Senator Dole's New Anti-Atheist Advertisement

If you have any interest in running for public office, then stay away from this blog.

Seriously, quit reading, put some type of internet block on this site so that you might not accidentally find yourself here, and eliminate all traces of having visited this blog from your computers.

After all, palling around with somebody who self-identifies as an atheist will render you unfit for public office.

Senator Elizabeth Dole has released a new advertisement that attempts to clarify the fact that the problem with her opponent, Kay Hagan, is that she accepted an invitation to a fundraising gathering hosted by an atheist. (See The Hill Dole attacks Democrat with second 'Godless' ad

This ad ends with the question, If Godless Americans threw a party in your honor, would you go?

This is pretty much a universal political message - no politician may meet with or associate with atheists. No politician is permitted to be somebody that an atheist like myself can respect or seek to honor.

Hagan's political crime is not that she is an atheist (a horrendous accusation that makes the accuser the lowest of all low-life scum to occupy the planet). Hagan’s problem is that she attended a gathering at an atheist’s home and accepted money from an atheist.

Which, apparently, is comparable to visiting the home of a KKK leader, an official from the American Nazi Party, or Al Qaeda representative.

If attending a dinner hosted by an atheist is comparable to these things, we can only conclude that browsing internet sites such as "Atheist Ethicist" is comparable to browsing white supremacist and Nazi Party web sites. If that information were to hit the presses, you can bet your political career would be over.

So, I advise you that if you have any political aspirations, it is no longer sufficient that you are not an atheist yourself. You cannot be caught communicating with atheists in any way. Atheists are political lepers – unclean and dangerous things that one cannot even be in the same room with and not be infected by a fatal political contagion.

A few days ago, I wrote a posting suggesting that it would be foolish to expect Obama to be a friend to secular values. Many of the comments to that blog suggested that people did not interpret my posting correctly. They thought that I had written that Obama did not share secular values or did not think of them as worth protecting.

However, that is not what I wrote. I wrote that if Obama was smart he would not protect secular values because doing so would put the whole rest of his political agenda at risk. Obama will need to decide which ground he wants to stand and hold, and which ground he might need to give up because it is strategically indefensible.

Another way of saying the same thing is that I hope that Obama is willing to sacrifice secular values to the wolves because if he does not, then the Republicans are going to sweep back into power by turning America’s anti-atheist bigotry against him – a bigotry that has more than enough power behind it to turn the tide of elections unless the target does out of his way to prove that he is as bigoted, if not more so, than his accusers.

This is simply a fact of American political life.

If Obama is smart, he knows that the Republicans would love a fight over secular values, and they would love to have it early in Obama's administration. As soon as this fight erupts, Obama is going to have to make a choice between sacrificing secular values so that he can focus on other concerns, or suffer such a political kneecapping on the part of anti-atheist bigots so as to be rendered politically impotent.

Such an event would parallel what happened to Bill Clinton after his election in 1992. Clinton was forced to discuss the issue of gays in the military. The Republicans were able to use this issue to stage such a powerful comeback that they were able to capture control of the House and Senate – and keep control through the next ten years.

We even have a readily made issue that the Republicans in an excellent position to exploit to their political advantage. Sooner or later the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals will have to release its decision on whether it judges "under God" in the Pledge and "In God We Trust" as the national motto to be violations of the Constitution. Chances are that that the opinion will read that "under God" at least is a violation of the Constitution. This will then be the foundation for a Republican return to power – the tool they will use to kneecap the Obama presidency and shatter his approval ratings.

If Obama is smart and he wants to use his political capital to accomplish things in the area of economic reform, then he will have to decide not to invest political capital in a fight that is almost certainly doomed to fail anyway.

To disarm the Republican attempt to base a return to power on the promise of theocracy, Obama will need to condemn the 9th Circuit Court opinion (assuming the decision goes as I have suggested) in no uncertain terms, promise to put the whole weight of the Federal Government into the fight to overturn this decision, and promise to make the protection of "under God" a litmus test for any Supreme Court justices he might have the opportunity to appoint.

The Republicans, then, sufficiently disarmed, will simply have less power to interfere with Obama's other goals, while Obama preserves his popularity and, with this, his ability to throw his political weight around.

The fight against anti-atheist bigotry has to be our fight. The idea that we can hide behind politicians and judges forever while they do the dirty work (and pay the political price) for protecting us – while we do nothing in our own defense is as absurd as the belief that the Earth is only 6000 years old. It is a willful denial of political reality.

Even with this, there is one last question that needs to be answered.

Maybe secular values do not matter. Maybe a social prohibition (even if there is no actual legal statute) against atheists from holding political power or positions of public trust is actually . . . if not a good thing . . . at least trivially unimportant.

As for me, I think that our refusal to challenge anti-atheist bigotry is one of the major contributing factors behind the fact that we have suffered for eight years under President George Bush. Our refusal to fight this fight is what prevents children from learning about evolution, and prevents medical research companies and laboratories from studying medical stem cell research. We are the ones who are keeping homosexuals from enjoying the benefits of marriage, and we are the ones who are making sure that government policy decisions are based on myth and superstition rather than science and reason.

Because we do not do anything to challenge the idea that the atheist – the person who has no faith – is the lowest form of life in the country, comparable to the KKK member, Nazi Party leader, the traitor, the tyrant, the defender of injustice for all.

In fact, the evidence suggests that atheists are even lower than those who belong to these other groups. Kay Hagan merely goes to a meeting where somebody who does not support a nation "under God" is present and her entire political career is threatened. Sarah Palin is married to somebody who was a member of an organization where the idea of a nation “indivisible” was openly challenged – a secessionist party and she is still the model Vice President drawing huge crowds wherever she goes because she is the "True American."

We keep hiding behind other people – judges, Kay Hagan, Barak Obama – expecting them to do our work for us (so that we can get by with doing nothing). For a few decades, a number of dedicated judges were willing to do that. The result was the establishment of a new political power that saw to it that those judges were replaced, and that politicians who would support those judges (regardless of political party) would have the power to appoint judges. We have hidden behind others, until those we would hide behind have been removed.

There is nobody left but us.

Proposition 8: Decent People Doing Wrong

In a recent comment to a post on Proposition 8, an anonymous member of the studio audience linked to an article that contained the following quote:

It is apparently inconceivable to many of those who wish to change the definition of marriage that a decent person can want to retain the man-woman definition.

The fact is, I find it very easy to conceive of a case in which a person who is in all other ways a decent person, has adopted an attitude of prejudice towards some group and, as a result, denies them the decent treatment that they are willing to give others.

The way that I conceive it, most segregationists, and most of those who believed that the white race should not interbreed with the black race, were, in many respects, decent people. If you were to meet one in a context where race was not an issue – in an entirely Caucasian community where blacks were simply nowhere to be found – you would be hard pressed to identify any character fault in them at all.

The way that I conceive it, most of the German soldiers during World War II were decent people for the most part. They sought to care for and protect their children, they loved their spouses, they would help a neighbor who was in trouble (as long as the neighbor was not Jewish). They went to church, they donated to charity, and they were good Patriotic Germans who were willing to give their lives for their country.

The way that I conceive it, most West Coast Americans who supported the internment of the Japanese during World War II were, in many respects, decent people. That measure had the support of 80 percent of the population. It is difficult to imagine what California would have been like if those 80 percent did not have any good qualities. When it came to their treatment of other Americans (at least those of non-Japanese descent) there were some extraordinary people among them.

The way that I conceive it, most of those who defended slavery in the early 1800s, and most of those who took up arms and killed or tried to kill Union soldiers in order to protect the institution of slavery, were, in many respects, decent people. They wanted very much to do the right thing and to be good people. They taught their children the importance of being honest and trustworthy and placed great value on individual responsibility.

However, in all of these cases, their culture gave otherwise decent people a moral blind spot. These were not people who recognized that they were doing evil and went ahead and did it anyway. These were people raised with an inability to even recognize the evil that they were doing, where that blindness lead them to do evil that they would not have done if they had known better.

The attitudes that people have in opposition to gay marriage represents exactly the same sort of moral blindness. To them, their actions seem like a good idea – they seem to be something that a good person would support – so they do not suffer even the slightest twinge of conscience as they engage in behavior that, as a matter of fact, and quite independent of their perceptions, does great harm to others for no good reason.

Many of these morally blind people assert that it is a mistake to say that they suffer from hate. “I do not hate gays. I just think that marriage should be between a man and a woman. That’s not the same has hating gays.”

However, moral blindness is not a defect in reason. It is a defect in desire – a defect in emotion. It is a lack of an aversion to doing great harm to certain people, ultimately because one does not see them as entities that deserve the same type of decent respect that real people deserve.

In all of the examples that I listed above – the segregationist, the west coast patriot, the German soldier, the defender of slavery – otherwise decent people were made capable of doing great harm to others because their culture taught them to view those others as something less than full human beings. They were taught to view their victims as a lower form of life, so that, while they remained decent people when it came to their treatment of other persons, they also became morally blind when it came to their evil treatment of these non-persons.

Yet, we cannot strictly say that what these people suffered from was a mere lack of an aversion to do harm to others. I have no particular affection for the tools that I have at home. I certainly do not have any interest in treating them with the type of dignity and respect that I would accord to them if I viewed them as persons. Yet, this does not inspire me to spend millions of dollars or to take up arms or to hire the government to take up arms in my name to inflict great harm on those tools. In fact, insofar as they are useful, I seek to protect and care for those tools.

Homosexual neighbors are still useful as neighbors. If your house was on fire and your child needed rescuing, the homosexual neighbor might be in the best position to save her. Even if one viewed the homosexual neighbor as a mere tool, it is still useful to take care of the tool so that it will remain useful.

However, in the cases I mentioned above, the agents defended doing real-world harm to those they were taught to view as being undeserving of the respect given to persons. This harm cannot be traced back to the fact that it was useful to do this harm. In fact, those who inflicted the harm were generally made worse off as a result of what they did to their neighbors. This desire to do harm was something the agents came to value for its own sake.

When one devotes a great deal of energy to actions that harm others for its own sake – simply to realize the value that one finds in a state where others are harmed – then it is not unreasonable to say that this is ‘hate’. It certainly does not count as “love”, and it would be strange at best to say that somebody putting all of that energy into something harmful to others is suffering from “indifference”. It is, instead, the definition of “indifference” that one simply does not care to work either for or against that particular end. Calling this passionate devotion to realizing a state that is so harmful to the interests of other persons for no good reason “indifference” is about as absurd as calling a person on his honeymoon a “bachelor”.

So, if it is not love, and it is not indifference, then we are running out of options as to what we can call this sentiment that drives these people to work so hard to do so much harm to others.

Some might want to call it religious devotion – since they provide support for their attitudes in scripture.

However, these people need to explain why they are so devoted to enforcing scripture in the case of homosexuality, but ignore it in so many other areas. Why isn’t homosexuality on the ignore list like the charging of interest and working on the Sabbath? Any claim that takes the form “X -> P” (such as “God condemns it in the Bible; therefore, I condemn homosexuality”) can be refuted by examples of “X and not-P” (e.g., God condemns usury and working on the Sabbath, but I do not condemn these things.”.

Religion, in this case, Is being used as a smoke screen to hide a culturally learned bigoted blindness much like the blindness that allowed people to do harm to the interests of women, blacks, and Japanese Americans during World War II.

This is not a religious issue. This is very much a hate issue.

And history tells us that it extremely easy for somebody who is a “decent person” – whole societies filled with people who live the bulk of their lives being as good or better than you and I – can still have a moral blind spot that allows them to do truly horrendous things to others who do not show up on their moral radar.

Kay Hagan: The Slanderous Accusation of Atheism

Apparently, we now have Democratic Senate candidate Kay Hagan’s response to her opponent’s charge that she pals around with atheists.

The North Carolina I was raised in would NEVER condone this kind of personal slander.

(See: American Chronicle, Dole Ad Attacking Hagan Christian Faith Called Fabricated, Pathetic)

In short, Hagan responded by saying that the accusation of palling around with atheist is so horrendous and awful that anybody who makes such an accusation (without proof) is guilty of slander - a wrong serious enough to be taken to court.

At their core, Americans aren´t Democrat or Republican, red or blue – they´re Americans, plain and simple. We ALL love our country, and we all value the role of faith in American life. Shame on anyone who says differently.

Consider reading Hagan's prepared statement, which can be found in the link above, and imagine Democratic Presidential Candidate Barak Obama giving the same speech in response to accusation that he is a Muslim. Imagine what such a statement would say about attitudes towards Muslims.

Hagan isn't making the claim that atheists are Americans too and have a right to present their views to perspective political candidates. She is not saying that the fault of Dole's advertisement is that Dole is lying and promoting bigotry and hatred. She, in effect, endorsed the hate and answered, "How dare you accuse me of not being just as bigoted against atheists as you are! You take that back!"

She is not making an ordinary political charge of wrongdoing, like the wrong of accusing Democratic President Obama of palling around with (domestic) terrorists. This is far, far worse. The accusation of palling around with atheists is, according to Hagan, more like the accusation that one molests children – something that deserves a response that is just as powerful as the accusation itself.

Why would she say something like this?

My guess is that the pollsters told her that Elizabeth Dole's accusations will be successful unless she made a forceful response such as this. Atheists are so hated that the people of North Carolina will certainly refuse to vote into office anybody who can be successfully labeled as a "friend of atheists"

Consequently, Hagen did not have the option of saying, "There is nothing wrong with meeting with atheists." That would be political suicide. The only option she had available was to treat the accusation of meeting with atheists to be an order of magnitude worse than an accusation of meeting with terrorists. In order to preserve her chance of winning the election, she opted to go before the cameras and give support to atheist bigotry by reinforcing the message that talking to atheists is one of the worst possible things a political candidate can do.

At least the people of North Carolina (and, in fact, the people across the nation) are getting the same message from this race. At least both Hagan and her Republican opponent and accuser Senator Elizabeth Dole are spending their campaign money promoting a common set of values – the view that atheists are worse than the lowest form of criminals on the political landscape.

I have written in past posts that it is unreasonable to expect people to form their beliefs entirely by appeals to reason – they do not have the time. Instead, it is human nature – part of the brain's programming – to look for (admittedly fallible) shortcuts that do not guarantee the truth of the conclusions, but are reliable enough to allow the agent to get by.

One of those shortcuts is to look at society and seek beliefs that are held almost without question by everybody. Even though people can be in near universal agreement on something that is mistaken, they still get buy. A vast majority of the beliefs a society holds in common are true, and good enough.

The message coming out of North Carolina is that atheists are such a despicable group of people that nobody – particularly nobody running for public office – should be caught in the same room as one.

One of the things that I have now learned about the event in which Hagan allegedly met with atheists is that this was a meeting among several advocates, one of which happened to be a member of the Godless Americans Political Action Committee. She did not go to this event specifically to meet with atheists. She went to a meeting in which one of the participants happened to have been an atheist.

You can well bet that, with this article now in the news, future politicians will be much more careful. If somebody wants to host any new events like the one that Hagan attended are going to be more careful about vetting the list of attendees, and to make sure that nobody associated with anything like a Godless American Political Action Committee is in the room. Failure to do so could cost the candidate the election.

Even if Hagan wins this election (particularly given the way that she has decided to respond to the accusation of meeting with atheists) the lesson will still be learned that one must exclude atheists from all future events.

At the time that the news first broke that Dole was going to appeal to anti-atheist bigotry, many of those who noted that fact decided to respond by contributing to the Hagan campaign. As it turns out, those people ended up funding a front page news campaign to cover North Carolina in specific, and ultimately the country, with a major news story that the accusation of atheism, or the accusation of meeting with atheists, is slanderous. This is the message that those contributions have ultimately funded.

Which brings me to a question that I have asked a couple of times now in recent posts.

Are you tired yet of being used as a club for attacking the very things that you claim to value?

Addendum

Here is an editorial that appears in the Greensboro, North Carolina paper, News-Record: Dole's attack on Hagan's faith drives heated campaign lower

Dole's ad forced the political debate into the realm of religious beliefs. It exploits what now looks like a campaign misstep by Hagan -- attending a Boston fundraiser at the home of atheist activist Woody Kaplan, a founder of Godless Americans.

Note that it is now being counted as a "misstep" for a candidate for public office to attend a function in which a known atheist is present.

It is not just a misstep to go to a function hosted by atheists or to talk to atheists directly. It is a misstep to go to a political event in which one or more promiment atheists has also been invited to attend - unless the atheist is there is an adversarial role (e.g., a debate opponent perhaps).

Republican Reform

As the election draws near, and it looks increasingly like the Republican Party is in a world of political trouble, I have read some analysis of what the Republicans might do to increase their political power.

