-28T11:57:00.003-06:00

I love the name "Thanksgiving" because the word is made up of "thanks" and "giving." These are two very imporant words. What I experienced more of yesterday was the giving part of the word.

At Immanuel Trinity we volunteered to help deliver meals, and serve Thanksgiving dinner to hundreds of disadvantaged people in the Fox Valley. What a great feeling one gets from pure giving. My wife Debbie and son Ryan also helped and it was a great experience for them as well. If I have faith in anything, it is in the marvelous potential of the human heart. Good hearts were seen all over the place.

I also got to show off my modest guitar playing. I played a two sets including a total of 15 songs, once in awhile telling the folks what I am thankful for. It was an exhilarating experience.

The set was as follows:

I Can Only Imagine
The Boxer
Blue Divide
Fire and Rain
The Kite Song
Beyond Belief*
The Whippoorwill
Heavenly Day
Arrowhead
The Courier
Texas Blues
Old Tennessee
The Island
Last Fare of the Day
Lawrence, Kansas

"Beyond Belief" is a song I wrote, for my wife Debbie, about her generous nature and how lucky I am to have her by my side.

I feel I gave of myself completely, and that is the best and most unique feeling in the world :)

p.s. Have been listening to Yusuf Islam lately. He is a very interesting person with some great messages for all of us. I would urge you to listen to this man, who is a devout Muslim(formerly Cat Stevens.)

Creationism is Silly and False Teachers Spread Irrationality

2008-11-25T10:11:00.001-06:00

by Richard Dawkins

The Rome-deniers, let's imagine, are a well-organised group of nutters, implacably convinced that the Roman empire never existed. The Latin language, for all its rich literature and its romance language grandchildren, is a Victorian fabrication. The Rome-deniers are, no doubt, harmless wingnuts, more harmless than the Holocaust-deniers whom they resemble. Smile and be tolerant. But your tolerance might wear thin if you are a scholar and teacher of Roman history or literature. And what if Rome-deniers manage to infiltrate the teaching staff of an otherwise reputable school, and energetically promote their inanities to a susceptible new generation? A normally tolerant person could be forgiven for wanting to see those teachers fired. Well, that's approximately where I stand with respect to the clique of Genesis creationists who have moved in on Emmanuel College, Gateshead. What they deny is the unassailable evidence for biological evolution. The present head of the school, Nigel McQuoid, with his predecessor John Burn, wrote the following: "We agree that [schools] should teach evolution as a theory and faith position... Clearly also schools should teach the creation theory as literally depicted in Genesis. Both creation and evolution provide ways of explaining the past that are beyond direct scientific examination and verification. Ultimately, both creation and evolution are faith positions." The vice-principal, head of science, senior assessment coordinator and maths teacher, have all said something similar. Creation as literally depicted in Genesis is indeed supported by faith (and needs to be, since it is not supported by anything else, certainly not the Pope, nor the Roman or Anglican hierarchies). Evolution, on the other hand, is supported by evidence. Any science teacher who denies that the world is billions (or even millions!) of years old is teaching children a preposterous, mind-shrinking falsehood. These men disgrace the honourable profession of teacher. By comparison, real teachers, teachers who respect truth and evidence whether in science or history, have so much more to offer. Today's children are blessed with the opportunity to open their minds to the shattering wonder of their own existence, the nature of life and its remarkable provenance in a yet more remarkable universe. Teachers who help to open young minds perform a duty which is as near sacred as I will admit. Ignorant, closed-minded, false teachers who stand in their way come as close as I can reckon to committing true sacrilege.

Even Christmas Parties are Suffering These Days

2008-11-25T10:07:00.002-06:00

(from Workforce Week Magazine)

Across the U.S., companies are canceling annual end-of-the-year holiday bashes to cut costs, or in some cases just to blend in with the rest of a world that’s too worried about money to feel like a party. The trend is having a ripple effect on caterers and event coordinators. This year, the Grinch may not have stolen Christmas, but he definitely took the Christmas party.Across the nation, companies are canceling annual end-of-the-year holiday bashes to cut costs, or in some cases just to blend in with the rest of a world that’s too worried about money to feel like a party. The trend is having a ripple effect on caterers and event coordinators who say that calls canceling parties have spiked in the past few weeks.
Two annual holiday-party surveys back up anecdotal evidence that a record number of companies have dropped holiday parties this year—more even than in 2001 after the September 11 terrorist bombings—while others are scaling back how much they spend, what they serve or how many people they invite.
In its survey of 100 companies, outplacement consultant Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. found that 23 percent of companies elected not to host a holiday party this year, compared with only 10 percent in 2007. New York executive search firm Battalia Winston Amrop found in its survey of 108 firms that 19 percent will forgo a party this year, the highest percentage in the poll’s 20-year history.
And in a separate study of more than 1,200 executives by Towers Perrin, 58 percent of all organizations polled acknowledge they are somewhat or very likely to scale back this year’s holiday party and other employee events to save money.
“People are scared,” Battalia CEO Dale Winston said. “We do this survey because it’s a way of calibrating the mood of the country, and we’re just not in a celebratory mood.”
Investment banks and financial institutions rocked by the mortgage industry crisis were some of the first to cancel celebrations, including Barclays and Morgan Stanley.
Barclays will sponsor parties for employees’ children at several locations internationally, but it canceled other celebrations. Company executives issued a memo to employees stating that given the upheaval in the financial industry and in light of its Lehman Brothers acquisition, “it is not appropriate for us to do anything that might be seen as inappropriate by any of our stakeholders.”Publishing, news and entertainment companies dealing with tanking revenues and earnings have put the kibosh on once-lavish celebrations, including Viacom, ABC News and Hearst.
Holiday parties at Viacom were the stuff of legend, but this year, the media conglomerate that owns cable TV networks MTV, VH1, BET and CMT canceled all year-end festivities. Instead, employees will get two extra paid vacation days between December 22 and January 1. Kelly McAndrew, a Viacom corporate communications vice president, wouldn’t discuss whether trading parties for time off will save the company money. McAndrew said only, “This is what we think is right for our company at this time.”
The celebratory downsizing doesn’t end with finance and media companies. Enterprise Rent-A-Car, hit with a triple whammy of credit, energy and auto industry woes, put the brakes on the year-end party it normally hosts for 2,000 St. Louis corporate headquarters employees and their spouses on a weekend night at a downtown hotel. After 200 corporate staff members were laid off in late October, having a party just didn’t seem right, said Ned Maniscalco, an Enterprise spokesman.
Adidas Group also canceled annual holiday parties at multiple locations internationally as part of broader cost-cutting measures that include a hiring freeze and less business travel. The Germany-based global sportswear giant did its partying earlier in the year, with a picnic for 1,000 employees and their families June 7 to kick off the Euro 2008 soccer championship and a two-day, all- expense-paid trip to the Summer Olympics in Beijing for 1,000 Chinese employees, said Anne Putz, a corporate spokeswoman.
As companies rein in party spending, it’s affecting caterers, hotels and event planners at what is typically the biggest party season of the year. At Tavern on the Green, the historic restaurant and banquet facility in New York’s Central Park, clients are postponing, cutting out luxuries such as seafood displays, or canceling altogether, including one longtime client that canceled a party for 1,000. In years past, the facility would have been booked solid for December. This year, “We have some holes we’d love to fill,” said spokeswoman Shelley Clark.
Even companies that aren’t in bad shape are forgoing extravagant affairs. Nobody wants to be the next American International Group, which was excoriated for sending executives to an opulent spa retreat days after receiving a federal bailout.
“If the company is laying off people, celebrating in some over-the-top way would be insane,” said John Challenger, CEO at Challenger, Gray & Christmas. It’s appropriate, however, to bring employees together in some fashion to thank them for their hard work and long hours, he said.

Some Pictures from my Life

2008-11-24T12:35:00.002-06:00

Stephen's Group Home

The Group Home Neighborhood

Beautiful Tree in our Neighborhood

Stephen's Thanksgiving on Sunday

The Family

For more family pictures, go to stephensautismjournal.blogspot.com

Jeff's Hilarious Top Ten List

2008-11-22T09:10:00.003-06:00

Top Ten Skits on SNL that Would've Won Palin the Election

Doing affirmations with Al Franken's Stuart Smalley
A heated argument with the Church Lady
A loose associations contest with Emily Letella
Getting constant and unending noogies from Bill Murray
Wearing a conehead with John McCain and singing in French
Trying to Imitate Belushi in a rendition of "Samurai Republican."
Singing White Skinhead Christmas with Bing Crosby
Having pizza and getting drunk with Father Sarducci
Playing bad acoustic guitar with Adam Sandler
Seen "palling around" with Wild and Crazy Martin and Aykroid

Colbert's Own Brand of Mental Illness Unleashed

NEW YORK (AP) — The permanently suit-clad Stephen Colbert has traded in his pinstripes for a cardigan sweater, red turtleneck and furry boots.
Following the tradition of Andy Williams and Bing Crosby, Colbert hosts his own holiday special in "A Colbert Christmas: The Greatest Gift of All." The hour-long special airs Sunday at 10 p.m. EST on Comedy Central, and will on Tuesday be released as a DVD, complete with a Yule log of burning books.
Clearly in the Christmas spirit, at the first mention of old holiday specials, Colbert launches into renditions of Williams' "Little Altar Boy" and Crosby and David Bowie's "Little Drummer Boy."
The latter was the inspiration for a duet between Colbert and Willie Nelson, who appears — in one of the more bizarre numbers — as a tiny wise man in a miniature nativity scene.
"This is just some good fun to watch during your eggnog-induced dementia," Colbert joked in an interview Wednesday.
The special finds Colbert far from his "Colbert Report" set in an obviously made-for-TV room of a mountain cabin dressed for Christmas. Hanging by the fireplace are two stockings, one labeled "Stephen," the other "Colbert."
While he's snowed in and a bear lurks outside, Colbert is visited by Nelson, Toby Keith, Jon Stewart, John Legend, Feist and Elvis Costello to sing Christmas songs that were penned by "Daily Show" executive producer David Javerbaum and composed by Adam Schlesinger.
"I had a clear, clear command to everyone involved: 'No cynicism,'" said Colbert. "We're not mocking Christmas specials. We're doing MY Christmas special. And that was the aesthetic we tried to bring into it. Like, we're really doing this. I want people to see this every year."
The special was originally planned for last Christmas but was delayed a year when Colbert became swamped during his brief run for president in the South Carolina primary. Instead, the special was taped mostly over a three-week period in August.
The 44-year-old comedian, who lives in New Jersey with his wife and three children, is a practicing Catholic who has taught Sunday school at his church. The special concludes on a positive note, with Colbert and Costello singing that "there are much worse things" than believing in Christmas.
Costume pieces from the special are being auctioned to benefit Feeding America, and a percentage of the DVD proceeds will also go to the charity.
Conservative pundits, of course, were the basis of Colbert's character — and there is some allusion to the "war on Christmas" that various commentators have waged in recent years.
But while Colbert still remains in character, the special is ultimately mostly free of politics. During the nonstop campaign, Colbert looked forward to the special like a "gift box," completely removed from the election.
"See, no politics," said Colbert proudly, as if proving his versatility.
Though fodder from the campaign was a boon to "The Report," Colbert says he feels greater freedom now that the election is over.
"I've actually had a better time than I've had in a long time," he said about the last few weeks. "I was strapped to someone else's galloping horse. There was no escaping how fast the news was changing. We were completely in a responsive comedy."
But there is nothing reactive about the unique "A Colbert Christmas."
"I'm so proud that we made something that is sincerely strange," said Colbert, "but also strangely sincere."

