PHREADOM

The Word that Was

2009-09-15T07:14:00.003-04:00

I recently ran a search on the history of liberalism and stumbled upon a question/answer forum where one user asked what the word 'liberal' meant.

A revised version of my answer follows here. Since it is crucial that words have shared meanings, I think it's important that we pause and take a real short look at the life and times of the word 'liberal', may it rest in peace...

In the case of ‘liberalism’ or ‘liberal’, the etymology gives us a foreshadowing of our recent past. The original french word came into use in the 14th century, meaning ‘free’ or ‘pertaining to free men’ (as in 'liberty!'), then later began appearing as ‘generous’ (as in, a ‘liberal helping of soup, please’)

It turns out that is also a good summary of what happened to the word ‘liberal’ in not-so-distant United States politics.

From its inception, liberalism meant economic and personal freedom from the rule of local sovereigns and governments of any kind. It grew out of a middle-ages Europe that had begun technological advancement, but not-yet formed large nation-states. It was in essence little more than the simple observation of the advantages of an inoffensive duke, who took little from his subjects or from passing traders, in comparison with a neighboring one just a few kilometers away, who plundered his lands, visitors and people.

But with the close of the 19th century the memes of european socialist thought had begun to spread to the new world and found nourishment as an extension to the idea of creating order in society. 'Liberal' was increasingly finding use as an adjective for policies that promised to be scientific, to be utilitarian and to be liberally generous. … with other people’s money.

What once meant ‘free’ as in speech (and action) was now supposed to mean ‘free’ as in ‘free lunch’. Why, one wonders, did this transformation / inversion occur in the USA and not in Europe? It seems to me one of the great ironic tragedies of the twentieth century, that this complete inversion of the meaning of ‘liberal-liberty’ to ‘liberal-slavery’ (yes, slavery as in 'bondage to the government', whether as taxpayer or as dole recipient) was accomplished in the land that created (for non-slaves) the world’s freest known republic in 1776.

Having suffered being turned inside out like a skinned rabbit, the poor word that once stood for the doctrine of freedom was now to be roasted to a cinder.

In more recent times – 1980s and 90s, conservatives and/or Republicans launched the well known and reported attack on ‘liberals’. You see “Liberalism” was now going to be revealed for what it was – the code-word for socialism.

But no mention of the theft. No. Republicans accepted the wrong definition of ‘liberal’, so they could force the Left to repudiate it and thus exterminate it for all time. No Democrat OR Republican would EVER refer to themselves as advocating liberalism again… the word that once meant “freedom”.

1) Among the many fine resources on the web, the Mises Institute (with the amazing mises.org library), stands out as the best free source on the liberal tradition in economics and public policy.

Moving Beyond Ignorance

2009-07-29T13:04:00.005-04:00

I ran across a quote today that I felt compelled to share... it so powerfully sums up the issue of promoting credulity above reason.

"Man once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without rudder, is the sport of every wind. With such persons, gullibility, which they call faith, takes the helm from the hand of reason, and the mind becomes a wreck." --Thomas Jefferson to James Smith, 1822.

Peter Schiff Unchained

2009-03-05T22:01:00.009-05:00

The popularity of investment advisor Peter Schiff has grown explosively since he locked heads with the pundits on TV in 2006/2007 by correctly forecasting the current recession.

No, he's not some magic guru - just a man who understands economics (real economics, Austrian economics) and told the truth to the American public on television. Now Schiff is taking it to the net, with a new radio and TV show where we finally get to hear him talk without suffering the interruptions of fools.

His March 04 podcast is remarkable for some points made to the scandal-du-jour that have lasting import. Lasting and important enough to transcribe for 'phreadom' readers (thanks nomin)! Here's an excerpt of the podcast where he explains what is right about 'wishing ill' upon the stimulus.

Apparently, Rush Limbaugh said some things that the dems jumped all over, Obama jumped all over. It shows how they like to spin this stuff and demagogue on these issues. What Limbaugh said was that he hoped Obama would fail. He didn't want him to succeed, he wanted him to fail. Now of course, the democrats jump on this as if Rush Limbaugh wants America to fail, wants the economy to fail, wants the stock market to fail, and he's hoping that all this bad stuff happens to discredit Obama.

Well of course that's not what Rush Limbaugh means at all. And a lot of people are afraid to talk about what he really meant. Look, Rush Limbaugh wants America to succeed as much as anybody wants America to succeed. But what Rush Limbaugh understands is that in order for America to succeed, Obama has to fail. He has to fail at getting his agenda through Congress. If Barack Obama gets everything that he wants, if he can fully implement his agenda and his plan, there is absolutely no chance the US economy will succeed. There is a 100% chance that it will fail. So the only way for us to succeed is for Obama to fail, and we need people in Congress to oppose what Obama is trying to do. The problem is, the loyal opposition - in this case the Republicans - just don't have any credibility on this issue; because how can they oppose Obama when he wants to do exactly what Bush did? That's the whole big irony of this whole situation. Barack Obama constantly talks about how it's different now, how it's so much different under his administration, that the voters wanted change and he's here to deliver it. Well I got news for you: there is nothing different. All Obama is doing is continuing the failed policies of Bush.

He's got the same Wall St. types running government. He took the head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and stuck him in Treasury. It's the same people that are in charge and it's the same policies. It's bailout failing companies and stimulate the economy with government spending, trying to encourage more consumption. That's exactly what Bush did. They're trying to prop up real estate prices -- well, that's what Bush did. It's all the same. He can talk about how different it is, but there is no difference. The only difference is the degree. He's simply out-bushing Bush. We're getting Bush on steriods with Obama. We're getting even more government, so that's the only change. He's doing exactly what Bush did only worse. So if you didn't like the economy under Bush you're really not going to like the economy under Obama because it's the same stuff.

What would be change, what would really be change, is if we stop bailing companies out, if we stop trying to stimulate the economy, if we reduce government spending. At the same time Obama is criticizing Bush for running up a big deficit during his term of office, what is he doing? What budget is he about to sign? Nearly a 2 TRILLION DOLLAR deficit in a single year, dwarfing anything Bush did! So how can you criticize the deficits of your predecessor and run up even bigger ones yourself?

Now he's trying to say he's got no choice, he's forced to do it because of the circumstances. Well that's nonsense. Of course he has a choice. He can level with the American public and do the right thing. Bush can say the same thing: he had no choice, he inhereted a recession just like Obama did. He came in at the bursting of the dotcom bubble, right? Clinton. Just like Obama, comes in after the bursting of the real estate bubble. And so what did Bush do to try to fix the economy? Exactly what Obama is doing now. He ran up deficits, he increased government spending, and this is the result! So how can Obama criticize Bush for running up deficits to stimulate the economy when that's exactly his policy, only with bigger deficits?

Now the only thing different is Bush slightly reduced taxes on the rich and Obama wants to slightly increase taxes on the rich. Big deal!

In fact, the thing that bothers me is one of the only things that the republicans are criticizing in the Clinton (meant to say Obama) budget is the fact that it raises taxes when that's the least of the problems. It's the big spending that's the problem not the tax hikes and the tax hikes are small. Sure, it's a move in the wrong direction, we should have spending cuts, not tax hikes. But you know, the one thing that I support that Obama is doing is taxing carried interest as if it was ordinary income, and it's ridiculous for the Republicans to try to argue against that, that somehow there's something wrong with making rich hedge fund managers pay the same taxes on their income as everybody else. It makes no sense, it's absurd to try to defend that position. Now they try to make believe that it's capital gains, it's not capital gains, they're not risking thier own money. When I'm managing somebody's money and they're giving me 2% management fee and I get 20% of the profits that I generate for them by managing their money and I earned that 20% of the profits without risking a quarter of my own money, it's income. It's the same type of income as a broker earns when he charges a commission, or a traditional money manager or a mutual fund manager when they charge a fee. It's the same type of income, the same risks are involved, there's no reason for one to have a lower tax rate than the other.

What the Republicans should be championing, is not just lower taxes for rich hedge fund managers, it's lower taxes for everybody. We should make the tax rate the same and then lower them, lower the marginal rate across the board. But the only way we're gonna do that, is if we cut government spending! Because we can't have less government, we can't have lower taxes, unless we have less government. Because the taxes support the government. So if we want to pay less taxes we need a smaller government.

But, what Obama is doing is dramatically increasing the size of government and unfortunately that's not where all the republican critcism is being leveled -- it's being leveled on these tax hikes. And again, I don't think it scores them politcal points to be defending the paychecks of hedge fund managers and people on Wall St. especially since it's Wall St. that the public is already blaming for a lot of this mess. To try to defend their tax loophole is absolutely ridiculous, it's a waste of political capital. I don't know where these guys are getting their politcal marching orders, but it makes absolutely no sense to me to proceed this way.

In the media's mental mudput filled with partisan hackery and endless misdirection of the public to pablum, tripe and drivel, Schiff stands out like polished gold.

Bless you, Peter. Long may your voice be heard throughout the lands.

Debunking the slander about Obama's Citizenship.

2008-11-03T17:33:00.003-05:00

Now I wasn't an Obama supporter obviously, being a rather devout Ron Paul fan etc.

But after the past few weeks of arguing with the dishonest insanity I see rampant on Republican and Libertarian discussion groups and mailing lists, I've learned a lot about the facts involved around many of the lies being told about Obama and I have to say that it's given me a lot more respect for the moral high ground his campaign has stuck to.

I wanted to include below a message I sent to one of the groups I'm a part of in response to their several times a day repetition at this point of the lies about Obama's Citizenship. I wanted to illustrate how desperately they keep telling these lies and how little effect it has to show them the facts and the evidence to the contrary.

Excuse my obviously aggravated insults therein, I think if you start reading back through the past few weeks of exchanges, you'll start to understand why I started resorting to using such accurate, if juvenile, monikers to address them.

(In response to Scott saying he was glad he'd signed a petition against Barack Obama challenging his Natural Born Citizen status.)
Because you're an idiot who can't read? Grow up you pathetic child.
I'll illustrate here for everyone how thoroughly I've debunked your childish insistent and desperate lies here.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/kirstenandersenfanclub/message/29653
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/kirstenandersenfanclub/message/29659
And for the sake of thoroughness:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/kirstenandersenfanclub/message/29658
Every time you tell this lie again, dishonorable as you are, I'm going to paste this message again from now on showing that you've been told the truth repeatedly but have no interest in the truth or the facts. Only in intentionally trying to spread misinformation and lies to try to win an argument through dishonorable and dishonest means, through scare tactics and slander.
You should be ashamed of yourselves.
I tried to stop you from saying these stupid lies again.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/kirstenandersenfanclub/message/29653
If you read those you'd know that you're lying (not that you don't already know, which you do. You just don't care because you can't help it but be a stupid liar).
Obama's step-father couldn't have renounced his citizenship and I linked the US Code section a few weeks ago that explicitly stated that fact. MORON.
http://travel.state.gov/law/citizenship/citizenship_776.html
*F. RENUNCIATION FOR MINOR CHILDREN*
Parents cannot renounce U.S. citizenship on behalf of their minor children. Before an oath of renunciation will be administered under Section 349(a)(5) of the INA, a person under the age of eighteen must convince a U.S. diplomatic or consular officer that he/she fully understands the nature and consequences of the oath of renunciation, is not subject to duress or undue influence, and is voluntarily seeking to renounce his/her U.S. citizenship.
I've covered this before.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/kirstenandersenfanclub/message/29271
See that? I pointed this out to you THREE WEEKS AGO.
It's pathetically obvious at this point that you have no interest in the truth. You deny all evidence and FACTS presented to you that debunk your lies and desperate conspiracy theories. If you were interested in truth, you would acknowledge things like what I pointed out above and STOP REPEATING THE LIES.
GROW UP.
Of course you won't acknowledge that the state government, local government, health department and everyone else there has explained what the difference is between them, why the certificate looks the way it does, even had some of the people their show their certs as well that DID look identical etc.
HONESTY. TRY IT SOMETIME.
I've explained all this before and linked you to numerous articles clearly explaining it. You stink of desperation and a pathetic need to flatly ignore the truth when it's right in front of you.
First link is more for Scott to explain the matter of jurisdiction in the case and why Berg's case was so amateur and unfounded. It's pretty embarrassing to read actually (and unlike some people here, I actually read the entire thing.)
http://www.flds.ws/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/obama-surricks-10242008-ruling-2.pdf
Then this one for Aaron about citizenship and travel etc.
http://travel.state.gov/law/citizenship/citizenship_778.html
Then we move on to the pages that explain the situation:
http://www.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/20081031/BREAKING01/81031064/0/BREAKING04
http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/born_in_the_usa.html
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2008/jun/27/obamas-birth-certificate-part-ii/
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-birth-certificate-30-oct30,0,1742172.story
http://www.kitv.com/politics/17860890/detail.html?rss=hon&psp=news
http://news.cincinnati.com/article/20081031/NEWS0106/810310417/1104/election3
http://hotair.com/archives/2008/10/12/obama-is-an-american-no-really/
Having read those, is it starting to sink in yet?
Maybe you need to go back and read them again... and pay close attention.
Let me know how it goes. :)

At this point Aaron has basically resorted to even more pathetic attempts at slander and has challenged me to come fight him in person to force him to be honest. Something that for any mature, rational, intelligent adult would have long since been accomplished by the repeated presentation of the facts, with evidence, with references, and with repeated explanations of the subject matter. As they say, you can lead a horse to water... *sigh*

"Intellectual Property" is Fiction.

2008-05-10T22:07:00.020-04:00

"Intellectual property" is a legal fiction ...
... which violates the natural rights of man.

verba ita sunt intelligenda ut res magis valeat quam pereat

"Words are to be understood such that the subject matter may be more effective than wasted."

The concept of "property" originates from a state of nature, namely the state of having exclusive control over a physical object or land. In recent history, the concept has been extended to include services, employees under contract, and ideas themselves.

Libertarians (should) reject outright the concept of "intellectual property" because the nature of an idea is completely different from the nature of a physical object or an economic good. To be an economic good, the object must be scarce in nature, it must serve some human end, and it must be controlled by a person. This applies to all the common objects you consider to be your property; your house, your car, your food, your land et cetera. Ideas do not meet these criteria.

Admirers of Ayn Rand are generally pro-IP because they think that ideas have value due to being a product of human intellectual labor and by virtue of this, the author "deserves" remuneration. In doing so, they essentially rely upon Adam Smith's (and Ricardo's and Marx's) "labor theory of value". The gentle reader is invited to savor the sweet irony of a plank of Randian philosophy depending on a communist economic fallacy....

The labor theory of value was shown to be false by Ludwig von Mises and other Austrian economists. Value is an attribute ascribed to a specific economic good by the consumer at the time of purchase: "I want that thing now, and I'm willing to exchange these things for it." For proof of this, imagine yourself facing imminent death by starvation and meeting someone trying to sell a diamond that he laboriously dug up, ground and polished. That diamond will be of little value to you at that moment because in your ordinal ranking of goals, fending-off death by acquiring food is vastly more important than acquiring the pretty stone. By contrast, the diamond might be of great value to a plump duchess riding-by. Or imagine you and I standing in the Garden of Eden and you offer to sell me an apple. It has no value to me because I can reach out and pick as many apples as I want. Thus the economic value of a good is always subjective, individual and situation-dependent, and to even qualify as a "good" it must have a non-zero value by virtue of being scarce in that time and place. Value is not defined by the effort expended to produce the good, nor can it be determined by some abstract calculation of social utility.

Taken to its logical conclusion, the Randian position on "intellectual property" claims that I have the right to go into a marketplace, perform an interprative dance involving jumping jacks and push-ups, then demand (using state force) money from passerby for having witnessed the spectacle -- simply because I broke a sweat.
(Thanks to Walter Block for this reductio ad absurdum).

Even if people choose to watch what I have placed into the public arena (public-ation), even if they have walked out of the stores to watch and appreciate my dance, my idea broadcast via public performance does not qualify as an economic good; because I do not control who watches it, I can not charge for it. Because I can not restrict others from dancing like I do without violating their right to self ownership, I have sacrificed ownership in presenting it.

So ideas are not property because by their nature they can be freely copied and spread without diminishment. An idea, once released into the modern world, exists in effective superabundance because the natural opportunity cost of obtaining it is as close to zero as picking an apple in Eden. We therefore can not accept the term "intellectual property" to describe ideas; it is an incorrect and fundamentally misleading term.

Now let us consider circumstances in which scarcity is imposed upon ideas. We can distinguish between two forms of attempts to turn ideas into goods: One is to create a consumption good: "I want many people to pay to hear my song". The other is to create a production good: "I want only selected associates to be able to use my innovative process to gain a competitive advantage in producing some goods". The former is usually the domain of copyright, the latter of patents or trade secrets. Are these legal institutions consistent with supporting natural human rights?