Unfortunately, these analyses have all drawn upon the assumption that the only thing that matters is winning elections – being politically successful. I have read very few who have given consideration to the question of the price of that success.

On this standard, we can view Hitler’s campaign to blame all of Germany’s problems on the Jews and to rouse up an “us’ versus “them” hatred of anything not sufficiently ‘German’ would have counted as effective. Hitler, after all, was elected and was a very popular leader for a period of time, because Hitler figured out how to be effective in getting votes and winning popular support.

However, one of the lessons we hopefully have learned from that era is that “effective” (in securing votes) is not the same thing as “right”.

I wonder how many people are now turning up their noses to the Republican Party because they have discovered what type of people they have been hanging around with.

One of the relatively unique aspects of this campaign, or so it appears to me, is a new type of attack campaign that does not target the opposing candidate, but that targets the people who support the opposing candidate.

We have seen or heard:

(1) Audience members at McCain and Palin events shouting death threats or racial slurs at campaigns.

(2) A man who walked around with a stuffed monkey on which he had placed an “Obama” bumper sticker.

(3) Interviews with people who were walking up to attend a McCain or Palin rally – or simply video of them walking by Obama supporters..

(4) A McCain supporter falsely claiming to have been attacked by a big black man who forced her to the ground and carved the letter “B” on her cheek.

(5) A pair of white supremacists recently arrested for planning to kill dozens of black people, including Obama.

(6) The widespread popularity of emails making false claims that Obama is a Muslim and that he does not say the Pledge of Allegiance as well as other lies too readily believed merely because people want to believe them. (And what type of person is so eager to believe and to pass along such lies?)

I think that this is a good thing. I have argued from the first days of this blog that it is not enough to hold Bush morally responsible for his own failings. It is also necessary to hold the Bush supporters responsible for their decisions. When a candidate deprives the people of basic civil rights, he has done something immoral. However, the people who cheer and support him are at the very least accomplices to that immorality. They have shown themselves to be as much a threat to the freedoms whose destruction they cheer as are the candidates who actually implement that destruction.

Too often we condemn the symptom of some public prejudice or widespread evil without condemning the source itself – the political or social base that has given that prejudice and widespread evil political life.

So, I am very much pleased to see so much effort into recording images of Republican supporters and saying to other Republicans, “These are the types of people you associate with. These are the types of people you call ‘friends’ and allies’. Do you really want to be associated with these types of people?”

Those same good Republicans, while they look around and ask these questions, they should notice that the Party leadership – the people who are up on the stage, who are writing and delivering the speeches and creating the advertisements, do not seem to be on the side of decent Republicans who abhor these practices. Instead, the Republican leadership has tended to hover between silent acceptance of this type of behavior, to subtle encouragement through the careful use of selected rhetoric – rhetoric that seems to say, “You know, those people are right, but I can’t actually say that in so many words.”

It is time for the good Republicans to see what they can do to take control of the Republican party and drive out those who should not find a home in any political party, and to create a better moral culture within their own party. They need to make it a party that decent people can be proud to be a member of, where decent people do not have to be ashamed of the associations they are drawn into.

Asymetric Beliefs about Good, Evil, and Religion

I made a response to a comment to my previous blog that I think deserves more development.

I argued that California’s Proposition 8, which would ban homosexual marriage, provided an example of people claiming to do harm to others because God told them to. Then, I was asked to look into the prospect that an atheist can also oppose Proposition 8, and be opposed to gay marriage completely. The answer points to an asymmetry in the way some atheists look at the relationship between morality and religion.

On the one hand, we hear that religion is the source of a lot of evil. From this, people draw the conclusion that if get rid of religion, we can get rid of this source of a great deal of evil.

On the other hand, we are told that religion is not the source of much good. The impulse to do good comes from another source (typically, I hear it argued, from our genes). Atheists also have access to this ‘other source’ of good, so it is not only possible but common that a person can be good without religion. If we get rid of religion, this will leave the amount of goodness in the world untouched

I do not see any basis for this asymmetry other than the fact that it has emotional appeal for somebody who already hates religion and is looking for an excuse to attack it.

The fact of the matter is that both good and evil come from other sources. Kindness, charity, parental affection, all come from other sources. Then they get written into the religion. Atheists have the same access to this source of kindness, charity, and parental affection as theists have, and are capable of being just as good as theists.

Similarly, hatred, bigotry, the disposition to divide the world into “we” and “they” and to attack ‘they’ groups violently also come from another source. They then get written into the religion. Atheists have the same access to these sources of hatred, bigory, and injustice as the theists have, and are capable of being just as evil as theists.

The point is easy enough to prove. Everything in religion is made up. It was created by humans from “another source” and then written into the religion. The forces that caused people to select “this religion” or “that religion” have no divine origin. They are natural human processes – at much at work in the brains of the atheist as in the brains of theists.

Otherwise, this evil would not have been invented and, as such, would never have found its way into scripture. It had to come from somewhere, and none of it – none of the good and none of the evil – ever came from God. It all came from some other source.

Which means that you can’t fight evil by fighting religion. The other source of evil will still exist, and will still drive evil, even without religion – just as it will continue to drive good, even without religion.

Having said this, one of the roles that religion plays in morality is as a way of rationalizing unjustifiable actions. It provides a way of giving an illusion of legitimacy to actions that cannot be justified outside of an appeal to religion.

This is different from saying that evil comes from religion. The evil does not come from religion – that evil comes from someplace else. However, insofar as these dispositions are evil, they seek some form of justification. An appeal to religion is a particularly useful form of justification (at least within our current culture) because an assertion that “God wants this” is not subject to any further proof or justification. We are supposed to take the word of the person who advocates something harmful on faith – without asking too many questions – without, in fact, asking any questions at all.

This role of giving something the appearance of legitimacy actually applies to good and evil both. Depending on the moral character of the person who is inventing any given religion, that person will often use religion to give legitimacy to anything he seeks to promote – regardless of whether he promotes good or evil. Good and evil people both can and do make appeals to religion as a way of convincing people that what they want is what God wants. The good person just happens to want what is right (and, consequently, so does his god). The evil person wants that which is wrong (and, consequently, so does his god).

However, only the evil person needs religion.

The good person can use the fact that he is promoting something that people generally have reason to promote to demonstrate the legitimacy of his morality outside of religion. The good person can defend honesty, charity, kindness, responsibility, liberty, and the like without appeal to religion. He may choose not to. He may not actually believe that he can do this. However, he can. The requirement for something to be good is that it be something that can be justified by appeal to the reasons that people have for promoting it, which does not depend on any religion.

The evil person, on the other hand, has no legitimate place to turn to justify what he seeks to promote. He needs the illusion of legitimacy, and religion provides a very useful illusion. Once he assigns his prejudice to religion, he can then stop anybody from asking any further questions about the legitimacy of his moral claims. He only needs to say, “God wants it this way; and that is something you must accept on faith, without asking any questions.”

It is a very useful way of arguing, if you can only get your audience to go along with it – to claim that the harms that others will suffer as a result of adopting the speaker’s moral attitudes needs no justification or defense – that it is to be taken on faith.

Yet, it is still the case that these prejudices and unjustified moral attitudes do not come from religion or god. Prejudices cause people to believe absurd things and to think them profound. Some people accept the absurdities of religion. Some people accept blatant contradictions like thinking that evil must come from religion and be reduced by reducing religion, while good must come from some other source and can live without religion.

California Proposition 8 as a Moral Issue

PZ Myers of Pharyngula has gotten it right. Proposition 8 in California - the constitutional amendment against gay marriage - is a moral issue.

For a great example of narrow-minded wretched biblical rationalizations, listen to Rick Warren of the Saddleback Church. He comes out strongly for Prop. 8, calling it a "moral issue" (which it is — too bad he's fighting on the side of evil) . . .

(See Pharyngula, The Division on Proposition 8

Proposition 8 is very much a moral issue. It is a question about doing the right thing - about fairness and about justice. It is about kindness. It is about respect.

It is about refusing to do harm to innocent people - making their lives worse off than they need to be - without a good reason. And the fact that bigots 2000 years ago valued doing harm to certain people is not a good reason to be doing harm to those people today.

It is about the difference between right and wrong.

The typical way of approaching questions such as this has been to allow the anti-gay bigots to claim the word 'moral'. From polls to newspaper coverage, we have allowed them to claim the title of anti-gay legislation as 'morals legislation'. We have, for all practical purposes, allowed them to use without question the assumption that homosexual relationships are immoral.

We have, instead, spoken in other terms. We have used nonsense phrases in defense of homosexual relationships such as, "You should not be imposing your morals on other people." This phrase is absurd on its face, because it says, in effect, "I am going to force on you my moral standard that it is wrong to impose one's moral standards on others."

If a standard is not to be imposed on others, then it is not a moral standard. Prohibitions against murder, rape, theft, fraud, reckless endangerment, every violent crime written into statute is an example of forcing morality on others.

"You shall not do harm to others without a good reason for doing so," is a moral standard that may be imposed on others.

"Your faith is not a good reason," is a corollary to this. If we allow faith to justify harm to others then we might as well go ahead and permit all harm. There is nothing we can do against the person who claims that his actions were based on faith.

Kill your daughter for staying out to late? Sure, can't touch the father in this case. His faith says that it is okay.

Plan to fly a plane into a sky scraper . . . no problem there. After all, one of the things we must respect is a person's right to practice their religious beliefs.

But what if those religious beliefs include the belief that he must fly an airplane into a sky scraper, murder his daughter, or declare peaceful members of the community whose actions do no harm to others second-class citizens?

Proposition 8 requires that we take sides on a moral issue - to do that which is right, or to do that which is wrong. To allow people to harm others based on no better reason than, "My god told me to," or to protect people from being harmed by those who harm others in the name of God.

Even the decision not to vote (where one is eligible to do so) is a moral decision. A person hears screams in the alley, He looks out the window and sees a large man beating a child mercilessly. He closes the window and returns to his television.

He may not be as morally culpable as the person in the alley doing the beating, but he is not morally innocent either.

Proposition 8 is about morality. It is about allowing people to do harm to others for no reason better than, "My God told me to," the very same reason used by those who engage in terrorist bombings and other harms. Or it is about saying to people, "Your religious conviction that these people are to be harmed is not a good enough reason to have them harmed."

The message that we should be sending around the world is the latter message.

We will all be better off as a result.

BB3: Roger Bingham: Opening Statement

This is the first in a series of posts on presentations given at Beyond Belief 3: Candles in the Dark"

You can find a list of all Atheist Ethicist blog postings covering Beyond Belief 3 at the Introduction post

And I would like to encourage you to give a contribution to the Science Network, who makes these presentations available for free.

As I mentioned, I was invited to actually attend the Beyond Belief conference this year. In This video of Roger Bingham's opening remarks you will find me in the video as the audience member with the black vest and maroon shirt. What I was thinking, while I listened to each presentation, was, "What will I write about what person is saying?"

It is not an accident that I spent this week on my blog writing about the need for those opposed to anti-atheist bigotry to publicly respond to that bigotry – and how to respond. That is a thought that came to my mind as I listened to Bingham’s introduction to the series – with one minor change.

The Science Network set up "Candles in the Dark" to provide an opportunity for scientists to provide solutions to current problems. The presenters were asked to present some problem in their field of study or interest that science can help to provide an answer to. We will see that few presenters actually paid attention to that motto. However, it was still Bingham’s wish, as he expressed in his introduction.

He also lamented the fact that science does not get the respect it deserves in the public eye. He spoke about the Republican war on science – the idea that it makes any type of sense for a political operative to rewrite a scientific report so that the findings support the administration's policies. Some of us think that this is backwards – that when there is a conflict between policy and reality, that the policy be adjusted to conform to reality. The assumption that bureaucrats can rewrite reality to conform to policy is simply absurd.

He showed Oprah Winfrey's library, which she is very proud of, and lamented that there is not one book in the collection that has anything to do with science. He expressed a wish that public figures would use some of their power to promote a public interest in science. However, he expressed it merely as a dream, not as a plan of action.

My thought was that, if you have a product that you think has value, and you think that there is reason to sell it, then you should set up some sort of program whose job it is to sell that product.

We have, for example, a campaign that promotes milk (milk: It does a body good.). We have a campaign that promotes pork (the other white meat), beef (it's what's for dinner), Virginia (it’s for lovers), Las Vegas (what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas).

I do not know of any campaign in existence, or anybody even working on a campaign, to sell science.

Of course, how do you get started with such a campaign? If one wanted to sell science, how does one begin?

This question explains why I decided to spend a couple of posts leading up to the Beyond Belief series discussing the response to anti-atheist bigotry, because the two problems are related.

What you do is you go out to people who have some money to spend who might recognize the value of promoting this particular project and you say, "We need some money to launch a campaign to market science."

They will then ask, "What will you do with the money?"

The answer is, "We will hire a marketing firm – somebody familiar with television, radio, web broadcasting, billboards, print advertising, mass mailings, and the like, and we will ask them to design and run a campaign for us. They will give us a proposal and a budget and, if we like the proposal, we will give them the money."

Of course, part of the campaign will be to raise more money. I see no sense in spending $50,000 to promote something unless the promotion brings $60,000 in additional contributions, which can then be spent on a project that brings in more contributions. Yet, the same firms that are useful in public relations are typically also trained in fundraising. After all, they want to be paid and they want to make things as easy on their customers as possible. I suspect that such an agency would be very helpful.

There are a couple of questions to be asked first. The first is, do we really have a sellable product?

Science is a product that keeps most of us alive. It gives us food to eat, provides us with energy, allows a simple person like me to communicate with people all around the world every day, allows us to visit places we would never otherwise see, cures and prevents disease, warns us of upcoming hurricanes and tsunamis and warns us as to whether the levees will hold if we are not so stupid as to ignore science. It allows us to build buildings that can withstand earthquakes, identify murderers and rapists, heats and cools our homes and warn us of global changes in time for us to actually take action to address them.

Science definitely has a lot of value. To the degree that anti-science is the norm, to that degree we suffer from our ignorance.

There is, as it turns out, a free rider problem associated with selling science. If I can get you to pay for promoting science, then I get the benefits without suffering any of the costs. The same is true of you. If I am busy promoting science, then you get the benefits of my actions without suffering any of the cost. The result is that nobody pays the cost, and the benefits are not realized.

However, the problem of free riders exists in a number of areas where people ask for contributions. In a political campaign, I am better off if my candidate wins the election and I contribute nothing to the campaign than I am if my candidate wins and I have contributed $1000. And the odds that my contribution is what will determine the outcome of the campaign is rather slight. Yet, in spite of this free rider problem, people contribute to political campaigns.

Professional fundraisers have had to deal with this problem for a long time. They have found ways to mitigate it. For example, they establish a system where contributors get personal, public recognition. Another method is that they give different levels of contributors different ranks, with special services and recognition given to those who have the highest rank. For example, heavy political contributors get invited to special dinners in which they are given access to the candidates and elected officials.

The point being that the professionals, in this case, have the knowhow to deal with these issues.

You would not construct a house by showing your plans to your friends and soliciting feedback. You would not perform brain surgery by reading about it on the internet. You should not organize a campaign without consulting experts in that field. Expertise will pay for itself in terms of greater efficiency – being able to do more with less money, and being able to raise more money.

I am a major fan of consulting with experts when you want to get something done. If the question is, “How do we increase the prestige that science has in the public mind,” my answer is, “Don’t ask me. Ask an expert in the field and get to work.”

Beyond Belief 3: Candles in the Dark - The Series

This is the official beginning of my annual series in which I discuss each presentation that takes place at the Beyond Belief conference in La Jolla, California.

This is the posting to bookmark if you want a shortcut to the table of contents that will eventually link to all of the other postings. As I write those other essays, I will return here to post a link to those write-ups. In the end, there will be at least one link here to each video posted from the conference.

Last year, I was asked if, on the introduction page, I would skip the essay and quickly get to the links – by somebody who hated scrolling down to find those links. So, I’ll limit myself to one quick statement before starting the Table of Contents:

The Science Network provides these videos for free. It is an excellent service. We need to praise and reward that which we have reason to nurture and grow. So, please, make a contribution to the Science Network.

Roger Bingham: Opening Statement: Roger Bingham introduces the series as one in which participants have been asked to deliver "a potential solution to a problem that they have identified in their area of expertise or informed passion. He then talked about his own perceived problem - that science and science education are not given the attention that such a useful tool to promote human welfare deserves.

AC Grayling: Happiness, Flourishing, and Fulfillment: I divided AC Grayling's discussion into two parts. In this part, I discuss Grayling's suggestion that flourishing (rather than happiness) is "the point" of human activity.