Keith Olbermann, Deepak Chopra and Jesus

2008-11-16T11:44:00.003-06:00

Watch this Keith Olbermann. It's a very passionate speech. He's not afraid to criticize America, and the direction she should be going in.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqxmPjB0WSs

In other notes:

I'm reading a book by Deepak Chopra called "The Third Jesus." The argument is that Jesus the man was misintepreted and that his message has been twisted since his time. Chopra argues that what Jesus called all of us to do would be radical, and most have not followed through except for a handful like Gandhi, MLK, etc. He asked us to love our enemies, which is too abstract for us to understand. Gandhi proclaimed passive resistance and non violence, closer to what I think Christ was saying. Easy to preach this stuff, almost impossible to live by.

I highly recommend this book for almost everyone. My lay minister Tim and I plan to discuss the book tonight at our restaurant we call "The Greek Place." Next time you stop at a book store, glance at the introduction, you may be surprised at how bright Chopra is. The jury is still out to whether he truly respects science though. He would be a GREAT guest on "Point of Inquiry." Will, what do you think of Chopra?

Good Night and Good Luck

2008-11-16T00:13:00.005-06:00

I just received an excellent link (originally from Nancy D.) to what I think is Keith Olbermann's best soliloquy yet. He is talking about California's vote to deligitimize gay marriage (or Proposition 8.) The act amends the state constitution and specifies that a marriage must be between a man and a woman. To watch this clip is the hear the passion of Edward R. Murrow all over again and to see first hand the power of morality journalism can engender:

http://www.couragecampaign.org/page/s/prop8repeal

Hope you enjoyed the clip. Let's have faith that the people will decide the right answer. My mother also sent an excellent article by Leonard Pitts on the same subject which shall be shown in its entirety right here:

Some blacks forgot sting of discrimination

BY LEONARD PITTS JR.

Sometimes, progress carries an asterisk.
That's as good a summary as any of a sad irony from last week's historic election. You will recall one of the major storylines of that day was the fact that, in helping make Barack Obama the nation's first black president, African Americans struck a blow against a history that has taught us all too well how it feels to be demeaned and denied. Unfortunately, while they were striking that blow, some black folks chose to demean and deny someone else.
Last week, you see, California voters passed an initiative denying recognition to same-sex marriages. This overturned an earlier ruling from the state Supreme Court legalizing those unions. The vote was hardly a surprise; surely there is nothing in politics easier than to rouse a majority of voters against the ''threat'' of gay people being treated like people.
But African Americans were crucial to the passage of the bill, supporting it by a margin of better than two to one. To anyone familiar with the deep strain of social conservatism that runs through the black electorate, this is not surprising either. It is, however, starkly disappointing. Moreover, it leaves me wondering for the umpteenth time how people who have known so much of oppression can turn around and oppress.
Yes, I know. I can hear some black folk yelling at me from here, wanting me to know it's not the same, what gays have gone through and what black people did, wanting me to know they acted from sound principles and strong values. It is justification and rationalization, and I've heard it all before. I wish they would explain to me how they can, with a straight face, use arguments against gay people that were first tested and perfected against us.
When, for instance, they use an obscure passage from the Bible to claim God has ordained the mistreatment of gays, don't they hear an echo of white people using that Bible to claim God ordained the mistreatment of blacks?
When they rail against homosexuality as ''unnatural,'' don't they remember when that word was used to describe abolition, interracial marriage and school integration?
When they say they'd have no trouble with gay people if they would just stop ''flaunting'' their sexuality, doesn't it bring to mind all those good ol' boys who said they had no problem with ''Nigras'' so long as they stayed in their place?
No, the black experience and the gay experience are not equivalent. Gay people were not the victims of mass kidnap or mass enslavement.
No war was required to strike the shackles from their limbs.
But that's not the same as saying blacks and gays have nothing in common. On the contrary, gay people, like black people, know what it's like to be left out, lied about, scapegoated, discriminated against, held up, beat down, denied a job, a loan or a life. And, too, they know how it feels to sit there and watch other people vote upon your very humanity, just as if those other people had a right. So beg pardon, but black people should know better. I feel the same when Jews are racist, or gays anti-Semitic. Those who bear scars from intolerance should be the last to practice it.
Sadly, we are sometimes the first. That tells you something about how seductive a thing intolerance is, how difficult it can be to resist the serpent whisper that says it's OK to ridicule and marginalize those people over there because they look funny, or talk funny, worship funny or love funny. So in the end, we struggle with the same imperative as from ages ago: to overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. But if last week's vote taught us nothing else, it taught us that persistence plus faith equals change.
And we shall overcome.

It's time to get out the guitar and sing "We Shall Overcome" loudly and clearly. the fight isn't over yet. Intolerance is still alive and well.

Have a good weekend everyone. Get ready for the ride of our lives with Barack at the helm.

Greg Mars Hits the Blogosphere

2008-11-14T08:06:00.005-06:00

A man who I would count as one of my top ten friends in life has written a new blog. I highly recommend the new blog from Greg Mars. His writing is fresh, incisive and insightful and he has a very unique perspective on life---not to mention a great sense of humor. Greg is one of the few people who could make me laugh until I cried. Greg worked with me in the radio business in Amery many years ago. He had a show called "The Mars Cafe"--a very well respected show with faithful listeners(including my brother in law Craig) We had show called "Sportschat" where we had a lot of fun--and that is an understatement. Favorite memories--doing the radio show from a barber's chair, seeing how much gum Greg could chew and still do the weather, broadcasting from my house and having to pause because my wife was mowing the lawn in the background, and oh yeah...Greg having fun playing a tape over and over of me swallowing a fly while doing baseball play by play. That was quite a blooper. :) Greg's creativity is boundless and I'm sure it will be reflected in his blog. Welcome to the blogosphere Greg, and I heartily recommend my blog friends to take in the Mars Cafe experience on tattletalegray.blogspot.com. It's worth your while. I promise you.

Getting Ready to Give Thanks

2008-11-13T22:45:00.009-06:00

As I prepare for my guitar playing at Immanuel Trinity Church on Thanksgiving I am coming up with a song list. I plan to also talk about what I'm thankful for, interspersing my comments between the songs.

Heavenly Day(thankful for just being on Earth)

The Beauty of the Rain(thankful for the beauty of reflection)

Dove and the Waterline

I Can See Clearly Now(thankful for the ability to think postively in a world full of obstacles)

New Year's Day(thankful for seeing things in a brand new way and for new beginnings)

Beyond Belief(thankful for my lifetime companion Debbie)

Reunion Hill

Grocer's Broom(thankful for hard work and restful days deserved)

Over There(thankful for the miracle of children)

I Had Something(thankful for the gift of spiritual yearning)

The Ballad of Mary Magdalene

Northbound 35

Gray Green(thankful for the gift of being new parents and beholding this new child)

Blue Divide

Ain't No Sunshine(thankful for the companionship in marriage)

Take Me Home(thankful for the peace of rustic roads)

Texas Blues

So Says the Whippoorwill(thankful for freedom)

Lighthouse Light(thankful to that light in our souls that leads us home)

This Little Light of Mine

The Storms are on the Ocean

Houses in the Fields (thankful for the dedication of the nation's farmers and their respect and connection to the land)

Love is Our Cross to Bear(thankful for love)

Ponies

She's All There is to Me (thankful for the love of Debbie)

I Can Only Imagine (thankful for imagination and love)

I Saw My Youth Today

Waiting for the Storm

Arrowhead(thankful to those young men who fight and die for freedom)

The Kite Song

TV Light

The Boxer

Lawrence, Kansas(thankful to the farmers who work so hard---to Donnie and Bev)

State of the Union(thankful for the courage it takes to beat a drug habit--to Tim)

This Land is Your Land(thankful for the USA)

The Island

On a Sea of Fleur-De-Lis

Senor

Old Tennessee

Peace Will Come(thankful for peace that comes being bathed in perfect love)

From this songlist, I will be choosing the songs I will be singing at Thanksgiving. It will be a great experience to be able to share my music and the songs I love. I look forward to meeting a lot of wonderful people and in giving what I can. It could be the most meaningful Thanksgiving of all.

The true joy in life is giving and I am learning this at a late age, but I think it is never too late.