Before the existence of government-created patent monopoly, the profit-seeking innovator kept his cards close and only shared the innovation with associates who agreed to not divulge it. It should be emphasized that such an arrangement falls purely within the right to contract and violates no rights of third parties.

The modern patent regime claims to improve upon this natural situation by the utilitarian argument that it fosters innovation and increases social wealth. Although this claim is contested by experts, it is not an argument we need to consider if we understand that the proper role of government in a free society is limited to protecting individual rights. If one person has an idea and claims patent on it, another might independently get the same idea, publish or implement it, then find himself forced by the state to pay fines to a stranger half-way around the world. Patents thus raise an artificial monopolistic profit privilege over the right of individual self-ownership (to think and create). This is unjust since natural rights trump privileges.

The current copyright regime for 'consumption media' is also illegitimate and violates rights. Data once released to the public is not property because it is no-longer scarce or under the unique control of an individual. Any attempt to imbue it with the attributes of property in the modern age inevitably requires a control regime consisting of continual invasive spying into private communications and personal effects (storage media). Here too, the right to speak (anonymously and privately) and the right to be secure in one's person and effects trump profit privilege - no contest.

Thus we arrive at the final question; "In the absence of patent or copyright law, what form of restriction of ideas is compatible with liberty, justice and natural rights?"

The answer is simply enforcement of mutually consensual contract. An inventor has the right to make contracts with others which stipulate that they may not further sell or divulge the invention. If such a party breaks contract, the inventor has the right to seek redress according to the terms of the agreement.

Voluntary contractual restriction can also be a functional replacement for copyright (at least with music and film) since algorithmic means are available to individually mark or sign each copy of a work. The person who wishes to consume video or audio works simply enters into a contract with the producer/distributor to not redistribute the work, or pay an agreed-upon fine. If a particular watermarked copy is discovered 'loose' in the wild, the origin can be traced to the buyer and legal redress can be obtained.

Voluntary contract also allows for consumer media to be funded by a subscription model. Content producers would submit ideas (album ideas, movie plots) to a subscription service. Members of the service could subscribe to a project and bindingly pledge some money amount to the project. For example Jane pledges $10 to Steve Jackson's next movie and John pledges $5 to Madonna's next album. If the project receives enough subscription pledge dollars, it gets produced and Jane or John are debited their pledged amount upon delivery of the media to them. To be sure, this model does not eliminate the free rider 'problem' of non-payers being able to consume the product, but neither does the current system. And again, it is not the function of law in a free society to guarantee that a certain class of producers be compensated at a particular rate, or that a business model for multi-million dollar films be propped-up. Rather it is to guarantee our individual rights as human beings.

In a just (libertarian) society, no-one would have the privilege to claim a published or leaked idea as his own "property" and thereby seek redress from any and all parties who acquire the idea either by invention or discovery. If Bayer were to to invent an improved process for synthesizing aspirin and keep it secret, then I later independently discover the same idea, Bayer would not have an artificial government-granted privilege to harm me for the act of creative thinking. Likewise, if I were to find a copy of a book, song or movie on the Internet, no-one would have the privilege of appropriating my real property in retribution for viewing or sharing something that does not belong to them as a uniquely held piece of property.

Ideas are not property, and to legally define them as such is to deny their nature and violate the rights of man. Any (non-retributive) claim by you against my real property begins and ends with the terms specified in a contract formed by mutual consent.

Update on UK "extreme porn" legislation

2008-04-27T05:24:00.001-04:00

I reported on this back in July of last year and now it's back in the news again as it rolls forward.

As this new article in The Register points out, this legislation would make it illegal to have pictures of acts which themselves are perfectly legal under the government's justification that so called "extreme pornography" leads to violence. A very weak claim at best on their part.

Aside from the obvious comments on the trouble with the government becoming the "thought police", I found this quote from Lord McIntosh of Haringey rather poignant; "What does it matter to the Government whether what we have in our homes for our own purposes is for sexual arousal or not? What is wrong with sexual arousal anyway? That is not a matter for Parliament or government to be concerned about."

Stop the insanity!

2008-04-20T15:44:00.000-04:00

The next time you see someone typing the words "after the fold" or "after the jump", please slap them upside the head and sternly ask "what the hell are you doing!?"

Help stop the trendy idiocy. We're on the web, not in a magazine or a newspaper.

There is no "fold", there is no "jump". And if you put in such obtrusive in-line ads that they make the reader completely unable to follow the story, then you're an idiot to begin with and stating "after the jump" isn't going to help your absolute design ineptitude.

Stop the insanity; smack the next person you see doing this, and if you find it on a website, make sure to leave a comment telling them how stupid it is.

Thank you.

and because PC keeps mentioning it.

2005-06-20T05:27:00.002-04:00

I'm sure some people are probably wondering by now just what the fuck the "bobbi shirt" is. well, allow me to lay that mystery to rest as best I can.

back in 2000, I met John/Dragon while working out in California on contract work for what was VA Linux at the time (VA Software now, VA Research initially...) doing the front-end design for sourceforge.net.

in the spring of 2002, John had flown out to attend the Linux World Expo with a bunch of us who were at the time running the windowmaker.org booth. PC drove up to attend, as it was in New York, and he was living in New Jersey at the time I believe. I'd known PC for a few years already at that point.

anyway... we ended up renting 2 hotel rooms in Hopatkong for whatever reasons that PC probably remembers better than I do... Kenny was with us, and my friend Bastien, who had flown over from England (he's actually French, but was living in England at the time).

so... John being his normal cocky self, had made the bet that nobody could hack his laptop, and to prove the bet, left it in our hotel room and went off to sleep in the other room. the combination of I think mostly PC and Bastiens skills, maybe Kenny's and probably not much of mine, I don't remember... but we got the laptop booted into single user mode, blah blah... we got access. so as a practical joke, (again, ask PC for the details, I think it was him) someone got the idea to set up his desktop to wait for like 15 minutes of use and then open up a porn video, fullscreen, playing, with sound etc.

this was the very video that was to become the start of a private in-joke that spread like wildfire around the LWCE convention floor, within our social circles.

you see, the video starred a beautiful girl named Bobbi who was, as she stated in the video, from Colorado and just turned 18.

the actual execution of the joke fell far far short of the infamy the video received... John had the lightning reflexes of a shaolin monk and managed to close the video before nary a few frames had hit the screen. this could have had something to do with his wife sitting right next to him... who knows. ;)

anyway... the now (in)famous opening line of the video is as follows:
"hi... my name is bobbi... I'm 18 years old... I'm from Colorado... and today.... I'm gonna get my ass fucked."

this was (for obvious reasons) shortened to a simple "hi, my name is bobbi..." which became an inside joke that would be spoken as a sort of greeting whenever we ran into each other... (person 1): "hi, my name is bobbi..." (person 2): *starts giggling uncontrollably* "I'm 18 years old..." (person 3): "I'm from colorado..." (person 4): "and today...." (person 5): (by this point everyone is laughing) "what the heck are you guys talking about?"

whereupon we'd have to usher the unsuspecting victim off to see the video and hence become a part of the inside joke. ;P

so, with that said... we decided to make a t-shirt for those of us who attended the expo to commemorate the event... but never got around to it for a number of reasons. the shirt still lives on as an inside joke, and something that most everyone who heard the joke still longs for.

so, without further ado... the design of the shirt:

that's the best copy I have of it... I never actually made a hi-res or vector copy to send to a printer to have the shirt made.

one of these days maybe. I still know a few people who keep asking for one.

oh, and we can't forget this; the actual words that inspired a legend:

(blame it on PC... he's the one that kept bringing it up. ;) heh blame it on John/Dragon too, he's the one who first showed us the video.)

The Phantom of the Opera

2005-05-12T00:48:00.001-04:00

just watched the new movie. I really enjoyed it, partially I think because of how closely it sticks to the broadway musical. I have the 2cd broadway cast cd set, and am very familiar with it... so while it was really fun to watch the movie (and because Christine is ABSOLUTELY BEAUTIFUL and has a voice to match), I was so used to the specific voices, words and notes, that the slight variations in the movie threw me a little bit.

but overall... go watch the trailer on the website, and if you're a fan of the musical, you really should watch the movie. :D

Biblical Rebuttal

2007-06-20T20:14:00.000-04:00

I posted the following as a rebuttal to a rebuttal of 4 points of biblical contradictory verses. Figured I'd share it here so that others could see it. The forum I debate on requires an account to read the posts, so I can't easily just link to it for people to read.

First off, for context, I'll include the post I was responding to:

KonaCoffeeCo. said:
Tin-tin, I hope you're ready for it...

(deep breath)
What time of day was jesus crucified:
1) "And it was the third hour, and they crucified him" (Mark 15:25)
2) "...about the sixth hour..." (John 19:14-16)
The first reference (1) is correct. The second (John) does not have any reference to the time of crucifixion. Not in either the NIV or in King James. Did you make that up or something? In fact, those two verses are regarding when Jesus is on trial under Pilate.
Did Jesus drink anything on the cross?
1) Yes, he drank vinegar (John 19:29-30)
2) No: They gave him wine, but he rejected it (Mark 15:23)
Mark 15:23-25:
22 And they bring him unto the place Golgotha, which is, being interpreted, The place of a skull.
23 And they gave him to drink wine mingled with myrrh: but he received it not.
24 And when they had crucified him, they parted his garments, casting lots upon them, what every man should take.
25 And it was the third hour, and they crucified him.
The question and answers posted above are a huge interpretation, and not straight text. You realize that you are reading two different views of the same event right? They are not mutually exclusive points.

This is the set-up: Jesus is on the cross and they attack a sponge to the end of a spear or stick and hold it next to his face. Maybe to John it looked like he drank it, and to Mark it did not. And depending on the age of the wine, it could have been both wine and vinegar. Hardly a contradiction!
When did the flood waters finally dry
1) First day of the first month (Genesis 8:13)
2) 27th day of the second month (Genesis 8:14)
Also another case of distortion from the way that this question is presented. Here you present it as though you are asking when the waters first dried up.

Here's the whole passage:
5 And the waters decreased continually until the tenth month: in the tenth month, on the first day of the month, were the tops of the mountains seen.
6 And it came to pass at the end of forty days, that Noah opened the window of the ark which he had made:
7 And he sent forth a raven, which went forth to and fro, until the waters were dried up from off the earth.
8 Also he sent forth a dove from him, to see if the waters were abated from off the face of the ground;
9 But the dove found no rest for the sole of her foot, and she returned unto him into the ark, for the waters were on the face of the whole earth: then he put forth his hand, and took her, and pulled her in unto him into the ark.
10 And he stayed yet other seven days; and again he sent forth the dove out of the ark;
11 And the dove came in to him in the evening; and, lo, in her mouth was an olive leaf pluckt off: so Noah knew that the waters were abated from off the earth.
12 And he stayed yet other seven days; and sent forth the dove; which returned not again unto him any more.
13 And it came to pass in the six hundredth and first year, in the first month, the first day of the month, the waters were dried up from off the earth: and Noah removed the covering of the ark, and looked, and, behold, the face of the ground was dry.
14 And in the second month, on the seven and twentieth day of the month, was the earth dried.
15 And God spake unto Noah, saying,
16 Go forth of the ark, thou, and thy wife, and thy sons, and thy sons' wives with thee.
All that is said is that Noah waits about two months in the ark before he gets word from God that he should go out. Basically that the land dried up on Jan. 1st, and that it was, in fact, still dry on Feb. 27th.

You're 0 and 3, dude.
Who destroyed Sodom and Gomarrah?
1) Angels (Genesis 19:13)
2) God (Genesis 19:24)
Genesis 19:13 only says that God sent the angels to destroy Sodom and Gomarrah. The more important fact here is that the angels were needed to tell Lot and his family to get out. Maybe the angels destroyed the cities with God's power, maybe God directly did it himself. If that is an important question to you, then I understand your interest. If you're just looking for contradictions in the Bible, sorry, still not here.

Acheron, I'll take a look at yours too. This one just took up WAY too much time to refute properly.

Side Note: I don't want to give the impression that I necessarily believe the Bible to be infallible. I've gone back and forth on that issue for years now. However, I do have a problem with people that use faulty evidence to stake a claim, regardless of my position on it. Until tomorrow!

It should also be pointed out that he's using the King James Version as a reference which is known to be inaccurate. That aside, I make the rest of my points in my post as included below.

First off, I already pointed out that I wasn't specifically vouching for the points on here, or even the points I copied from that website. Now I'm going to start addressing them specifically.

We'll start with the four that Kona addressed as 4 points.

Point #1
----------
What time of day was jesus crucified:
1) "And it was the third hour, and they crucified him" (Mark 15:25)
2) "...about the sixth hour..." (John 19:14-16)
Kona is correct on this one in stating that John, and Matthew or Luke for that matter, never specifically state the time of the actual crucifixion. They state the times that Pilate turned Jesus over to the soldiers to be crucified and/or the time of events after the crucifixion. However...

Let's address several points here regarding the crucifixion stories.

First the timeline. By all accounts, this happened in 1 day. Now let's address the times listed for certain events during the course of that 1 day as listed in the 4 gospel accounts.

Matthew 27:45-46: 45From the sixth hour until the ninth hour darkness came over all the land. 46About the ninth hour Jesus cried out in a loud voice, "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?"—which means, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

Mark 15:25: 25It was the third hour when they crucified him.
Mark 15:33-34: 33At the sixth hour darkness came over the whole land until the ninth hour. 34And at the ninth hour Jesus cried out in a loud voice, "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?"—which means, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

Luke 23:44-46: 44It was now about the sixth hour, and darkness came over the whole land until the ninth hour, 45for the sun stopped shining. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two. 46Jesus called out with a loud voice, "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit." When he had said this, he breathed his last.

John 19:14-16: 14It was the day of Preparation of Passover Week, about the sixth hour.
"Here is your king," Pilate said to the Jews.
15But they shouted, "Take him away! Take him away! Crucify him!"
"Shall I crucify your king?" Pilate asked.
"We have no king but Caesar," the chief priests answered.
16Finally Pilate handed him over to them to be crucified.

Now based on those accounts, we have it stated that Pilate turned Jesus over to be crucified at the 6th hour, but he was crucified at the 3rd hour... 3 hours back in time. Also the fact that while one account lists him as being turned over to be crucified at the 6th hour, which entailed being marched through the streets carrying his own cross to Golgotha, where he was then crucified, which obviously took some time, other accounts list him as already having been crucified at the 6th hour, as the skies darkened for 3 hours before he commended his spirit to God at the 9th hour.

So even if we roughly give a little bending to the ~6th hour to ~9th hour timeline for the crucifixion to play out, the crucifixion happening at the 3rd hour does contradict the rest of the timeline.

This also ignores the differences in who said what, what was written on the sign above his head, etc. which differ between each of the gospels as well. Or the fact that one gospel lists the fact that in Matthew 27:52-54, it states the following:
52The tombs broke open and the bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. 53They came out of the tombs, and after Jesus' resurrection they went into the holy city and appeared to many people.
54When the centurion and those with him who were guarding Jesus saw the earthquake and all that had happened, they were terrified, and exclaimed, "Surely he was the Son of God!"
But none of the other gospels make any mention of this obviously miraculous event of many holy people being brought back to life and going through the city appearing to many people.

Moving on to point #2...

Point #2
----------
Did Jesus drink anything on the cross?
1) Yes, he drank vinegar (John 19:29-30)
2) No: They gave him wine, but he rejected it (Mark 15:23)
Here we have 2 different points to address... the gospels make reference to drink being offered to Jesus twice. Once by bystanders and again by soldiers. We'll address them as such.

In Matthew:
First the soldiers offer him the following: "34There they offered Jesus wine to drink, mixed with gall; but after tasting it, he refused to drink it.", later a bystander offered him the following: "48Immediately one of them ran and got a sponge. He filled it with wine vinegar, put it on a stick, and offered it to Jesus to drink."

Jesus refuses the first, but it doesn't say if he drank the second, only that the bystander was told to leave him alone.

In Mark:
First the soldiers offer him the following: "23Then they offered him wine mixed with myrrh, but he did not take it.", then later a bystander offered him the following: "36One man ran, filled a sponge with wine vinegar, put it on a stick, and offered it to Jesus to drink. "Now leave him alone. Let's see if Elijah comes to take him down," he said."

Again Jesus refused the first, but it doesn't say if he drank the second, only that the bystander was told to leave him alone.

In Luke:
First the soldiers offer him the following: "36The soldiers also came up and mocked him. They offered him wine vinegar". Nobody else offered him anything.

This time it doesn't say if Jesus even drank the first and he wasn't offered anything else.