AC Grayling: Flourishing, Fulfillment, and Freedom of Choice: Grayling argues that his concept of "flourishing" argues in favor of freedom of choice - that there is value in choosing one's life rather than having somebody else choose it for you. I compare his Aristotilian defense of liberty with the Millian desire utilitarian defense.

Sonja Lyubomirsky: The Utility of Happiness: Sonja Lyubomirsky presents a brief opening argument that happiness is "the point" of activity, then devotes the bulk of her presentation to showing a wealth of empirical evidence that happiness is also quite useful.

Owen Flanagan: Eudemonia and Existentialism: Owen Flanagan discusses certain existential concerns we have, including the concern that we are mere animals. These concerns drive us towards or away from certain conclusions about the universe. I further ask, "Where do these concerns come from?"

Güven Güzeldere: Epistemological vs Social Atheism: Güven Güzeldere talkes about the existential concern that there is no such thing as "disembodied cognitition" and the relationship between epistemic atheism and social atheism.

George Koop: Addiction vs Flourishing George Koop looks at what happens in the brain that brings about drug addiction. He argues that there are mechanisms in the brain that exist because they prevent too much pleasure or happiness, where it would lead to destructive behavior.

Eudemonia Panel: Happiness. After the talks listed above on human flourishing, the speakers participated in a panel discussion. One of the topics that came up was the fact that happiness can be controlled, not by changing the world, but merely by changing expectations of the world. This post looks at the moral implications of managing expectations, in contrast to managing reality.

Naoimi Oreskes: Science vs Beliefs about Science. Naoimi Oreskes uses the history of global warming to illustrate a huge gap between science and people's beliefs about science. While scientists formed a consensus on global warming decades ago, a substantial portion of the population still believes that scientists are undecided. It is not that they do not know what scientists actually believe. It's that they have a belief about scientists that is entirely false.

Mooney and Kirshenbaum: The Political Voice of Science. This posting actually starts off a series of postings on the issues of promoting science. Mooney and Kirshenbaum, who tried to get a science debate inserted into the Presidential campaigns (where the candidates held around 30 debates, but none on science) illustrates the ways in which we can try to make science important to the electorate. This posting, and the rest of the postings for that week, discuss some of these ideas.

Mooney and Kirshenbaum: Media Coverage of Science. Ultimately, in this debate on promoting science, I argued that the project should be to use moral institution to promote a stronger demand for scientific understanding. Mooney and Kirshenbaum seem to put the cart before the horse. They argue for promoting the supply of science understanding in order to stimulate demand. Whereas I argue that if we promote a demand for scientific understanding, people will come along to fulfill that demand.

Tony Haymet: Non-Human Threats. Tony Haymet came with evidence of two severe threats that we face, in addition to increases in atmospheric CO2 concentrations. One is that this CO2 is being absorbed into the oceans and making it more acidic. A more acidic ocean would be fatal to such sea creatures as snails, clams, oysters, and coral. The other threat is the depopulation of the oceans. Haymet suggests that we have removed up to 90% of the biomass from the sea. In addition, while the government easily comes up with huge quantities of money to bail out businesses and fight wars, a few million dollars to study things that really will save the planet are hard to come by.

Panel Discussion The Energy War. In a panel discussion on science and politics the idea of an Energy War is discussed - an Apollo like project to render oil worthless. One if the issues discussed is whether we need to find a human enemy - an enemy that can be killed and tortured - in order to motivate people to participate in such a project.

Panel Discussion: Be Kind to Religion. In a panel discussion on science and politics, Chris Mooney suggested that we should be conciliatory towards evangelicals because they are now motivating people to be on the right side of the climate change issue. This posting asks the question of what form this conciliatory attitude should take.

A Case Study: The Atheist Bus Sign Campaign

It is convenient that the week that I decide to write about the necessity of publicly responding to anti-atheist bigotry, a campaign is launched in England that reflects much of what I have been writing about.

The campaign was designed to respond to various claims from various religions that people who do not believe in God are doomed to an eternity in hell. They sought to raise money for a campaign that says, “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” Within two days of launching the fundraising portion of the campaign they had all the money they needed, and the money has continued to come in. The organizers of the campaign are now looking at how they can expand it.

The Good

This campaign has many of the elements that I have been writing about for the past few days. In this campaign, a group of people decided that they wanted to respond publicly to some common anti-atheist claims. They designed a campaign and figured out what would be required to run it. Then they put out a call for funds. They received their funds, and they are launching the campaign.

This campaign happens to be in response to the claim that atheists are doomed to an eternity in hell (so don’t become an atheist). I am arguing for responses to such things as the Kieffe and Sons advertisement that secularists should sit down and shut up, Monique Davis’ accusation that atheism is a philosophy of destruction, General Petreus’ endorsement of a book that claims that atheists make poor soldiers, and Elizabeth Dole’s campaign (later reinforced by the Republican National Committee) that no candidate for public office should listen to the concerns of godless Americans.

The fundamental structure is the same. A situation exists that warrants a response. This incident is used to raise money so that a public response can be made in condemnation of this incidence of anti-atheist bigotry.

Another campaign that follows the same model is the campaign to put up billboards that say, “Imagine No Religion.” Here, too, a campaign is designed. People interested in the campaign raise money. The campaign is then launched.

One of the particularly beneficial things about both of these projects is that they can provide an infrastructure for the type of campaigning that I have been writing about. With these projects we now have a cadre of people who have a certain amount of experience getting a campaign organized from conception to launch. This knowledge and experience is an extremely valuable resource. Yet, like any tool, its value depends a lot on how it is put to use.

If this campaign were taking place in the United States, there we would have another good effect. American atheists sufer from a form of out-group passifism that is best combated by anything that would suggest some element of ‘atheist pride’. These advertisements may have an effect of picking up the morale of atheists, so that they are more likely to stand up against the injustices imposed on them, rather than passively accept them. Anything that breaks the grip of out-group passivity would be good in this sense.

The Bad

The advertisements are not given any type of empirical testing as to their effect. If people are going to spend large sums of money on a project, there should be some effort going into making sure that the project is having a desired effect.

For example, consider the London bus campaign. The intent of the campaign is to give a light-hearted response to the assertion that “If you succumb to the atheist’s message, you risk eternal damnation.” This was the intent. But what will the actual effect be?

Sometimes, the real world is not as it appears to us. We need to objective research to determine if what we think to be true is true in fact. I can easily imagine a huge segment of the population reading the sign and suddenly getting a burst of anxiety and fear. “Here is somebody telling others to do whatever they please because there is no God. Rape. Murder. Theft. All sorts of evil are possible from this type of campaign.”

This type of emotional response would then likely contribute some of those who have that response to contribute more to the fight against atheism. In fact, this could well explain why some religious organizations have contributed to the atheist bus campaign. Because they see it as an excellent way of increasing the level of public anxiety about the bad consequences of atheism, and thus driving more people to religion.

I think that the “Imagine No Religion” campaign is a waste of time. The person who imagines no religion is going to take his or her own prejudices into that imaginary world. The theist will imagine a world of rampant crime and suffering, while the atheist will imagine a world of tremendous scientific progress and prosperity.

There are ways to find out what these effects may be. Simply pay a group of people $50 to come in off the street and answer a few questions, get their reaction to a few suggestions, and simply talk about the various possibilities. This work should be done with all of the scientific rigor that all experiments should be done with. For example, the people doing the work should not care what the results are (should have no vested interest in which campaign gets the better reaction).

Also, the type of advertising that I am talking about requires a much quicker response time. The response must hit while the item is still newsworthy. It would do no good today to launch a campaign against Kieffe and Sons or against Monique Davis (though it would pay to keep an eye on both targets). In two weeks it will do no good to respond to Elizabeth Dole (though, if she wins the election, it would be worthwhile to keep an eye on her as well).

This means having a reserve of money in an account that can be put to immediate use, and using the fundraising associated with a particular incident to rebuild that reserve.

An Alternative Campaign

I have little interest in atheist activism – promoting the belief that no god exists. My interest is in virtue activism. This is not an atheist blog – I make no attempt to defend atheism itself in these postings. This is an ethics blog, that happens to be written by an atheist.

This concern with virtue leads me to suggest another type of campaign compared to those discussed above. This is a campaign that would promote particular virtues, but then link those virtues to atheism. For example, it could consist of billboards with a value-laden word in large type, a short tag phrase, and the identity of the atheist sponsor.

Here are five examples of what could be put on such a billboard.

CURIOSITY:
It pays to know what the world is really like.
*insert name of atheist organization here*

TRUSTWORTHINESS:
The only people we have to help us in times of trouble are each other.
*insert name of atheist organization here*

FREEDOM:
We have only one life. Nobody should spend it enslaved to another.
*insert name of atheist organization here*

JUSTICE:
Faith that somebody else is deserves to be harmed is not good enough.
*insert name of atheist organization here*

As I see it, these billboards would promote positive values, should not generate any type of anxiety, and would be difficult for the enemies of atheism to exploit for their own ends.

However, anybody can come up with an idea, and each is going to think that theirs is perfect. The test should be to collect these ideas and test them, to the best of our ability. As an advocate of empirical observation, I would not say that a suggestion of mine must necessarily be better than the suggestions of somebody else. If we are going to advertise, we should use empirical facts, not feelings and intuitions, to judge how best to spend that money.

Conclusion

I am, in general, pleased to see these types of campaigns spring up. They are laying an important groundwork for future efforts – efforts that should eventually have an effect in reducing anti-atheist bigotry in the United States. However, these projects should grow in the direction of providing some objective data on the effectiveness of the various projects and selecting those that have the best effect for the least amount of money.

Atheists to Blame for Economic Downturn

There is so much (unanswered) anti-atheist bigotry around the world that I am falling behind in my attempts to keep up with it.

At the same time that the story about Elizabeth Dole's and the Republican National Committee's anti-atheist bigotry campaign hit the news last week, there was another story circulating around that expressed a different type of bigotry.

Melanie Phillips decided that "militant" atheists are to be blamed for the financial meltdown. She decided to go to print with an article where she instructed the people that they should turn their fear and concern for their economic future into hatred of atheists. (See: The Culture War for the White House)

I see this financial breakdown, moreover, as being not merely a moral crisis but the monetary expression of the broader degradation of our values – the erosion of duty and responsibility to others in favour of instant gratification, unlimited demands repackaged as 'rights' and the loss of self-discipline. And the root cause of that erosion is 'militant atheism' which, in junking religion, has destroyed our sense of anything beyond our material selves and the here and now and, through such hyper-individualism, paved the way for the onslaught on bedrock moral values expressed through such things as family breakdown and mass fatherlessness, educational collapse, widespread incivility, unprecedented levels of near psychopathic violent crime, epidemic drunkenness and drug abuse, the repudiation of all authority, the moral inversion of victim culture, the destruction of truth and objectivity and a corresponding rise in credulousness in the face of lies and propaganda -- and intimidation and bullying to drive this agenda into public policy.

When the world entered the Great Depression in the 1930s, it became popular in America and, particularly, in Europe to blame the Jews for that economic collapse. People seeking political power for themselves named Jews as the culprit, either through the corruption of their influence and their values on (otherwise) 'good' Christians, or as a part of a conspiracy to take over the world – or, at least, the global economy.

That vilification of the Jews had some very ugly consequences.

Today, blaming the Jews for economic bad news is not as popular as it used to be. Consequently, bigots need to find a new target group – one that can be effectively blamed where the people might actually believe the hate-mongering that the writers engage in. Or, at least, where nobody would be foolish enough to actually stand up and defend the target group (and condemn those who did the targeting).

The vulnerable group in America today, of course, is those who do not believe in God. With a Pledge teaching children each day that a person who does not support a nation 'under God' is as unpatriotic – as downright evil – as one who does not support a nation 'indivisible, with liberty and justice for all', and with a motto that says, "Somebody who does not trust in God is not one of us," and without a word being raised in protest to those messages, the message that atheists are responsible for our economic problems is certainly going to go unchallenged.

This is not to say that we can expect atheists to be herded into gas chambers in this country within the next ten years. Hopefully, the world has had its fill of that type of moral monstrosity for a while and is now on the watch against it. However, that fact does not mitigate against the moral wrong of Phillips’ way of thinking.

We could argue about how a certain type of false accusation 50 years ago would have gotten the accused a death sentence, whereas now the same false accusation 'only' results in 20 years in prison. However, the fact that the harm suffered by those who are falsely accused has been reduced does not argue that it is now permissible to make false accusations.

It is still the case that Phillips' accusation that atheists are guilty of the economic problems we face today, and the accusations made 75 years ago that Jews were responsible for that economic downturn, are both morally outrageous examples of trying to promote hatred and bigotry of a target group.

Yet, nothing, other than the meek mumblings of atheists among themselves, is said against these types of claims. Phillips is not now fighting to keep her job. We will hear no apology. The people themselves will read that atheists are responsible for the loss of their jobs, the destruction of their 401(k) plan, and the foreclosure of their homes without hearing anybody say, "No they’re not." In this type of atmosphere, it would be absurd to believe that some of them will not actually come to share that opinion.

One of the ways that we learn that a statement is questionable is that we hear somebody actually question it. One of the ways that we learn that something is a 'received truth' is that we hear it, and nobody takes the effort to question it. This is one of the quick rules-of-thumb that permeate society because people do not have the time or the skill to apply the rigid rules of deductive logic to every sentence they may hear.

And, indeed, Phillips’ claim has gone unchallenged. At least, I have not heard a word of protest outside of a few atheist blogs claiming that this type of message is morally contemptible.

So, it becomes a part of the received view that disbelief in God is economically harmful, and faith is necessary for the economic well-being of the country.

We can add this to the growing list of examples in which the people at large get to hear anti-atheist rhetoric, without hearing anybody stand up and say, "Not only is that message mistaken, but the type of person who would deserve such a message deserves our contempt."

Melonie Phillips, at this point, should be fighting for her job, no less so than any other public figure who has let their bigotry show through in their writings during the past year.

The Science of Persuasion

Twice now Ebonmuse at Daylight Atheism has been used in Republican advertisements as a tool to keep a North Carolina Senate seat in the hands of an anti-atheist bigot. Specifically, the Elizabeth Dole campaign itself, and now the Republican National Committee, have decided that Ebonmuse is useful to them. They have decided to use him to get the people of North Carolina to keep Elizabeth Dole (who would be uncomfortable having an atheist to dinner) in the Senate.

For the most part, Ebomnuse's response (See: In Which I Am Attacked by a U.S. Political Party) is a good response. However, there are two important points that I would like to draw out of it.

Exploiting Anti-Atheist Bigotry

First, Ebonmuse describes himself in his title as having been attacked. Technically, this is not true. The advertisements say nothing about Ebonmuse himself – it only cites some things written in his blog. This is not an attack.

It is, however, a clear attempt to use (exploit, take advantage of) Ebonmuse for the purpose of promoting ends that Ebonmuse himself explicitly oppose. They found Ebonmuse to be a convenient resource – a convenient tool – that they could then use to construct the type of world that they desire, a world in which atheists are second-class citizens who find themselves explicitly excluded from meetings with their elected representatives.

More specifically, Elizabeth Dole and the Republican National Committee are exploiting the fact that anything that come into contact with an atheist is, in the minds of a majority of voters, tainted and corrupt. It is now impure and, like an infected neighbor, must be removed from society and quarantined until the corruption is somehow removed (if possible). They have selected Ebonmuse as the agent of corruption. That which Ebonmuse praises is thereby corrupted, because whatever an atheist praises is bad, and whatever is pure and good is that which an atheist would not praise.

They find this to be an effective tactic because, as a matter of observed fact, most people are prejudiced against atheists. They learn this prejudice, I have argued, from the moment they start school and learn that Americans who do not support 'one nation under God' are as contemptible as those who would support tyranny and injustice for all. They learn it from the money, and in more and more cases from the school room wall, that say, "A person who does not trust in God is not one of us."

This reality, where atheists are a contaminant and anything they are associated with must e rejected, is simply the reality that we live in.

That is the reality that we have helped to make.

The Science of Persuasion

The second point that I want to draw out of Ebonmuse’s posting explains how we have helped to create a world in which atheists are viewed as a contaminant – used to turn people off to anything that the atheist expresses positive value for.

Ebonmuse wrote:

I continue to be disappointed by the lackluster quality of these smear ads.

He then goes on to identify the things that he sees to be wrong with these advertisements.

However, this response fails to respect the way these advertisements are made. These types of advertisements have the best elements of the scientific method backing them up. Those who make these adds do not rely on 'feelings' of 'intuitions' to judge these advertisements. Instead, they cast feelings and intuitions aside and look instead at the observable, objective, fact of the matter. They invest in a great deal of research. If one's feelings or intuitions are 'disappointed' in the advertisements, then one’s feelings and intuitions are out of synch with objective fact.