2008-11-12T08:44:00.001-06:00

The Affirmations of Humanism: A Statement of Principles

We are committed to the application of reason and science to the understanding of the universe and to the solving of human problems.
We deplore efforts to denigrate human intelligence, to seek to explain the world in supernatural terms, and to look outside nature for salvation.
We believe that scientific discovery and technology can contribute to the betterment of human life.
We believe in an open and pluralistic society and that democracy is the best guarantee of protecting human rights from authoritarian elites and repressive majorities.
We are committed to the principle of the separation of church and state.
We cultivate the arts of negotiation and compromise as a means of resolving differences and achieving mutual understanding.
We are concerned with securing justice and fairness in society and with eliminating discrimination and intolerance.
We believe in supporting the disadvantaged and the handicapped so that they will be able to help themselves.
We attempt to transcend divisive parochial loyalties based on race, religion, gender, nationality, creed, class, sexual orientation, or ethnicity, and strive to work together for the common good of humanity.
We want to protect and enhance the earth, to preserve it for future generations, and to avoid inflicting needless suffering on other species.
We believe in enjoying life here and now and in developing our creative talents to their fullest.
We believe in the cultivation of moral excellence.
We respect the right to privacy. Mature adults should be allowed to fulfill their aspirations, to express their sexual preferences, to exercise reproductive freedom, to have access to comprehensive and informed health-care, and to die with dignity.
We believe in the common moral decencies: altruism, integrity, honesty, truthfulness, responsibility. Humanist ethics is amenable to critical, rational guidance. There are normative standards that we discover together. Moral principles are tested by their consequences.
We are deeply concerned with the moral education of our children. We want to nourish reason and compassion.
We are engaged by the arts no less than by the sciences.
We are citizens of the universe and are excited by discoveries still to be made in the cosmos.
We are skeptical of untested claims to knowledge, and we are open to novel ideas and seek new departures in our thinking.
We affirm humanism as a realistic alternative to theologies of despair and ideologies of violence and as a source of rich personal significance and genuine satisfaction in the service to others.
We believe in optimism rather than pessimism, hope rather than despair, learning in the place of dogma, truth instead of ignorance, joy rather than guilt or sin, tolerance in the place of fear, love instead of hatred, compassion over selfishness, beauty instead of ugliness, and reason rather than blind faith or irrationality.
We believe in the fullest realization of the best and noblest that we are capable of as human beings.

2008-11-11T12:19:00.003-06:00

A Persistent Myth about Secular Humanism

by Bill Cooney

Someone recently wrote to me that he didn't buy "all that secular humanist crap" I was finding myself interested in. Fair enough. But did this person venture into anything specific? As a matter of fact, he did. He wrote that secular humanists hold all philosophies and world views to be equally valid and that he disagreed strongly with this precept. The implication was clear: secular humanists possess no powers of discernment. I was surprised such an educated and intelligent person would resort to invoking so shallow a myth as to compel me to wonder what he really understood about humanism at all.Still, this was not the first time I had heard this criticism of secular humanist philosophy. I consider myself a humanist, and in no way do I subscribe to the notion that all world views have substantially equivalent validity. People who hold this view of humanists are incorrectly extrapolating from the principle that no one world view explains everything that all world views are therefore equally valid. To be more precise about what humanism does in fact avow: all world views are fallible. That is to say they are subject to - in the secular sphere - critical and rational analysis. Opposing world views are no doubt possessed of varying degrees of enlightenment, which deems them, by definition, to be of varying degrees of value.Something else this particular myth seems based upon is the notion that humanism is as rigidly dogmatic as any religion. While there are a number of stated principles humanists aspire to, it is much more accurate to characterize humanism as a method for reasoning and achieving understanding. It is not a compendium of dos and don'ts or intractable beliefs; it is a foundation for skeptical analysis and inquiry based upon rational examination. Secular humanists question the veracity of claims to possess knowledge about that which does not suffer rational examination well.Much criticism of humanism comes from the religiously inclined because of its expressed resistance to explain the world in supernatural terms. To many, the very idea of not deferring to a specific deity in constructing its ideological platform is offensive. What we humanists can't understand is why this would offend anyone. We are not offended by the choice of others to believe in a god, but to quote from Paul Kurts' Affirmations of Humanism, A Statement of Principles: "We deplore efforts to denigrate human intelligence . . . and to look outside nature for salvation."More often than not, criticism of secular humanists as undiscriminating purveyors of "anything-goes" intellectualism is a naked attempt to malign us, our intellects, and our principles. We, as much as anyone, welcome criticism so long as it is not offered as disparaging rhetoric.

Thanks Bill great post. Check out his blog on my favorites list.

BTW....a movie recommendation:

Laura Dern ("Jurassic Park", "Blue Velvet") gives a scintillating performance in "Damaged Care," the true story of Dr. Linda peeno, a woman pushed to the edge, risking her career and family to punish the ruthless companies who valued profit over human life. Trained as a doctor, Linda in medicine for a family life but after learning that a new type of medical insurance was treat in the rich at the expense of the poor for greater profits, she went all out, using her experience to testify on behalf of patients suing the insurers. The task seemed impossible. The risks too great. But if it only takes one man to build a multi-million dollar corporation, then it only takes one woman to bring it back down.

Heroes and Villains

2008-11-10T08:08:00.003-06:00

My son Ryan brought home an assignment that led to an interesting father/son discussion the other day. Who are your heroes and villains? It got me thinking and Ryan too. Here is the quick list I came up with:

Heroes: MLK, JFK, RFK, Edward R. Murrow, Christopher Reeve, Mike Severson, Barack Obama, Mario Cuomo, Gandhi, John Gorka, Paul Wellstone, Al Gore, Richard Dawkins, Leo Buscaglia, Carl Sagan, Dan Rather, Al Franken, Wayne Dyer, Albert Einstein, Chris Matthews, my mother, father, sister, Uncle Charlie and Will and Iris.

Villains: Joseph McCarthy, Hitler, Stalin, dicators of Iran and North Korea, Sarah Palin, Jeffrey Dahmer, John Gacy, Barry Bonds, Paris Hilton, Michael Savage, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Osama Bin Laden, Jerry Falwell, and last but not least---Ann Coulter.

Try your own heroes and villains list. You may be astounded at what you may find.

Speaking of villains, I wonder if Sarah Palin will give the presidency a shot in 2012. Another vast embarrassment for our country if she does I'm afraid.

As Leo Buscaglia would have said---love your neighbor as yourself. Didn't someone else say that too?

Music Inspirational Thoughts and More

2008-11-08T10:19:00.003-06:00

I think I will call Mike Tollifson today. He is the man who first inspired me to play guitar.

I am very impressed to be playing my very first "gig." It is at the Thanksgiving dinner served by Immanuel Trinity Church. I will play for about an hour after delivering meals to shut in's earlier in the day. This will be a great new way to spend the holidays. Debbie and possibly son Ryan will be going over to help as well. I have 40 songs I will be chosing from and I'm excited about what reaction I may get from people at church.

This morning I am doing youtube surfing and finding some fascinating new artists which include:
Caroline Herring, Mark Geary, Laura Kemp, Emily Kurn, Peter Mayer, Jud Caswell, Ron Fetner, Terrence Martin, Stephen Hunter and a band called Bread and Roses. I also took some of the morning going through what the best songs will be for Thanksgiving. Well, the Highlander Grogg coffee tastes great and I'm ready for another day. After calling Mike and Craig today I will call Tim about going bowling today. (hope to hit 150)

Hope your weekend is full of warmth and love and caring. Even on a cool cloudy day in the 30's in Wisconsin, I plan to have a great day!

Obama's Hope

2008-11-05T00:10:00.002-06:00

This is a great day to be alive. To watch Barack Obama speak at Grant Park in Chicago, was to watch history in the making. Obama has the power to get people dreaming again and to take away some of the apathy that so many have nowadays. To watch that gleam of hope in Barack's eyes, to feel that he really believes what he is saying. It makes me think anything is possible. To think that the downtrodden in our society have a voice, to think that this nation has new hope, of the type never seen before. To see people dancing in the streets of Kenya, to see the tears in Oprah's and Jesse Jackson's eyes. To see that moment, to be a witness to the true face of hope, that is a truly meaningful experience.

We have many challenges as Americans, but we now have one more reason to hope----thanks to Barack Obama.

"Palin's Pure Stupidity" by Christopher Hitchens

2008-11-02T23:26:00.002-06:00

In an election that has been fought on an astoundingly low cultural and intellectual level, with both candidates pretending that tax cuts can go like peaches and cream with the staggering new levels of federal deficit, and paltry charges being traded in petty ways, and with Joe the Plumber becoming the emblematic stupidity of the campaign, it didn't seem possible that things could go any lower or get any dumber. But they did last Friday, when, at a speech in Pittsburgh, Gov. Sarah Palin denounced wasteful expenditure on fruit-fly research, adding for good xenophobic and anti-elitist measure that some of this research took place "in Paris, France" and winding up with a folksy "I kid you not."

It was in 1933 that Thomas Hunt Morgan won a Nobel Prize for showing that genes are passed on by way of chromosomes. The experimental creature that he employed in the making of this great discovery was the Drosophila melanogaster, or fruit fly. Scientists of various sorts continue to find it a very useful resource, since it can be easily and plentifully "cultured" in a laboratory, has a very short generation time, and displays a great variety of mutation. This makes it useful in studying disease, and since Gov. Palin was in Pittsburgh to talk about her signature "issue" of disability and special needs, she might even have had some researcher tell her that there is a Drosophila-based center for research into autism at the University of North Carolina. The fruit fly can also be a menace to American agriculture, so any financing of research into its habits and mutations is money well-spent. It's especially ridiculous and unfortunate that the governor chose to make such a fool of herself in Pittsburgh, a great city that remade itself after the decline of coal and steel into a center of high-tech medical research.

In this case, it could be argued, Palin was not just being a fool in her own right but was following a demagogic lead set by the man who appointed her as his running mate. Sen. John McCain has made repeated use of an anti-waste and anti-pork ad (several times repeated and elaborated in his increasingly witless speeches) in which the expenditure of $3 million to study the DNA of grizzly bears in Montana was derided as "unbelievable." As an excellent article in the Feb. 8, 2008, Scientific American pointed out, there is no way to enforce the Endangered Species Act without getting some sort of estimate of numbers, and the best way of tracking and tracing the elusive grizzly is by setting up barbed-wire hair-snagging stations that painlessly take samples from the bears as they lumber by and then running the DNA samples through a laboratory. The cost is almost trivial compared with the importance of understanding this species, and I dare say the project will yield results in the measurement of other animal populations as well, but all McCain could do was be flippant and say that he wondered whether it was a "paternity" or "criminal" issue that the Fish and Wildlife Service was investigating. (Perhaps those really are the only things that he associates in his mind with DNA.)
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With Palin, however, the contempt for science may be something a little more sinister than the bluff, empty-headed plain-man's philistinism of McCain. We never get a chance to ask her in detail about these things, but she is known to favor the teaching of creationism in schools (smuggling this crazy idea through customs in the innocent disguise of "teaching the argument," as if there was an argument), and so it is at least probable that she believes all creatures from humans to fruit flies were created just as they are now. This would make DNA or any other kind of research pointless, whether conducted in Paris or not. Projects such as sequencing the DNA of the flu virus, the better to inoculate against it, would not need to be funded. We could all expire happily in the name of God. Gov. Palin also says that she doesn't think humans are responsible for global warming; again, one would like to ask her whether, like some of her co-religionists, she is a "premillenial dispensationalist"—in other words, someone who believes that there is no point in protecting and preserving the natural world, since the end of days will soon be upon us.
Videos taken in the Assembly of God church in Wasilla, Alaska, which she used to attend, show her nodding as a preacher says that Alaska will be "one of the refuge states in the Last Days." For the uninitiated, this is a reference to a crackpot belief, widely held among those who brood on the "End Times," that some parts of the world will end at different times from others, and Alaska will be a big draw as the heavens darken on account of its wide open spaces. An article by Laurie Goodstein in the New York Times gives further gruesome details of the extreme Pentecostalism with which Palin has been associated in the past (perhaps moderating herself, at least in public, as a political career became more attractive). High points, also available on YouTube, show her being "anointed" by an African bishop who claims to cast out witches. The term used in the trade for this hysterical superstitious nonsense is "spiritual warfare," in which true Christian soldiers are trained to fight demons. Palin has spoken at "spiritual warfare" events as recently as June. And only last week the chiller from Wasilla spoke of "prayer warriors" in a radio interview with James Dobson of Focus on the Family, who said that he and his lovely wife, Shirley, had convened a prayer meeting to beseech that "God's perfect will be done on Nov. 4."
This is what the Republican Party has done to us this year: It has placed within reach of the Oval Office a woman who is a religious fanatic and a proud, boastful ignoramus. Those who despise science and learning are not anti-elitist. They are morally and intellectually slothful people who are secretly envious of the educated and the cultured. And those who prate of spiritual warfare and demons are not just "people of faith" but theocratic bullies. On Nov. 4, anyone who cares for the Constitution has a clear duty to repudiate this wickedness and stupidity.