In John:
In this account, the soldiers offer him nothing, but the bystanders offer the following: "28Later, knowing that all was now completed, and so that the Scripture would be fulfilled, Jesus said, "I am thirsty." 29A jar of wine vinegar was there, so they soaked a sponge in it, put the sponge on a stalk of the hyssop plant, and lifted it to Jesus' lips. 30When he had received the drink, Jesus said, "It is finished." With that, he bowed his head and gave up his spirit."

So this time only the bystanders offer him anything, and he explicitly drinks of it to fulfill scripture.

So we have the soldiers offering the following: "wine mixed with gall", "wine mixed with myrrh", "wine vinegar", and nothing in the fourth.

Then we have the bystanders offering the following: "wine vinegar", "wine vinegar", nothing, and then again "wine vinegar". Now we should note that Jesus specifically drank the wine vinegar this second time in order to fulfill scripture, so it seems odd that Luke would make no mention of it.

So what did the soldiers actually offer Jesus, given that we have 3 different mixes listed and nothing at all in the fourth? And why does Luke make no mention of the explicitly scripturally fulfilling second drink?

Point #3
----------
When did the flood waters finally dry
1) First day of the first month (Genesis 8:13)
2) 27th day of the second month (Genesis 8:14)
Here is another where Kona is sort of correct in his statement. The New International Version makes this perfectly clear: "13 By the first day of the first month of Noah's six hundred and first year, the water had dried up from the earth. Noah then removed the covering from the ark and saw that the surface of the ground was dry. 14 By the twenty-seventh day of the second month the earth was completely dry." This should have been clear even from the other translations.

However...

I should take this opportunity to soundly debunk the whole Noah's Ark story from the ground up in order to render this whole point moot. :)

Let's start by reading Genesis chapters 6 through 8 to get the whole story.
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%206-8;&version=31;

Now that we've done that, we notice as a side note the story of the "Nephilim" breeding with the daughters of man... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nephilim... but we'll move past that for now. ;)

We see in chapter 6, verse 7: 7 So the LORD said, "I will wipe mankind, whom I have created, from the face of the earth—men and animals, and creatures that move along the ground, and birds of the air—for I am grieved that I have made them."

Here he states that he will kill every living creature on Earth, including all the birds, many species of which can survive just fine for months, even years, without landfall. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seabird

But I guess special "God Rain" can kill them too, right? ;)

Then we come to another important point where it explicitly lists Noah's sons: "10 Noah had three sons: Shem, Ham and Japheth.", this will come in handy in a bit.

Then we have the dimensions of the boat: "14 So make yourself an ark of cypress wood; make rooms in it and coat it with pitch inside and out. 15 This is how you are to build it: The ark is to be 450 feet long, 75 feet wide and 45 feet high. 16 Make a roof for it and finish the ark to within 18 inches of the top. Put a door in the side of the ark and make lower, middle and upper decks."

I'll link a few articles that explain this in greater detail to save myself a bit of typing... http://www.geocities.com/evoatheism/articles/asize.html, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noah%27s_Ark#Biblical_literalism_and_the_Ark etc.

Essentially Noah would have to have built an Ark using technology more advanced than that of the end of the main era of wooden ships, thousands of years later, would have had to fit literally millions of animals on it, provided food and water for every single one of them, enough to last almost a year, and make sure that not a single animal died of any of the "unclean" animals or that species would be wiped out, as all the non-livestock and non-avian animals only had 1 male and 1 female to represent them. As for the birds, as there are over 10,000 species of birds, this would equate to 70,000 birds alone being on the ark, as Noah was required to bring 7 of every kind of bird, over 100 different livestock animals, and so on...

But what have we here? In verse 20 it states: "20 Two of every kind of bird, of every kind of animal and of every kind of creature that moves along the ground will come to you to be kept alive.", but then in Chapter 7, verse 3, it states: "3 and also seven of every kind of bird, male and female, to keep their various kinds alive throughout the earth."

Where is he going to get the other 5 of every kind of bird if only 2 of each will actually come to him? Is he going to have to travel the world and capture the other 5 of every different kind? ;)

Moving along... we see the following: "6 Noah was six hundred years old when the floodwaters came on the earth. 7 And Noah and his sons and his wife and his sons' wives entered the ark to escape the waters of the flood.", and as I was sure to point out earlier, we know there to be 3 sons. So we have 8 people in total entering the ark to repopulate the entire earth so that all the genetic diversity and geographical dispersal we see in the global human population happened within the past few thousand years. And by that I'm talking specifically around 4 or 5,000 years. Now we know through the fossil record etc, that this is simply not true. :) Much less the fact that even the genetic diversity as measured by the spread of Mitochondrial DNA and it's rate of mutation far exceeds this window.

Again, moving along...

I suppose I should touch on another interesting side note... in chapter 7, verse 11, it states: "11 In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, on the seventeenth day of the second month—on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened." With that said, it bears noting the the direct lineage from Adam up through David etc, were listed along with the ages of every person. Now given that these ages were generally all several hundred years, and that gives us the proverbial 6,000 span from creation to modern day... it would bear noting that even that span of time relies on improbably long lifespans for the individuals listed. If we were to say that perhaps they used a different measurement of time, that would actually lead to an even younger earth. Even more improbable. ;)

Again... moving on.

We come to the next interesting verses: "17 For forty days the flood kept coming on the earth, and as the waters increased they lifted the ark high above the earth. 18 The waters rose and increased greatly on the earth, and the ark floated on the surface of the water. 19 They rose greatly on the earth, and all the high mountains under the entire heavens were covered. 20 The waters rose and covered the mountains to a depth of more than twenty feet."

Allow me to reference a partial explanation of this. From http://en.allexperts.com/q/Physics-1358/Water-Volume-during-Great.htm we get:
The earth has a radius of approx. R=6374 km.
Its surface area is thus A= 4*Pi*R² = 5.1 *10^14 m².

Mr. Arafat (the late President of Palestine) was not very tall, but Mt. Ararat (the volcano mountain in Northeastern Turkey) is 5165 m high.
This makes the water volume necessary to flood it to its peak V= 2.6 * 10^18 m³. (Or 2.5 million million million cubic meters of water)
This water weighs 2.6 * 10^18 tons.

Spread out to 40 days the average rainfall would be 5165m / 40 d = 129 000 mm per day or 5375 mm per hour. Imagine standing under a waterfall.

Evaporated it would saturate the whole atmosphere plus the stratosphere with 105% humidity. In other words: Clouds would fill the atmosphere from the ground on upwards plus the stratosphere (where there are usually no clouds - "above the weather"). This would lead to the earth freezing under the clouds since no sunlight reaches the ground. The consequences would be harsher than the imagined "nuclear winter" after a global thermonuclear war.
Now mind you, that only relates to Mt. Ararat, which is only 5,165M. But the bible states that the water covered the highest point on earth by 20 feet. That would increase that height to over 8,850M, which would only dramatically compound the effects listed above.

Are we seeing a theme yet? Not to mention that there simply isn't, and never has been, that much water on the entire planet. Not by an incredibly huge margin.

A few other things to note, as far as space on the boat etc... we would also have to account for at least 46 weeks worth of food for the 8 people and all the millions of animals on the boat. Or how about the fact that that much rainfall etc would effectively desalinate the Oceans, killing off further hundreds of thousands of species at the very least who rely on specific salinity levels and temperature ranges etc.

I think that's at least a satisfactory debunking of that fable... enough to illustrate that bickering over when the waters dried is a rather moot point given that the whole story is nothing more than an impossible myth to begin with. And even if you try to play apologist and reference the supposed flood of the Black Sea by the Mediterranean Sea after the receding glaciers raised the water tables, that would unfortunately not only still not lend any credence to almost any of the fantastical claims of the Noah Ark story, but it would also just happen to predate the date of the biblical creation story by well over a thousand years.

Moving on...

Point #4
----------
Who destroyed Sodom and Gomarrah?
1) Angels (Genesis 19:13)
2) God (Genesis 19:24)
Kona fails on this one as well when we actually look at what was written.

In chapters 12 and 13, two angels (as clearly stated in chapter 1) specifically state that they had not only been sent to warn Lot and his family, but specifically to do the destroying. "12 The two men said to Lot, "Do you have anyone else here—sons-in-law, sons or daughters, or anyone else in the city who belongs to you? Get them out of here, 13 because we are going to destroy this place. The outcry to the LORD against its people is so great that he has sent us to destroy it.""

However, in chapter 24, it almost humorously explicitly states that God specifically was the one doing the destruction. "24 Then the LORD rained down burning sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah—from the LORD out of the heavens."

So the point stands.

Hopefully this is a thorough enough coverage of these points. :)

The fuzzy issue of Ron Paul on abortion.

2007-12-24T12:51:00.000-05:00

After a somewhat heated debate on the local Ron Paul meet-up group mailing list, I decided it was time to tackle this topic.

This has been one of those grey areas of the Ron Paul campaign for awhile now and I've seen it put in a variety of ways by members of both the Pro-Life and Pro-Choice camps in order to claim support for Ron Paul from both sides of the proverbial fence.

One of the first things I wanted to show was the difference between the way he presents his views in two recent media appearances.

First is his interview on the television talk show The View: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbljWBdSW30

And then we have his speech to the Family Research Council: http://www.frcaction.org/get.cfm?i=WX07L05

You'll notice how in the first video he carefully approaches the issue by making it an argument about late term abortions, which are already illegal under Roe v. Wade unless a physician deems it necessary to protect the woman's health. He makes almost no mention of the right of choice for early term abortions, opting to make an obvious emotional plea that doesn't line up with the facts.

The central holding of Roe v. Wade was that abortions are permissible for any reason a woman chooses, up until the "point at which the fetus becomes ‘viable,’ that is, potentially able to live outside the mother's womb, albeit with artificial aid. Viability is usually placed at about seven months (28 weeks) but may occur earlier, even at 24 weeks." The Court also held that abortion after viability must be available when needed to protect a woman's health, which the Court defined broadly in the companion case of Doe v. Bolton.

He opens his argument with the following exchange with Joy Behar:

Joy Behar: What about Roe v. Wade? I don't want the government telling me what to do with my body. How do you justify that?
Ron Paul: Well, I think the question is whether a baby that is unborn that weighs eight pounds, in the seventh, eighth month of gestation has any rights. Is it a person.
Joy Behar: Oh That's... but what about the first month, you know, when you usually get an abortion?
Ron Paul: Ok, so you're not for all abortion?
Joy Behar: I don't know, it would have to come up in a specific case.
Ron Paul: So you thin the line... so you don't want me to do an abortion on somebody that has an 8 pound normal baby.
Joy Behar: No of course not, but the... but if the...
Ron Paul: Ok, So you're not for abortion really.

He tries to establish here a false dichotomy, in almost clear contradiction with what Roe v. Wade actually covers, a point which will become rather relevant in a moment.

In the second video he openly rails against what he calls "one of the most despicable of all court rulings" and calls for the overturning of the Roe v. Wade decision and the removal of the abortion issue from Federal jurisdiction.

Dr. Paul states in this speech:

And for my time that I've spent in politics as well as medicine, I've thought this issue through rather seriously and have written even a booklet on the right-to-life issue and the importance of the unborn. And I frequently tell the story about when I was a resident, that this issue came up. It was in the 1960s, when abortions were still illegal, but my professor was doing abortions and permitting abortions to defy the law. And I accidentally walked into a room where they were doing an abortion, and they delivered a two-pound fetus, an infant that was breathing and crying. And they took this baby and put it over in a basket in the corner, and they waited, pretended they didn't hear it and let it die.
That is an outrage.
And unfortunately, since that time, our Supreme Court has institutionalized that, and that is why I think one of the most despicable of all court rulings has been the Roe versus Wade, and that should be our goal, is to repeal Roe versus Wade.

This latter stance raises a few issues of its own which I'll attempt to address.

First off is the fundamental matter of the Constitutionality of Justice Harry Blackmun's decision.

The opinion of the Roe Court, written by Justice Harry Blackmun, declined to adopt the district court's Ninth Amendment rationale, and instead asserted that the "right of privacy, whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment's concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action, as we feel it is, or, as the District Court determined, in the Ninth Amendment's reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy." Douglas, in his concurring opinion from the companion case Doe v. Bolton, stated more emphatically that, "The Ninth Amendment obviously does not create federally enforceable rights." Thus, the Roe majority rested its opinion squarely on the Constitution's due process clause.

What this means is that there are certain rights that are fundamental to man and cannot be abridged. Consider the comments of Justice Arthur Goldberg (joined by Chief Justice Warren and Justice Brennan) in their concurring opinion in the case of Griswold v. Connecticut (1965):

[T]he Framers did not intend that the first eight amendments be construed to exhaust the basic and fundamental rights.... I do not mean to imply that the .... Ninth Amendment constitutes an independent source of rights protected from infringement by either the States or the Federal Government....While the Ninth Amendment - and indeed the entire Bill of Rights - originally concerned restrictions upon federal power, the subsequently enacted Fourteenth Amendment prohibits the States as well from abridging fundamental personal liberties. And, the Ninth Amendment, in indicating that not all such liberties are specifically mentioned in the first eight amendments, is surely relevant in showing the existence of other fundamental personal rights, now protected from state, as well as federal, infringement.

The emphasis at the end is mine.

In this vein the Roe v. Wade decision defends those fundamental personal rights, that of a woman's right to privacy and the right to control her own body.

This also relates to the rights covered in the 10th Amendment of the Constitution:

"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

What these together illustrate is the principle that a woman has the fundamental natural right to privacy and the right to control her own body, that the founding fathers and the Constitution recognize the principle of these rights and that they defend those rights through several of the Amendments in the Bill of Rights in a manner which precludes infringement upon them by either the state or federal governments.

So in his speech, Paul first makes a case about what he describes as a viable (his implication) fetus that was discarded in a trash can and left to die, before Roe v. Wade ever happened. Roe v. Wade actually moves to prevent such an act by forbidding late term abortions except to protect the mother's health, only allowing the mother the choice of control over her own body and not specifically over that of the fetus. This makes the issue not one of whether or not the mother has the right to kill her own child, but of whether or not she has control of her own body and whether or not to continue a pregnancy. If the child can survive outside of the mother, it is thus protected under Roe v. Wade.

If Paul's intention was truly to prevent late term abortions, he would be attacking Doe v. Bolton, the case that actually allows late term abortions in cases of a physician's decision to protect the health of the mother, not Roe v. Wade which prevents them after viability.

Given these issues, it becomes clear that his intention is not to benevolently remove the federal government from meddling with our right to choose, thus allowing the states to decide for themselves, or even to prevent late term abortions. His intention is specifically to remove the Constitutionally protected status from the issue as recognized by Roe v. Wade in order to facilitate the criminalization of abortions on the state level, something that cannot be done currently because of the Supreme Court's recognition of the natural rights of the woman that are reflected in and protected by the Bill of Rights.

With those points hopefully addressed, I'll move on to a more specific facet of this debate raised on the local meet-up mailing list.

There was a statement made about supporting Ron Paul because he supported a woman's right to choose not to fund abortions with tax dollars. The specific statement was as follows:

Ron Paul supports my pro-choice decision not to be COMPELLED to fund Abortions through TAXATION for women who make their own choice to have one.

This was followed by several other similar statements about sex education, public education, freedom of religion, medical history, border protection, welfare and charity.

The whole statement was meant to be a play on the "Pro-Choice" stance by actually turning it around to mean that Ron Paul gives the woman the choice not to support abortions with her tax dollars etc.

At first glance this may seem like a sound statement and a clever way of showing why she supports Ron Paul. However, this is another case where the issue is not as simple as it may seem at first glance. The actual reality of the issue more likely has the opposite effect of what she and the Pro-Life camp seem to think it would.

Under Paul's plan, he asserts that control of the issue would move out from under Federal control and become a state issue.

Currently federal tax dollars cannot be used to fund abortions since the passage of the Hyde Amendment over 30 years ago (Passed in 1976 with additional wording to allow for exceptions for rape, incest, or the life of the mother in 1977).

However, on the state level 17 of the 50 states currently support the use of state tax dollars to fund abortions. Thus Paul's removal of federal government involvement would not change the issue of tax dollars being spent on abortions because the issue simply does not really exist to begin with. This is a case of smoke and mirrors.

Based on the 10th Amendment of the Constitution, the states would have the right, independent of the federal government, to continue to fund abortions with tax dollars and to keep abortions legal. Based on Paul's own Constitutional platform, the federal government would have no right to intervene in the state choices on the matter.

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

The only possible recourse Paul would have to fulfill his desire to ban abortion through the abolishment of Roe v. Wade would be to violate the very fundamental tenets of his Constitutional claims of wanting the federal government out of the issue, and thus attempting to pass wholly hypocritical legislation at the federal level to prevent the states from exercising their own Constitutionally protected right to govern themselves and create their own legislation on the matter. This would be acting precisely in the same vein as the Roe v. Wade legislation he decries as the federal government interfering in our person lives.