These advertisements are backed by a great deal of research. Focus groups, surveys, questionnaires, all quality-checked by looking at their ability to yield predictable outcomes, lie behind these advertisements. Each day an army of researchers are at work looking at what will work on those voters who have an opportunity to turn an election from one candidate to another. "How Ebonmuse will view this advertisement" is not a standard that these researchers are at all interested in. "How effective this advertisement will be in causing people to vote for Elizabeth Dole as Senator, or at least to stay home and not vote for Kay Hagan" is the only standard that matters.

I find this to be extremely ironic. We live in a society where the enemies of science and reason put the best tools of the scientific method and objective measure to work defeating science and reason, while the defenders of science and reason think that feelings and intuitions are all we need to judge the effectiveness of an advertisement campaign.

One of the clichés of the last century came from communists who said, "They (the capitalists) will sell us the rope that we (the communists) will then use to hang them with." The irony today is that the proponents of science and reason have given their enemies the tools to effectively attack science and reason.

Responding to Bigotry

This situation needs to change.

We need is a non-profit organization that can collect donations and has a marketing public-relations firm on call so that the instant one of these major examples of anti-atheist bigotry show up, they can immediately launch two campaigns in response.

Fundraising and Coordination

The first campaign would be a campaign to raise money. This group, under the advice of public relations and marketing experts, would immediately put together a package whose purpose is to raise money – fundraising letters, media advertising, contacts with organizations who can pass along a message to their members, all aiming at raising money for a campaign to answer this bigotry.

If that organization existed today, it would immediately have gone to work soliciting contributions for a campaign to answer the bigotry we see in North Carolina. Using blogs, web-based advertising on sites that atheists tend to visit, phone trees, email lists, they would announce, "There is a campaign to promote anti-atheist bigotry and to use this to keep a bigot in the Senate," to as much of the secular community hat they can reach, to gain money for advertisements, to answer this campaign.

This fundraising campaign would be run by marketers with know-how and experience on how to get money. They will put their experience to work to measure the effectiveness of various campaigns and they will use that data to refine their fundraising accordingly.

Advertising

The second campaign, and the reason for the money, would involve responding to this bigotry. The organization would immediately create web videos, television, radio, and print advertising and send that advertising out to the people who are being presented with anti-atheist bigotry in order to counter that bigotry.

The organization would create press releases, contact the press, and have a set of potential speakers ready to be interviewed on the topic in question. Those speakers would be ready to show up on any news channel – national or local – with talking points in hand ready to point out to listeners and readers what exactly is wrong with the campaign that the bigots have launched. The media company would, in this case, have talked to Ebonmuse and determined if he could effectively speak in his own defense. If so, they would start calling media outlets and arranging for Ebonmouse to speak to the press.

They would contact other bloggers and others who have contact with a relevant part of the intended audience and say, "Here is an issue that we are addressing. We would like you to join us by saying something on this matter." The invitation would be accompanied by a list of talking points.

Somebody like me might look through the talking points, find one or two I disagreed with, and make those the topic of my particular blog. I am not talking about blind obedience to a public relations leader. I would oppose that. However, there is nothing objectionable with a group of people who want to say X finding a way to do so more effectively – in a way that will reach more people and could potentially change more minds than the system we have now.

The Current Situation

The situation, as it exists today, makes me think of a trial in which the prosecutors go to great efforts to present their best possible case to the jury. At the same time, the defense sits at their defense table and mumbles among themselves about how poor this particular piece of evidence is and how that particular witness from the prosecution presents a poor image to the jury.

Yet, throughout the whole trial, they never ask any questions, they never raise any objections, they never call any witnesses of their own or engage in any public cross-examination in front of the jury, They simply assume that the jury, presented with only one side of the story, will see through all of the problems and come to the right decision on their own without anybody pointing out the flaws in the case that the prosecution is making.

Even though juries keep coming back again and again with verdicts of ‘guilty’ – still, the defense thinks that it is sufficient to do nothing but mumble among themselves about how good or how poor certain pieces of evidence is or how well it is presented, and justice will prevail.

Justice will not prevail until the defense team decides to actually put together a defense – which is something we do not currently have.

Will there be any advertisements broadcast in response to the anti-atheist bigotry we see in North Carolina?

There will not be.

The prosecution – the bigots – have full control of the court. In fact, they have the only team actually playing the game. When this happens, it is almost a sure bet that they will win – and keep winning – until an opposition team actually decides to start playing against them.

It is time for a change. It is time to realize that a public defense is very much necessary. It is time to realize that the bigotry exhibited in the campaigns of Elizabeth Dole and the Republican National Committee need to be met with a public response that respects the fact that there are experts in this field who know how to organize a public response – and a willingness to pay the costs that this type of campaign would require.

Either that or we, like Ebonmuse himself, choose to be tools to be exploited in the destruction of the things we claim to value – because we refuse to challenge those whose aim is to create a society in which anything an atheist values – anything an atheist is even associated with – is contaminated, unclean, and to be done away with.

A Weak Response to Harsh Bigotry

Normally, I like the work that Hemant Mehta does at his site Friendly Atheist. On a recent posting, though, he gave a response to anti-atheist bigotry typical of those who . . . for all practical purposes . . . have come to accept the idea that they are an inferior people and that the bigotry is somehow justified, for the most part.

Elizabeth Dole's "Bigot or Senate" campaign now has the backing of the Republican National Committee, who has decided to join Dole in spending to promote anti-atheist bigotry in America. (See: Friendly Atheist: National Republican Senatorial Committee Puts Out Anti-Atheist Political Ad.)

Unfortunately, after presenting the advertisement, Mehta presents a response to it that has the tone and content of somebody who seems to feel ashamed that he is an atheist, who effectively endorses the condemnation of anybody who would dare to meet with leaders of atheist organization, and merely asks not to be judged like the rest of them.

Consider this statement:

Also, to quote two representatives from American Atheists — one organization and hardly the largest atheist group in the country — is misleading. Not all atheists agree with them. Most atheists could care less about those issues.

The first question that comes to my mind in reading this statement is, "Why is this important?" Why would it matter whether the American Atheists is not the largest atheist group in the country, or whether some atheists disagree with them?

It would matter only if there was something wrong with being a member of or agreeing with the American Atheists, and that as a result it is important to put some distance between Hagan and members of this group.

Later in the essay Mehta reinforces this view by equating a hypothetical association between Hagan and leaders of the American Atheists with an association between Obama and leaders of the Weather Underground.

To say that because she associated loosely with someone who might not share the values of most Americans, she must be stopped? That’s what John McCain was doing to Barack Obama with William Ayres. It implies a much closer connection than actually exists.

However, there are important differences between the American Atheists and the Weather Underground. To the best of my knowledge, the American Atheists have never sought to use bombs or other forms of violence to achieve their objectives. They have not advocated any form of harm be done to others. Yet, Mehta sees similarities between linking one politician to one group that uses mere words and private actions to present its views to the public, and another that used bombs and other weapons to do so.

Politically, I recognize that there may be some value between putting distance between Kay Hagan and those vile atheists. People are not going to lose their anti-atheist bigotry over night, so the best thing to do in two weeks is to admit that this bigotry exists and to argue that Hagan is not, in fact, somebody who would actually consider associating with those people. However, this is a question of political practicality. Not a question of morality.

I have written a few posts about how bigotry two major effects.

It has the effect of making members of the 'in' group dominant and assertive – capable of self-confidently going forth and asserting their superiority because they believe that they are superior and have a right to such things.

It also has the effect of making members of the 'out group' docile and apologetic. They avert their eyes, lower their gaze, sit back meekly and learn to do pretty much how they are told.

This is how it is possible for a dominant group to get millions of people of the target group into railway cars, concentration camps, and gas chambers. This is how it is possible for society to exist in which the slave population greatly outnumbers the master population. It is precisely because out-group membership makes one submissive and tolerant of abuse.

Mehta’s response shows the symptoms of the second effect. It implicitly assumes that the condemnation of atheists is somehow justified – that atheists are a lesser form of life and that there is something wrong with associating with them. This makes it important to challenge any claim that such an association exists – in order to keep the target (Hagan, in this case) uncontaminated.

Militant Atheists and Uncle Tom Atheists

I want to add that I am generally supportive of Mehta’s approach to the divide between theists and atheists. This is not an argument that there should not be a friendly atheist. That view comes from a false dichotomy that says that there are only two options, the “militant atheist” or an “Uncle Tom atheist”, and that one must choose to become one or the other.

There is a third option, an option that holds no hostility towards theists in general, but that is still willing and able to resist the view that atheists should be put into a subordinate position. It is a view that imagines atheists and theists getting equal respect, and that condemns any deviance from this standard in either direction.

Mehta, in this posting, missed the target of being the friendly atheist who holds, “Let us treat each other with the equal respect that both of us have a right to,” to being the submissive atheist who holds, “I know that we are undeserving of equal respect, but could you please see that some of us are not as bad as those other atheists out there and respect us a little?”

The reason, I hold, is because this is the type of behavior that bigotry teaches to members of the out group. He simply fell into the natural state for out-group members; the docile, submissive, compliance with the attitude that ‘you are inferior and unworthy’.

The proper response to the video from the Republican National Committee is not to condemn the advertisement for attempting to link Hagan to bad atheists - because, in fact, none of the people represented in the video are bad atheists. They are atheists – and, in the mind of the bigot, all atheists are bad atheists. We should not be assuming that this association between ‘atheist’ and ‘bad’ is necessarily or even often true.

In fact, this is the association that we should be challenging.

All that Needs to be Said

The Republican National Committee's video is no different than an advertisement that one might expect in the 1930s linking a candidate to Jews (particularly in Europe). It is no different than an advertisement that one might expect in the 1950s linking a candidate to blacks. It is a video that plays off of bigotry and prejudice. It is, in fact, an advertisement for bigotry – and endorsement of prejudice.

Certainly, if (when) bigots make associations that are worthy of contempt – such as when they link atheists such as myself to Stalin and Mao Tse Tung – it is legitimate to point out that these associations are illegitimate, and being used by bigot to sew fear and hatred. Here, it is important to argue that the associations do not stand – that there are a lot of atheists who do not agree with the policies of those leaders or their groups.

However, this response assumes that there is something worthy of condemnation in those people and those groups. Which, in the case of Stalin and Mao, happens to be true.

When Mehta made the arguments that he made, using the same arguments against the idea of an association with American Atheists and those who wish to see 'under God' removed from the Pledge and 'In God We Trust' removed as the national motto, this argument only has value under the assumption that 'American Atheists' and those opposed to 'under God' are like Stalin and Mao.

For all practical purposes, it assumes that comparisons between atheist leaders to Stalin and Mao, and between atheist organizations and the Weather Underground, are legitimate.

Which they are not. This is a legitimacy that should not be granted or assumed.

Expect Obama to be No Friend to Secular Americans

If Obama is as smart as he seems to be, he will not be the secularist's friend during his term in the White House (assuming he has a term in the White House). He will either need to toss secularism to the wolves, or he will need to give up his office in four years to somebody else who will toss secularism to the wolves.

One of the observed facts of this campaign is the degree to which McCain's nomination of Sarah Palin galvanized the religious right to work for his campaign. It generated millions of dollars in campaign contributions, and millions of hours in volunteer labor, that he would not have otherwise had from the religious right.

It turns out that it had other ill effects. Palin's utter lack of experience, combined with her inability to form a coherent sentence on political policy, more than cancelled out the political advantages of her religious leanings. However, let us imagine for a moment that Palin was, in fact, capable of making intelligent statements about political policy – that she knew the Bush Doctrine, could cite numerous Supreme Court cases, was widely read, had travelled broadly as Governor of Alaska to set up trade deals with, for example, Japan, China, Russia, and the like.

There are a lot of religious conservatives that have these types of credentials. She happened not to be one of them. But that was a happy coincidence, not a law of nature.

I also want you to note the fact that the Obama campaign never attacked Palin's religious beliefs or her credentials. The criticism heaped on Palin came from forces outside of the campaign (or forces whose connection to the campaign were largely invisible). Obama does, in fact, seem smart enough to know that it would be political suicide to challenge the Religious Right – that his political future depends on his ability to appease them.

He will almost certainly continue to appease them through four years as President.

He will give them the Office of Faith Based Initiatives – making this a permanent part of the American political system. And he will, in all likelihood, increase funding – his way of paying to prevent the religious right from campaigning too heavily against him.

He will certainly condemn what I expect will be the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals' opinion that 'under God' in the Pledge is unconstitutional. He will – probably with some politeness – assert in all likelihood that it is absurd to think that 'under God' in the Pledge is somehow oppressive. He will, by necessity, put his Justice Department to work defending "under God" and "In God We Trust" before the Supreme Court, as well as campaign publicly on what he is doing to protect these traditions. against us on this issue. And he will campaign against us hard enough so that the religious right will have little reason to doubt his sincerity, and thus have less of an incentive to close ranks and form a political army that will work against him.

[Note: Having a national pledge that equates one who does not favor 'one nation under God' with one who does not defend a nation 'indivisible, with liberty and justice for all' certainly goes a long way towards prejudicing the population against such a person, and there is a growing stack of evidence on how real and potent that prejudice is.]

So, I suspect that, in addition to giving the religious right the Office of Faith Based Initiatives, he will also give them the courts. He is going to choose his battles – and his battles will be on Roe v. Wade and forms of discrimination other than discrimination and the promotion of prejudice against atheists. He will toss the atheists to the wolves in order to save others who are more important to him.

The Religious Right will probably realize that if they keep the right to subject generation after generation of school children to the propaganda that atheism is as un-American as tyranny and injustice, that they will win on the other issues eventually.

I would like somebody to ask Obama the question – while there is still a chance to do so – "President Bush said that we need common-sense judges who believe that our rights come from God, and declared that these were the types of judges he would appoint. Do you share his view that a person who does not believe in God is, by that fact alone, unqualified to be a judge?"

As I said above, his personal views do not matter. What I am writing about here is the fine art of political manipulation. It has to do with being effective, versus being right, and a mindset that says that being effective goes a long way towards being right. He will console himself by telling himself about the good that he has accomplished. Though it was sad that he had to sacrifice some people (atheists, secularists) to realize these goods, the gains were important enough to justify the sacrifice.

So, what comes from all of this pessimism?

Well, actually, I think that we ought to live in the real world and make real-world plans that reflect the facts of the universe that surrounds us. What I have stated above is what I believe to be the political facts.

What I mean is that, if you believe in fact-based initiatives rather than faith-based initiatives, if you would prefer a society that did not teach prejudice that particularly targets young children, values science education, and would like to end the social barriers that keep atheists out of public office and positions of public trust, you need to take this message to the people themselves.

It is because our culture is the way it is that a politician like Obama will almost certainly need to sacrifice secular values in order to obtain other goods. It is because of the things that people are willing to invest their contributions of political time and money in that the politician who refuses to sacrifice seclar values will find himself replaced by one who does not refuse. It is only by changing the culture, from the ground up, that we can alter these political facts.

It means that it is time to stop thinking that the situation will magically correct itself. It means that it is necessary to contribute political time and political money to protesting the sacrifice of secular values.

Obama will almost certainly sacrifice secular values just to stay in office. Mumbling among ourselves will not accomplish anything.

Writing letters to Obama himself will be worth than useless. He will toss them aside and scoff, "Live in the real world, people. If I followed your suggestions I might as well simply resign and give my seat over to Huckabee or Palin because, by following your advice, I would give them an excellent chance of winning the next election."

The message has to be taken to the people themselves, and delivered in such a manner that even those who do not want to hear that message cannot ignore it.

Until we create a culture in which it is safe for a politician to support a secular government, we are self-deluded fools if we demand politicians to support secular government. Such a politician will simply be replaced with a different politician who does not have, or is smart enough not to let people know that he has, secular values.

We need to create a culture in which it is safe for politicians such as these to hold secular values, and we cannot do so by hiding our beliefs and praying that, without any effort on our part, a messiah will come along and do all of the hard work for us.

It is up to us to make the political and cultural environment safe for politicians with secular values.

Religion and "More Harm than Good"

Today, I want to spend some time on a point that I made in yesterdays post. It is a point that relates to something I read this morning – an article that suggests that the "New Atheism" argues that religion "does more harm than good".

This question – phrased this way – contains an assumption that is, itself, morally questionable. It suggests that the way we should evaluate something is to sum up all the good that it does, then sum up the harm it does, and accept everything where the good exceeds the harm.

However, this is a nonsensical way of doing moral calculus.

It suggests that if we have something that produces (to speak abstractly) 10 units of good, that it can then produce up to, but not more than 10 units of harm without any moral objections being raised against it. If it produces 10 units of good and 9 units of harm, then it still does not do “more harm than good” – which means that it is immune from criticism according to the standards listed above.