2008-11-01T11:55:00.003-06:00

Well it's my birthday weekend and Debbie and I are having a good day together along with the minor inconveniences of getting a 13 year-old to listen to us with respect. Tonight it is out for Chinese at my favorite place in town, then Rocky Road ice cream and cake with present opening tonight. (Gee I feel like a kid again, even though I'm 49).

Tomorrow it's a trip to visit my parents in Winnebago County. I told Mom not to fix anything or worry about another cake, that ordering out pizza is just fine. I've requested that I would like to go to a guitar store and look around for my birthday sometime. Tonight I read in church too(closet Christian, yeah we knew it all along.) Had to get some tips from friend Tim on how to read and what to say. I think I'm ready.

Tomorrow we visit Stephen at the group home. I look forward to seeing my son on my birthday and to have the whole family together. Rumor is that I will get a 48-pack of guitar picks from Stephen. The togetherness is definitely the best present though.

Other notes:

If you haven't checked out this website, please do. It is the Youngturks. The commentator is kind of like Bill Maher, telling us exactly what he thinks whether we want to hear it or not!!

http://www.youtube.com/user/TheYoungTurks

Faith in Jackson Browne

2008-10-30T22:07:00.003-06:00

Ever since I was a young teen, I have marveled at the talent of Jackson Browne. This week, I got a CD from the library called "Jackson Browne Solo Acoustic Volume 2"

It is such an intimate and marvelous way of capturing this pop/folk icon in concert.

Here is one review of the CD:

On his new CD Solo Acoustic 2, Jackson Browne has produced another intimate, classy collection of "unplugged" material from throughout his career. As with Vol. 1, it's just Browne and his guitar (or sometimes piano), a setting that seems to highlight the lyrics more strongly, prompting a greater appreciation of the songwriter as a poet. I'm impressed that his vocals have remained so pure and true after all the years, and what minor trembling or breathless moments occur just add character to the performances. Vol. 2 has a somewhat more obscure songlist - many of the more "famous" Browne tunes already having appeared on Vol. 1 - but they're still a well chosen set of tunes. Most of them converted really nicely to the acoustic mode, particularly "The Night Inside Me" and a movingly beautiful "Sky Blue And Black." A few songs, particularly "In The Shape of a Heart," fall a bit flat without the band. Seven cuts have brief spoken introductions by the artist. Most are pretty uninformative and completely off the cuff, and include a lot of shout-outs from the live audience. Fortunately (also like Vol.1), the spoken bits are separately indexed so they can be skipped. I will be listening to the CD many more times, but I won't need to hear the intros ever again.

I think he hit it on the head. We get a great snapshot of the singer/songwriter and his poetic best. Like a fine wine, Jackson Browne keeps on getting better with age.

Here is another favorable review:

Jackson Browne's second installment of "Solo Acoustic", shows an introspective and revealing side of Browne. Not just music, there is a self-biography and story-telling approach to the songs, much like Harry Chapin used to do in the 70's that endeared him to millions worldwide. There is no backing full piece band behind him: just Browne, his guitar/piano and the small intimate audience. It's a `here is what i am really like' performance that is made to be heard from beginning to end, and will not lend itself well to IPODs. Even the songs that Browne selects from his vast catalog are personal, close to the vest songs that don't need much embellishment for a listener to understand that they are more than just words and music. It's also not some kind of unplugged retread of his hits either: it's an intimate recital that you could only get from small venue atmosphere. It opens up, perhaps, a new genre of recordings: personal presentations with the artist speaking ad-lib about the songs, life, loves and disappointments. It differentiates itself from other uplugged cds in this way. The songs are mostly culled from his latest studio release: 2002's "The Naked Ride Home" (4 songs); "Somebody's Baby" from the Fast Times at Ridgemont High soundtrack; "From Everyman" and from "Looking East". With the exception of 3 or 4 songs, the body of the work will be largely unknown except to Browne fans who know his entire catalog. For me, this made the music even more evocative, since it's just not something you sing along to in the car, it's a bonding between listener and artist: something only a privileged few in music can pull off. Jackson Browne was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007, deservedly so, and not just for his music, but for the impact he's made on it, and the humanitarian events he has been famous in contributing to.

Yes, one gets the feeling of intimacy when listening to Jackson Browne.

Mike's Story Teaches Us a Lesson

2008-10-26T15:41:00.005-06:00

My friend Mike from West Virginia says that one of the basis's of his faith is to always be reminded that anyone important to us can be gone at any time. He says it is always important to hold the ones important to you close to your heart because you never know when the time will come when it is the last time you talk to them. It's at that point that you would pay substantial amounts of money just to have a few minutes more with them to say the things we need to say. Unfortunately, it's not our choice when those times arrive, making life that much more bittersweet. The lession: Say the things you want to say now before it is too late. So this post is dedicated to Mike, who loves his sister Randi with all of his heart. Randi passed away over the weekend at the age of 40 leaving a beautiful 2 year-old girl behind. What possible rationale could have God had to make this happen? A troubling question indeed.

Instead of eating himself up with anger, my friend Mike has chosen to remember all the good times with his sister, all the guitar songs they would sing together, all the smiles they have shared. Whe he looks into his niece's eyes, he sees a lot of Randi. He is in that state of mourning right now that is close to denial but soon there will be acceptance that she has passed on from this world. Mike's Christian faith helps him accept this somehow. I hope that I am as strong as Mike when something like this confronts me. Mike I wish you the most love and hope that is possible in this situation. Hang in there.

Here is Mike's note to me which came into my e-mail inbox late last night:

My 40 year old Sister died today from complications from a serious intestinal disorder.
She has been to 5 hospitals and 10 ER visits in less than the past 30 days.
She had surgery about 5 years ago, and was scheduled-after an ER visit to Johns Hopkins for a procedure, then to be followed by another surgery. That was scheduled for Nov. 4th-procedure. None of the other hospitals could do anything but prescribe pain medications.
Her body could stand no more of the pain.
She could not eat.
She was incontinent.
It was a nightmare.
She leaves behind her beautiful 2 year and 8 month old daughter that my parents and I have been caring for, and will raise her. She adored her daughter, and her daughter loved her Mommy very much. They were very simpatico.
Be happy that you had Uncle Charlie for 73 years. You are more fortunate than you know.

A very traumatized brother of a wonderful young deceased Sister, Daughter, and Mother.

P.S.
With my injured fingers, I went into her bedroom-where she passed, and played her favorites: my original-she had me play for so many people and parties, JT-"Secret 'O Life",
I Want To Hold Your Hand-she sang that very well at 5,6, 7 years old, and a family favorite,
Joy To The World. I later went back and sang a capella: "Workin' At The Car Wash Blues", which she always used to ask for last. I can't conceive-yet-that she won't be singing it with me anymore. I will teach her daughter, and if she wants, she can sing it when she gets older.

I wept after I read Mike's letter this morning. Mike's news should serve as a reminder that our time(each day we are alive) is infinitely precious. Let's say the things and do the things we really want to do today, and not put it off for tomorrow.

Remembering Two Giants in My Life

2008-10-25T11:24:00.003-05:00

Today would have been my Uncle Charlie's 73rd birthday. I have talked on this blog about Charlie before. Charlie was a kind and intelligent man who achieved his PhD in his mid-50's. He always cared about my welfare and the welfare of each of his family members. He was modest and when he gave a gift of golf clubs to my son Ryan several years ago didn't want anyone to know, even Ryan. We had a long talk about the benefits of golf one Tuesday night. His father and my grandfather Charlie was an avid golfer into his late 70's, and had golfed his age many times.

Perhaps Charlie's downfall is that he wore his heart on his sleeve. He was sensitive to comments made in the family realm and at work sometimes. Perhaps overly sensitive. He was very empathetic to people who were bullied, those who were the black sheep in life. Not everyone in my family knew the real Charlie, but I believe I did. In our many conversations I got to know his true moral character and deeply sympathetic humanism. My mother often calls me Charlie by mistake,(and so did Grandma Jane sometimes) and that is the biggest compliment in the world. And if I wear my heart on my sleeve, I hope it is to show an empathy that will teach lessons to others. In our conversations we talked about the courage it takes to be "totally oneself" in this world. Charlie told me that he was very proud of how I never gave up in the broadcasting industry even though the politics was constantly in my way. He told me he was so proud of how I never gave up and was able to get back on my feet after a job layoff of personal crisis. Charlie said he was deeply moved by the number and quality of the good comments I got from letters of recommendation from community leaders(over 4 dozen of them) after I was laid off of my job as News Director in Fond du Lac. He empathized with my journey because in many ways it was most like his own. I found Charlie to be very approachable and he was the kind of guy that would help somebody if their vehicle broke down on a busy road. He had great passion for politics and the direction this country was headed in. He was a strong backer of Dennis Kucinich and I'm sure would have backed Obama strongly in the presidential race if he would have lived long enough to find out who the Democratic nominee was to be. Charlie was a lot like me. But there were differences. I am married and he never married(and there is speculation that he may have been bisexual, but never pernicious because of the respect he earned). My father says he had a propensity towards paranoia which hurt him in his personal and professional life. I would say earning a PhD pretty much dispells any myths that he may have been intellectually unable to set and follow through with work goals if the desire was there. Charlie had many wide ranging interests and perhaps that kept him from being 100-percent focussed(somewhat similar to me).