Thus we're left with quite a conundrum.

Now we could probably take this a few different ways, and from what I've seen that is precisely what people are doing.

On one hand you could argue that Paul is downplaying the issue to most media outlets and actually intends to have Roe v. Wade overturned and thus implement legislation that would abolish the right to have legal abortions by cutting the head off of the proverbial snake at the federal level.

On the other hand you could argue that while he personally might be strongly against abortion, he is simply playing to the desires of his different constituents in an attempt to achieve the larger goal of removing federal involvement in our personal lives and that he really does believe in the Constitutionally protected right of states to govern themselves, whatever ends that may lead to.

Fortunately we have Dr. Paul's own words to give us a clearer idea what his intentions really are.

Now, there's a couple of ways that that can be done. Of course, we could wait until we have our Supreme Court justices appointed for them to, when the time comes, to rehear a case like that and rule differently; that's taking a long time. We've been living with Roe versus Wade since 1973, and it hasn't happened.
My approach -- I certainly support that, but my approach is a little bit more direct, and it could happen much quicker, and that is accepting the principle that we can, as a legislative body and as a president -- we can remove the jurisdiction of this issue from the federal courts.
I have a bill called the We the People Act, and this addresses several subjects -- prayer in school, the marriage issue as well as the abortion issue -- which literally just takes it away from the federal courts, which means any state could pass a law passing a prohibition that could not be heard in the federal courts.
Now, the question I have and something I don't have the answer for is I wonder why we haven't done better with this approach in Washington. I don't get the support that I think we should have. We haven't had the support in the Congress. We had the majority for a good many years, we've had a pro-life president, but we have not moved in that direction, and we say, "Oh, yeah, I'm going to appoint judges, and we'll take care of that." This would go into effect immediately, and it occurs only with majority vote of the Congress.
So don't give up on that method. Make sure that when you're promoting your issues and promoting the cause of life, that you remember that principle. It can be found in my bill called We The People's Act.

He wants to pass legislation that would remove the possibility of these issues being Constitutionally protected at the federal level as the natural rights that they are. This would not only allow the states to pass legislation that would in effect be in violation of the Constitution's protection of natural rights, but would prevent anyone from having any recourse to have their grievances heard at the federal level and thus Constitutionally protected.

This seems to me to be a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of the Constitution in protecting the natural rights, freedoms and liberties of all of us.

This is the second troubling issue I've had with Ron Paul and his comments about roles of state and federal government, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. The first issue was with a series of comments Ron Paul made about Christmas and I wrote an article on it entitled "Ron Paul makes some serious fallacious claims."

I want to be clear that I still definitely support Ron Paul for the 2008 Presidency, but I don't believe any decision to elect a candidate for such an important position should have such fundamental issues overlooked without due diligence and critical assessment.

It reminds me of the words of our 26th President and fellow Republican to Ron Paul, Theodore Roosevelt:

"The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the Nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else." -President Theodore Roosevelt - Kansas City Star, May 7th 1918

Should we do any less for a candidate for that position? Given the opportunity to address issues before a candidate might gain that office?

Perhaps in closing we should ponder a few words by the great Thomas Jefferson, who Ron Paul has often been compared to.

Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government; that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights. (January 8, 1789)

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. (January 6, 1816)

Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day. (April 24, 1816)

We are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it. (December 27, 1820)

Thank Senator Dodd for filibustering the FISA update!

2007-12-18T15:21:00.000-05:00

Check out http://thankyoudodd.com/ for all the information on the filibuster by Senator Chris Dodd (D-Conn) of the Unconstitutional update to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (which I mentioned in my previous post "Hello, Congress? This is the Constitution calling.").

The major media coverage of this event was slim at best, generally just stating that Reid had delayed the legislation, with no mention whatsoever of Dodd and his filibuster.

Thank you Senator Dodd!

Hello, Congress? This is the Constitution calling.

2007-12-18T13:03:00.000-05:00

I am seeing in the news lately a lot of talk about legislation being passed that will retroactively exempt from criminal prosecution actions done by persons or companies acting illegally in the interests of the current administration.

Some of the legislation I'm referring to includes the cases of the new Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) update which will grant retroactive immunity to the telecoms that illegally assisted the NSA under Bush's direction in illegally wiretapping US citizens, or the government in 2006 passing the Military Commissions Act which provided retroactive legal protection to those who carried out waterboarding and other coercive interrogation techniques along with a slew of other criminal acts.

I am astounded that it seems that there isn't more attention being brought to the fact that the United States Constitution clearly states in Article I Section 9:

No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.

No two ways about it, no Law can be passed after the fact to grant retroactive immunity for illegal activities. Article I Section 10 goes on to set this same limit against the State Governments as well.

Not to mention that Article I Section 9 also clearly states:

The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.

And yet, having no rebellion here at home and no invasion, Habeas Corpus is being suspended for anyone the government arbitrarily deems an "enemy combatant" or "person of interest" etc.

On what it means to be an American.

2007-12-18T10:30:00.000-05:00

In responding to an article on the Backyard Beacon entitled "No Ron Paul relief for New Orleans", I went on a bit too long and decided to post my comment as an article on here and simply link to it.

I could probably have continued on, touching on things such as the government and media denial of the North American Union, despite a variety of news coverage, already passed legislation, government meetings and even government websites detailing parts of the plan etc. But I'll leave that for another post.

For now, here is my comment:

I think what binds us is that we share a common privilege of being part of what was founded as the greatest nation on Earth, primarily for the reasons of its diversity and freedoms. We were a nation that ensured equal status for people of any nationality or religious belief. People could come here from foreign countries for a new start and know that they would have the equal grounding to begin from. This was the great American dream of coming here to rise through the ranks through hard work and provide for your family and descendants etc.
We are united in the patriotism we feel that we were a nation that threw off the shackles of a foreign imperial power to fend for ourselves on the world stage and through American ingenuity and hard work became the dominant world power, based on the principles of freedom and equality for all engendering a spirit of progress and competitiveness.
Americans take pride in being a part of the "land of the free and the home of the brave". They like to feel that the government is here to protect that institution and preserve the sense of liberty and freedom espoused by the founding fathers.
Many of these points could probably be argued when contrasted with the historical facts or motivations of particular people, but the point stands that most Americans feel and believe in these ideas. Just as the soldiers who sign up to fight and die in foreign lands believe so strongly in their hearts that they are fighting and dying to protect those most precious principles.
What Paul proposes is not to completely cut off the current system, but to return to the rightful system of states' rights and states' responsibilities. A state has a right and an obligation to govern its own people as it sees fit, to make laws on the state level and to provide for its people on the state level.
The Federal Government's role is that of arbiter of international conflicts, interstate commerce, interstate disputes etc. It is not to govern the people of every state individually, that is the role of the state government.
If a city floods, that is the role of the state government. If a drought hits or a depression occurs that affects the nation as a whole, that is a national disaster.
First off there should not have been a city built on the gulf coast in the line of hurricanes that was below sea level and relying only on a levee wall to keep it from being submerged. Secondly the state should have been responsible for ensuring the safety of a city built in such a foolish location. It is not the responsibility of other states to have their tax dollars used to fund the fools errand of protecting a city below sea level hundreds or thousands of miles away.
I think it almost goes without saying that if a city is built in such a foolish location, they should have planned ahead and created emergency procedures, evacuation routes etc.
To rely on the Federal government to use billions of tax dollars from across the nation to take care of them, and then bail them out when everything goes wrong is to demand and rely on a welfare state. A socialist government that takes from one man to give to another. Not a free society of individual responsibility and opportunity.
I hear over and over again that the government failed in their responsibility to the people of New Orleans, but the reality is that the Federal Government had no such responsibility to the people to begin with and was in the wrong in creating such bureaucratic monstrosities such as FEMA and the DHS to begin with. They should have never been responsible for building the levee. They should have never been responsible for bailing the people out or taking care of them after the fact.
There is a problem here with confusing State Government with Federal Government. People cannot seem to differentiate the two. They just ignorantly see "government" and expect to be taken care of it.
I should point out that I am in Michigan and thus did not see the disaster first hand. My cousin is in the National Guard and spent several weeks in New Orleans helping with the rebuilding etc. In the interest of full disclosure.
I worked for a Tribal Government here in Michigan for several years and we had implemented a variety of disaster related procedures. Evacuation routes, rescue procedures, locations for different bases of operation, methods for cooperation between law enforcement, medical, government, media, etc.
There was nothing preventing New Orleans from planning for this possibility and having a system in place to facilitate a disaster prevention and recovery operation, moving the people out of danger zones, providing safe refuge through the storm, channeling relief supplies and coordinating volunteers to assist in the recovery etc.
There is nothing preventing the nation from an outpouring of assistance and volunteering, from one end of the country to the other. But it should have been the responsibility of the state to coordinate these things and channel the proper funds, goods and personnel to the proper places.
Instead what we got was a bunch of Federal Government bureaucracies and mercenaries creating a perfect storm of red tape, government largesse, unConstitutional actions, incompetence at essentially every level and a waste of tax dollars at a staggering level. Interference, if not outright prevention, of independent relief efforts at every turn etc.
I'm sure that many of you who were there could vouch for these things better than I.
The point is that many many mistakes were made here in almost every possible aspect of the situation, starting from years in advance up until the present day situation of refugees still languishing in squalor, still waiting for the hollow promises of the Federal Government to bail them out.
The solution is not to hope in vain for the Federal Government to solve the problems while pointing the finger at them for their failure to prevent it, but to look more closely at the factors that led to this. To understand the responsibility of the different parties involved on both the State and Federal level and the important differences between them. The failures in state and local preventative planning. And possibly most importantly, looking to the future and in how to avoid a repeat of this disaster, which may very well include the obvious option of leaving the area.
There are lessons to be learned from this, but they are certainly not that we should sit idly by relying on an authoritarian government to police and provide a welfare state for the entire nation, but that we are a nation of proud patriots that celebrate our freedom and liberty and can take care of ourselves on the state and local level when left to do so. That we don't need a Statist big brother to direct our lives and provide for all of us by taking from one neighbor to give to another just because one neighbor might have a better job or been luckier. That we can rely on ourselves to govern ourselves and to support our communities and our neighbors. To have faith in the human spirit of accomplishment, of compassion... the great American spirit of Adventure, of Discovery, of Invention... the great "American Ingenuity" that was spoken of in years gone by.
We need to return to the great nation our founding fathers built for us and turn away from this horrible descent into a Statist and Socialist Authoritarian and Totalitarian Theocratic Dictatorship.
The direction we are heading is in every way, and at every step, the very antithesis of what our founding fathers intended and created for us. Suspension of Habeus Corpus, suspension of Posse Comitatus, suspension of due process, of right to privacy, of right to bear arms, of separation of Church and State, of freedom of speech, of right to protest, right to property, of protection from search and seizure, of representation and on and on.
Our Constitution and our Republic are being openly and systematically dismantled before our eyes under the ageless guise of trading our most fundamental freedoms and liberties for an utterly false sense of security.
We need to take responsibility for our actions. Take pride in our communities and in our country. Respect the rights of our fellow man to his life, liberty, beliefs, property and pursuit of happiness (all of which are mentioned in the documents which founded our nation). Respect the rights of foreign sovereign nations to govern themselves by their own laws and customs. To aid only those foreign countries in need and only by consensus of the people as laid out in our Constitution and not to wage preemptive wars or enter entangling alliances with foreign powers. To return to a sound currency for our nation instead of relying on an unbacked paper currency implemented by a private bank to control every aspect of our society and government from the very top to the very bottom. To abolishing the income tax and returning our country to the Constitutional government system we had before 1913 where a man was free to enjoy the fruits of his own labor, thus enabling a great amount of income to go back into the hands of the people to be used directly in the economy and not instead go into the government coffers to be used at the whim of a bloated government acting largely in the interest of corporations and lobbyists, where companies take the profits but the American people pay the price of failure, thus perpetuating a one way flow of wealth away from the people.
When I look around me and see all the hallmarks of the fascist states we so soundly denounced over the past half century, I am appalled. When I hear what so many of my international friends, and the friends in foreign lands of all of us American people, think of our current government... it deeply saddens and disheartens me. When I see our media lying to the people and covering up the most important events of our time, because a handful of powerful companies own essentially all the sources of mainstream information and are in bed together with the government that enables them... it angers me. When I see our government openly being converted into a theocracy in violation of the Constitution, Creationism and biblical fundamentalism displacing the teaching of scientific fact and critical thinking skills in our schools, of a nation increasingly devolving into divisions of race, gender, sexuality and beliefs... echoing the unconstitutional change of our national motto from "E Pluribus Unum (out of many [come] one)", which celebrated the strength of our nation through its diversity, to the divisive "In God We Trust", which states that to be an American is to be a Christian and espouse Christian beliefs, which in turn shuts out millions of Americans who hold different beliefs or whose lifestyles don't match the arbitrary biblical morals of the Christian majority... I am pressed to rise up, to speak out, to rage against the criminal injustice being done to our nation as a whole.
We are showing almost all of the symptoms of the most heinous regimes in modern history and it is frightening to the extent to which the American people seem apathetic to and unaware of the dire warnings history holds for us.
There are countless direct parallels today between the United States and Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Fascist Italy, Communist China, etc. The American heart and soul recoils at such claims, but the reality is there for those brave enough to look, see the evidence and act as true patriots to protect our country, our people and our Constitution which is at the very heart of it all.
God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. ... What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.
-- Thomas Jefferson, November 13, 1787
So stated by the author of our own Declaration of Independence. A true patriot seeks always to guard against the consolidation of power by the government, to be ever vigilant in protecting our liberties. To maintain a spirit of resistance. To call the government into account for its actions.
I feel the desire to go on about how we cannot be set right as to the facts, as Jefferson proposes above, because our government has invented scores of illegal "top secret" classifications that violate the rule of law, because they have invented ways to prevent people from speaking out about what is being done to them, because they have destroyed vast amounts of incriminating evidence, in direct violation of the law, because they openly state that they are not beholden to the law and have the absolute authority to grant themselves any powers they so choose, at their own discretion and without the need to reveal their actions to anyone.... and on and on.
I can only hope people can start to open their eyes to what is happening. To what history tells us. Look at the facts and the evidence. Don't be afraid to ask questions, to research, to try to understand. Use your common sense, reason, critical thinking skills, rational and logical thought gain a greater understanding of the world you live in... of the great country you are a part of that is in imminent danger of fundamentally losing it's very foundation.
(There is so much more to these issues, but I must stop at some point and submit this... I fear that I've gone on too long as it is... I lack the gift of brevity it seems.)

Separation of Church and State

2007-07-03T09:37:00.001-04:00

I've covered this issue in various ways in past posts, but felt I should write a clean, coherent post on the subject to hopefully clarify the issue.

First I'll include some posts I wrote on another forum, and then follow that up with some further explanation.

I ran across this article around 5 years ago, written by Rev. Charles Henderson. To give you an idea who he is, I've included an excerpt from his bio on his website "GodWeb".

It's refreshing to see a Christian who understands the fundamental importance of a separation between Church and State.

Here's the bio excerpt:
Who is Charles Henderson?

The Rev. Charles P. Henderson, a graduate of Princeton University and Union Theological Seminary, is a Presbyterian minister. He has led churches in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut and has served as a chaplain at Princeton. He is the author of numerous articles and books including God and Science (John Knox / Westminster Press, 1986). He has taught and lectured at Princeton, Columbia, Yale Divinity School, Union Seminary, Harvard Divinity School, and others. He is Executive Director of the Association for Religion and Intellectual Life, an interfaith organization that publishes CrossCurrents, an academic quarterly and is President of the Society for the Arts, Religion and Contemporary Culture. Rev. Henderson is a founding member of CIE/ the Consultation on Interfaith Education.

He lives in New York City with his spouse, The Rev. Katharine Rhodes Henderson, Executive Vice President of Auburn Theological Seminary. The Hendersons have three children and two grand children. When not working on the projects mentioned above, Charles Henderson may be out sailing in the waters of New York harbor or beyond.
And here is the article itself in full:
A Wall That Should Not Fall
While some propose tearing it down, the wall separating church and state must stand

This is not the first period in our history when there has been a widespread debate over the posting of the Ten Commandments on school house walls. In 1844 there were riots in the streets of Philadelphia over the question of which version of the Ten Commandments would be so posted. In these riots six people were killed. Note that the 19th Century debate was not whether the Commandments should appear on school house walls, but only which version. But religious passions ran so strong around the issue that blood flowed in the city's streets.