It is easy to see why an institution that does great harm would want us to use a standard like this. It is easy to see why an institution that does great harm, and great good, would want us to simply ignore the harm that it does in virtue of the fact that it does good. However, it is still the case that a competing institution that does a little less good, but also does significantly less harm, is a better institution. The fact that the first institution passes the “less harm than good” test does not save it from this type of criticism.

Yesterday, I wrote about Proposition 8 in California to remove the right of same-sex couples to get married. This is an example of an institution motivating people to behave in ways that are harmful to others. The claim that the religious institutions in this case do good in other areas is irrelevant. It is still the case that an institution that does just as much good as these religious institutions – but which does not contaminate the good that they do with harmful actions such as these – is a better institution than one that mixes good deeds with great harm.

On this, there is the related issue that faith is a good thing – that a person ‘with faith’ is somehow better off than a person 'without faith'. This, of course, is a prejudice. A person 'with faith' is like a person living his live in an experience machine – some type of machine that makes a person believe that she is living a wonderful life when, in fact, her life is a lie.

However, even independent of this consideration, we have to question the value of faith when it is faith that somebody else deserves to be harmed. The people who are most adamantly in favor of Proposition 8 – the people who put it on the ballot and contributed millions of dollars and countless labor hours to get it passed – are mostly people of great faith. However, the institutions they have faith in are institutions that are driving them to do harm to others.

The idea that we must respect another person's faith – when that faith causes them to come at innocent people with laws that do great harm – is absurd. The person who shall be harmed by an action has a right to demand that those who do them harm actually justify their actions. "I have faith that you should be made to suffer" simply is not good enough.

There is also the question – when we consider doing harm and doing good – of the difference between prevention and response. We typically see religious institutions responding in great numbers to those who are the victims of poverty, health problems, natural disasters, and the like. We often hear the claim made that atheists seem to contribute less to these types of efforts than theists (thus concluding that theists are 'better people' than atheists.

However, when we turn our attention from the realm of response to the realm of prevention, we see a huge difference between the contributions of atheists compared to the contributions of theists.

The theist recipe for prevention is to have prayer in schools, pass laws against abortions and gay marriage, and to prevent atheists from holding public office and positions of public trust. This, to them, is the model way to prevent every type of evil from terrorist attacks to plague to hurricanes.

Actually, this follows the pattern that ancient tribes used where, when they were faced with a anything unusual and potentially harmful – from famine to a solar eclipse – respond by identifying some segment of the population that needs to be sacrificed to the gods in order to win their favor.

If you listen to people talk, Proposition 8, and similar laws and amendments around the country, are the 21st century equivalent of identifying some group of people who need to be sacrificed to the gods, so that the gods will be pleased and grant our community good fortune. It is not as brutal and bloody as the silver dagger and the blood-stained altar, but it has the unfortunate effect of doing harm to far more people.

To make matters worse, they are using the government as an instrument to force this sacrifice on others. This is not a case of people sacrificing volunteers from their own religion to appease the gods and buy their favor. This is a case of people going to the government and getting a law passed telling others, "By law, you must submit yourself to being a human a human sacrifice to our God, who will not protect us from terrorists and earthquakes unless your well-being is offered up as a sacrifice to Him."

The atheist recipe for prevention, on the other hand, is to take measurements of nature, form a hypothesis of how nature operates that best explains those observations, use that hypothesis to make predictions, test those predictions, then keep the hypothesis that makes accurate predictions and throw out or modify the hypothesis that does not.

Then, using the power of prediction that they acquire from this method, decide what the results will be of particular actions and choose the actions that will produce the best results. The scientist predicts the direction that a hurricane will take, so that the reactive elements commonly associated with a local church simply has less to react to.

When we measure the ‘charity’ of theist and atheist organizations, we typically do not count the lives saved by the science that said, 'A hurricane will hit in three days.' We tend to count the polio victims who received aid on the side of the ledger, but we do not count the people who did not get polio because biologists (with a firm understanding of genetics and the theory of evolution) never got polio, or small pox, or (some day) malaria.

Malaria, for example, will not become a thing of the past by praying to a God to get rid of it. Malaria will become a thing of the past when people put into practice the things that scientists have learned about malaria through their detailed study of the physical world.

There are those who clearly believe that religion does do more harm than good. Rather than hold that religion might do 10 units of good and 9 units of harm, they would argue that it does 1 unit of good (perhaps) and 10 units of harm.

However, for the purposes of this posting, this dispute is of little consequence. However much or how little good comes from religion, we can do better if we can get rid of the harm. We can set the question of how much good remains once the harm is removed for another day.

Religious institutions that do harm certainly have a strong motivation to get us to adopt a “more good than harm” standard. It gives them a license to do harm, so long as they can assert that there is some good elsewhere being done.

However, we have no reason to accept this standard, and many strong reasons not to. Those strong reasons not to come from the unnecessary harms that those religions want a license to commit.

It does not matter whether a particular religion does more good than harm. California's Proposition 8 is an example of certain religions doing harm. Their "good to harm" ratio of a religion is probably going to be higher for a religion that does less harm than for a religion that does more harm. That is to say, the good to harm ratio is going to favor the religion that does not motivate others to support Proposition 8 than for the religion that does.

Morally, the question of "more harm than good" or "more good than harm" turns out to be substantially irrelevant. Regardless of the current ratio of good to harm, thta ratio would be better if only those religions associated with harm would simply cut back on the harm they do.

No on Proposition 8 - California

There is a measure on the ballot in California, Proposition 8, whose purpose is to overturn a California State Supreme Court decision that made homosexual marriage legal in the state. It has collected a lot of support – a lot of money – among those who are opposed to gay marriage.

I had been thinking that the people of California were good people, on the average, and would not allow this measure to pass. However, news reports have reached me recently suggesting that Proposition 8 is heading toward victory in California. Gay couples there are rushing to get married before the right to do so is again taken away.

The specific argument that I would like to see being made against Proposition 8 is that it is yet another example in which religion inspires people to go to great effort and to put a great deal of enthusiasm into doing harm to others (in the name of God). It is not as violent as a bomb on a crowded bus and will probably not kill as many people. However, this does not change the fact that the Proposition, if passed, will severely millions of lives. Legislation has always been the greatest and most destructive of all of the weapons of mass destruction for those who seek to do harm to others.

I want to add that a lot can be said in favor of those who have given up bombs and guns as their tools of choice for imposing their religious views on others. The theocrat who decides to use the ballot box instead at least gives their opponents (victims) the opportunity to argue in their defense, and they spare society the widespread disruption of physical violence. This is a huge step forward, and it should be acknowledged.

However, the fact that a particular group of people determined to do harm to others in the name of God have decided to give up bombs and guns and limit themselves to the ballot box does not argue against the fact that they still do harm to others in the name of God. This is their goal, their passion, they can think of nothing else in their life that gives it more value than to make sure that the group that they have properly targeted is sufficiently harmed by their actions.

I have argued in the past that it is a mistake to claim that the number of people who actually get their morality from their religion is anything more than a miniscule fraction of the population. The proposition that A implies B . . . or even A tends to lead to B . . . is sufficiently discredited when one can find case after case after case of A and not-B. The huge number of cases in which the Bible prescribes or proscribes some conduct that religious people ignore are a huge number of counter-examples to the thesis that anybody gets their morality from their religion.

Instead, what we have is a group of people who get their morality from their culture, who then read that culture morality into their religion. These people do not get their morality to God, they give their morality to God through their selective use of biblical test, taking from it only what they want and ignoring that which they find inconvenient. It is because this culture is bigoted that they find bigotry in their religious text. They read those values into their religion and, in this case, they read hatred into that religion. They invent a god to give support to their hatred.

They do not assign their bigotry to God but they still share the bigotry that their culture-mates are assigning to God.

So, this is not a case where religion causes people to be evil. In fact, it is actually quite difficult to make the case that religion causes people to be evil . . . or to be good. Because they create a religion to hold their values, the values must come first. Morally good people invent good religions and good gods. Morally vicious people invent vicious religions with vicious gods.

Still, the important point for the purpose of this blog is that the opposition to gay marriage gathers a lot of its support from a religious faction that puts a high value on hate. This is an example in which religion is intimately connected to motivating people to act in ways harmful to others. Yet, in the eight years in which this campaign to do harm in the name of God has been waged, I have not heard people expose these particular campaigns for what they are.

When the current group of atheist authors – Harris, Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, and others – filled the air waves, a part of their message was that it is time to stop coddling religion and to expose it for what it is. Yet, on a national campaign issue that had its primary purpose the use of legislation to do harm to the well-being of millions of American citizens – a classic example in which it is possible to connect religion to a motivation to do harm – religion was still coddled. Nobody, as far as I could tell, pointed out the similarities between using a law to destroy the lives of millions of people that one’s religion has taught one to hate, and using a bomb against the enemies of one’s religion.

The task of describing Proposition 8 accurately – the task of communicating the thesis that this is an example of people being driven to do harm to others in the name of religion – cannot be trusted to a political group that aims to oppose Proposition 8. There are certain things they cannot say – certain groups they cannot offend. It is up to us to carry the message that this type of legislation is actually an excellent example of causing harm in the name of God. It is yet another example in which religion is involved in motivating people to behave in ways harmful to their neighbors.

Given the content of this posting, I believe that I should take at least a couple of moments to address a claim that some might make, “But look at the good that religion has done?”

However, the good that religion has done, if there is any, is not relevant to this debate. Consider the person who gives you $10 to buy some groceries but slices you with a razor at the same time. We can say of him, “Look at the good he did, giving that person money so he could eat.” However, this does not change the fact that he would have been better off still getting the $10 without being cut, than he was getting the $10 and getting cut at the same time.

The charitable contribution does not excuse the harm done by cutting the recipient

Nor is it the case that any good that religious people do excuses the harm they do at the same time. The good that they do with their charitable work would be just as good if it were not accompanied by such enthusiastic devotion to such harmful behavior as getting a ban on gay marriage passed in the state of California (or any other state).

So, this is a post not only in favor of supporting the campaign to reject Proposition 8 in California. This is a post that speaks against the habit of refraining from saying the obvious – that this ballot initiative is just another example of how religion in this country is intimately tied to behavior harmful to others – of making people enthusiastic beyond reason over the prospect of doing something that is harmful to others.

In the name of God.

A Filibuster-Proof Majority

The Filibuster Proof Majority

According to a site that I follow, fivethirtyeight.com, the Democratic Party has a 30% chance of obtaining a filibuster-proof majority (60 seats) in the U.S. Senate.

I do not want that to happen.

The Democratic Party is not a font of all wisdom and virtue. Just as the Republicans have tied themselves to people who have absurd beliefs about the real world (the Religious Right), the Democratic Party also has an element with equally absurd beliefs (the Anti-Business Left).

One area in which this is the case is with NAFTA (North American Free Trade Association) and LAFTA (Latin American Free Trade Association). On this issue, the Democratic left wants to see free trade curtailed – wants to see policies enacted that “keep jobs here in America” and stops the flow of jobs overseas. The fact of the matter is that by "shipping jobs overseas", the populations of other countries become more prosperous, which has two effects.

First, they are less likely to go to war because, the more a country trades with others, the more it has to lose by getting involved in armed conflict.

Second, a more prosperous country has more use for the goods and services of other countries.

In addition, there is the simple moral, humanitarian issue underlying this. To fight to prevent people who are now earning $200 per year . . . per year . . . with no health care, no decent food, and surrounded by outlaw militia that have nothing better to do with their time from earning $1000 per year, and later $2000 per year . . . is morally depraved. Yet, when the Democratic left talks about international trade they speak as if this part of their plan is perfectly acceptable. The welfare of human beings in other countries seems, to them, to be of no moral significance whatsoever, a long as Americans can "preserve their jobs".

Even that part of the Democratic Left's approach to international trade is absurd. Assume that you had a choice – you could either make Africa like Europe, or make Europe like Africa. Which do you think would benefit America more? All we have to do is look at how much economic benefit we obtain from trade with Europe compared to what we gain from trade with Africa. How many jobs are created because the Europeans are prosperous enough to buy what Americans are selling, compared to how many jobs are created by the demand for American exports coming out of Africa.

Another issue in which I worry about an unchecked Democratic majority is on the issue of Iraq (and of foreign wars in general). Far too many Democrats think that they know with certainty, and without evidence, that the best thing to do is to leave Iraq. They might be right. I, on the other hand, am reluctant to draw a conclusion one way or the other without evidence, and the evidence (in this case) is hidden from my sight.

On this issue, the Democratic Left is much like President George Bush. Bush did not need to actually look at the intelligence reports. He knew that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was ready to use them on the United States. If the intelligence reports said otherwise, this simply proved that the analysts could not do their job very well. The Democratic Left knows that the best option is to leave Iraq. If the intelligence reports contradict this option then they, too, will simply assume that there was something wrong with the intelligence reports.

So, here is my recommendation to my readers. If you live in a state with a close Senate race, I would like you to take a good look at the Republican candidate in that election. If the Republican candidate is half way decent (not lost in some second-coming fantasy that utterly prevents him or her from making rational real-world decisions), then there is reason to consider voting to prevent the Democrats from having entirely unchecked political power.

We could be better off as a result.

The Pledge Project Revisited

We are nearing the one-year anniversary of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals hearing of a case in which Michael Newdow argued that "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance and "In God We Trust" as the national motto were unconstitutional. This is a second case, in which 'standing' should not be an issue. Michael Newdow, who argued the case on his own behalf 5 years ago, is arguing this time on behalf of parents who have full and legal custody of their own children.

At this point in the game, it is becoming increasingly unlikely that Court will release its decision before the election – which is a good thing, since it would likely become a major campaign issue and could perhaps alter the course of this election. (Though it should not do so – there are far more important criteria to base one’s vote on – a lot of people have a rather warped sense of what is important.)

However, the Court cannot wait too long after the election to render their decision. The Courts web site states that decisions are released up to one year after the hearing, and that one-year anniversary comes up in early December, right in time for annual war on Christmas.

Long time readers know that I consider this issue to be extremely important when it comes to anti-atheist bigotry and all of the issues tied to this bigotry. Through the national motto and the Pledge of Allegiance the U.S. Government is involved in a program of teaching children that those who are not 'under God' or who do not 'trust in God' are not good Americans.

See, The Pledge Project: Table of Contents

An atheist, according to this message, is not 'one of us.' 'We' trust in God, so a person who does not trust in God does not belong in the group identified as 'we'.

An atheist – or even a theist whose religion does not argue for putting the nation 'under God' – is the patriotic equivalent of somebody who supports rebellion, tyranny, and injustice for all.

Planting this bigotry into the brain of a very young child gives these ideas a strong emotional component. Many children learn to associate trust in God and the idea of a nation ‘under God’ with the deep emotional need of acceptance and belonging. This deep emotional link makes it quite difficult for the child, when she becomes an adult, to shake this idea. The very thought of not trusting in God or being 'under God' brings an emotional turmoil that even the adult would have trouble dealing with.

This motto and this pledge, then, feed society’s anti-atheist bigotry and, in turn, feeds off of it. The relationship is the same as that which existed between segregation (marking certain facilities or sections of a restaurant as ‘white’ and ‘colored’ respectively) and racial bigotry. Segregation was the product of bigotry. Yet, the signs, the rules, and the laws also promoted bigotry by teaching even young children to see a social difference between the two – to see members of one group as superior to members of the other group.

The effect was pronounced on both groups. Segregation not only taught white children that they were superior to black children, it taught black children that they were inferior to white children. It taught them this lesson at a young age where they learned the lesson not only intellectually, but emotionally. They adopted the attitude of inferiority, because this was the attitude that they were taught.

It took World War II, and the proven worth of the black soldier (along with countless black soldiers proving to themselves and others that they were as good as white soldiers) to end this stupor and begin the drive for racial equality at home.

Atheists also suffer from the effects of a learned sense of inferiority. There is a reason why atheists do not stand up to the likes of Kieffe and Sons, Monique Davis, Elizabeth Dole, and the local school in which children are taught daily to regard those not 'under God' as un-American. It is because they, too, have this learned sense of inferiority that makes them timid and afraid – unwilling to earn the displeasure of the 'superior' members of society, those who trust in God and support a nation 'under God'.

The last thing we want is for the better part of America (or that which the government told us in no uncertain terms was the better part of America) to be angry with us. Because we, quite obviously, do not deserve equal consideration and equal respect of our government and our fellow citizens.

When these decisions are released, I can easily predict that theocratic Americans (because a nation 'under God' is the very definition of theocracy) will scream and shout at the top of their lungs that this decision is wrong and something must be done to stop this outrage. While, on the atheist, humanist, and theist-secularist side of the equation, the bulk of the population will cower and declare, "Now look at what you did. You made them mad at us again. Shame on you."