When I tried to ask my brother Will whether Charlie was mentally ill, he dodged the question like any good attorney would. Will and I will have to talk about that more sometime because I see him as a supportive and compassionate brother who would want to elucidate. I would also like to talk to my sister about Charlie sometime, but so far the opportunity has not presented itself. Will and Sarah will be backers of mine in the long run and we need to have more of these important conversations. I love and care about them very much. I will also have to talk to Iris sometime about why Charlie once said she was a kind of soulmate of his. Very interesting, have to probe that one!

Perhaps to Charlie's surprise, nobody talked too much about him when he was not around, but perhaps that wasn't good because our true feelings and compassion toward the goodness and decency of man maybe never got articulated the way it should have. Those are my feelings and I stand by them.

In other notes: Senator Paul Wellstone died six years ago today in a plane crash in northern Minnesota. He is another hero of mine. Here is a tribute to Wellstone on youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MjcGF1V-wM

Paul David Wellstone (July 21, 1944 – October 25, 2002) was a two-term U.S. Senator from the U.S. state of Minnesota and member of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, which is affiliated with the national Democratic Party. Before being elected to the Senate in 1990, he was a professor of political science at Carleton College. Wellstone was a progressive and a leading spokesman for the progressive wing of the national Democratic Party. He served in the Senate from 1991 until his death in a plane crash on 25 October 2002, 11 days before he was to stand in the midterm US senate election. His wife, Sheila, and daughter, Marcia, also died in the crash. They had two other grown children, David and Mark, who now co-chair the Wellstone Action nonprofit group.

Paul Wellstone was born in Washington D.C to Ukrainia-Jewis immigrants, Leon and Minnie Wellstone, and raised in Arlington, Virginia. Originally, his family name was Wexelstein, but his father changed the name to Wellstone in the 1930s when he encountered virulent anti-semitism. He attended Yorktown High Schoo in Arlington. He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hil (UNC) on a wrestling scholarship, graduating with a degree in political science in three years and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He was an Atlantic Coast Conference champion in his scholarship sport.
Wellstone married in 1963. In 1965 he earned his B.A. in Political Science; William Keech and Joel Schwartz served as his thesis advisers. Four years later he was awarded a Ph.D. in Political Science. Wellstone's 1969 doctoral dissertation at UNC was "Black Militants in the Ghetto: Why They Believe in Violence." Upon earning his Ph.D., Wellstone accepted a job as a Professor of Political Science at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, where he taught until his election to the Senate in 1990.
During the 1970s, he became involved in community organizing, working with the working poor and other politically disenfranchised communities. The first organization he founded was the Organization for a Better Rice County, a group consisting mainly of single parents on welfare, which he organized to advocate for public housing, affordable health care, improved public education, free school lunches, and a publicly-funded day care center. During this same period, he also began organizing with union members, farmers, and liberal activists. Later, he would use these connections in his bid for the Senate.
In the early 1970s, the trustees of Carleton College considered firing him, and actually did fire him for a short time, but his students held a sit-in that resulted in him getting his job back and becoming the youngest professor at Carleton to ever get tenure.[citation needed]

Political career
In 1982, he ran for state auditor, but lost to Arne Carlson. In 1988, he was the Minnesota campaign manager for Jesse Jackson's Presidential campaign.
In 1990, Wellstone ran for the U.S. Senate against incumbent Rudy Boschwitz, beginning the race as a serious underdog. He narrowly won the election, after being outspent by a 7-to-1 margin. Wellstone played off of his underdog image by airing a number of quirky, humorous advertisements created by political consultant Bill Hillsman including "Fast Paul" and "Looking for Rudy", a pastiche of the 1989 Michael Moore documentary Roger & Me.. Boschwitz was also hurt by a letter his supporters wrote, on campaign stationery, to members of the Minnesota Jewish community days before the election, accusing Wellstone of being a "bad Jew" for marrying a Gentile and not raising his children in the Jewish faith. (Boschwitz, like Wellstone, is Jewish.) Wellstone's reply, widely broadcast on Minnesota television, was, "He has a problem with Christians, then." Boschwitz was the only incumbent U.S. senator to lose re-election that year.

Wellstone's distinctive campaign bus
Wellstone defeated Boschwitz again for re-election in 1996. During that campaign, Boschwitz ran ads accusing Wellstone of being "embarrassingly liberal" and calling him "Senator Welfare". Boschwitz accused Wellstone of supporting flag burning, a move that some believe possibly backfired. Prior to that accusation, Boschwitz had significantly outspent Wellstone on campaign advertising and the race was closely contended, but Wellstone went on to beat Boschwitz by a nine-point margin in a three way race (Dean Barkley received 7%).
Wellstone's upset victory in 1990 and subsequent re-election in 1996 was also credited to a massive grassroots campaign, which inspired college students, poor people and minorities to get involved in politics for the very first time. In 1990, the number of young people involved in the campaign was so notable that shortly after the election, Walter Mondale told Wellstone that "the kids won it for you." Wellstone also spent a large portion of his Senate career working with the Hmong American community in Minnesota, an immigrant community that had not traditionally been involved in American politics. Wellstone also spent a great deal of his Senate career cultivating the veterans community - he served on the Senate Committee on Veteran's Affairs[4], and successfully campaigned for atomic veterans to receive compensation from the federal government[5] and for increased spending on health care for veterans [6].
In 2002, Wellstone campaigned for re-election to a third term (despite an earlier campaign pledge to only serve two terms) against Republican Norm Coleman, the two-term mayor of St. Paul, formerly a Democrat who had chaired Wellstone's 1996 re-election campaign. Earlier that year he announced he had a mild form of multiple sclerosis, causing the limp he had believed was an old wrestling injury.
Wellstone was in a line of left-of-center or progressive senators of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (DFL). The first three, Hubert Humphrey, Eugene McCarthy and Walter Mondale, were all prominent in the national Democratic Party. Shortly after joining the Senate, South Carolina Senator Fritz Hollings approached Wellstone and told him, "You remind me of Hubert Humphrey. You talk too much."

Policy views
Wellstone was known for his work for peace, the environment, labor, and health care; he also joined his wife Sheila to support the rights of victims of domestic violence. He made the issue of mental illness a central focus in his career.He was a solid supporter of increased immigration in the U.S. He opposed the first Gulf War in 1991 and, in the months before his death, spoke out against the government's threats to go to war with Iraq again. He was strongly supported by groups such as Americans for Democratic Action, the AFL-CIO, the Sierra Club, the ACLU, and People for the American Way.
In 1996 (facing a bitter re-election fight against Boschwitz), he voted in favor of the Defense of Marriage Act, which allowed states to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states and also excluded gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered married couples from receiving equal treatment under federal immigration, tax, welfare, Social Security and inheritance legislation.[8] His vote angered many of his long-time supporters in the LGBT community, and it didn't help his cause when he explained that he voted because he didn't believe in re-defining marriage. However, he later asked his supporters to educate him on the issue and by 2001, when he wrote his autobiography, Conscience of a Liberal, Wellstone admitted that he had made a mistake. After voting against the congressional authorization for the war in Iraq on October 11, 2002, in the midst of a tight election, Wellstone is said to have told his wife, "I just cost myself the election."
In the 2002 campaign, the Green Party ran a candidate against Wellstone. Some Greens opposed this move. The party's 2000 Vice-Presidential nominee, Winona LaDuke, described Wellstone as "a champion of the vast majority of our issues".[9] The Green Party's decision to oppose Wellstone was criticized by some progressives.[10]
Wellstone was the author of the 'Wellstone Amendment' added to the McCain-Feingold Bill for Campaign Finance Reform, in what came to be known as the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002. The law, including the Wellstone Amendment, was challenged as unconstitutional by groups and individuals including the California State Democratic Party, the National Rifle Association, and Republican Senator Mitch McConnell (Kentucky), the Senate Majority Whip, with critics agreeing on both sides of the political spectrum.[11] On December 10, 2003, the Supreme Court issued a ruling upholding the key provisions of McCain-Feingold, including the Wellstone Amendment; the vote on the court was 5 to 4. Wellstone saw McCain-Feingold's protection of "advocacy" groups as a "loophole" allowing "special interests" to run last-minute election ads. (Since corporate and union money was already banished in the bill, Wellstone was presumably worried mainly about money from rich individuals.) Wellstone pushed an amendment to extend McCain-Feingold's ban on last-minute ads to nonprofits like "the NRA, the Sierra Club, the Christian Coalition, and others." Under the Wellstone Amendment, these organizations could only advertise using money raised under strict "hard money" limits—no more than $5,000 per individual.

Presidential aspirations
Shortly after his re-election to the Senate in 1996, Wellstone began contemplating a run for his party's nomination for President of the United States in 2000.
As the first stage in his nascent pseudocampaign, he embarked upon a cross-country speaking and listening tour that he dubbed "the Children's Tour" in May 1997. This tour, which took him to rural areas of Mississippi and Appalachia and the inner cities of Minneapolis, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Baltimore, was intended to retrace the steps taken by Senator Robert F. Kennedy during a similar tour in 1966, in order to showcase the fact that conditions had not improved, as well as to test his message.
The following year, 1998, Wellstone began to more openly investigate the possibility of running. He formed an exploratory committee that paid for his travels to Iowa and New Hampshire, homes of the two first contests of the nomination process, to speak before organized labor and local Democrats. (His catchphrase from these speeches, "I represent the democratic wing of the Democratic Party," would later be incorporated into the 2004 stump speech of Governor Howard Dean.) He also met privately with the Rev. Jesse Jackson, allegedly to determine which of them would challenge Vice President Al Gore from the left in 2000.
During this time, a college student named Paul Hogarth designed and put up Wellstone2000.com, a website intended to drum up grassroots support for Wellstone's candidacy. By the time it completed its two-year run, the site had led to the recruitment of nearly 700 official members into the Draft Wellstone movement, had sold hundreds of "Wellstone 2000" political buttons, and had led to the formation of "Students for Wellstone" clubs on campuses across the country.
Then, on January 9, 1999, Wellstone called a press conference in the Minnesota capitol building. Rather than announcing his candidacy, as had been expected, he instead declared that he would not be a candidate. His explanation was that his old wrestling injury (in reality, it would some time later be diagnosed as multiple sclerosis) prevented him from mustering the stamina necessary for a national campaign. Later that year, he would endorse the candidacy of former Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey, the only Democrat to run against Gore.