I mention this obscure event in American history because it illustrates a problem I have with President Bush's effort to provide direct federal support to faith based organizations. When asked recently what the federal government could do to control the allegedly harmful effects of popular media: music, movies, and such, that appeared to be "bringing our country down," Bush again referred to his proposals to fund "character education" programs in the public schools. These new programs would not be run by the schools themselves but by private "faith-based" organizations, churches, para-churches, and the like.
You bet there's things the government can do. I would greatly expand character education funding. I think that after-school money ought to be available for faith-based programs and charitable programs that exist because somebody has heard the call to love a neighbor like you'd like to be loved yourself. -- George W. Bush October 17, 2000
During last year's presidential campaign there was little debate about all this because Al Gore also announced his support for similar initiatives. Indeed, the extent to which religion factored in the presidential campaign is only one part of a much larger story. For several years now, in various ways, we have witnessed a major re-alignment in thinking in the highest reaches of power about the relationship between religion and public life, between church and state. Federal funding for character education programs in the schools and "faith based" poverty programs that would replace traditional welfare are only the tip of the iceberg.

Indeed, some suggest that if the last great event of the twentieth century was the fall of the Berlin wall and the emergence of a new world order in which capitalism prevails, the first great event of the twenty-first century may be the fall of the wall separating church and state in the United States and the emergence of a new "politics of redemption" in which the line between private faith and partisan politics disappears. Some welcome this trend, seeing it as the key to our future; others are deeply alarmed. And perhaps the most interesting thing about this discussion is that traditional differences between liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats, born again Christians and others less clear about their religious commitments are breaking down. New alliances are being forged, and old friendships tested.

In a recent article in the New York Review of Books, Joan Didion traces the roots of what George Bush has referred to as "compassionate conservatism." While the term is open to many possible interpretations, Didion credits (blames?) Marvin Olasky, a journalism professor at the University of Texas, who has been a Bush advisor since 1993, with doing more than anyone to influence the candidate's thinking on the topic. Olasky is a born-again, evangelical Christian and author of a highly influential book, The Tragedy of American Compassion. Published in 1992, the book so impressed William J. Bennett when he read it in 1994 that he gave it to Newt Gingrich as a Christmas present; Gingrich recommended it as required reading for all Republican members of Congress. Olasky has further refined his thinking in this year's Compassionate Conservatism, which is nothing less than a manifesto for the transformation of political life in America. Candidate Bush contributed a foreward for Olasky's latest book. In it he writes: "Marvin offers not just a blueprint for government, but also an inspiring picture of the great resources of decency, caring, and commitment to one another that Americans share."

In these books Olasky spells out the critical role that "faith based" organizations will play in the politics of redemption. He also makes an important distinction between newer "faith based" organizations and traditional ones like Church World Service or Catholic Charities that have long worked hand in hand with government. Writes Didion:
This use of "faith-based" is artful, and worth study. Goodwill was founded by a Methodist minister and run during its early years out of the Morgan Memorial Chapel in Boston, which would seem to qualify it as based in faith, although not, in the sense that Olasky apparently construes the phrase, as "faith-based." "Faith-based," then, is, as Olasky uses it, a phrase with a special meaning, a code phrase, employed to suggest that certain worthy organizations have been prevented from receiving government funding solely by virtue of their religious affiliation. This is misleading, since "religiously affiliated" organizations can and do receive such funding. The organizations that have not are those deemed "pervasively sectarian," a judgment based on the extent to which they proselytize, or make religious worship or instruction a condition of receiving aid. This, the Supreme Court has to date maintained, would violate the establishment clause of the First Amendment.
Olasky believes that the very concept of a "wall" separating church and state is a fiction, a myth that should be exposed as such. Writes Olasky, "There's nothing about 'separation of church and state' in the Constitution or the First Amendment. That was Thomas Jefferson's personal expression in a letter written over a decade after the amendment was adopted.... The founding fathers would be aghast at court rulings that make our part of the world safe for moral anarchy."

Which brings me back to 1844 and those Philadelphia riots. In the third debate George Bush repeated over and over again that the problem with "Washington" is that people tend to be divided along partisan lines. Democrats and Republicans engage in too much " bitterness and bickering," and thus can't get anything significant accomplished. Wouldn't it be wonderful if, rather than dividing along partisan political lines, our leaders could unite around basic precepts such as the Golden Rule, which in the George Bush version declares that everyone should "love their neighbors as they'd like to be loved themselves."
In every instance where my administration sees a responsibility to help people, we look first to faith based organizations, charities and community groups that have shown their ability to save and change lives. ... We will change the laws and regulations that hamper the cooperation of government with private institutions.
-- George W. Bush July 22, 1999
Generalities like this make "compassionate conservatism" sound like something that all Americans could join in supporting, wholeheartedly. The problem is that just as there are differences with regard to the Ten Commandments that were so strongly felt that they caused riots in the streets of Philadelphia, there are also grave differences with regard to the Golden Rule and what it requires. While some believe that the Golden Rule (and the command to "love thy neighbor" with which George Bush confuses it) requires that Christians and Jews should learn to live together peacefully, respecting each other's beliefs, others passionately believe that neighborly love requires that Christians inform their Jewish neighbors that they are in mortal danger of facing an eternity in hell if they do not convert. Likewise, while some believe that the Golden Rule requires that gay and lesbian persons be treated as equals in every possible way, others believe with equal passion that the Golden Rule requires that one should inform gay and lesbian persons that they are living a life of sin. In fact, religious communities all across America are deeply divided in their understanding of what the Golden Rule requires with respect to issues like abortion, the relationship between the genders, capital punishment, gun control, school vouchers, or homosexual unions. Indeed, the courts of our churches are as deeply divided over many of these issues as is Washington. If you want to see examples of the partisan "bitterness and bickering" that George Bush finds is the heart of the problem in Washington, all you have to do is attend the national meeting of any of the major religious groups in America. Few of these meetings take place inside the Beltway.

If Bush advisor Marvin Olasky believes that Supreme Court decisions upholding the wall of separation between church and state have served no better purpose than to make room for "moral anarchy," I have news for him. The way out of moral anarchy cannot be found by turning our school systems, our poverty programs, or our public life generally over to the leadership of "faith based" organizations that are themselves deeply divided over basic questions about what true "faith" is. Religious passions and religious differences are the stuff that wars are made of. The founders of our republic knew this very well. That is why they erected the wall that was designed to separate religious passion from the more rational deliberations which they believed would contribute to good government. The founders of our republic got it right. Religious passions are important; they are the motivating force of my own life. They are also powerful and potentially dangerous, as the victims of religious persecution around the world can testify. We dismantle the wall the separates these passions from the seat of government at our own grave peril. This is one wall that should not fall.
The emphasis at the end is mine.

scourge99 said: Many people are very confused on what this means. The key word here is "establishment". The forefathers did not want a national church that existed in some European countries. So basically the US is not allowed to have a nationally recognized church or give preferential support to any religion.
Gee, expressly making it a law to have "In God We Trust" and "Under God" as parts of our government, pledge of allegiance, national motto and on our money etc... wouldn't happen to be preferential support for a religion would it?

When my government makes the express statement that to be an American is to believe in God, they are falsely speaking for me. They are asserting that I believe in God when I do not. They are clearly expressly supporting religion, expressly Christianity.

This quite clearly goes against the wishes of the founding fathers whose deliberations on this topic are available to understand the context in which they wrote it, including Thomas Jefferson, who authored the Declaration of Independence and who was influential in the creation of the Constitution and drafted the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. He wrote "The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." as well as making it clear that the government should not act to speak for any man by asserting for that man a believe in God.

While the root of the movement was to prevent the establishment of a church in relation to what had happened in England, through deliberation it was clearly deemed that to take any particular religious stance would necessarily diminish the equality of any other religious stance and thereby infringe upon the natural rights of man.

scourge99 said: There is no law or amendment that says, "Don't make laws just because your religion thinks it knows the only moral truth." My point is its scary to think that the US could become similar to a theocracy. The US may not be allowed to recognize a national church but it could recognize a bunch of laws stemming from a particular religion. Is there any way to circumvent this from happening?

However, on the flip side, if I am extremely religious, I believe my religion has the only answers, and in many cases, I would believe that others should follow my religion so they are "saved." So why shouldn't I attempt to have laws passed to have you "saved" if thats the will of the majority?

Is there some middle ground?
I think that was something important about the constitution and many of the documents involved in its creation, which are taken into account when interpreting constitutional rights. Our rights are not limited solely to what is spelled out explicitly in the constitution and bill of rights etc. It is not meant to imply that if something is not listed there, that you do not also still retain such other rights. It is more to cover simply a few of the most important as well as set some specific limitations and guidelines for the Government etc.

This is one of the reasons why so many supreme court decisions have still found in favor of "separation of church and state" because of the logical conclusions based on the full body of evidence etc.

I think some other important things to note are that the founding fathers had not only seen religious persecution in other countries, but had also seen it here in the United States before its inception with the infighting and persecution of the Puritans towards other Puritans and other Christians of differing beliefs, over differences of interpretation, or of the accusations of witchcraft or heresy etc.

They understood the idea that it was wrong to force another man to believe in your religion, and that by establishing a state religion, you effectively diminished the rights of any other religion that was not the favored state religion. That man had an inherent right to choose his beliefs for himself and that the role of the government was to stand on a neutral, secular ground in its laws to protect all religious beliefs equally. When a government takes a specific stand on the side of one particular religious belief, it inherently diminishes the protection and rights of all other religious beliefs.

In short, the government is establishing a state religion when it expressly states that all Americans believe in and trust in a Christian God. When they change the motto from the unofficial motto of "E pluribus Unum" (Out of many, [come] one.) to the official motto of "In God We Trust", they make the clear move from celebrating the diversity of ethnicities, beliefs, cultures etc of its constituents to the stance of labeling all citizens as Christians who believe and trust in God. Effectively labeling us a Christian nation, in spite of historical facts to the contrary. Then they officially add this motto to our paper currency, which is the only legal tender for all debts, public and private as a citizen. Then they add "under God" to the pledge of allegiance, requiring all citizens who wish to pledge allegiance to the United States, to pledge allegiance to it as a Christian nation, espousing a Christian doctrine.

I fail to see how people cannot grasp how this inherently diminishes the rights of people of different beliefs or non-believers. When we clearly see such quotes from George W. Bush himself as

Sherman: What will you do to win the votes of the Americans who are atheists?

Bush: I guess I'm pretty weak in the atheist community. Faith in God is important to me.

Sherman: Surely you recognize the equal citizenship and patriotism of Americans who are atheists?

Bush: No, I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God.

Sherman (somewhat taken aback): Do you support as a sound constitutional principle the separation of state and church?

Bush: Yes, I support the separation of church and state. I'm just not very high on atheists.

This sentiment is echoed throughout the government and in turn throughout the citizenry. Atheists are considered the least trusted minority group in America on the basis of race, ethnicity, religious beliefs, gender and sexuality.

To not believe in God is to not be a patriot, to not be a true citizen of this Christian nation.

Time and again we hear the phrase "This is a Christian nation." or more specifically "This nation was founded as a Christian nation." While the former may sadly be true today, this nation was not founded as a Christian nation. This nation was founded by men of varying beliefs with the intention of preserving a freedom for its people to believe or not believe in the religion of their choice without reprisal, ill treatment or oppression. Whether they used the moral principles of their personal religious believes as guides in their decision making or not, and we know that most obviously did as an inherent part of who they were, is irrelevant.

The Separation of Church and State is not meant to oppress Christianity, or any other belief for that matter, but to instead preserve the rights of the citizens to believe in Christianity or any other religion or lack thereof by maintaining a neutral stance in its role and thus protect all beliefs equally. Taking a specifically Christian stance, requiring a pledge to that expressly Christian nation, inherently diminishes the rights of all other religious beliefs. It implies that to not believe in God is to not be an American because all Americans believe in and trust in God.

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;..."
— from the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

"... no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States."
— from Article VI of the U.S. Constitution

"The Government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion."
— from The Treaty of Tripoli, written during the administration of President George Washington, signed by President John Adams and unanimously approved by the Senate in 1797. (And in case you wanted to argue this point, the text that was signed by President Adams and reviewed and approved by the Senate did include that phrase.)

Ron Paul is the Thomas Jefferson of our time and the only viable 2008 Republican option.

2007-12-17T08:31:00.000-05:00

As Allen Holm states in his The Conservative Voice article Reasons for Republicans to Vote Paul, "Ron Paul is going to win the nomination of the Republican Party or the party is going to lose in the general election. Take that as a guarantee. One I would bet money on."

He closes out his excellent article with a number of quotes that I literally thought were from Ron Paul when I started reading. They so poignantly illustrate how Congressman Paul's stance echoes that of the author of our Declaration of Independence and one of the most influential founding fathers of our country.

We should also take a moment to note that yesterday Ron Paul set another campaign record by raising over six million dollars in 24 hours, beating his previous record of $4.2M in 24 hours, which was itself a record in the GOP.

http://ronpaulgraphs.com/dec_16_vs_nov_5_total.html

We should also take note again of the blatant, if not criminal, bias being shown by the mainstream media in openly trying to keep Ron Paul out of the limelight.

"You say Ron Paul doesn't have a chance? But who is giving you that idea? The major media outlets."

“I am for preserving to the states the powers not yielded by them to the union; and for preventing the further encroachment of the executive branch on the rightful powers of congress. I am for a government rigorously frugal and simple, and for retiring the national debt, eliminating the standing army, and relying on the militia to safeguard internal security, and keeping the navy small, lest it drag the nation into eternal wars. I am for free commerce with all nations, political connections with none…. I am for freedom of religion, and for freedom of the press. And against all violations to the Constitution to silence our citizens” - Thomas Jefferson on his positions for the 1800 election.

“Paper is poverty…it is only the ghost of money, and not money itself” –Thomas Jefferson

“I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us that the less we use our power, the greater it will be” –Thomas Jefferson

“I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them” –Thomas Jefferson

“I sincerely believe that banking institutions having the issuing power of money, are more dangerous to liberty than standing armies” –Thomas Jefferson

“It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God; it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” -Thomas Jefferson

“I consider trial by jury as the only anchor yet imagined by man by which a government can be held to the principles of its Constitution.” —Thomas Jefferson, letter to Thomas Paine, 1798

Restore the Republic. Restore the Constitution. Restore Freedom and Liberty to our nation.

Please vote for Ron Paul for President of the United States of America in 2008.

Tea Party '07!

2007-12-16T12:14:00.000-05:00

It's time for another record breaking day for Ron Paul!

The Nov 5th donation drive netted the Paul campaign over $4M in one day! Let's see if we can't soundly surpass that record today!

Let's return our nation to one based on the principles of our founding fathers and under the rule of the Constitution and the people, not a power hungry dictator.

http://www.teaparty07.com/

Compare the live graph of today's fundraising with that of the Nov 5th drive: http://ronpaulgraphs.com/dec_16_vs_nov_5_total.html

Case in point.

2006-04-06T10:28:00.000-04:00

Discovered: the missing link that solves a mystery of evolution.

Quirky "fishapod" crawls onto our family tree. (Thanks Jen!)

Let's see how many creationists want to talk about this. ;-)

(Not to mention Archaeopteryx etc...)

It should also be pointed out, as someone else commented, that there really isn't such a thing as a "missing link". This terminology was invented by creationists trying to find a way to argue against science. It takes a rather in-depth ignorance of the subject to think that evolution is a single chain from *poof* having life begin, and *tada!* having us as the end of the evolutionary chain. And that is putting it -very- nicely.

Starting with the concept of "life", which is something religious wackos have essentially no real grasp of... we have something that is actually a progression of proteins, molecules etc... those which "work", stay. Those which don't... don't. For instance, the protein that causes mad cow disease (and mad deer) isn't a living thing... although it acts like one. It's simply a protein that has found a way to travel and reproduce as such... where does this fall?

Religious nuts like to think of "life" as this magical gift from god that just starts... magically... at some point... when God chooses to give you a soul or something... (explain plants? explain bacteria? are they alive? how about viruses? where do you draw the ARBITRARY line?)

In actuality, those with any real scientific understanding know that "life" is an arbitrary classification we give things that portray certain characteristics. For instance, let's look at the criteria listed on Wikipedia's Life page:

Although there is no universal agreement on the definition of life, the generally accepted biological manifestations are that life exhibits the following phenomena:
Organization - Living things are comprised of one or more cells, which are the basic units of life.
Metabolism - Metabolism produces energy by converting nonliving material into cellular components (synthesis) and decomposing organic matter (catalysis). Living things require energy to maintain internal organization (homeostasis) and to produce the other phenomena associated with life.
Growth - Growth results from a higher rate of synthesis than catalysis. A growing organism increases in size in all of its parts, rather than simply accumulating matter.
Adaptation - Adaptation is the accommodation of a living organism to its environment. It is fundamental to the process of evolution and is determined by the individual's heredity.
Response to stimuli - A response can take many forms, from the contraction of a unicellular organism when touched to complex reactions involving all the senses of higher animals. Plants also respond to stimuli, but usually in ways very different from animals. A response is often expressed by motion: the leaves of a plant turning toward the sun or an animal chasing its prey.
Reproduction - The division of one cell to form two new cells is reproduction. Usually the term is applied to the production of a new individual (either asexually, from a single parent organism, or sexually, from two differing parent organisms), although strictly speaking it also describes the production of new cells in the process of growth.