Actually, the shame belongs to those who do not stand up to bigotry.

It is morally outrageous for any country to have a motto that says, “If you do not trust in God, then you are not one of us.”

It is morally outrageous for a country to have its youngest children pledge daily to regard Americans who do not support a nation 'under God' the same way they regard Americans who support rebellion, tyranny, and injustice for all.

It is morally outrageous to have the government of a free society involved in a campaign that is effectively designed to put up an insurmountable barrier between peaceful, law-abiding citizens and public office and positions of public trust. Because, this much is clear, 'under God' and 'In God We Trust' are being promoted precisely because they are effective in locking atheists out of public office and positions of public trust. This way, theists only need to compete with other theists for these positions.

The role of the atheist is never to govern, but always and only to be governed – never to lead, but only to obey.

Bigotry does not end as a result of the target group "playing nice". Bigotry ends when the "target group" musters the courage to make the bigots uncomfortable with their bigotry – when they muster the courage to stand up to the bellicose anger that the bigot inevitably uses to defend his position of social superiority. They have no reason – absolutely no reason – to give up their position of superiority without a fight. The question is whether their victims have the courage to fight back.

Once again, I end with my standard disclaimer. The right to freedom of speech, association, and religion is not a right to freedom from criticism. It is a right to freedom from violence. Fighting back, in this sense, is morally limited to fighting back with words and private actions (actions that one may legitimately perform without justifying them to anybody).

It also may include non-violent civil disobedience – such as the sit-ins of the 1950s where the object is to do no physical harm (and threaten no physical harm) to person or property, but to send a message to people who would not otherwise have an opportunity to hear it.

It means, in this instance, an unwillingness to be meekly sit down and shut up (as we are often told to do) as the theocrats rant and rave against the suggestion that it is not the government's right or duty to declare citizens who trust in God or who support 'one nation under God' are superior to those who do not believe that there is a god to trust or to be under.

No on Measure AA

I received in my email recently a press release calling for opposition to “Measure AA” in Villa Park, CA. The measure would put the motto “In God We Trust” in the city council chambers.

The Press Release says that the Council missed the point in putting this measure on the ballot. However, the press release itself appeared to miss a few points.

Point 1: The press release opens by stating that opposition is being lead by Bruce Gleason, the leader of Backyard Skeptics, "a community of humanists, freethinkers and atheists and an affiliate of Atheists United." This, in a country where any position that gets associated with atheists or atheism is guaranteed to make that position unpopular.

We live in a society where a majority of the people view atheist as those who least share their values, as being unfit to hold public office purely in virtue of their beliefs, and those whom they would least want their child to marry. I wrote just a few days ago about Senator Elizabeth Dole's strategy of defeating her challenger, Kay Hagan, to atheists. The main strategy for denigrating the teaching of evolution is by associating it with atheism – a strategy also used in the movie "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed."

Supporters for Measure AA would have paid good money to have somebody associate opposition to this measure with atheists. This association was handed to them free of charge.

I am not saying that Gleason and the Backyard Skeptics should not be involved in this campaign. In fact, I think that the victims of bigotry need to take the lead in this type of fight. Blacks did not obtain any measure of political equality by sitting home and watching Davey Crocket, and 21st century atheists will gain no measure of political respect by sitting home and watching Survivor.

However, that involvement should at least pay attention to the fact that we live in a society with a great deal of anti-atheist bigotry. This fact needs to be acknowledged and tacked directly.

I am an atheist, and I oppose Measure AA. For many of you, the fact that I am an atheist will be seen as reason enough to support this measure. From the time you were a small child the government has been feeding you a steady diet of anti-atheist bigotry. One of the forms these lessons have taken is to put on the money and in public buildings a message that tells you, "In order to be counted as a true American, one has to trust in God." The government should not be involved in teaching hate. The government should treat all of its law-abiding citizens with equal respect, regardless of their religious beliefs. This is why I oppose Measure AA.

Point 2: The Press Release mentions that the use of the motto violates the Constitution. This ignores the fact that most people believe that it is consistent with the Constitution – and this (probably) includes a majority of the judges on the Supreme Court.

We are dealing with a culture that is built on the practice of reading what one wants to read into texts such as the Bible. This culture wants to see the Constitution as protecting their religious supremacy, so this is what they see in the Constitution. According to their argument, the motto, "In God We Trust" is an example of religious expression protected by the Constitution. It is also an example of freedom of expression. Those who oppose this measure are the ones who are anti-freedom and anti-Constitution.

It is a waste of time to argue to somebody that they should believe Q because P implies Q when they have already rejected P. If there is any interest at all in pursuing this argument, then the argument needs to backtrack and prove the truth of P, before one can effective assert that P implies Q. In this case, it means defending the principle of the separation of church and state, rather than merely asserting the principle as if everybody already accepts it. They do not.

Any decent person has to recognize that he is capable of error. It is pure arrogance for he Christian to assume that the Jew or the Atheist is wrong, just as the Jew or the Atheist exhibits pure arrogance in assuming that the Christian must be wrong. The reason why the founding fathers argued for freedom of religion is because it did not want the government to take sides in these disputes. They wanted the people to debate these differences among themselves and reach their own decisions free from government interference. It is ludicrous to suggest that the national motto, "In God We Trust", is not an example of taking sides.

Point 3: The Press Release does not ignore, but does bury, the absurdity of the claim that the motto is being used to promote patriotism.

Here’s a question to be asked of anybody who defends posting the national motto:

So, tell me, do you believe that a person who does not trust in God cannot be patriotic?

If the answer to this question is, "Yes.", then one can launch into a speech against religious bigotry – of how bigots try to gain advantage for themselves by putting down others and calling them inferior, and that no good government would post signs declaring that one group of peaceful, law-abiding citizens who hold one religious beliefs are, in its eyes, inferior to all others. A clear example of this is anybody who would claim that a person who trusts in God is a patriot, and those who do not trust in God are not.

If the answer is, "No", the response is, Then this is not patriotism. If you agree that a person who does not trust in God can be a patriot, then promoting trust in God is not the same as promoting patriotism. You cannot have it both ways. If this sign is meant to promote patriotism, you have to say that patriotism requires trust in God. If you deny that patriotism requires trust in God, then this sign does not promote patriotism.

Summary

The press release does include a statement from Stuart Bechman, the head of Atheists United, that “These efforts serve the singular purpose of promoting the idea that the United States is a Christian nation and that non-Christians are second class citizens or not citizens at all.”

This statement should not be buried at the end of the press release. That should be the lead, because this is what the dispute is all about.

Slavery, at one time, was constitutional. You cannot argue that something should be the case by arguing that it follows the Constitution, because the Constitution was written by fallible human beings. Even arguing that something violates the Constitution, it is still reasonable to ask whether it is right or whether it is wrong.

The first argument should be why the motto should be rejected even if there were no Constitutional prohibition against it. The first argument should be to point out why it is wrong for any government to post a sign in its public halls that say, "Those who do not trust in God are not welcome here – we do not think of you as one of us."

Then, after establishing the wrongness of this proposal, it is meaningful to point out that either (1) the founding fathers were wise enough to see the wrongness of this type of conduct and write it into the Constitution, or (2) the founding fathers made yet another mistake by using the Constitution to defend something that is, in fact, wrong. These become the only two options where the wrongness of the act has already been established.

The reason people want to post "In God We Trust" in government buildings is because they want to send the people a message that there are two classes of citizens in this country. "We" – the superior, first class, 'good', 'patriotic' Americans, trust in God. 'They', who do not trust in God, are not good enough to be included in the group called Americans. It is to be expected that Sullivan and those like her would love to see a sign on the City Council walls that brand them as superior citizens to those who do not share their religious beliefs. But the question remains whether it is legitimate for the government to be posting this message in public meeting rooms.

In fact, Sullivan is clearly seeking to make trust in God a religious requirement for public office. "All members of this Council trust in God, so that if a person does not trust in God, do not make them a member of this council." She seeks to deprive American citizens of one of their most fundamental right – to run for office as a political equal regardless of one’s religious beliefs – by hanging an advertisement favoring candidates who trust in God in the City Council chambers.

Sullivan's purpose with this measure is to establish religion – to establish 'trust in God' as a religious test for public office, and she wants to advertise this message of bigotry, division, and exclusion from the walls of the City Council chambers itself. That is something that the Founding Fathers told us we should not tolerate. And they were right.

Crises and Competence

So, are you sufficiently frightened yet?

Three months ago, you had a good idea what the world would be like two years from now. Even with the question of whether Obama or McCain would become President, the differences here would not be earth shattering. After all, we survived eight years under Bush. With a Democratic Senate and House, we could probably survive four years of McCain.

Now, intelligent people have to be asking, what will the world be like in two years? Unemployment in the double digits on a global scale? Baby boomers with their retirement accounts all but destroyed and nothing to live on but Social Security, and a government too bankrupt to even pay that. Perhaps we will be dealing with double-digit inflation, destroying investments by doubling the price of everything on the shelves.

These events are providing quite a shakeup.

Now what?

Well, we have the hucksters for religion going around saying, "In these times of uncertainty, turn to God – the only certainty in the world."

One of the problems with this option is that those who choose this route become almost worthless when it comes to solving a problem. When a house is burning down, or an earthquake has buried a quarter of a city's population in rubble, the people huddled in a prayer circle on the lawn are not actually doing anything to help bring the fire under control or rescue their buried neighbors. This is a terrible time to turn to prayer. This is a time to do some physical, real, materialist universe work.

However, in the current situation, a great many people are wishing that there was something they could do. Having the opportunity to pick up a shovel and actually do something useful would be a relief, compared to sitting home and watching the news. The situation is just too big for most of us. What can we do?

These concerns have two implications.

The first is that, for those who can do something, the previous concerns hold. It is time for them to get to work, to do what they can, and not waste time in prayer, superstition, and other nonsense. Real-world problems require real-world solutions. This requires having people who have studied and who understand how the real world works put their knowledge to use. A lack of understanding of the real world – real-world ignorance – is not going to help any of us.

This, of course, carries with it a lesson relevant to who should become President (and who should become vice-President with a possibility of becoming President in the future). We need people in that position who have a grasp of reality. In particular, we need people who know that they do not know everything, and that it is necessary to turn to experts in a field in order to figure out right answers. This means having somebody in the office of President who is at least competent enough to recognize the competence of others when he sees it – a quality that we can judge in this election by looking at who one chooses for a vice-Presidential candidate.

Those of us who have an unfavorable view of Bush and who have warned about how his stupidity is a threat to all of us like to blame others for putting Bush into office. We did not vote for him, so none of this is our fault.

However, we all did not work as hard as we could have worked to get the right person in office. The fault lies not only with those who did not vote for Bush, but those who did nothing (or did not do as much as they could have) to challenge a culture that treated incompetence and stupidity as virtues worthy of holding the highest office in the land.

I am not talking about merely campaigning for one candidate or the other. I am talking about the types of behavior that we engage in that helps to shape the culture that we live in – the values that we express to our friends, families, co-workers, fellow club members, and other acquaintances on what counts as a virtue worthy of admiration and respect, and what it is foolish for people to hold in high esteem.

Of course, eight years ago the liberal community was under the delusion that all value-systems were equal, that it makes no sense to say that one person's values were any better than anybody else's. Eight years ago, within the liberal community, criticizing somebody else's values was considered a fundamental error and something that ought not to be done. Let us ignore the fact that this view is internally inconsistent – it proved to be quite destructive. It gave destructive and dangerous value systems equal standing to the values of peace and competence.

We started to see that error on 9/11, where we were finally forced to wake up to the idea that all value systems are not equal. Now, we are being forced to wake up to the idea that competence is real – that folksy wisdom that allows a hockey mom to become President might work in a Walt Disney movie where everything is under the tight control of the director, but has as much bearing on the real world as teleporters and warp drive.

So, what is it that we can do in these circumstances, other than huddle in a circle and pray?

One of the things that we can do is to use this opportunity to promote the idea that competence is a virtue, incompetence is a vice, and the idea that an incompetent (but likable) idiot can run the country is one of the most dangerous and most destructive ideas floating around this country today. The way we mold the culture – the way we create a culture that values competence – is through the things we say in the company of our friends, family, neighbors, co-workers, club members, and classmates.

In other words, we need to challenge the idea that elitism is a dirty word, and that elitists are worthy of condemnation.

I am an elitist. By that I mean that when there is a job to be done, the job should be given to those who are the best skilled in performing that job – the elite. If there is a military operation to be conducted, we want elite forces to do it. If there is a medical outbreak to contain, we want elite medical specialists to contain it. If there is a financial meltdown to handle, we want elite economists to tackle it.

This means that we also want elite people in office – highly educated people, highly competent people, people who have the ability to recognize competence in others and who are willing to put elite people into positions that require competence.

"You people who think that folksy ignorance is a virtue got us into this mess – and the rest of us let you do it. We will not be letting you do that to us again. There is too much at stake."

That's our job in this crisis. That's what we can do. Because we are going to get through this a lot better and a lot faster with intelligent, competent people working on the problem, then we can ever hope to do by trusting to idiots backed by a circle of supporters praying that the idiot can come up with the right answer.

Marketing Truth

Today’s topic comes from one of the discussions that I had at Beyond Belief 3. This was a discussion of the role of truth in a political campaign.

As will all free-flowing discussions, it touched on a number of related topics. It touched on the need for a candidate to pretend to agree with the things that he does not agree with in order to attract voters. It touched upon what the religious views of the various candidates were, compared to what the candidate claimed to be true. For example, why do we believe that Alaska Governor Palin is seeped in religious ignorance, while Obama’s religious views are less dangerous. Is it the case that “our religious fanatic is better than your religious fanatic?”

When it comes to a candidate’s lies, we are quick to jump on any distortion of the truth that an opponent might make (even if it seems to be merely the type of slip we all make from time to time), while forgiving the deliberate distortions of friendly candidates.

We talked about Fox News and its business model. I hold that Fox News did not set itself up to be the propaganda arm of the Republican Party. Rather, Fox News set itself up with the idea that people tune in to hear people who are telling them what they want to hear. For Fox News, stories are not driven by ideology. They are driven by popularity, so that, if the popularity of certain ideas change, Fox News will seek to preserve its high ratings by pursuing the new trend.

In this conversation, I mentioned that there is no organization out there that is marketing truth.

Here’s my proposal. I would like to see a non-profit organization created whose purpose is to promote truth and reason. This organization would be smart enough to take whatever contributions that it can raise and go to a public relations firm. It will then tell the firm, “We want to sell truth – or, more precisely, promote a love of truth – in America. We want Americans to be more enamored with science and reason, and less enamored with superstition and nonsense. I want you to help us.

There are a number of people out there professing an interest in promoting science and reason over superstition and nonsense. However, none of them, that I am aware of, has gone to the effort of hiring professional public relations and marketing experts to sell this particular product. They think that they (the rank amateurs in this field) can do as good of a job, or better, than the experts.

Why is it that people who know the value of going to an expert scientist when they want to know something about a medical problem, or global warming, or the possibility of an asteroid impact, or engineer a bridge, or program a computer, do not recognize the value of going to experts when it comes to the task of selling product, such as selling a love of truth and reason? It seems to be nonsense that people who would never be so foolish as to think that they can do brain surgery on their own child themselves (without specialized training) can design a marketing campaign for a whole nation.

One of the questions that came up with in this discussion was, “How do we pay for it?”

At the moment, I could not think of any quick answers to that question. However, an answer came to me later – a rather obvious answer. That this, too, is a question for whatever public relations form takes up the task of marketing truth and reason. You ask them, “We need to raise money for this campaign. So, in designing this campaign, design a fund-raising program for it as well.”

I am simply following the same general principle that I have described elsewhere. “If you want something done right, don’t ask me to do it. Ask a professional to do it.” The very idea of an individual providing advice where there are professionals to ask – from areas of finance, law, medicine, engineering, and even matters of ethics and of marketing – is a sign of arrogant foolishness.

The arrogant fool sometimes gets lucky. And there is a small number – a very small number – of true geniuses who can figure things out without a lot of training. However, when it comes to betting one’s life, one’s well-being, and one’s fortune, it is not wise to assume that one is going to be lucky, or that one is one of these geniuses.

However these experts may decide to market truth, there is certainly an argument to be made for making the investment. The objective would be to get away from (or at least to get a little bit further from) all of the things from myth and superstition to deliberate deception that are clogging our social interactions and our efforts to make a better world.

Elizabeth Dole's Anti-Atheist Senate Campaign

Are you, my atheist – agnostic – freethought – humanist – secularist readers, tired of being used as the tool with which others bash the things you claim to value? I say claim to because I think that a person who values something would be adverse to being used as a tool in its destruction.

