Hello From Uranus

2001-3001 My Spiritual Odyssey

2011-10-13T16:04:00.000-07:00

3001: The Final Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The late Arthur C. Clarke is one of my favorite science fiction writers and 2001: A Space Odyssey, based on an earlier short story of his, The Sentinel (1948), has always been something of a spiritual experience for me, even though I am not prone to spiritual experiences. But, given the prescient depiction of the moon and our galaxy in those pre-Apollo mission days, both film and book are breathtaking.

For this current generation reared on CGI animation and blockbuster special effects and IMAX, it’s hard to articulate the feeling of this Clarke/Kubrick classic as it moved across the big screen. There was a certain indescribable feeling – a breathless, “whoa” at the end of the film as the screen went dark and the theatre lights came on. No one in the auditorium moved to peel ourselves off the uncomfortable seats. It was a hot summer day and the air conditioning had died halfway through the movie…yet nothing mattered.

This was my experience in 1977, nine years after the film’s release, and I had already seen both Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which were special effects wonders in comparison. There was just this weird feeling that something happened. The 11 year old that I used to be had just had the second of only two real theophanies I would ever have…the first one occurred when I was six years old.

Unfortunately, the lingering eager naiveté that accompanied my pleasure over 2001 and even 2010 (I was a high school senior when both the novel and the movie were released) could help 3001 measure up to the first two. But, then at 44 I am a bit more jaded then when I was a geeky and easily awestruck teenage science fiction nerd. My expectations were perhaps unrealistic. Nostalgia can break your heart.

3001 is still compelling. The breadth of Clarke’s imagination has never failed to astound me as he takes current scientific knowledge and extrapolates the future world and fate of humanity. Just as in Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was broken into four components (the symbolism of 4 appeared throughout the film), Clarke has broken up his literary odyssey into four distinct novels that are not typically linear storytelling.

As the final story opens we are a thousand years into the future from where the failed Discovery mission ended with Frank Poole being ejected from the spacecraft by Hal and the transformation of Dave Bowman into the star child. Heywood Floyd, Dr. Chandra and the Russian crew of the Leonov are also long gone. The earth and our small galaxy are different places…almost unrecognizable. Jupiter has been transformed into Lucifer, a dimmer version of our own sun, and it shines down on the evolving Europa.

It is this future time that the 100 year old body of Frank Poole is found floating out in the outer reaches of the galaxy…frozen, but apparently not dead. He is miraculously revived and comes full circle in an odyssey of his own as he resumes his life in a world and time far removed from the early 21st century. As Frank adjusts to his life in this new world it would seem that the monolith is become active again. Soon Halman – the merged consciousness of Dave Bowman and the computer HAL – is being spotted again in various places. Soon he has an ominous message for his old friend Frank Poole.

Clarke manages to tell a great story and retain an element of mystery about the powers or intelligences behind the monoliths, although I think he does a much better job of this in his Rama series, which are both technically and artfully his more superior works. But, those of you who share my sense of wonder over the world of the monoliths, Dave Bowman and Hal will still find something worthwhile in 3001 The Final Odyssey.

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The Odyssey as Maturation Process

2011-10-12T17:07:00.000-07:00

A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.
~George Moore

I have often heard Mr. Moore’s pith teaching stated another way. The only wisdom you find at the top of the mountain is the wisdom you brought with you. Indeed, but nonetheless the journey or the ascent up the mountain is still necessary. The journey is the process of discovery whether it is an outwardly geographical one or an interior one. Sometimes they are both.

It’s no accident that the ancient Greeks often depicted the pursuit of wisdom as an odyssey, a circular journey where you end right back where you started. Odysseus is the quintessential spiritual hero when viewed in this light. So, too, is his son Telemachos although in Homer’s epic poem his journey is not explored in great thematic detail. Nonetheless it is there for those who posses both the insight and imagination to divine it.

The journey or the ascent up the face of the mountain (I think of John of the Cross’s Ascent to Mt. Carmel) is the maturation process, the refining of character that is needed to access the wisdom that we possess innately.