I don't see any mention of a magical gift from God... or a soul in there... do you? I do however, see a set of scientifically testable criteria. Funny that...

Moving on...

From these beginnings, fitting the theory of "Survival of the Fittest", as atoms followed the laws of physics and molecules formed... and proteins etc... and these continually followed the mantra of the best "surviving" and the imperfect ones failing... we grew. "Life" grew. There was no magic moment when Life Began^TM. Things simply progressed... and this progression, from the start... was as a tree with a multitude of branches... ever growing. Not a single chain... but each "offspring" having it's own offspring... and essentially all of them slightly unique... and as these branches grew... some grew ever further apart from each other as each found different traits beneficial to survival... either through reproductive traits... or survival traits.... depending on geography, habitat, "food", mate availability etc... any number of different factors... and so we progressed from organic compounds... proteins... single celled organisms... multicellular organisms... towards things like primitive plants and animals as the first "major" branches of the tree of life started diverging in more dramatic ways. (See Wikipedia's article on "Evolution" for another thourough explanation.)

Many of these branches exist simultaneously, in similar forms. Some reach essentially efficient stable forms and remain unchanged for millions of years, such as Sharks. Some have been merely a twinkle in the eye of time... some have held sway over the earth for millions of years... only to be eventually unseated by a different form... such as the transition from the dinosaurs to mammals as we now know them as the dominant life forms (leaving out insects and such, who ridiculously outnumber us).

But back to what I was saying... as someone earlier said... as much as such a "missing link" is a transitional life form... which essentially all live on earth is... then we must not forget that we are simply a transitional life form between our more ape like ancestors and relatives, and some future "super-human" form. We are a chronospecies... one that will inevitably cease to exist simply due to the passage of time. Any real study of the fossil record will demonstrate innumerable species that have changed so dramatically over the course of time, that if you took the animal now, and one of it's ancestors from millenia past... they would not be able to interbreed, having changed so dramatically in the interim.

I have no problem addressing these complex issues scientifically, and adjusting the models as evidence and data requires... but oversimplification and rote denial of mountains of factual data and scientific evidence in pursuit of elevating a belief, based on ignorance, to the level of supposed credibility... I have a rather serious problem with that.

For instance, there has been an issue of an evangelical nutcase archaeologist who claims to have discovered organic "tissue" inside T-Rex bones etc... while I think that she is a nutjob, given many of her public statements... I won't discount her findings over it... I simply want to see more research done along those lines. If the models of biological material decay were wrong, address them... if there really is some other problem with the models... address them. Failure to address an issue when it doesn't fit the expected guidelines, out of a fear of what it might mean, is to completely fail the goals of science.

(Read this article about the T-Rex, from the perspective of some Creationists, to get an idea how ridiculous these people's beliefs are. For instance, take every living species of animal alive today, and take a single male and female from each (not to mention that the bible specifies that SEVEN of every type of clean animal and SEVEN of every type of bird... AND food enough for themselves and every single animal... aside from "every kind of food"... or the fact that the waters were so deep that they covered the entire earth COMPLETELY, 20 feet deeper than the tip of the highest mountain on earth... or that all mankind was killed except for Noah, his wife, their 3 sons, and their wives... and all of humanity is supposedly now descended from those 8 people... or maybe more, as polygamy was accepted in those days... the list goes on and on and on...) and see if you can fit them all onto a single boat of the size Noah built. Not to mention ignoring the fossil record and archaeological evidence concretely dating when these animals lived. Or ignoring the fact that due to inbreeding, almost all of these species would die off etc... it's simply scientifically ludicrous bullshit... but that doesn't stop these nutjobs from throwing mountains of science out the window, while clinging to straws... even scientific ones... to try to prove they're right.)

We have creationists scrambling to cling to this issue as supposed proof of young earth theory etc... and others denying the evidence outright, without even looking into it, for fear that it might give the young earthers ground to stand on.

(Let's not forget that the bible explicitly lists the animals created during creation; cows, birds etc... and fails to mention the kind of life we know actually came about, billions of years after the formation of our planet, which in turn came billions of years after the beginning of the universe as we know it... to put this a little more clearly for you... sit down in front of a nice old analog wall clock, and starting at midnight, watch the second hand sweep around... second after second... as it travels around the face of the clock 1,440 times over the next 24 hours... and just before midnight, 24 hours later, as the second hand ticks off that one final second... that single second, in relation to the previous 23 hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds, represents more time than cows as we know them, and ourselves, have existed in relation to the age of the universe as we know it.)

UPDATE - WEDNESDAY, APRIL 12, 2006:
Please see my later post Visual timeline of evolution that has a link to a much better visual example then my clock metaphor. (Evolutionary Timeline)

I think it's pretty safe to say that fundamentalist Christians are broken in the head... but let's not let our fear of their delusional rantings prevent us from addressing what could be shocking findings about fossilization and such. Keep our eyes on the truth for the sake of the truth, the whole truth, wherever it may lead us.

Visual timeline of evolution.

2006-04-12T20:57:00.000-04:00

You have to see this.

Evolutionary Timeline

I tried to illustrate this a few posts ago (in my post entitled Case in point ) by describing the second hand on a clock... but this is way... WAY better.

Go. Look. Now.

Wow.

Preposterous wishful thinking.

2007-12-04T22:41:00.000-05:00

I noticed a link to a blog in a Google ad earlier while reading my e-mail and decided to have a look. What I found both saddened and angered me while simultaneously causing me to laugh out loud at its claims.

Answer The Skeptic

I felt compelled to write a lengthy comment denouncing what I read, which led me to notice something else; almost every overtly religious blog I've run across moderates their comments and tends to only allow comments that they agree with. This shouldn't really be a surprise, considering that it is precisely the mentality of such religious people; to only acknowledge points of view and information which seem to support their belief while willfully avoiding at all costs acknowledging any information or facts to the contrary. Confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance at their most pronounced.

With that said, I'm including my comment below as I'm not sure it will show up on the other site. Here is the original post that prompted my initial response (which grew to encompass other points on that site etc.): Humans are different from other animals

I think the important thing to note here is the obvious statement that "I don't care if the evidence proves that we are related to monkeys and just another animal, I don't want to believe it because I don't like it, so I'm going to argue that my feelings are more important than factual reality."
Science proves that we are related to the great apes etc, and are just another animal in the animal kingdom, evolved in the same way as the rest. Religion on the other hand is still trying to cling to the ancient mythology that we are some magical, divine being created wholly separately from the rest of the animal kingdom.
They only grudgingly, and wholly hypocritically, admit pieces and parts of the truth while still trying to hopelessly cling to the ancient myths.
My frustration with this behavior is such things as teaching Evolution still being outlawed in more socially behind the times areas such as the southern states etc... Creationist mythology being dressed up to pretend that it's not just religious wishful thinking and pawned off on our children under the false pretense of it being scientific... a claim which has been soundly disproven in courts of law.
This kind of primitive and dishonest thinking is slowly turning our country into an intellectual backwater where scientific research and education is taking a backseat to primitive mythology and superstition. Modern technological and medical advancements are now being made overseas and the United States is losing its place at the forefront of human scientific progress. Our children are left a mockery to more educated industrialized countries, left unable to fully comprehend global scientific, political, social and cultural issues... being blinded by the cognitive dissonance and fog of internally conflicting facts and myths, reality in front of their eyes and heads full of ancient fairytale stories about the world they perceive. When these things inevitably conflict, they are left in a sort of cognitive daze.
It's not hard to look and see what this religious wishful thinking and desperate denial of reality is doing to our country.
As final food for thought in response to some of the desperate and off-base claims made by the article referred to in the post... consider that dolphins have been shown to understand time, the concept of future rewards in relation to investment etc... and other animals such as elephants and gorillas have been shown to understand the concept of mortality. The dolphins were trained to pick up litter in the pool and return it to the trainers for a reward. The dolphins on their own came up with the idea of hiding a piece of litter at the bottom of the pool and tearing off pieces of it to get more fish at later times. http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2003/jul/03/research.science
Here is another good article that covers this general theme: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/2/23/10551/6579
In short, your wishful thinking, despite the reality around you, is a problem. If you simply started accepting the facts of reality around you, you could open your eyes to the vast and mind boggling wonders of the universe that REALLY EXISTS around you. This is vastly more wondrous and awe inspiring than the small minded myths invented by ignorant and primitive sheep herders thousands and thousands of years ago when people still thought the earth was flat, the sky was a mechanical dome, the sun was a light that orbited the earth, that the world was only a few thousand years old, that knew nothing of other continents, dinosaurs, atomic structures, physics, sickness and health, flight and on and on and on.
Putting that mythology behind us and pursuing real knowledge of the world around us has enabled mankind to fly, to leave the bonds of mother earth and step foot upon other worlds, gazing back at our planet through the vastness of space... to understand the world we cannot see in provable ways which enable us to harness atomic energy, to create the very computer you're reading and typing on at this very moment, that allowed us to send out probes which have flown far beyond the reaches of our solar system into the vast expanse of interstellar space...
Clinging to primitive myths despite facts and evidence proving otherwise is blasphemous to the very nature of the human mind. Reprehensible to human progress. Such religiously based willful ignorance and defiance of reality would have all of us still living in mud huts, fearful of a vengeful sky god who would smote us with spears from heaven if we were bad, or strike us down with plagues for our sins... sicknesses which we would be ignorantly praying for salvation from rather than harnessing our scientific knowledge to cure them ourselves.
Religion is the ceaseless denial of the greatest accomplishments of mankind, of mankind's greatest potential. It would have us all remain servile and ignorant sheep and that, to me, is an abomination.
Reading some of the other articles on this blog saddens, frustrates and even angers me with the insult it does to humanity and our own common sense at the very least. Arguing about evil when the bible itself states that God CREATED evil... a vengeful, jealous god that creates good and evil, creates sin, lives in darkness, lies to his creations, creates a flawed angel whom he allows to rebel and take one third of all the angels with him to earth to further torment his less loved creations, angels being held closer to him in both favor and locale, allowing humanity to sin and then punishing them for it when he created that sin to begin with... refusing to forgive the sin or simply remove the sin, but preferring to subject humanity to an eternity of suffering for what HE CREATED... then creating a son to be sent to earth to suffer and die horribly for nothing more than a show... STILL not removing that punishment for sin... leaving humanity no better off than the moments after Eve ate from the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil... the list goes on and on... and what's worse is that it's ALL A STORY! A provably ridiculous myth written by primitive people thousands of years ago! And you people still cling to it as FACTUAL REALITY!?
Articles about science not being able to YET fully explain the origin of the universe, or FULLY understand the physical functioning of the human brain... SERIOUSLY!? ARE YOU KIDDING ME!? Science has taken mankind from believing the ignorance of the bible to being able to travel between planets! To fly through space! Science has allowed us to map the functions of the brain, enabling advanced brain surgery and greater understanding of mental impairments and diseases etc...
Your desperate claims to point to Science not FULLY explaining some of the most profoundly complex problems of our time when you have NO PROOF WHATSOEVER for your beliefs, and not to mention that they are even more ridiculous in light of the MOUNTAINS of scientific PROOF to the contrary... you have the audacity to point to modern astrophysics and call it a fundamental failure that they haven't PROVEN the creation of the universe when the best your ignorant shepherds millennia ago have come up with is that a man in the sky created everything one day!? LISTEN TO YOURSELF!
If the Universe requires a creator because of its complexity, then how can the creator, being necessarily more complex than the universe, not also require a creator? And if the creator does not require a creator, then the universe, being less complex, would certainly not either and would be more likely to have simply sprung into existence.
The logic behind that simple statement is enough to explain the foolishness of your beliefs to even a child. And fortunately we have mountains and mountains of scientific evidence and proof from centuries of research and understanding and human achievement to bring us, through a preponderance of convergent evidence, to the enlightened understandings we have today of the REAL WORLD AROUND US, an understanding that compels us to leave the ignorant and primitive myths of our ancient ancestors where they belong... by the wayside along with all the other gods and myths man has worshipped, believed and inevitably left behind on the road of human progress.

On military bulletins...

2006-10-31T13:02:00.000-05:00

I've received 2 military related bulletins today on MySpace, and the second one just finally pissed me off enough to blow off a little steam. I haven't posted on this topic in quite awhile, so I guess maybe I was due for a little rant. ;-)

My responses (as should be obvious) are below in italic.

I'm going to post a point by point rebuttal to some of these statements as a "food for thought" type polemic.

Think.

Read to the end before you snap back...

-------------------------

Your alarm goes off, you hit the snooze and sleep for another 10 minutes.
He stays up for days on end.

You take a warm shower to help you wake up.
He goes days or weeks without running water.

As do hundreds of thousands of civilians, whose infrastructure we bombed into oblivion, directly and indirectly taking the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent people.

You complain of a "headache", and call in sick.
He gets shot at as others are hit, and keeps moving forward.

You put on your anti war/don't support the troops shirt, and go meet up with your friends.
He still fights for your right to wear that shirt.

I wouldn't wear a "don't support the troops" shirt, and it's incredibly stupid to think that not supporting the war means that you don't support the troops. Those soldiers are a bunch of men and women who signed up to defend an ideal... freedom and liberty... and they're putting their lives on the line in the belief that that is what they're defending. Whether or not they understand the full weight of what they're doing, their intentions are generally for the best, and to put their lives on the line for that deserves respect. But that doesn't mean that if someone disagrees with the government policy that has sent good men and women to die for no good reason, that they don't support those men and women. It is the same mentality that cannot understand what true patriotism actually is... and who believe that questioning the actions of the current administration is unpatriotic, when the very founding fathers themselves made it clear that to be a patriot was to question that very government, to be ever vigilant... that sometimes the blood of patriots must be shed to show that government who is actually in charge... THE PEOPLE of the United States... the government exists for no other purpose than to serve the people and the constitution of the United States of America, NOT the other way around.

Not to mention that he is NOT fighting for my right to wear that shirt. Our country is not and was not EVER under attack by Saddam Hussein OR Iraq. Our Freedoms are not under attack by any foreign power... they are under attack by our own government, which is plain to see for anyone who actually takes the time to look at the legislation that has been passed over the past few years, and just how many of your constitutional rights have vanished. You have been completely hoodwinked and blinded to who the real enemy is here. These men and women, however honorable their intentions, are fighting a war for a very difference reason, a reason decided and enforced by the current administration, not by the soldiers themselves... and again, even if the soldiers do believe they're fighting for that reason... they're not. Iraq/Saddam are not the enemy... they are not the ones that attacked us... and even the ones who did have at least in part, valid reasons for their attack that the government and many of the people either cannot see, or refuse to see.

You need to understand these things much more thoroughly (if you do at all) before you condemn or praise those involved.

You make sure you're cell phone is in your pocket.
He clutches the cross hanging on his chain next to his dog tags.

Just another reminder that a large part of this war is a matter of religious dogma and not rationality or truth.

That goes in part to the fact that Bush had launched this war believing that God told him to do so... and believing that we essentially have some divine moral high ground that ensures our victory... this is the same kind of mindset that the other side has... they BOTH believe in figments of their imaginations, and they BOTH believe ABSOLUTELY that they are Just and Right and WILL PREVAIL etc... both are convinced 100% that the other side is wrong, that the other side CANNOT be right, because that would mean giving up their own fairy tale belief in religion. It is a No Win situation until rational thinkers can bury this scourge of irrational superstitious nonsense and get the world to wake up to the reality of the modern day.

You talk trash about your "buddies" that aren't with you.
He knows he may not see some of his buddies again.

And it's our fault that his friends are dying? We who oppose them having been sent there to die, and not the actual government who made that decision, against the majority will of the people? What kind of backwards thinking is that? Seriously.

You walk down the beach, staring at all the pretty girls.
He walks the streets, searching for insurgents and terrorists.

Again, how is this our fault?

You complain about how hot it is.
He wears his heavy gear, not daring to take off his helmet to wipe his brow.

Yet another case of "not my fault, I didn't want him there to begin with. There's no good reason for him to be there. blame the government that sent him, not me". Starting to catch on yet?

You go out to lunch, and complain because the restaurant got your order wrong.
He doesn't get to eat today.