Earlier this year, Kieffe and Sons auto dealership put out advertisements telling you to sit down and shut up. They should have not only been forced to apologize, but to run an advertisement in which they retracted their earlier statement. Instead, they made money. (See: The Pledge Project: Sit Down and Shut Up.)

Then, Illinois Representative Monique Davis told an atheist witness to a legislative hearing that atheism is a philosophy of destruction and that he had no right to be there. Her so-called apology actually was founded on the bigoted belief that atheism brings immorality – a school shooting that, like all school shootings, can be blamed on the fact that God has been removed from the schools, and only religious students can be moral. She should have lost her job over this. (See: The Moral Argument for Davis' Resignation in Detail)

We had Army general Petraeus endorse a book that said that atheist soldiers are incapable of fully contributing to their military unit and, unlike Christians, may have a personal agenda that could lead to the unit's failure. (See: Petraeus Book 'Endorsement' Draws Fire)

We had North Carolina Senator Elizabeth Dole send out an fundraising letter in which she accused her challenger of meeting with 'those people' – atheists, secularists, humanists – that no good North Carolinian would be comfortable sitting down to dinner with. (See: Guess Who Is Not Coming to Dinner.)

In a society, we grow certain cultural elements by the use of praise and reward, and we inhibit or shrink them through the use of condemnation and punishment. In each of the examples given above, the perpetrator was met with more praise and reward than condemnation and punishment. So, in this culture, those elements were allowed to grow.

What, for the Elizabeth Dole re-election campaign, began as a profitable fundraising letter, is now a full-fledged campaign. Dole now seeks to defeat her opponent, Kay Hagan, by accusing Hagan of talking with atheists, humanists, and other undesirables. (See Friendly Atheist: Republicans Smear Senate Candidate Kay Hagan for Meeting with Atheists.)

Let's be clear about what Hagan's crime is here, according to Dole. Hagan is not being criticized for agreeing with any particular set of positions. Dole is condemning Hagan for the crime of merely talking to atheists, scularists, and the like. Not only are we wrong - we do not even have a right to present our case to those who may be our elected officials.

I want you to know what it means to allow this campaign to succeed.

If it succeeds, it will serve as a warning, from one end of this country to the other, that no candidate is to meet with or associate with atheist citizens. It will serve to put up a firewall (or, actually, strengthen an existing firewall) between atheists and those with political power. where the last thing a person in or seeking political power wants to be seen as doing is having an association with atheists, freethinkers, humanists, and the like. If we allow this meeting to be punished rather than rewarded, we would be foolish not to expect that future meetings will be harder to come by.

So, if we value what we claim to value, we will not allow ourselves to be used as a weapon for the destruction of those values. It is time to react with anger to make sure that bigots suffer punishment for their behavior, rather than reward. Whereas Elizabeth Dole's defeat for her bigotry earlier would have been a good thing, it is now essential to anybody who wants the secularist community to have any voice in the political arena.

Once again, I hasten to add that there is a right to freedom of speech and freedom of association, and freedom of religion. This right is not a right to immunity from condemnation or criticism for what one says, who one associates with, and one’s religious beliefs. It is, instead, a right to freedom from violence. So, in calling for the condemnation and punishment of these bigots, that condemnation and punishment must stay within the boundaries of words and private actions. Private actions have to do with issues like where to shop, what channels to watch on television, what to buy, who to go out with after work, what causes to contribute to, and who to vote for.

Dole and her cohorts deserve condemnation and punishment for their bigotry, but not the type of punishment that violates – or even threatens to violate – their rights through violent actions or threats of violence against persons or property.

However, within those bounds of words and private actions, we have our rights as well.

The bigotry that Dole is attempting to milk and nurture in her campaign is, actually, the same bigotry that resulted in the candidates for President having two faith-based debates or meetings, but which allowed them (encouraged them) to refuse to participate in Science Debate 2008.

We claim to value science, the scientific method, reason, and scientific thought. There is, in this country, a very strong anti-science contingent.

How does that anti-science contingent grow? It does so by equating science with atheism and by asserting that whatever is associated with atheism is to be condemned. Here, again, we claim to value science, but we allow ourselves to be used as a weapon in its social degradation and abuse. If we truly value that which we claim to value, we would not allow ourselves to be used as a weapon in this way. We would think that it is important to take a stand – to condemn and to punish (within the bounds established by existing rights as stated above) those who use us in this way.

One of the things that this campaign complains about is the desire to see 'under God' removed from the Pledge of Allegiance and 'In God We Trust' removed as the national motto. It is time to put some effort into communicating with the country why no good person would support 'under God' or 'In God We Trust'. These are the tools through which the nation teaches hatred and contempt for atheists to young children every year – an adverse emotional reaction to those not 'under God' or who do not trust in God – that gets fixed into their immature brain and frozen there.

By planting anti-atheist bigotry into the brains of young children, North Carolina (and the country as a whole) creates a block of adult voters with that same bigotry fixed into their brain that these candidates can then exploit in campaigns such as this.

To fight back, we must fight against the practice of feeding anti-atheist bigotry into the brains of young children. If we are not willing to do so, then we are willing to allow them to continue to use us as weapons for the sake of promoting an anti-secular government and anti-science values that will ultimately do all of us great harm in the long run.

There are those who say that, because of Dole's campaign, it would be a good idea to contribute to Kay Hagan's campaign. That would do some good, and I will not argue against it. However, this type of contribution is fighting the symptom, not the disease of bigotry itself. In order to fight the disease of bigotry the message has to be delivered to the people themselves.

I suspect that there are others who would be thinking that the North Carolina campaign is so far away from here that, "It does not concern me, so I have no reason to get involved."

If you are a member of an atheist, agnostic, humanist, secular, or similar organization in any state, then you need to be asking yourself how you are going to protect the electability of any politician that should happen to meet with leaders of organizations such as yours. If you can't (or won't) protect the electability of those leaders, then those leaders have every reason to avoid you and your organizations and to focus their attention instead on organizations who will take steps to protect and promote the electability of those who meet with them.

One of the ways to do this is to make noise about Dole's campaign not only in North Carolina but locally – to make sure that such behavior gets the condemnation and criticism it deserves among the people of whatever city or region you happen to live in.

Or, you can sit back and observe as people work to make sure that anybody who should show any type of respect or consideration for your views and your values are punished for their actions, and those who declare that you should be regarded as somebody who decent people should not invite to dinner (meet with, or talk to) are rewarded for their bigotry.

We can judge a person's true values by his actions – and what he really does not care about (in spite of his claims to the contrary) by his inactions.

McCain's Health Care Plan

As I said yesterday, both the McCain camp and the Obama camp seem to have adopted a policy of distorting their opponent's views to score political points. Today, voters are not getting anything in the way of truth. If you see a campaign advertisement, you might as well simply tag it as a lie (and the politician who says "I endorse this message" as a liar) and move on.

Yesterday I wrote about McCain's distortion of Obama’s view on Iraq – by classifying 'redeployment' as 'surrender'. Today, I am going to write about Obama’s mischaracterization of McCain’s health care system.

Several organizations that measure the truth of political advertisements have attacked Obama’s statement. See, for example the write-up on PolitiFact.com .

McCain's health insurance plan gives $2,500 to individuals and $5,000 to families for a tax credit to apply to health insurance. As the Obama advertisement points out, this goes to entirely to the insurance companies – as if it is a bad thing. Of course it goes entirely to the insurance companies. It's supposed to be spent on insurance. Would you expect money spent on insurance to go to a bakery?

Think of it this way. A company tells an employee that she can spend up to $50 per day on meals. On this particular day, the employee spends $41.59 on meals. So, the employee files an expense report with her employer, and the employer covers the $41.59.

The whole $41.59 ultimately goes to the restaurant that served the meal. Of course it does. It's supposed to. If the company gives money to an employee to cover meals, and the money goes to cover meals, is this supposed to be odd?

Now, let's alter the company’s meal plan a bit. Let's say that the company tells its employees, "You have a choice. You can either sign up for the Macaroni Grill meal plan, or the Outback Steakhouse meal plan. Whichever plan you choose, you will have to buy all your meals from that restaurant. We will pay half the cost of the meal. You pay the other half. However, your share of the cost of the meal will be tax deductable."

So, the employee buys all of his meals at the same restaurant. If he runs up a $50 tab at a particular restaurant, then his company will pay $25, he will pay the other $25 out of his pocket, but be able to deduct the expense off of his taxes. If the employee is in a 20% tax bracket, she will pay $25 for the meal and save $5 on her taxes, for a total cost of $20.

The company then gets bought out by McCain, Inc., which alters the meal plan. The company than says, "We will give you $2,500 per year for meals. You can eat wherever you want. If you end up spending less than $2,500, then we will cover all of your expenses. However, if you end up spending more than $2,500, then you pay for everything over that amount. We will not subsidize that portion."

Obama objects to this plan and says that it will increase costs for the employees who travel.

Actually, that depends on the employee.

If the employee spends less than $2,500 on meals, then his expenses will drop from $1,250 in pre-tax dollars (or $1,000 in after-tax dollars if we assume a 20% tax rate), to spending nothing. The agitator who is trying to get the employees to reject the plan by saying, "This will cost you more money!" would be lying – manipulating his fellow employees through a campaign of deception.

If, for example, the employee decides to spend $3,000 on meals, then he will still be getting $2,500 of that free, and spend $500 out of her pocket for the rest. Her after-tax expense would be $500. Under the old meal plan, she would have paid half of the total price for those meals but gotten a tax break of 20% (or $300), leaving a total cost of $1,200.

However, if the employee buys more or more expensive meals, If she spends $5,000 on meals, then, on the old plan, she would have had to cover $2,500 in expenses in pre-tax money, meaning an out-of-pocket after-tax cost of $2,000. Under the new plan, she pays for the whole cost of everything over $2,500 or $2,500 in after-tax expense.

In short, the plan provides three significant advantages over the current system.

(1) Choice: People get to eat at whatever restaurant they want rather than with one of the restaurants that the company has selected.

(2) Price elasticity: Buyers are more sensitive to price. This gives buyers an incentive to look for less expensive options – which gives companies an incentive to lower costs and to offer less expensive options.

(3) Freedom:

One area where the analogy above breaks down is that I have compared a company-offered plan with a government-supported plan. The advantage of the government supported plan is that the employee can take it with her.

Today, countless employees are trapped in their current job because they cannot afford to give up their company-provided health insurance. This gives a significant amount of power to the employer. In fact, where on paper it appears that the company is giving an employee a benefit in terms of paying a part of the health insurance, in fact the company makes that money back by offering less in terms of wages. The employee takes lower wages than she would accept if she had the option of leaving the company and taking her health insurance with her.

Now, if somebody does not like this option, or is making too little to take advantage of the tax credits, McCain's plan allows employees to continue to use the traditional option of signing up for company-offered health insurance (if available). If you do not like the new plan, then you can stick with the old plan. Though there would, of course, be some implications from the fact that people with lower medical bills will opt out of the current system, leaving only higher-cost patients within that system.

There are elements of the plan that Obama could honestly criticize. However, Obama opted against honest criticism in order to promote malicious representations instead.

Obama’s advertisements and statements on this matter are not only dishonest, they are harmful. Because of his deception, the American people on the whole are being made worse off than they would otherwise be. He is using lies and deception to warn people away from going down a path that may well be in our best interests, to manipulate us into going down a path of his choosing, rather than providing us with the facts and allowing us to choose for ourselves.

Much the same way that President Bush manipulated us into a war of his choosing.

Yet, Obama "approve[s] this message." Obama approves of the practice of using malicious distortions to manipulate the voting public into taking a course that he wants us to take.

That’s not a quality that I want to find in any presidential candidate and, less so, in any president. We have suffered through enough of that.

Iraq and Target Fixation

Iraq and Target Fixation

I take a weekend off to go to a conference and, while I am gone, both the Obama and the McCain campaigns decide to throw aside all respect for truth. Both are currently attempting to score political points by making claims about the other that are entirely false. They are both making several claims that fit this description, but I want to focus on two of them (one per candidate).

I wish to start with McCain’s representation of Obama’s strategy with respect to Iraq. McCain is attempting to cast as ‘surrender’ a type of strategy that can perhaps best be described as a redeployment – the way that a general on the battlefield might move a regiment from one part of the line to another as a part of a strategy for winning the battle.

(Tomorrow I will write about Obama’s representation of McCain’s strategy with respect to health care.)

I want to look at the way McCain (and Palin) are trying to describe Obama’s position with respect to Iraq by looking at a syndrome that the military is familiar with called ‘target fixation’.

Target fixation is a state (which I have most often seen in reference to combat pilots) in which the soldier becomes so fixated on a target that he is trying to destroy that it attracts all of his attention. He loses what is known as ‘situational awareness’.

For example, a fighter pilot picks out an enemy plane as his target. He tries to get on the enemy’s tail, or to get a lock for his radar. The enemy plane jinxes and twists in order to get out of (or reverse) the situation. The attacker then becomes so focused on fighting this one enemy that he loses track of everything going on around him. He does not see the enemy’s wingman line him up for a kill until it is too late.

An intelligent target can take advantage of an attacker’s target fixation. He can use it to lead the enemy attacking him into a trap. The fixated attacker does not see the trap until it is too late, because he is not watching what is going on around him.

However, target fixation can kill pilots without the intelligent intervention of the enemy. Pilots in the grip of target fixation can hit the ground or some other obstacle, simply by having their attention focused too heavily on a single target.

I am not going to stick to my position on the Iraq War – that I am not going to say which strategy is best until after I have attended all of the top secret military briefings on the conflict. Until that time, I do not have sufficient evidence on which to make a decision. And if I can offer a moral note, anybody who does offer that they know what to do in Iraq in spite of their substantially incomplete knowledge should be smacked down (verbally) for the moral crime of arrogance.

However, even though I can offer no intelligent guidance on how to conduct the war, I can still assess the logic that the McCain campaign is using to attack Obama’s position on the war. That language is the language of target fixation. As such, it is preventing the people of the United States from having an intelligent debate on these issues (as intelligent as it could b given the possibility of error).

In the Vice Presidential debate, Governor Sarah Palin said to Senator Biden:

Your plan is a white flag of surrender in Iraq.

When I heard this, a scene as if from a movie popped into my mind. In this scene, a lead fighter pilot has become fixated on a particular target. His wingman, who has preserved situational awareness, sees that the lead pilot is getting himself into a dangerous situation. He yells at the lead pilot, “Break off! Break off!” However, the lead pilot, who sees breaking off as surrender, refuses to do so.

Breaking off in this type of situation is not the same as surrender. It is simply a matter of using sound strategy against a determined enemy. The attacker will sometimes have to redeploy his forces, moving forces from one area where they are doing no good into another area where they can strike with greater effectiveness.

Similarly, there is nothing about the Obama strategy that is like surrendering to the enemy. The strategy is to pull resources away from one section of the battle where they are (allegedly) doing little good, and moving them to other sections of the battle that are crumbling. Over the past five years, Bush has allowed the Afghan/Pakistan front and the Domestic front in the war on terror to crumble to point that they seem nearly ready to collapse. We need to shore up those fronts – the Afghanistan/Pakistan front because that is where the terrorists really are hiding, and the domestic front because a powerful economy gives us strength.

I am not saying that this is the best strategy. It may well be that the Iraq front is the most important front in this conflict, and it would be foolish to weaken ourselves there in order to strengthen these other areas.

I am saying that the rhetoric that the McCain campaign is using against Obama is inaccurate – that Obama’s stated strategy does not involve surrender in any way. It involves the type of strategic redeployment that springs from situational awareness, recognizing that the war against terrorists has to be fought on a wide front that includes attacking their headquarters (which are on the Afghanistan/Pakistan border) and maintaining a strong economy/

We should clearly understand that the current economic crisis is a part of the war on terror. It represents a substantial deterioration of our economic ability to fight the war efficiently. Money that goes into preventing this economic collapse is money that cannot go into fighting military operations. It is also money that cannot go into education, technology development, infrastructure repairs, and similar investments. It is a multi-trillion-dollar blow against the war (probably arranged by Allah who has decided to ally Himself with the Jihadists who are fighting in His name).

McCain should at least be honest enough to describe Obama’s suggestion accurately. To the degree that we can do so, we should be discussing whether this redeployment of resources away from the Iraq front and into the Afghanistan/Pakistan and domestic fronts actually make sense. To the degree that we cannot do so (because we cannot attend the intelligence briefings that would be necessary to give us the important pieces of information) the candidates should at least have the integrity to present the options honestly.

Or, where the candidates refuse to be honest, we should seek an honest understanding from other sources.