In the past when people have slyly advised me that my outward searching will get me nowhere because “I could find everything I need right where I am” I smiled and politely pretended to acknowledge their oh-so-advanced-wisdom, while ignoring it completely. Just because you have a personal insight or spent $1,500.00 to get your first degree Reiki mastership doesn’t mean anything. We often just think we are wise. After 20 years of meditation I am less of a master then when I started.

The only think I know for certain is that I am ignorant. The more I learn the more I realize how little I truly understand. Wisdom and serenity and just about all spiritual attributes we hope to obtain require hard work, sweat, blood and sometimes a near death experience (literal and /or metaphorical). Even Grace requires learning how to recognize and accept it.

The late 19th century novelist and occultist, Dion Fortune, once described the spiritual journey as an arduous climb up the side of a cliff to get to the holy temple. Once you arrived the quest is still not over. The true dangers are still before you. You must penetrate the temple until you get to the inner sanctum where the Holy of Holies, behind a gossamer veil lies. Once you rend the veil you find the chamber empty and a thin, quiet voice whispering to you seemingly out of nowhere, “It was you the whole time.”

Sure sometimes we mistake running from our troubles as part of the quest, but in its own way it truly is part of the maturation process. Sometimes staying where you’re at is just hiding. And that too is part of the maturation process. None of us are in a position to claim knowledge of a how a person should grow. The truly mature among us know that. It’s the immature that often feel inclined to offer pat phrases wrapped up in spiritual packaging. “Look,” they say, “See how wise and spiritual I am compared to you?” That doesn’t mean your sponsor or spiritual mentors are without value. They have tremendous value. But, their value lies in their openness and their maturity

At the end of the odyssey the hero always returns to his or her point of origin. That is the point after all. A treasure hunter may circumnavigate the globe in search of a great treasure only to find it under their floor when they return home. But, it is the experiences along the way that teach them where to look when they get home. It is the journey or climb itself that allows one to truly appreciate what they find waiting for them. Without it all you have is another worthless artifact.

Postscript

As a postscript it seems apropos to note that well traveled people are often more wise, compassionate and possess true knowledge far and above those who don’t travel as much. This seems especially true of those who actually live for periods of time in new places – even if it is within their own countries.

The Friend of Silence

2011-10-12T17:01:00.001-07:00

This statement seems patently false to me.

We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature - trees, flowers, grass- grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence... We need silence to be able to touch souls.

Mother Teresa

It smacks of spiritual fantasy. I don’t doubt that given a serene and bucolic setting I can find myself drawing closer to god. But, the demands of my life make this unrealistic. It seems a false sense of mysticism. If I find God amidst the clamor and chaos of the city, if I can draw closer to him and feel his presence among the thousand shouting voices, crying souls, gunshots and screeching tires than I am truly centered.

Moments of silence are nice. They are even necessary for mental health and spiritual growth. But, anyone can cultivate silence sitting against a tree near a babbling brook. It’s finding that silence in the heat and passion of daily life that makes for great silence and even greater spirituality.

When you have the luxury afforded to the religious of making regular retreats (in the Catholic Church all members in religious orders are required to withdraw at least once annually) then you have the luxury to experience what Mother Teresa is talking about. Hell, go camping in a national park for a couple of days when you can.

God is the friend of silence, but he is the friend of chaos too. In the Judeo-Christian tradition he created by passing over the void and calming its tumultuous nature. Perhaps, God is silence itself and in order to be experience one must become consciously aware of god’s presence.

Zen Humanism in a Nutshell

2011-09-01T09:32:00.000-07:00

In a nut shell Zen Humanism is the resolution of our psychological and emotional conditioning that prevents us from seeing the world as it really is. It is the examining of the way we have been conditioned by our culture, our parents, our religions and various political worldviews to the exclusion of all other possibilities. It puts the needs of people above god, religion, nation and politics. It maintains a reverential attitude toward our ecosystem and the world at large, but it is not pantheism. There is nothing to worship. Worship is an ego driven need.