I call bullshit on that one. The military is very well stocked, and if you want to cry about him maybe missing a meal, then maybe you should take a look at the many thousands that have died of starvation due to their homes, stores, water supplies, hospitals and so on... all being bombed into rubble. Actually go and learn about the hundreds of thousands who have died, and the conditions which led to their deaths... and then you bitch about a soldier missing a few meals while on patrol, if it even happens.

You need to get your perspective straight.

Your maid makes your bed and washes your clothes.
He wears the same things for weeks, but makes sure his weapons are clean.

A MAID? Since when do I have a maid... and what on earth would it have to do with a soldier in Iraq, even if I did? Nothing. Again, another straw man statement that means nothing. Remember, I didn't send him there and even while he's there, he's not fighting for my freedom... at most he's fighting to keep my gasoline cheap... something that he's basically failed at doing. If he wanted to fight people that are more of a threat to the US, he'd be in Syria or Iran or any number of other places, fighting fundamentalist Islam, and our government would be fighting religious fundamentalism the world over, not simply breeding our own version of the same sickness domestically.

You people are so far off the base with this tripe that it's horribly disheartening.

You go to the mall and get your hair redone.
He doesn't have time to brush his teeth today.

Another straw man, not to mention that I've shaved my own head for the past 10 years plus... and that it's misleading to say he doesn't have time to brush his teeth today... the military are trained that proper oral hygiene is paramount and they are provided with the necessary supplies. And I highly doubt that missing brushing your teeth here and there is going to be that big of a deal. Extenuating circumstances.

You're angry because your class ran 5 minutes over.
He's told he will be held over an extra 2 months.

And this is a good point... but again a responsibility that lies firmly on the shoulders of the government who betrayed the trust of it's own soldiers under false pretenses and used a backdoor clause to force them in for extended tours because they needed the extra bodies to fight their war for them. I didn't want them there to begin with.

You call your girlfriend and set a date for tonight.
He waits for the mail to see if there is a letter from home.

Again, place the blame where it belongs, not with the people who never wanted them far from home and dying in the first place.

You hug and kiss your girlfriend, like you do everyday.
He holds his letter close and smells his love's perfume.

See above... again.

You roll your eyes as a baby cries.
He gets a letter with pictures of his new child, and wonders if they'll ever meet

See above... again.

You criticize your government, and say that war never solves anything.
He sees the innocent tortured and killed by their own people and remembers why he is fighting.

WHAT!? This coming from a government who has flat out stated that we are not beholden to the Geneva conventions or laws of war and who admit to torture and who have actually passed new laws to ensure that we can torture prisoners of war and not be accountable to any international human rights bodies etc...

This statement is THE height of HYPOCRISY.

We have caused the deaths of over 100 TIMES as many as Saddam ever killed... in a SECULAR country that was actually one of the most stable in the region... turning it into a graveyard and the hottest breeding ground in the region, if not the world, for terrorist activity. We have created and exacerbated a problem far FAR beyond anything we claimed to be solving.

You hear the jokes about the war, and make fun of men like him.
He hears the gunfire, bombs and screams of the wounded.

I've never done any such thing. And as for the screams... when you consider that we've killed over 100 TIMES as many of them as they have us, and that 60% of those deaths have been children... I think you'll forgive me a lack of pity here.

You see only what the media wants you to see.
He sees the broken bodies lying around him.

I couldn't agree with this more.

You are asked to go to the store by your parents. You don't.
He does exactly what he is told.

And while, as I've said before, I respect the reason he believes he's fighting... I feel that one of the main problems today is this mindless, blind obedience to the government... to authority figures. People need to start THINKING... to understand the history and the FACTS that have led us to this point... and to use their own minds to make informed, rational decisions... and have the spines to act on those.

You stay at home and watch TV.
He takes whatever time he is given to call, write home, sleep, and eat.

I don't watch TV. I don't have cable. But that's beside the point. Again, any discomfort he feels is the fault of the government for sending him there... and perhaps I'd feel more compassion for him if he really were defending my freedom and liberty... but to do that, he'd have to not be blindly obedient and would honestly have to be here, in the US, fighting to overthrow our own government, abolish all these laws lately that have overridden the constitution and take us back to the kind of free country that the founding fathers intended... to actually fight for my rights. What is going on today couldn't be farther from the "truth" the government does it's damnedest to try to convince you of.

You crawl into your soft bed, with down pillows, and get comfortable.
He crawls under a tank for shade and a 5 minute nap, only to be woken by gunfire.

*sigh*... these meaningless comparisons get REALLY OLD when you're not enough of a sheep to swallow them hook line and sinker without thinking.

You sit there and judge him, saying the world is probably a worse place because of men like him.
If only there were more men like him!

Again, I commend the soldiers who sign up to the military believing that they'll be making the world a better place. That they'll be defending Freedom and Liberty... those are noble ideals... but the truth is far from the belief... it is not always so... but sadly, with the US... it is almost always the case that good men and women die because of lies... because of money... for any reasons but freedom and liberty. I guess such is often the case when a government can spend the lives of it's youth as easily as it spends our tax dollars...

As Stalin said "the death of one man is a tragedy... the death of a million is but a statistic."

Food for thought.

And as a footnote... if you really want to do a service to your country as a patriot... try going and reading about the founding of our country... read the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence. Read the Federalist Papers... the works of Jefferson and Washington... understand the turmoil and the bloodshed that surrounded the founding of this country...

I want to leave you with a few quotes to contrast... and see if you can't get an idea who had a better idea of what true freedom and liberty actually was...

"Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost." --Thomas Jefferson

"I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it." --Thomas Jefferson

"We are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it." --Thomas Jefferson

"The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." --Thomas Jefferson

"Delay is preferable to error." --Thomas Jefferson

"God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. ... What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure." --Thomas Jefferson

"I am really mortified to be told that, in the United States of America, a fact like this can become a subject of inquiry, and of criminal inquiry too, as an offence against religion; that a question about the sale of a book can be carried before the civil magistrate. Is this then our freedom of religion? and are we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books may be sold, and what we may buy? And who is thus to dogmatize religious opinions for our citizens? Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched? Is a priest to be our inquisitor, or shall a layman, simple as ourselves, set up his reason as the rule for what we are to read, and what we must believe? It is an insult to our citizens to question whether they are rational beings or not, and blasphemy against religion to suppose it cannot stand the test of truth and reason." --Thomas Jefferson

"You don't get everything you want. A dictatorship would be a lot easier... So long as I'm the dictator." --George W. Bush

"I think people attack me because they are fearful that I will then say that you're not equally as patriotic if you're not a religious person. ... I've never said that. I've never acted like that. I think that's just the way it is." --George W. Bush

"There ought to be limits to freedom." --George W. Bush

etc.

As always... read, learn, educate yourselves.

Thank you for taking the time to read this far.

scary.

2005-06-23T04:17:00.000-04:00

I was watching a special on "Who Wrote the Bible", produced by Channel4, and right at the end, the last 7 minutes or so, the main narrator Robert Beckford stopped to speak with Richard Land (see here for a more in-depth description of who he is, from his own website). The following is a brief transcript of that very tail end of the show. I wonder if anyone else finds it as disturbing as I did. (mind you, seeing someone saying these things matter of factly as he does, and to a congregation etc.... UGH.)

hahaha... I was just looking for a link to information on Robert Beckford and ran across a rebuttal of this program, and one quote leaped out at me: "The whole programme, of course, was the devil’s lie."

yes.. of course... if we agree with you, we're influenced by god... if we disagree, it's not our actual studying and research... it's THE DEVIL. such a clear worldview must be very comforting. :)

you can even read the whole thing for yourself here in the evangelical times, just to be fair. I'm sure it will be a fairly unbiased and honest evaluation of the material. ;)

UPDATE: I typed and formatted all of this myself. stepping through the video, writing down and describing every few seconds of video. just wanted to point out that I didn't copy this transcript from somewhere else, which is what Jen thought this morning when she asked me what I spent all night doing. this is what I was doing.

--------

RB = Robert Beckman, Theologian
RL = Dr. Richard Land - President of the Southern Baptist Convention

RB: My journey is almost over. It's taken me back thousands of years, but the questions I've been asking matter today more than ever, and I'll tell you why.

(video clip of George W. Bush. audio byte of GWB saying "Freedom and Fear... are at war.")

RB: US President George W. Bush claims to live by the bible, and between 30 and 40% of the American Electorate are Evangelical Christians who believe that god wrote it.

Just before the presidential elections, Bush knows that if he rallies the religious hard-liners that didn't vote last time, it'll be 4 more years in the White House.

(audio byte of RB's car radio playing part of a sermon by Richard Land (RL): "If the Christians in America get right with God, God will bless America. If they don't, God's not gonna bless America.")

RB: I'm on my way to a baptist church in Georgia to meet a big time preacher who's been dubbed "Spiritual Advisor to the President". He's known Bush since 1988 and even wears Presidential Cuff-Links.

RB speaking to RL: What does the bible mean to George [W.] Bush?

RL to RB: I believe he believes it's God's word, and it's a source of guidance.

(video clip of RL speaking emphatically to his congregation: "God said it. That settles it. I believe it.")

RL to RB: The most important source of knowledge about Good and Evil, Right and Wrong... umm.. meaning and purpose for Human Life... umm.. that is uh.. available to human beings.

RL to congregation: I was asked the other day by a liberal uh.. if I had anything I would suggest the president had done differently, I said "yes, I would have flooded Iraq with American troops. Not 120,000... 500,000."

RB to RL: Is it right for the bible to impact Domestic and Foreign Policy?

RL to RB: Sure. Biblical Truth is Truth with a capital T... and if it's true on Sunday, it's true on Monday... it's true 24 hours a day, 7 days a week... and it should apply to every area of our lives.

RL to congregation: For a Christian to be involved in an armed conflict means that it must be authorized by the legitimate authority. I do not believe that a legitimate authority for the United States is the United Nations. Now, if they want to agree with us, great. But if they don't, (throws hands in the air and makes noise) EHH. I don't care.

RB to RL: Does reading the bible make you a better President?

RL to RB: Well, as a Christian, I believe it does. I would think it would make you a better person, a better husband, a better Senator, a better wife, a better father, a better mother, a better welder, a better lawyer uh... it'll make you a better human being.

RB to RL: On this journey, I've been looking at who wrote the bible, and I've come across theologians who say you don't have to take the New Testament literally.. because it was written decades after those events took place, so surely one needs to be a little bit more flexible...

RL cuts in on RB: I don't.. I.. I think surely not. umm.. it's not a question of intellect. It's not a question of scholarship. It's a question of Faith. umm.. most of the people that you're referring to come to the bible with what I call a Napoleonic Code... uh.. Assumption. In the Napoleonic Code, you're guilty until proven innocent. umm.. and I come to it with an English Common Law approach. You're innocent until proven guilty. It's God's word until you prove it isn't.

RB to RL: There are Theologians who argue that the biblical text was written thousands of years ago, is inaccurate, and can't be the basis of sound Domestic or International Policy. What do you say to that?

RL to RB: Rubbish. *smirk* *chuckles* You wanted a short answer, I'll give you a short answer. Rubbish. Dangerous Rubbish. When you believe the bible and you follow the bible, God blesses you and you grow. When you stand in judgment of scripture, that is a theology of death.

(video clip of Bush's victory with audio clip of Bush saying "I want to thank you all for your hard work...")

RB: 16 days later, the American Electorate gave George W. Bush a landslide victory. Many believe that preachers like Richard Land, and Bush's own very public relationship with the bible, won the day. It's been an earth shattering journey for me. From my roots, where whatever you do, you certainly never question the bible... first the so called Law of Moses turns out to be the work of many human hands... then I find much of the Old Testament was ruled by ancient politics as much as by Divine Insight. The New Testament too turns out to be a masterwork of spin. Written by people who were nowhere near the events they describe. All gathered together by powerful editors who made sure to keep out ideas they didn't like.

But my Mother always taught me: "Stay intelligent despite your education.", and what she meant by that was "use your experience to work out what's in front of you.", and if I apply that to this journey, Who Wrote the Bible? Well, I've learned that biblical authorship is messy, and it's messy because life is imperfect... and if we can find God in the imperfections of our lives, of my life, then maybe we can find God in the messiness of the text. Who Wrote the Bible? Well it's a complex question, and it takes some thinking through, and that tells me that to have Faith in the world today, is to ask questions and never have the wool pulled over your eyes.

Follow-up to the previous post...

2006-04-12T16:37:00.000-04:00

I posted a "quick" response comment to the previous post on "Religion: Blight on Humanity?"... and a short follow-up to that... and figured I'd post them here for good measure.

I wouldn't call religion a mental illness per se, however I would say that it causes mental failure.
Religion requires a compartmentalization of thought to enable one to simultaneously believe drastically different or contradictory things. For instance, a man or woman in their daily lives will generally require just as much proof of an amazing claim as any other person would. But when it comes to their religious beliefs… even the most outlandish claims, which are in direct violation of the physical laws of the daily world we live in… and are wholly self-contradictory etc… they take these without question.
This type of cognitive suppression and compartmentalization, which enables them to essentially overcome cognitive dissonance, has numerous ill effects. Its symptoms include such things as a complete inability to even entertain that any notion that in any way conflicts with their religious belief might have any validity. It causes them to oversimplify complex issues that might conflict with their beliefs if studied too deeply. It causes them to treat people of other beliefs as sadly wrong individuals… or to do such things as treat homosexuals as abominations who are going to burn in hell… while usually at the same time being polite to their faces. They don't understand that them telling a person that they're perverse and evil and abominations could have negative repercussions in that persons life. They believe that God hates gays, so they feel 100% right in sharing that view. They believe that the bible teaches certain things, and therefor they have a right to legislate those particular morals onto everyone else, even when others might not share their personal beliefs.
This type of detachment from reality… and from critical thinking… the oversimplification of issues, the outright willful ignorance of matters that might threaten their beliefs… these things do harm to society. When you have people that willfully make themselves ignorant of scientific facts and medical and scientific progress etc… and practice rote memorization of religious dogma and use it to try to fight scientific progress and hold humanity back as a whole while violating the basic rights of other individuals in society, while being largely painfully ignorant of the facts and complexities of the issues at hand as a result of the very belief system they are trying to maintain… this, as a whole, has a negative effect on society at large.
People unaware of sexual education because of the forced ignorance of the subject, leading to STD transmission and early pregnancies etc… or discrimination against gays because "God says so" rather than any real world reasoning… or teaching bigotry against people of other cultures if they don't share the same beliefs etc, because any other belief must be wrong if it's not Christianity, and other cultures entail different beliefs on non-religious ideas as well… but being different is also seen as dangerous to the conservative status quo in the cultural sense… so you have a general misunderstanding of people like Muslims etc… and rather than addressing the real foundations of the problems with Radical Islam today, you have such ignorant mindsets as that all Muslims are towel headed lunatics who hate life so much that they just want to kill us while they end their own miserable lives out of depression, hatred and jealousy of our Freedom… when this is entirely wrong! This leads us into wars where hundreds of thousands of lives are lost and whole countries descend into turmoil.
People fail to understand that the problems we have with terrorism today are generally the direct result of Religious Fundamentalism… and while this terminology is bandied about as the latest buzzwords… people utterly fail to grasp it's implications. The problem with Religious Fundamentalism is merely in people actually doing what their religion teaches them, even commands them to do! The only reason the rest of the religious aren't following suit is because of a combination of things… failure to understand their own religion fully, and a failure to obey it's teachings. This along with the scientific and cultural secular advances of the past 2,000 years have led to a society, especially here in the U.S., where a majority of people claim to be religious and will steadfastly and vehemently defend their beliefs, but generally have a very poor knowledge of those beliefs and a very poor concept of how those beliefs interact with and even contradict their own daily lives, beliefs and actions. This being another result of the aforementioned compartmentalization of thought that enables them to function from day to day while maintaining a belief system that contradicts the world around them, and the knowledge that enables them to function in it. (dying is bad. if you walk off this bridge, gravity will make you fall and die. certain diseases will kill you. the dead cannot come back to life. etc. bob cannot be 2 places at once. your biological mother cannot be 2 different people. praying will not pay your bills.)
I have seen many times over the results of this compartmentalized mental disconnection from reality… and while many apologists would like us to believe that religion is a good thing, they fail to understand that the kind of "good religion" they're referring to is nothing more than a rather large failure of actually being religious, and mostly following the secular wisdom of the past few thousand years in violation of and in contradiction with the religions they claim to wholeheartedly believe in and steadfastly support. And they do this while denouncing the people on both ends of the spectrum simultaneously… those who are against their beliefs, or do not believe them at all…. and those who share their beliefs, but believe them 100% and obey them in accordance with that belief.
How hard is it to understand that there is a problem when the only way your beliefs are a good thing is when you don't really believe them or follow them fully? And how can you claim their infallibility while at the same time saying that some of them are not relevant or don't need to be followed? (hint: the compartmentalization I talked about earlier). How can you say that Gods word is infallible and must be obeyed, but then ignore all the things he absolutely commands you to do? How can you claim someone is evil or wrong and justify retribution toward or denigration of such people, when you yourself invalidate the very words you claim as your authority? compartmentalization of thought… willful blindness of contradictions… willful ignorance of complex situations… refusal to even acknowledge any error in logic relating to your beliefs.
I could go on and on about this… but I'm not the best writer by any means, and I would hope that my explanation so far has shed a little light on this.