Beyond Belief 3: Candles in the Dark

For each of the past two years I have taken the presentations from the Beyond Belief conference and written a post summarizing and criticizing each presentation.

See:

Beyond Belief 2006

Beyond Belief: Enlightenment 2.0

I am going to do the same this year. However, this year I will be working under the advantage of actually having attended the conference. The organizers decided, for some reason, to send me an invitation. So, here I sit, in La Jolla, California, waiting for the conference to begin - tomorrow, as I write this, at 8:30 am.

The subtitle for this year's conference comes from Carl Sagan's view of science as a "candle in the dark". Each presenter is to have come to the conference this year to present "a potential solution to a problem that they have identified in their area of expertise or informed passion.

The presenters this year tend to be involved in studying the brain as it relates to some field of study - morality, law, politics, economics.

I have nothing in principle against mixing neural science and ethics. However, I think that there is a serious problem with how the current batch of researchers are going about the problem.

Specifically, I am a moral realist. Furthermore, I reject the claim that there is some hard distinction between 'is' and 'ought'. Loyal readers should be familiar with my claim that we should focus instead on the distinction between 'is' and 'is not'. Morality either belongs in the realm of 'is' (somehow), or it belongs in the realm of 'is not'.

However, this does not tell us where to find morality in the realm of 'is'. In past conferences, I have found that the neural ethicists were looking in the wrong spot.

Let me illustrate with an example. A researcher takes a hoard of subjects and performs brain scans on them while they think about planets and stars and take astronomy tests. He may learn a lot of interesting things, However, it would be a mistake to call this researcher an astronomer. Studying thoughts about stars and studying stars is not the same thing.

Neural ethicists seem to be unaware of this distinction. They study the brain while the subject thinks about moral concepts or works through some moral problem or puts down an answer on some moral test, and they think they are studying morality. They are not. They are studying beliefs and other attitudes on morality

Tomorrow, I will be able to ask this and other questions of the presenters (I hope). I will wait until the Science Network posts the presentations on line before I start posting my summaries. However, I should have something of a head start in writng them.

And, as I have done in the past, I note that the Science Network provides these items for free. If you (like me) think that there should be more of this type of information out there in the world, then please become a member, or make a contribution.

Earmarks and Tax Loopholes

One of the issues that is being discussed in this election, and which was brought up a number of times in the first Presidential debate, is the issue of earmarks.

Earmarks involve putting an item in a bill that sets aside a bit of money to engage in a special project such as building a bridge or a section of highway, where the money then gets spent in the legislator's congressional district. In the Presidential debate, the contestants seemed to agree that these earmarks came to a total of $18 billion in the past year.

However, I wondered why the contestants did not mention the many other ways in which a legislator can negotiate special favors on behalf of specific groups or individuals. Why the focus on just earmarks? This $18 billion is trivial compared to the manipulations that are possible using other methods.

Tax Loopholes and Tax Cuts

Here is a rhetorical trick that I am quite tired of hearing in political discussions – the rhetoric of tax loopholes and tax cuts.

If you create a special tax break for some group or business, those who are in favor of the break like to call it a "tax cut" and to brag about it accordingly. At the same time, if a legislator is opposed to this particular break, she calls it a "tax loophole" that she promises to close. When she advocates closing this loophole, the proponents of the break then say that she is "voting in favor of raising taxes."

We see this currently in the financial bailout bill, and in plans to end particular subsidies to energy companies. One of the ways in which the financial bailout package was sweetened (in order to attract more votes) was by putting in special tax breaks for those alternative energy.

In passing this legislation, those who supported it can then go home and say, "I voted to cut taxes." They do not dare mention that what they did was vote to create tax loopholes through which special interest groups can then pay less taxes. They simply use the more generic claim of "I cut taxes." They make the claim as if to say, "You are paying less to the government because of what I have done."

However, this is typically not true. "You" do not have the means to take advantage of these tax cuts – only those with the resources to hire tax accountants and tax lawyers have that privilege. Even then, the loopholes they exploit will have to be large enough to cover the cost of the tax accountants and lawyers.

In other words, these types of government favors are for the rich – for those who can afford the lobbyists to get it passed, the marketing firm to persuade the public, and the tax lawyers and accountants to keep it legal.

Similarly, if any candidate threatens to close those loopholes and remove their special breaks, we can count on the special interest group that is benefitting from that loophole to accuse that the plan is to "raise taxes." In Colorado, we have a proposition on the ballot that would eliminate hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies to oil companies (who are making tens of billions of dollars in profits). Of course, the oil industry is running advertisements saying that this is a plan to "raise taxes by hundreds of millions of dollars" and that the customers can rest assured that the costs will be passed onto consumers.

There is so much spin involved in these types of debate that one cannot read (or write) about them without getting dizzy. The winner of these conflicts tends to be the person who can create the scariest advertisements, and that tends to be the people who have the most money – who can pay for the most expensive commercials and the market research that goes into making sure that those commercials are effective.

Technically, there is little practical difference between a $300 million tax break and a $300 million tax subsidy. There is no difference between saying, “You all have to pay the same amount – then we will give Group G $300 million out of the money we collect,” and saying “You all have to pay the same amount, except for the members of Group G, who will be allowed to pay $300 million less.

Which means that, if it is good for the economy and for the people at large that an industry get a $300 million tax break, then it is also good for the people at large that they get taxed $300 million in order to give the industry in question a tax subsidy. An advertisement that says, "Keep our $300 million tax break" is no different than an argument that says, "Tax yourselves $300 million more and give the money to us."

It only looks different.

And looks are what is important in political spin.

An 'earmark', then, is a piece of legislation that says, "Tax the people $X and give it to this group over here." A tax loophole is little different from saying, "Tax the people $X so that this group over here can keep its money."

There is no particular virtue in being opposed to earmarks, as McCain claims to be, and being "in favor of lower taxes" in the form of tax subsidies to particular individuals.

I would bet that, if you added up the value of all of the tax loopholes that exist – the "tax cuts" as their proponents like to call them – it amounts to far more than $18 billion in special favors.

The discussion over earmarks is a diversion – a distraction – a concern over a trivial matter such as spilled coffee while ignoring the multi-vehicle pileup with death and injuries in which the coffee was spilled.

I am not saying that all tax loopholes are a bad thing. I would not say that all earmarks are bad either. Many of the earmarks that legislators approve are for things that would get done anyway under more general legislation such as improving infrastructure. The difference is between giving $18 billion to an agency and letting it decide which infrastructure to improve, and giving $18 billion to an agency and a list of infrastructure improvements for it to make.

What I am objecting to is the political language that plays upon the false attitude that earmarks are different from tax breaks in some significant way – that a person who is opposed to earmarks but in favor of tax loopholes is somehow being consistent when, in fact, she is not being consistent at all.

Even though not all earmarks are bad, and not all tax loopholes are bad, an argument can be made for getting rid of both of them completely. The argument says that, "Getting rid of all $18 million in earmarks may get rid of some good earmarks, but it will get rid of more bad than good."

Similarly, closing hundreds of billions of dollars in tax loopholes may close some good loopholes, but it will close far more bad loopholes and, thus, be a net benefit. It would, of course, be to our advantage to allow the good earmarks and eliminate the bad – and allow the good loopholes and eliminate the bad. However, if we seem incapable of having $X billion in good earmarks and loopholes without generating 10 x $X in bad earmarks and loopholes, we may benefit from ending the practice entirely.

This is an empirical question, and it would take an empirical study to support any conclusions.

The Vice Presidential Debate

The vice-presidential debates are coming up on Thursday night. ("Tonight", as most of you read this.)

I suspect that they are going to be totally worthless. They are not going to address many of the core issues that should be addressed with respect to job of being the vice president. What we are going to get is a 'debate' in which the moderator will ask a question, and the candidate will give us his or best guess as to what the person at the head of the ticket would say about that issue.

This is not what I want to hear.

The Subject of the Debate

If I were in charge of moderating the debate, I would begin with the following:

The most important job for the vice-President is to stand in and be President in case something happens to the person we elected to that position. At any moment an assassination, a heart attack, an airplane crash, or an unfortunate encounter with a pretzel could end that person’s life or render him incapable of serving as President of the United States. In this case, you get to take over.

So, let's work with that assumption. Let us say that John McCain and Barak Obama are no longer capable of being President of the United States, and the job is going to fall to you. I am going to ask you a set of questions, and I want you to answer how you would address that issue as President.

I do not want to hear the names "John McCain" and "Barak Obama" even mentioned in your answers. I do not want you to sing the praises of the person who leads your ticket. I do not want you to criticize the person who leads the opposing party’s ticket. They are no longer with us – that is why you are here. Now, the nation waits for you to answer the important question, "Now what? Now what will Sarah Pahin or John Biden do, now that she or he is President."

Now, let's go to the first question. As President, how would you approach . . .

These are things that I, as a voter, have a right to know about the person who sits a heartbeat away from being President.

The two campaigns will not like this option. The first and most important problem will come from the vice presidential candidate questioning some of the presidential candidate’s policies. The presidential candidate, let us assume, is pro choice. They do not like the idea of the vice presidential candidate questioning the policies of the presidential candidate – that would be disastrous. This leaves us with the option in which the vice presidential candidate tries to do his or her best imitating the presidential candidate.

Rhetoric and Generalities

The news has been reporting that a lot of effort has been going into preparing for this debate. Biden needs little training – he has been in politics long enough that he would do better as a teacher than as a student.

On Palin's side, her handlers will help her to provide answers that disguise her lack of knowledge of specific facts, and allow her to speak rhetoric. She will likely speak passionately about the wonders of a free market – on how it creates jobs, lowers costs, and generates opportunity. She will speak harshly about government waste and how important it is to root out these wasteful government programs and eliminate them. She will lament on how bad it would be to have a situation where the government will be stepping in to medical discussions that ought to be left between a patient and her doctor.

But, they will be light on specifics.

Part of the idea is that, if she doesn't say anything, then she can't say anything wrong (though, in Palin’s case, her handlers have discovered that there is some need to teach her how to utter coherent English sentences).

It is important to note who are handling Palin's training for this debate. These are people who have had years of experience hiding ignorance – hiding it at least well enough to win an election or two. Yes, we know that Bush was an ignorant fool. However, getting Palin (an McCain) elected doesn’t include wasting resources convincing us. There are others who will be easier to convince.

Handlers

One concern that people should have is that, while handlers can prepare a candidate for a scheduled debate against a known opponent, there is no way that they can prepare a President for an emergency like 9/11.

Remember George Bush on the day of the 9/11 attacks, sitting in a class of grade school children while America was under attack, not knowing what to do? He was incapable of action – incapable of leadership. What would Palin do if she were President, and some terrorists successfully launched another attack against us? Will she be carrying a stack of note cards in her pocket for just such an occasion?

How would Palin address the issue of a Russian invasion of Georgia? A nuclear standoff between India and Pakistan? A radical Muslim overthrow of the government of some oil-rich country? A Cuban Missile Crisis? Increased tensions between China and Taiwan? North Korea’s restarted nuclear program?

One option will be that President Palin will still be under the influence of her handlers. If this is the case, then her handlers will be in charge of foreign policy. Palin would simply be a figure head that these handlers will use to either sell their product to the public or to hide it from them with meaningless diversions.

If President Palin is not being handled, then where will she turn to interpret the events going on around her? Her personal history suggests that she is going to pray to God to tell her what to do. She will then see some random event – something that she will take to be a "sign from God," and whatever idea that pops into her head at that moment will determine her policy. She will step into it with utter conviction that it is the right thing to do because her instructions came from God, and God could not possibly be wrong. She will be throwing a dart at a dartboard (and, given her level of ignorance, she will be throwing the dart while blindfolded).

She might get lucky.

She probably won't.

I would rather give the darts to somebody who does not think that God is going to tell him where to throw it. I want a dart thrower who will remove the blindfold and use his eyes and his mind to decide where and how hard to throw the dart.

Nothing at the debates will show us how President Palin will handle an issue she was not prepared for, or what type of ideas might somehow spring into her otherwise empty brain.

Personal Financial Responsibility

There is a group of people among those whose morally culpable behavior contributed to the current meltdown in the financial markets whose blameworthiness is being swept under the rug.

We have heard people putting the blame on greed and irresponsibility on Wall Street. those few highly paid wall street executives who can drive a company into the ground and then retire with a multi-million dollar “golden parachute”.

We are missing is any discussion of the contribution that came from the greed and irresponsibility on Main Street.

Politicians, certainly, cannot deliver the message. They need to tell the voters, “This is not your fault. You are the victim. They did this to you. Vote for me, and I will make sure that they pay for their crimes.”

The fact of the matter is that some of the culprits are probably in the audience at every political rally. The honest politician would have to look out into that audience and say, “Given the way some of you have run your household finances, you have made your contribution to this. If we have a right to be angry at the prospect of bailing out greedy wall-street executives, we have just as much a right to be angry at the prospect of bailing out the financially irresponsible homeowner.”

A lot (though certainly not all) of the moral responsibility for the country’s current financial mess rests with those who took out loans that they could not afford. These people received a package in the mail or saw an advertisement on television from somebody promising to lower their monthly payments by hundreds of dollars, or to get them into a house that was larger than they dreamed they could ever afford, and the leapt at the opportunity. Or, they refinanced their homes in order to cash out some of the equity built up by rising home prices. Or both.

They were greedy. They wanted things, and they were not going to let a little issue like fiscal responsibility prevent them from satisfying this hunger. They went into debt – more dept then they could afford.

When the grace period on these loans ended and the value of their payments went up, they found that they were now being asked to pay more than they could afford. Some went into foreclosure. The bank seized the property and then sold it. But, with a lot of property being sold, the prices started to drop.

Others tried to sell their homes to get out from under their debt, but their homes were now worth less than the debt they needed to pay.

The world is full of risk. Often even the most responsible person will find herself the victim of a universe that cares nothing about his or her happiness delivering random blows that force them into bankruptcy. The most financially responsible person cannot guarantee financial solvency. So it is not the case that everybody who lost their home is to blame. At the same time, some of them could have acted more responsibly than they did.

If we are going to get angry and say, “Why should we bail out wall street?” then we should be equally angry and say, “Why should we bail out financially irresponsible homeowners?” In both cases, they could have helped the nation avoid this mess if they had only acted responsibly.

Ultimately, I do not advocate the type of cold callousness of refusing to help those who have gotten themselves into this kind of bind. We would be worse off living in a society where everybody was that callous. However, this does not change the fact that many of the people who took out loans, the people now dependent on our aid, put themselves in that position. They created a burden for us, and this should be figured into our response.

We have reason to turn to our neighbors and demand some measure of fiscal responsibility, to offer praise to the financially responsible neighbor, and condemnation for those who are financially irresponsible. We certainly have many and good reasons to promote financial responsibility in the community at large.

Here are some of the rules for financial responsibility.

(1) Create a savings account that you can draw on in case of emergencies. Instead of depending on other people to rescue you from some financial setback, give yourself the tools you need to rescue yourselves. Keep yourself in a financial position where you can say, “Don’t worry about me. Go help those who really need it.”

(2) Put a substantial percentage of each paycheck away in savings. If you are accustomed to living off of 80% of your income, and you have no debt, then you will be better off than you would be if you are living off of 110% of your income and this includes $200 per month in interest payments on credit card debt.

I constantly hear from people, “I cannot cut my expenses. All of the money that I get goes to essentials.” This is nonsense (in most cases). If you are making anything above subsistence level, then you can save money.

(3) Avoid debt. You do not need credit cards. Next time you put some debt on a credit card, think of it this way. That new purchase is going to go to the bottom of your debt pile. You will pay for that movie, game, tool when it reaches the top of your revolving credit list. How long will that be? And how much will it cost you when you add on all of the interest payments from the time of purchase until the time it reaches the top of the credit card list.

If it currently takes you 6 years to pay the current principle on your current debt and you have a 12% interest rate on your credit card, then the $50 dinner you buy today will end up costing you $100 by the time you actually pay for it. You can either pay $100 for a $50 night out, or you can buy two nights out (by not having any debt).

(4) Buy things that you can afford to keep if something goes wrong. It turns out that, in this housing crisis, it is the price of high-end houses that are dropping. People who bought modest homes well within their budget are not only staying in their homes, but their homes are not dropping in value either. People who are foreclosing or trying to get out from under staggering debt are selling larger homes and buying more modest homes. So, while the price of high-priced homes has dropped, the price of modest homes has stayed steady (depending on location).

The people who obeyed these basic principles of financial responsibility are not the ones who got our country into this mess. If everybody had behaved like them, then there would be no mess for us to dig our way out of.

It’s the moral difference between being a part of the problem, or being ready to be a part of the solution.