Gulf War
Senator Wellstone voted against authorizing the use of force before the Gulf War on January 12, 1991 (the vote was 52–47 in favor).[5] He also voted against the use of force before the Iraq War on October 11, 2002 (the vote was 77–23 in favor).[6] Wellstone was one of only eleven senators to vote against both the 1991 and 2002 resolutions. The others were also all Democratic senators: Akaka-HI, Bingaman-NM, Byrd-WV, Conrad-ND, Inoyue-HI, Kennedy-MA, Leahy-VT, Levin-MI, Mikulski-MD, and Sarbanes-MD.

Other key military action votes
Wellstone supported requests for military action by President Clinton, including Operation Restore Hope in Somalia (1992), Operation Uphold Democracy in Haiti (1994), Operation Deliberate Force in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1995), Operation Desert Fox in Iraq (1998) and Operation Allied Force in Yugoslavia (1999). On July 1, 1994, during the 100-day Rwandan Genocide from April 6 to mid-July 1994, Wellstone authored an amendment to the 1995 defense appropriations bill. The amendment expressed the sense of the Congress regarding the genocide in Rwanda and the need to expedite assistance in protecting populations at risk in that country but did not authorize military or peacekeeping aid.

Death
On October 25, 2002, Wellstone died, along with seven others, in a plane crash in northern Minnesota, at approximately 10:22 a.m. He was 58. The other victims were his wife, Sheila; one of his three children, Marcia; the two pilots, his driver, Will McLaughlin, and campaign staffers Tom Lapic and Mary McEvoy. The plane was en route to Eveleth, where Wellstone was to attend the funeral of Martin Rukavina, a steelworker whose son Tom Rukavina serves in the Minnesota House of Representatives. Wellstone decided to go to the funeral instead of a rally and fundraiser in Minneapolis attended by Mondale and fellow Senator Ted Kennedy. He was to debate Norm Coleman in Duluth, Minnesota that same night.

Wellstone Burial Plot, Minneapolis, MN.
The Beechcraft King Air A100 plane crashed into dense forest about two miles from the Eveleth airport, while operating under instrument flight rules. The charter plane Wellstone was traveling in had no flight data recorders. Both pilots tested negative for drug or alcohol use. Icing, though widely reported on in following days, was considered and eventually rejected as a significant factor in the crash. The Board judged that while cloud cover might have prevented the flight crew from seeing the airport, icing did not affect the airplane's performance during the descent.[14]
The NTSB later determined that the likely cause of the accident was the failure of both the pilot and copilot to maintain a safe minimum airspeed, leading to a stall from which they could not recover.
Michael L. Guess, the First Officer, was characterized in the NTSB report as being "below average" in proficiency.[15] Significant discrepancies were also found in pilot Richard Conry's flight logs in the course of the post-accident investigation. [16] He also had a well-known tendency to allow copilots to take over all functions of the aircraft as if they were the sole pilot during flights. After the crash, three copilots told of occasions in which they had to take control of the aircraft away from Conry. After one of those incidents, only three days before the crash, the copilot had urged Conry to retire[17]. A few months before the crash, Conry told another pilot, Timothy M. Cooney, a childhood friend, that he had difficulty piloting and landing King Airs[18]. The copilot Guess was cited by coworkers as having to be consistently reminded to keep his hand on the throttle and maintain airspeed during approaches[16].
The final two radar readings detected the airplane traveling at or just below its predicted stall speed given conditions at the time of the accident[16].
The timing and circumstances surrounding the crash, along with inconsistent statements made by public safety officials and crash investigators, led to speculation that a government conspiracy was behind the crash. University of Minnesota Duluth philosophy professor Jim Fetzer wrote several articles and a book alleging that the crash had been engineered by the Bush administration.[19][20]

[edit] Aftermath
Wellstone's death came just 11 days before his potential re-election in a crucial race to maintain Democratic control of the Senate. Campaigning was halted by all sides. Minnesota law required that his name be struck from the ballot, to be replaced by a candidate chosen by the party. The replacement candidate was former Vice President Walter Mondale, who accepted the nomination and later lost the election to Republican Norm Coleman.
The 20,000-capacity memorial service for Wellstone and the other victims of the crash was held in Williams Arena at the University of Minnesota and was broadcast live on national TV. Many high profile politicians attended the memorial, including former President Bill Clinton, Senator Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, Senator Ted Kennedy, Senator Trent Lott, and Governor Tommy Thompson. The White House offered to send Vice-President Dick Cheney to the service, but the Wellstone family declined.[21] After Rick Kahn began urging that the crowd should win the election for Wellstone and that Republicans should stop their opposition to the Senate seat, Senator Lott and Governor Jesse Ventura, were booed (Lott and Ventura ultimately walked out); Later in the service, Wellstone's personal eulogy was delivered by Senator Tom Harkin, another notable Democrat and Wellstone's close friend in the Senate, who urged those present to "stand up for Paul" in the election.
The event was criticized for its tone. Governor Ventura, who had the option to pick a replacement senator to serve out the remainder of Wellstone's term through January 2003, went so far as to declare he would solicit résumés for the senatorial position from everyone except Democrats. On the other hand, the pre-election outrage swirling around Wellstone's memorial was condemned by Democrats, like radio personality Al Franken, who was at the memorial and claimed that the outrage was overblown in order to damage the Democratic candidate running as Wellstone's replacement.
Don Hazen, executive editor of Alternet, wrote of Wellstone's passing, "Progressives across the land are in shock as the person many think of as the conscience of the Senate is gone."[22]
On November 4, the day before Election Day, Ventura appointed state planning commissioner Dean Barkley, founder and chair of the Minnesota Independence Party, to complete the remaining two months of Wellstone's Senate term; he had run against Wellstone in 1996.

[edit] Legacy

Paul Wellstone markerwith stones.
Wellstone is survived by his sons David and Mark and six grandchildren. The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations has created the AFL-CIO Senator Paul Wellstone Award for supporters of the rights of labor unions. Presidential candidate Howard Dean and California state senator John Burton both received the first award in January 2003. In 2004, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill dedicated the Paul and Sheila Wellstone Memorial Garden as a tribute to the couple, both graduates of the university.
Near the site of his plane crash, a memorial to the Wellstones was dedicated on September 25, 2005. His distinctive green bus was present, as well as hundreds of supporters and loved ones. The Senator and his wife were laid to rest at Lakewood Cemetery in Minneapolis, the same cemetery in which Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey is interred. A memorial sculpture near Lake Calhoun marks their gravesites. Visitors sometimes follow the Jewish custom[7] of placing small stones on the boulder marking the family plot or on the individual markers. His legacy continues as Wellstone Action, a nonprofit, nonpartisan membership organization that trains citizens and potential candidates with a progressive agendum.[23][24][25][26]
In 2007, former First Lady Rosalynn Carter joined with David Wellstone to push Congress to pass legislation regarding mental health insurance.[27] Wellstone and Carter worked to pass the "Paul Wellstone Mental Health and Addiction Equity Act" which requires equal coverage of mental and physical illnesses when policies include both types of coverage; both testified before a House subcommittee regarding the bill in July 2007.[27] David said of his father, "Although he was passionate on many issues, there was not another issue that surpassed this in terms of his passion."[27] Because Paul Wellstone's brother had suffered from mental illness, Wellstone had fought for changes in mental health and insurance laws when he reached the Senate.[27]
On March 5, 2008 the House of Representatives passed H.R. 1424, the Paul Wellstone Mental Health and Addiction Equity Act of 2007 by a vote of 268-148. It was sponsored by Representative Patrick J. Kennedy (D- Rhode Island), who is a recovering alcoholic and Representative Jim Ramstad, (R-Minnesota), also a recovering alcoholic. The narrower Senate bill S. 558, passed earlier, was introduced by Kennedy's father, Senator Edward Kennedy (D-Massachusetts), Pete Domenici, (R-New Mexico), and Mike Enzi.

Don't Mess with the Chris's

2008-10-24T11:51:00.005-05:00

Is it just me or does it seem like Chris Matthews of MSNBC is a little angry lately. He seem a little mean spirited wanting to draw the McCain female spokesperson out on what she knows about the role of the vice-president and trying to embarrass her. And the incident with the Minnesota congresswoman on anti-American views, that was more legit, but still could been a little more friendly too her. What's wrong Chris, a bad hair week---must be. Your show is still great and I love your books.

To my friend Tim. I sent a humorous video to you this week. Please do not take it personally. It is a fictional news story of how you ruined the 2008 election. It's all in fun :)

Did you guys see Christopher Hitchens talking to Sean Hannity about the death of Jerry Falwell. He is in attack mode, but 99-percent right on his points. I feel a little uncomfortable when he compares a far right spokesman to Jack Abrahmhoff. That's a little childish and dirty Chris. But, on the whole, Hitchens is far more lucid and intelligent and any other guest. Sometimes it seems he is in a William F. Buckley world of his own. I've included this great segment on my "Favorite Internet Sites."

Have a great weekend and keep reading Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris and Dennett whenever you can! Skip the Frances Collins please.

"When Athiests Attack" by Sam Harris

2008-10-22T23:40:00.004-05:00

Let me confess that I was genuinely unnerved by Sarah Palin's performance at the Republican convention. Given her audience and the needs of the moment, I believe Governor Palin's speech was the most effective political communication I have ever witnessed. Here, finally, was a performer who—being maternal, wounded, righteous and sexy—could stride past the frontal cortex of every American and plant a three-inch heel directly on that limbic circuit that ceaselessly intones "God and country." If anyone could make Christian theocracy smell like apple pie, Sarah Palin could.
Then came Palin's first television interview with Charles Gibson. I was relieved to discover, as many were, that Palin's luster can be much diminished by the absence of a teleprompter. Still, the problem she poses to our political process is now much bigger than she is. Her fans seem inclined to forgive her any indiscretion short of cannibalism. However badly she may stumble during the remaining weeks of this campaign, her supporters will focus their outrage upon the journalist who caused her to break stride, upon the camera operator who happened to capture her fall, upon the television network that broadcast the good lady's misfortune—and, above all, upon the "liberal elites" with their highfalutin assumption that, in the 21st century, only a reasonably well-educated person should be given command of our nuclear arsenal.
The point to be lamented is not that Sarah Palin comes from outside Washington, or that she has glimpsed so little of the earth's surface (she didn't have a passport until last year), or that she's never met a foreign head of state. The point is that she comes to us, seeking the second most important job in the world, without any intellectual training relevant to the challenges and responsibilities that await her. There is nothing to suggest that she even sees a role for careful analysis or a deep understanding of world events when it comes to deciding the fate of a nation. In her interview with Gibson, Palin managed to turn a joke about seeing Russia from her window into a straight-faced claim that Alaska's geographical proximity to Russia gave her some essential foreign-policy experience. Palin may be a perfectly wonderful person, a loving mother and a great American success story—but she is a beauty queen/sports reporter who stumbled into small-town politics, and who is now on the verge of stumbling into, or upon, world history.