After reading back over that comment, I noticed some things that I failed to clarify, which I felt were rather important, if not vital, to the point I was trying to make... so I added another reply:

I suppose that I should clarify something...
When I stated that "This type of cognitive suppression and compartmentalization, which enables them to essentially overcome cognitive dissonance, has numerous ill effects.", I should have clarified that the real danger with this is the fact that this same set of mental self-induced disabilities and dysfunctions follows through into their daily life... so that when faced with real life cognitive dissonance, they resolve it internally in the same manner. They ignore contradictions, they willfully maintain ignorance of ideas and knowledge that might contradict their preconceptions... and while these are all traits we somewhat share... they are also much more likely to simply completely fail to see even the most obvious contradictions, or to be able to use any real level of critical thinking skills or logical reasoning ability etc.
As these self-induced shortcomings spill over into their daily lives, this is when the damage really starts being done. At this point it is no longer simply a harmless fantasy that affects nobody but themselves, at this point they are failing to understand the world around them and using their own self-induced ignorance of concepts and it's resulting painfully flawed understanding of the world as motivations to force their beliefs onto other people by passing laws against them, or supporting wars against them, or simply spreading hate about them, while completely failing to see what they're doing for what it really is. They see what they're doing as perfectly right and perfectly good as extensions of God's perfect will.
If these types of people really did just have a fantasy that harmed no one but themselves, I wouldn't really care... I'd have little problem letting them run around and spend their lives as simpletons. I'd just pity them a bit and ignore them. But when we have them directing national policy and law because of their ignorance en masse... and when my life is personally detrimentally effected by their disassociation with reality and inability to think rationally etc... I have a problem with it.
Although Jefferson made his comment about it neither picking his pocket or breaking his leg... I think even Jefferson would understand that egregious violations of personal freedom in the name of religion is just as heinous... if not even more so.

(The closing comment about Jefferson refers to the following quote from Thomas Jefferson, taken from the Notes on the state of Virginia (1781-1785): "The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.", which was made in the context of Separation of Church and State.)

BULLSHIT!

2006-02-11T14:30:00.000-05:00

NSA vs FISA - Maybe It's Time For The Showdown

Man the amount of bullshit in this article just get my blood boiling. Allow me to put on my steel toed boots and kick the shit out of this article point by point.

As the usual Democratic peacocks prance around in the full display of their anti-Bush plumage over the NSA Wiretap Affair, public opinion is beginning to show a turn in the Administration's favor on the matter. Apparantly the general public is beginning to understand the issue better than the Congress.

First off, we know that the majority of Americans are ignorant to the complexity of the situation. I'll get to a related point in a moment. But as far as this goes... the general public does not understand the issue better than Congress. That's simply a ludicrous assertion! This is a matter of the law being broken, by Bush and the NSA. There were laws put in place in the 70's specifically to address precisely this kind of abuse of power by the President and the NSA! Bush and the NSA knew this and willfully chose to break the law. In part because they were betting that because of all the fearmongering about terror and the lie about this being a "time of war", which as I've explained before, it is not. There has been no official declaration of war. Got that? No war. There is no justification, even under this perceived threat, to allow the government to break the law, and to deprive us of our most basic civil liberties and rights.

These are not just temporary legal allowances in a time of combat... these are solid laws that are being passed to permanently remove our rights to privacy, due process, etc. The very Constitution is being shat upon. They wave it around like they're protecting our Freedom while they trample all over that very Freedom they use as an excuse!

Perhaps it's time for the Administration to take the gloves off and call the Dems bluff once and for all. There's no need for congressional "hearings", offering nothing more than an opportunity for grandstanding, speechmaking, and bluster – none of which will truly settle anything!

Yes, because we know how much you dislike obeying the law... but we'll get to the real kicker about that in a moment.

C'mon, George! Ask the Supreme Court to rule on the issue! Make the LEGAL case before SCOTUS that INTELLIGENCE gathering in time of war differs from EVIDENCE gathering in a criminal case… and as such, falls under the constitutional jurisdiction of the Commander in Chief. Argue that constitutional authority given the President can not be limited or diminished by congressional statute and FISA is irrelevant when it comes to surveillance of communications between persons in the US and suspected terror elements overseas. Debate whether the "probable cause" standard of used in law enforcement has any place in determining whether our National Security interests can be defended.

Say it with me now... WE'RE NOT AT WAR. This is a straw man! We're not at war, and this use of power is not only unjustified, but illegal. The whole point above is a lie. And they know it as they backpeddle and essentially say to rewrite the existing law to allow the illegal actions they're already taking.

Let's see if the Leftists are confident enough in their oppositional position to allow the case to be heard by SCOTUS! Let it become a matter of "Settled Law" by Supreme Court adjudication!

To make a point from the last paragraph as well as this one... isn't it convenient that the President gets to appoint his Supreme Court Judges etc? Not to mention the fact that they're ignoring present law and trying to get you to ignore it as well, while they try to get that existing law overturned and replaced by new laws that they'll only follow at all because they wrote it and it allows them to do what they want. Unfortunately in the process they're completely doing away with any need for the President to follow ANY law whatsoever and giving him absolute power to arbitrarily follow, ignore or rewrite ANY law as he sees fit! What then is the point of rewriting the law at all, if you don't even obey the existing law?

There's not much I hate more than the current Republican Christian army of idiots that's dutifully marching our country towards Armageddon. Nothing except the religion(s) that have enabled this kind of ridiculous inability to understand complex situations, question authority, logically and critically assess facts to reach educated, rational conclusions.

Humans, it might be argued, might be predisposed to faulty reasoning skills and therefor fall into some situations like this from time to time to some extent. But throwing religion into the mix is like taking a sober alcoholic and handing them the bottle of whiskey and watching what happens.

Which brings me to another point I noticed today. The media is now referring to the masses of Christians in the government and elsewhere, who are influencing politics etc... as simply "evangelicals". Just another example of the kind of subtle spin the government and media have been using lately to soften the reality of the fact that at it's very core, all of the major issues we're dealing with today are primarily the fault of religion. Evangelical Christians. Not just evangelical in the sense of being zealous in general about some topic... Evangelical in the sense of dutifully obeying the Christian God and following the Christian President in a perceived war of Patriotic Christian Good against the Evil Muslims, who don't deserve consideration, because being non-Christians, their beliefs can't be given actual credence... they're delusional not because of religion, but simply because they're not Christian. This Islam makes them crazy and makes them hate Freedom. In their minds it has nothing to do with our government's foreign policy, or our proclaimed Christianity as a nation (which is also illegal). To them it's all just a matter of stupid towel-headed goat herders living in mud huts, jealous of our Freedom and lifestyle, so out of suicidal depression and jealousy they blow themselves up to get back at us.

<SARCASM>If only we Patriotic American Republican Christians could free them from their mistaken beliefs and give them our Freedom by conquering them and converting them, they would all be happy people!</SARCASM>

(For some background on what the "terrorists" really believe and why they act the way they do, see my previous post: Clearing my head.)

When are people going to start realizing that religion is getting out of control? The Muslims rioting and killing people over cartoons... the Christians gladly trampling the Constitution, science and reason in their quest to be subservient to their imaginary God and proclaimed Christian leader and Nation? When will the rest of us rational people cease to be dragged along on this nightmare ride of religious insanity?

I despair at the thought of ever seeing an enlightened future for humankind.

Clearing out my head.

2006-01-21T17:52:00.000-05:00

So I've been pondering a few posts over the past few days, and finally decided to just get a skeleton of them out of my head and onto here before they pass on by.

First off let's touch on the recent audiotape release supposedly by Bin Laden himself.

This tape supposedly noted 2 topics. One was the notice of intent to attack within the United States if the battle was kept up. The second was the offer of a long-term honorable truce.

A little more detail into these; first Bin Laden noted that it was obvious that the majority of US citizens no longer wanted us to fight Muslims on Muslim soil, and did not want Muslims fighting us on our soil. Due to this, and the fact that Iraq and Afghanistan have been devastated by war, Bin Laden offered a long-term truce to end the conflict and remove our troops from Muslims lands so that they may rebuild their countries.

Now, for a few years the battlefront had been taken into Afghanistan and then Iraq, and became a gravitational point where fighters came to defend Muslim lands and gain fighting experience against the Americans etc. They have done this long enough and are now planning on one of two courses of action... either we refuse their offer of a truce and proceed headlong into our ever escalating bloodbath, with the inevitable and foretold outcome of further "terror" attacks within the US. OR... we take the offer of truce and have at least a chance of ending this bloody conflict.

Mind you, it was obvious that the Republicans and other ignorant ilk of theirs would refuse the offer of truce without even considering it, thereby damning us to further bloodshed with the only possible outcome being thousands more lives lost, an escalation in the violence and further "terrorist" recruitment as well as further attacks within the US. Which of course have the side effect of creating a greater environment of fear in which the ignorant populace gladly gives up it's basic freedoms and liberties to fight a threat created, maintained and bolstered by the willful stupidity, if not downright malice, of the current government. They have a multitude of reasons to continue this "war", and very little motivation to actually end it.

To shed a little more light on this situation, I've run across a few things in the past few days that might enlighten you as to the foe we face. (and I give due credit to Michael Shermer and Scientific American, from which many of the following figures are taken. As well as Thomas Joiner, Marc Sageman and others.)

These are not ignorant people per se... they are not depressed or suicidal. They are not lower class people living in squalor who see no other way out...

75% of all known Al Queda members come from the middle or upper class. 90% come from caring, intact families. 63% had attended college (in contrast to the normal 5% to 6% rate for third world countries). 73% were married and the vast majority had children. 75% were professionals and semi-professionals. Engineers, architects and civil engineers, mostly scientists. "Very few humanities are represented, and quite surprisingly very few had any background in religion."

This information comes from Michael Shermer's Skeptic column in this month's (January 2006) issue of Scientific American entitled Murdercide.

It goes on to list the social and psychological factors that influence these people to act in the manner in which they do. Things that I already understand, but which I feel the vast majority of Americans have simply no idea about.

This lack of understanding... this ignorance... of a foreign culture and it's religion etc... have led to the deplorable state we now find ourselves in... believing we're fighting ignorant goat raping towel heads that don't know any better and hate us for our freedom and have nothing better to live for... so to get away from their mud huts and caves, they choose to take some of us along with them when they finally kill themselves.

This is a far far cry from the reality of the situation.

"You should be very proud of me. It's an honor, and you will see the results, and everybody will be happy... whatever you do, head high, with a goal, never be without [a] goal, always have a goal in front of you and always think, 'what for.'"
-- Final letter to his wife by Ziad Jarrah, Spetember 11 terrorist who crashed Flight 93 into a Pennsylvania field.

Another thing I've noticed is the media calling these people "radical" Islamists. We should take note of this... these people are fundamentalists. They are following the letter of the law... the word of the Qu'ran. I see the media shying away from calling them fundamentalists... which is precisely what they are... in order to avoid shedding any light on the dangers of fundamentalist religious beliefs and on religion itself. It's a slippery slope they dare not tread near.

We are a nation primarily of Christians who claim to believe in the absolute infallibility of our God... and in his word written in the holy Bible. Yet when God himself states unequivocally that we are to kill anyone who tries to sway us from our beliefs, and to murder homosexuals and witches and any number of other people who simply differ in belief from ourselves... we fail to give any credence to these statements... we pick and choose what we want to believe. We ignore the unsavory... we are in essence disobeying God and calling him fallible. We are stating that his commands are not correct or absolute... that we need not follow his commandments... that our faith in God, against God's own words... is optional and arbitrary.

Are you starting to get the picture?

We have right here in America our own "radical" Christians... our own fundamentalists who believe they have a God given right to murder abortion clinic doctors... or black people, or homosexuals... because they believe the bible tells them that God commands it or condones it. Which it does.

We have these people who through their upbringing and social dynamics have come to believe in a fictional paradigm of reality that reinforces the idea that they are 100% right in their beliefs and their actions, in spite of even overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

So we have this other religion which has been taught to these people from birth, and a society which reinforces the idea that to die in the just cause of fighting the infidels and driving them from your lands is the greatest achievement you could possibly make in this life or the next... and one for which you will be forever remembered as a hero, and spend eternity as a prince in paradise with 72 virgins etc... with your picture and name and story plastered on giant billboards telling of your heroism in your home town etc... this core belief that you are achieving greatness and fulfilling your life, and ensuring a godlike eternity in the afterlife etc... protecting your nation, your family, your religion...

Our stubborn refusal to accept the reality of the situation... our pervasive and breathtaking ignorance and stupidity... is just fueling the fire... creating the very environment in which these people can fulfill the greatest cause of their life... and they are flocking to the chance in ever greater numbers.

Suicide attacks in 2000: 43
In 2004: 163
In 2005: roughly one a day

Percent of all suicide bombings
since 1968 that have occurred
after September 11th: 78%

It is quite obvious to see that the situation has only gotten increasingly worse as time has passed in the last few years since 9/11 as we've driven hard into the middle east in our ignorant bullheaded quest for revenge against a people who we understood very little about. A people who had attacked us in retaliation for very real wrongs that we have committed directly against them and indirectly committed by backing their greatest enemy... the latter being fundamentally a matter of religion.

As Richard Dawkins said... "There are would-be murderers all around the world who want to kill you and me... and themselves... because they're motivated by what they think is the highest ideal. Of course politics are important... Iraq, Palestine, even social deprivation in Bradford. But as we wake up to this huge challenge to our civilized values, don't let's forget the Elephant in the room... an Elephant called Religion."

This brings me, in closing, to another matter.

I've been talking to Russell, my younger coworker, on and off for a couple months now I think... mainly about religion... and he said something very interesting to me about it yesterday. He said that he'd been doing a lot of thinking, and the more he thought, the more he really understood... the more it was all starting to make sense... and that he didn't like it.

He said he was debating asking me not to talk to him about it anymore.

He saw just how real what I was saying was... and the truth made him uncomfortable... and it made him feel like it would be bad for him because he didn't want to know the truth if it meant having to stand up for it. If it meant not being able to feel a part of the group. If it meant having to know someone is wrong and try to hold your tongue... he was afraid of tasting of the sweet nectar of truth and not being able to stop drinking... and to invest the time in research and knowledge and further spiral into a place where he was no longer a happy part of the flock because he saw reality for what it really was.

He had started to catch himself when he went to pray... looking at what he was doing, listening to what he was saying... and it was dawning on him like a sledgehammer what reality actually was.

I think he's reached a point where there's no going back... and the cognitive dissonance and the fear of not belonging... the fear of the unknown... are all weighing heavy on his mind. But I believe he's smart enough that knowing as much as he does... and having already had many of the right questions on his mind, but having just been too afraid to ask them or face the reality of them... he was already toeing the line... and I think I simply nudged him over it.

I think most people don't want to know the truth... they don't want the burden of understanding... perhaps knowledge implies accountability... responsibility...

People don't want to see the reality of the consequences for their beliefs. They don't want to face the uncomfortable truth.

Deep down, most people don't want to know... and I've pushed many of them far enough to get them to admit it. They know the truth, but they don't want to admit it... they don't want to accept it... so that even while they do know the truth, they keep insisting to themselves that the fantasy is real... they take comfort in lying to themselves perpetually and living in a borderline state of fantasy and reality where they only have to face just so much reality from day to day to be able to survive... and beyond that they find solace in their fantasy. "I don't want to believe that my ancestors were monkeys. I don't want to believe that there's no heaven when I die." Even when I've had people admit that they know the truth... they still insist on holding onto the lies, and admit it. They don't want to let go of the comfort those lies provide.

The world makes a lot more sense when you actually start facing the truth. It's not always nice, but it's reality.

So I think that in the end... if people really stopped and looked at the reality of the situation we're in... and understood the cultural, sociological, psychological and religious ramifications of our current predicament... they would see the way out. They would understand the causes and effects.

But we won't do that because to do so would require us to admit the fundamental flaws and errs in our own beliefs. And better to kill our neighbor than face that uncomfortable reality ourselves.

Pity the man who steals another man's dreams.