The problem, as far as our political process is concerned, is that half the electorate revels in Palin's lack of intellectual qualifications. When it comes to politics, there is a mad love of mediocrity in this country. "They think they're better than you!" is the refrain that (highly competent and cynical) Republican strategists have set loose among the crowd, and the crowd has grown drunk on it once again. "Sarah Palin is an ordinary person!" Yes, all too ordinary.
We have all now witnessed apparently sentient human beings, once provoked by a reporter's microphone, saying things like, "I'm voting for Sarah because she's a mom. She knows what it's like to be a mom." Such sentiments suggest an uncanny (and, one fears, especially American) detachment from the real problems of today. The next administration must immediately confront issues like nuclear proliferation, ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and covert wars elsewhere), global climate change, a convulsing economy, Russian belligerence, the rise of China, emerging epidemics, Islamism on a hundred fronts, a defunct United Nations, the deterioration of American schools, failures of energy, infrastructure and Internet security … the list is long, and Sarah Palin does not seem competent even to rank these items in order of importance, much less address any one of them.
Palin's most conspicuous gaffe in her interview with Gibson has been widely discussed. The truth is, I didn't much care that she did not know the meaning of the phrase "Bush doctrine." And I am quite sure that her supporters didn't care, either. Most people view such an ambush as a journalistic gimmick. What I do care about are all the other things Palin is guaranteed not to know—or will be glossing only under the frenzied tutelage of John McCain's advisers. What doesn't she know about financial markets, Islam, the history of the Middle East, the cold war, modern weapons systems, medical research, environmental science or emerging technology? Her relative ignorance is guaranteed on these fronts and most others, not because she was put on the spot, or got nervous, or just happened to miss the newspaper on any given morning. Sarah Palin's ignorance is guaranteed because of how she has spent the past 44 years on earth.

I care even more about the many things Palin thinks she knows but doesn't: like her conviction that the Biblical God consciously directs world events. Needless to say, she shares this belief with mil-lions of Americans—but we shouldn't be eager to give these people our nuclear codes, either. There is no question that if President McCain chokes on a spare rib and Palin becomes the first woman president, she and her supporters will believe that God, in all his majesty and wisdom, has brought it to pass. Why would God give Sarah Palin a job she isn't ready for? He wouldn't. Everything happens for a reason. Palin seems perfectly willing to stake the welfare of our country—even the welfare of our species—as collateral in her own personal journey of faith. Of course, McCain has made the same unconscionable wager on his personal journey to the White House.
In speaking before her church about her son going to war in Iraq, Palin urged the congregation to pray "that our national leaders are sending them out on a task that is from God; that's what we have to make sure we are praying for, that there is a plan, and that plan is God's plan." When asked about these remarks in her interview with Gibson, Palin successfully dodged the issue of her religious beliefs by claiming that she had been merely echoing the words of Abraham Lincoln. The New York Times later dubbed her response "absurd." It was worse than absurd; it was a lie calculated to conceal the true character of her religious infatuations. Every detail that has emerged about Palin's life in Alaska suggests that she is as devout and literal-minded in her Christian dogmatism as any man or woman in the land. Given her long affiliation with the Assemblies of God church, Palin very likely believes that Biblical prophecy is an infallible guide to future events and that we are living in the "end times." Which is to say she very likely thinks that human history will soon unravel in a foreordained cataclysm of war and bad weather. Undoubtedly Palin believes that this will be a good thing—as all true Christians will be lifted bodily into the sky to make merry with Jesus, while all nonbelievers, Jews, Methodists and other rabble will be punished for eternity in a lake of fire. Like many Pentecostals, Palin may even imagine that she and her fellow parishioners enjoy the power of prophecy themselves. Otherwise, what could she have meant when declaring to her congregation that "God's going to tell you what is going on, and what is going to go on, and you guys are going to have that within you"?
You can learn something about a person by the company she keeps. In the churches where Palin has worshiped for decades, parishioners enjoy "baptism in the Holy Spirit," "miraculous healings" and "the gift of tongues." Invariably, they offer astonishingly irrational accounts of this behavior and of its significance for the entire cosmos. Palin's spiritual colleagues describe themselves as part of "the final generation," engaged in "spiritual warfare" to purge the earth of "demonic strongholds." Palin has spent her entire adult life immersed in this apocalyptic hysteria. Ask yourself: Is it a good idea to place the most powerful military on earth at her disposal? Do we actually want our leaders thinking about the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy when it comes time to say to the Iranians, or to the North Koreans, or to the Pakistanis, or to the Russians or to the Chinese: "All options remain on the table"?
It is easy to see what many people, women especially, admire about Sarah Palin. Here is a mother of five who can see the bright side of having a child with Down syndrome and still find the time and energy to govern the state of Alaska. But we cannot ignore the fact that Palin's impressive family further testifies to her dogmatic religious beliefs. Many writers have noted the many shades of conservative hypocrisy on view here: when Jamie Lynn Spears gets pregnant, it is considered a symptom of liberal decadence and the breakdown of family values; in the case of one of Palin's daughters, however, teen pregnancy gets reinterpreted as a sign of immaculate, small-town fecundity. And just imagine if, instead of the Palins, the Obama family had a pregnant, underage daughter on display at their convention, flanked by her black boyfriend who "intends" to marry her. Who among conservatives would have resisted the temptation to speak of "the dysfunction in the black community"?
Teen pregnancy is a misfortune, plain and simple. At best, it represents bad luck (both for the mother and for the child); at worst, as in the Palins' case, it is a symptom of religious dogmatism. Governor Palin opposes sex education in schools on religious grounds. She has also fought vigorously for a "parental consent law" in the state of Alaska, seeking full parental dominion over the reproductive decisions of minors. We know, therefore, that Palin believes that she should be the one to decide whether her daughter carries her baby to term. Based on her stated position, we know that she would deny her daughter an abortion even if she had been raped. One can be forgiven for doubting whether Bristol Palin had all the advantages of 21st-century family planning—or, indeed, of the 21st century.
We have endured eight years of an administration that seemed touched by religious ideology. Bush's claim to Bob Woodward that he consulted a "higher Father" before going to war in Iraq got many of us sitting upright, before our attention wandered again to less ethereal signs of his incompetence. For all my concern about Bush's religious beliefs, and about his merely average grasp of terrestrial reality, I have never once thought that he was an over-the-brink, Rapture-ready extremist. Palin seems as though she might be the real McCoy. With the McCain team leading her around like a pet pony between now and Election Day, she can be expected to conceal her religious extremism until it is too late to do anything about it. Her supporters know that while she cannot afford to "talk the talk" between now and Nov. 4, if elected, she can be trusted to "walk the walk" until the Day of Judgment.

What is so unnerving about the candidacy of Sarah Palin is the degree to which she represents—and her supporters celebrate—the joyful marriage of confidence and ignorance. Watching her deny to Gibson that she had ever harbored the slightest doubt about her readiness to take command of the world's only superpower, one got the feeling that Palin would gladly assume any responsibility on earth:
"Governor Palin, are you ready at this moment to perform surgery on this child's brain?"
"Of course, Charlie. I have several boys of my own, and I'm an avid hunter."

"But governor, this is neurosurgery, and you have no training as a surgeon of any kind."
"That's just the point, Charlie. The American people want change in how we make medical decisions in this country. And when faced with a challenge, you cannot blink."
The prospects of a Palin administration are far more frightening, in fact, than those of a Palin Institute for Pediatric Neurosurgery. Ask yourself: how has "elitism" become a bad word in American politics? There is simply no other walk of life in which extraordinary talent and rigorous training are denigrated. We want elite pilots to fly our planes, elite troops to undertake our most critical missions, elite athletes to represent us in competition and elite scientists to devote the most productive years of their lives to curing our diseases. And yet, when it comes time to vest people with even greater responsibilities, we consider it a virtue to shun any and all standards of excellence. When it comes to choosing the people whose thoughts and actions will decide the fates of millions, then we suddenly want someone just like us, someone fit to have a beer with, someone down-to-earth—in fact, almost anyone, provided that he or she doesn't seem too intelligent or well educated.

I believe that with the nomination of Sarah Palin for the vice presidency, the silliness of our politics has finally put our nation at risk. The world is growing more complex—and dangerous—with each passing hour, and our position within it growing more precarious. Should she become president, Palin seems capable of enacting policies so detached from the common interests of humanity, and from empirical reality, as to unite the entire world against us. When asked why she is qualified to shoulder more responsibility than any person has held in human history, Palin cites her refusal to hesitate. "You can't blink," she told Gibson repeatedly, as though this were a primordial truth of wise governance. Let us hope that a President Palin would blink, again and again, while more thoughtful people decide the fate of civilization.

Harris is a founder of The Reason Project and author of The New York Times best sellers “The End of Faith” and “Letter to a Christian Nation.” His Web site is www.samharris.org

Hopper Versus King, Pro Life Views a Litmus Test for Intelligence?

2008-10-22T10:59:00.005-05:00

There is a very interesting political race for the 18th State Senate in Wisconsin. Randy Hopper, the Republican, and Jessica King, the Democrat. It seems the two are most divided on pro-life/pro-choice, health care and revenue to local municipalities. I know Hopper is 100-percent with the NRA and I'm not sure what King's stance is but I would think more towards the gun control side.

My question is this. Is being pro-life a litmus test for the ability to reason and general use of logic, i.e. intelligence? And, shouldn't we be voting for the most intelligent candidate? Isn't Hopper's inability to reason through matters to become pro-choice a stumbling block that should be noticed by the voters? I believe he sees the world more through a faith-based lense than King's more objective scientific approach. Hopper who has been invited to parties with the Bush's is trying to buy this 18th Distict Senate race. His extremist views regarding gun rights should also open the voters eyes, but are the voters perceptive enough to see what is going on?

I will continue to campaign hard for Jessica on my campaign phone calls and the fact that Hopper is a former boss of mine only confirms my feelings about his character and ego.

Quotes from Carl Sagan

2008-10-21T09:38:00.002-05:00

A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.

All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value.

But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.

I am often amazed at how much more capability and enthusiasm for science there is among elementary school youngsters than among college students.

I can find in my undergraduate classes, bright students who do not know that the stars rise and set at night, or even that the Sun is a star.

If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits?

Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.

In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.

It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works.

Personally, I would be delighted if there were a life after death, especially if it permitted me to continue to learn about this world and others, if it gave me a chance to discover how history turns out.

Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.

Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense.

Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.

The brain is like a muscle. When it is in use we feel very good. Understanding is joyous.

The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.

The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.

We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.

We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. When you make the finding yourself - even if you're the last person on Earth to see the light - you'll never forget it.

Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.

Interesting Writers and Speakers

2008-10-20T12:40:00.004-05:00

There is a very good Q and A session with Richard Dawkins at a speech earlier this year from Berkeley, CA.

http://richarddawkins.net/article,3001,QampA-with-Richard-Dawkins-after-lecture-at-UC-Berkeley,RichardDawkinsnet

Many interesting ideas cropped up during Dawkins "God Delusion" tour. He is so good at explaining things in a scientific way. Dawkins also admits that he cannot prove 100-percent that there is not a God. Watch Dawkin's series called: "Enemies of Reason" on Youtube here:

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=enemies+of+reason&search_type=&aq=f

Also, I purchased a new book over the weekend. Deepak Chopra's "The Third Jesus." He writes in a very interesting way and his thoughts cannot be totally discounted. My little experiment---what thoughts of his could be not as easily discounted. When talking about the character of Jesus, he mentions the Golden Rule and how societies and religions have veered away from the simple truths that Jesus may have intended. Chopra's thought patterns may not be entirely logical, but they are certainly worthly of deep study and analysis. Some reviews of the book:

"In this book, Deepak Chopra proposes a Copernican revolution in our understanding of Christianity by replacing the theological version of the holy trinity with the triptych of Jesus as possessing a human, an institutional and a mystical dimension. By emphasizing the mystical dimension and identifying Jesus as a spiritual revolutionary, he invites Christianity to perform yet another miracle in his name- that of transforming the world once again."—Arvind Sharma, Birks Professor of Comparative Religion, Faculty of Religious Studies, McGill University

"The hardest thing to see is what is hidden in plain sight. After 20 centuries of doctrine and dogma we have nearly lost sight of the Jesus who was a wandering teacher of mystical truths. In his imaginative reconstruction of the inner meaning of the gospels, Deepak Chopra reminds us of The Third Jesus, the enlightened master of God-consciousness. It will disturb the minds of the orthodox, and delight the spirits of mystics and progressive Christians."—Sam Keen, Philosopher and Author, Sightings: Extraordinary Encounters with Ordinary Birds

"An insightful and clarifying glimpse into the life of one of the most radical spiritual teachers the world has known. Chopra gives us the gift of knowing that we may walk in the enlightened footsteps of our brother, Jesus the Christ."—Michael Bernard Beckwith, founder Agape International Spiritual Center and author of Inspirations of the Heart, 40 Day Mind Fast Soul Feast, A Manifesto of Peace

"In The Third Jesus Deepak Chopra unfolds for us the spirit of Jesus and with a reverence that is at once simple and profound makes his spirit accessible to us in our everyday lives."—Father Paul Keenan, Host, "As You Think," The Catholic Channel/Sirius 159“Distinguishing between the historical Jesus and the Christ of Theology and Philosophy developed over 17 centuries Dr. Chopra captures an intriguing vision of a “Third Jesus,” who, while living on Earth, developed a deep relationship with God. Deepak calls this “God-consciousness.” Dr. Chopra brilliantly uses the sayings of Jesus to demonstrate how his basic mission and ethic of love grew out of his God-consciousness. Through Jesus’ own words and spiritual exercises Deepak beautifully elucidates a beginning, middle and unity pathway for growing in deep God-consciousness to anchor our life on earth and our life after death.”—Rev. Edward J. Ruetz, retired Catholic priest of the Diocese of Fort Wayne/South Bend in Indiana

"Dr. Deepak Chopra's analyses and interpretations of the sayings of Jesus, in the form of "Comment," breathe renewed life into those sayings. Chopra's work brings the teachings of Jesus into sharp focus with a marvelous, modern touch of insight from the vantage of both Eastern and Western thought. With the thought of Jesus's model in hand, Chopra provides the reader with a spiritual path of exercises -- a remarkably renewed practice in search of a higher reality, helping to cause a connection between reader and God. The views Chopra imparts are definitely worth the effort to undertake this enlightening journey of reading and practice."—Ben Christensen, Ph.D., Prof. Emeritus Dean of the San Diego School of Christian Studies First United Methodist Church of San Diego, CA

"Jesus has now long since escaped the confines of church, Christianity and even 'religions.' Chopra's book thoughtfully presents a Jesus who is paradoxically both closer to the original and more available to post-modern people than the stained glass version. The book is bound to provoke both admiration and condemnation which, come to think of it, the maverick Galilean rabbi also did."—Harvey Cox, author, When Jesus Came to Harvard, Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard

"Chopra’s book The Third Jesus reminds me of the theological work of one of history’s greatest humanitarians and the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Dr. Albert Schweitzer. Schweitzer wrote extensively about Jesus and challenged much of the prevailing theology regarding Jesus’ life and ideas. Chopra is Schweitzer’s equal in bringing to light a fresh and profound way to experience the teachings of Jesus."—David T. Ives, Executive Director of the Albert Schweitzer Institute at Quinnipiac University

"In this book a man shaped by the religions of the East introduces the West to a Jesus we have either lost or have never known. That is itself a stunning concept, but Deepak Chopra is a stunning man. He explores what he calls the 'Christ Consciousness,' which can be identified neither with the Jesus of history nor with the Jesus of the creeds, the doctrines and the dogmas of the ecclesiastical institution. This 'Third Jesus' can be seen only when we move into a new human awareness that will carry us beyond tribe, prejudice and even beyond our religious systems. As a Christian, I welcome his insights into my Jesus and his provocative call to me to enter the 'Christ Consciousness' and thus to become more deeply and completely human."—John Shelby Spong, Retired Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Newark, Author, Jesus for the Non-Religious

"In this intriguing study of the sayings of Jesus, Deepak Chopra gently releases this highly evolved spiritual teacher, light of the world and son of God from the limitations of dogmatic theology. With profound wisdom and clarity Deepak offers the amazing suggestion that the same God-consciousness embodied in the human Jesus is present in all of us individually and collectively. In a spirit of humble knowingness Deepak encourages us to look deep into the mirror of our collective souls and ponder the question Jesus continues to ask “Who do YOU say that I AM ?"—Sister Judian Breitenbach, Catholic order of the Poor Handmaids of Jesus Christ, Founder of the Sari Asher Namaste’ Center in LaPorte, Indiana

"The book makes God accessible to those who find God distant, troublesome, or both. Chopra rescues Jesus from the confusion of the ever multiplying schools of Biblical criticism. The book shows us how to investigate, in a new way, Jesus--the mysterious man with divine awareness. Chopra resolves contradictions in Jesus' sayings, sharpens our understanding of Jesus' teachings, and guides us in the application of Jesus' teachings. Jesus comes into focus. We gain new expectations of what the spiritual life looks like. The book calls even to those who have lost any sense of God. By following the book's practical applications, they, too, may find the universe meaningful instead of indifferent. This is a book to read, re-read, and incorporate into one's life."—Bonnie Bobzien, MD, Member of board of directors of San Diego School of Christian Studies

"Literate, mainstream Christians will welcome Chopra’s championing before the world, the meaning of their commitment to action, practice, 'ortho-praxis,' following the only absolutely unambiguous demands of Jesus on his followers recorded in the New Testament: serving the poor, loving neighbor and even enemies. It is the most effective response to the Dawkins’ crowd who never even mention the Bishop Robinsons, Martin King, Dietrich Bonhoeffers, Mother Teresas who by their actions, have shown their faith in this Jesus Christ."—Rustum Roy, Evan Pugh Professor of the Solid State Emeritus, Professor of Science Technology and Society Emeritus, The Pennsylvania State University

Hate Talk in America

2008-10-15T08:26:00.002-05:00

There is some interesting stuff out on the web titled: "The McCain/Palin" mob. The following video reveals a lot about the closed mindedness of extremist right wingers who are zealous and not rational in their views:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJghQMq49dw&NR=1

The last few days of this campaign it's going to be interesting and you will see more nuts like this show up at Obama rallies. I fear for his safety.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=031VHnUD0aw&feature=related

Robert Gibbs, Obama's Campaign Manager, goes head to head with Mr. Ignoramous himself, Sean Hannity:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjWnpeH31ds

If you doubt Hannity is a bully, watch this interview:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmcupSmgraw

Here is another person who is very dangerous for the country, Ann Coulter. I have personally interviewed her and find that she comes close to a sociopath on the empathy for the common man scale:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvjoYkUX6IQ&feature=related

How about this one??

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWo5IiyxfuE&NR=1

Have you had enough? I certainly have.

Have a good day.

Hardball

2008-10-14T13:04:00.004-05:00

I have been watching a lot "Hardball" with Chris Matthews lately. His questions are hard hitting but he is brilliant how he does it in sort of folksy way, like how someone at the barbershop or the watercooler would ask questions. I also have his new book from the library called, "Life is a Campaign." In the book he has some sterling advice for people who want to be winners at life, because, of course, politics is all around us. The book also convinces me that I relate a lot better to liberals than conservatives. Matthew's way of speaking is in a clear voice that is direct, much like the style of the late Tim Russert. After each chapter of the book, he has sayings called "The Bottom Line." The essence of each chapter is siphoned down to one paragraph. One of my favorite chapters so far is the one that warns, "Not Everyone is Going to Like You." He presents some good examples in the book about why this philosophy works at home and at work. There are also examples of how Bill Clinton and more of Matthews' heroes were not stunned and sidelined by their detractors.

Check out "Hardball!!"

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036697/

btw....Chris had a ball with this one last night, Sarah Palin being booed at a hockey game in Philly!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gd4wQd_gbj8

Have a great day. Enjoy the fall weather :)