It is the latest stage in my personal development combining my experiences from practicing a form of Buddhist meditation (although I am not a Buddhist necessarily) and as a religious humanist. I am an atheist with a pious attitude toward life and the universe. I see the world a certain way and it often blocks me to the pain of my fellow humans an all sentient beings...I must resolve these barriers.

Zen Humanism is pro-human, pro-ecosystem and pro-life (not to be confused with the inappropriately named anti-abortion movement). Any religion or ideology that does anything other is detrimental to life on this planet and anti-human. Finally, Zen Humanism, having no essential creed or dogma, seeks to remain open to new revelations in psychology and science and to allow them to inform the decisions we make. We seek to prevent our tendency toward dogmatic thinking.

The Dynamic Tension between Capitalism and Socialism

2011-08-22T09:33:00.000-07:00

I am equally as suspicious of socialism as I am of capitalism. But, I see no solid evidence that socialism is any less destructive then capitalism or more beneficial. The states that have the most success with socialist type experimentation seem to be democratic style governments that exist in a state of dynamic tension between capitalist interests and socialism. Proponents of either economic theory (theories, really) accuse the opposite camps of relying on outdated and discredited ideas. It seems to me that both Socialists and Capitalists are guilty of such behavior.

Buy success I should clarify that I am speaking of Western Europe, where the populations are smaller and more stable then they are throughout the rest of the world. China is the last great bastion of Marxism of any great significance and they have taken to experimenting with free enterprise, the most basic tool of capitalism. Ideologically they are seeking to beat the western world at its own game, but the reality is that pure socialism simply does not provide the necessary economic stability needed to ensure a nation’s long term viability. Sadly, China seems to have not learned much from the west’s failures with capitalism. They understand capitalism’s advantages, but they are seeking to prevent the wrong failures. Countries such as Cuba are basically failed states.

I currently believe that the answers we seek to stabilizing our economic future is to be found in exploring the dynamic tension between capitalism and socialism rather than in the fierce polemical debate that seeks to eliminate one over the other. Conservatives in America in their ignorance and unwillingness challenge those on the left by stating “socialism hasn’t worked anywhere.” American socialists point to countries such as Norway (that is enviable in both economics and lifestyle, although Oslo made Forbes list as the 2nd most expensive city to live in throughout the world) without seeing some of the challenges it faces as well.

Such a blanket statement is hardly true. I would agree that pure socialism doesn’t appear to have worked, at least as far as my current knowledge to date indicates. But, that doesn’t mean it is completely unviable as a working theory. Secondly, American conservatives seem to be confused as to a definition of what socialism really is. They point to Germany (of all countries) and rant about socialized medicine. Germany doesn’t have socialized medicine. It’s a complex hybrid of for profit insurance and single payer. Canada also doesn’t have socialized medicine. It is largely single payer. Neither system is perfect. Both systems have issues of sustainability and affordability. But, then so does the United States, which is 100% free market, for profit.

Fear of socialism in America has been rampant since FDR unveiled the New Deal Programs. It seems that post modern conservatives are still stuck in the cold war where our ideologies clashed with the Soviet Union. They are still operating on such old definitions. They have not seen that the West won the cold war. The epitome of Marxism collapsed in the late 1980’s and in the years that followed Western Europe has curtailed socialist policies in favor of mixing them with capitalism to ensure a more vibrant economic life. Yes, some places that has worked better than others.

Capitalism and Socialism do not need to be mutually exclusive except in the erudite world of academics and the polemicists who defend their favored horse. I for one love free enterprise. But, I also respect the idea of single payer health insurance. The problem is the terms we use. We need a new working theory. A theory that takes the best of both and seeks to eliminate the failures and find a way of compromising on those aspects which would clash and prevent any new theory from working properly, after all you can’t have a football game when both teams are playing by separate sets of rules. That would be chaos.

We need to stop thinking in terms of capitalism and socialism. How this will look I am not yet certain. But, if we don’t start moving toward the center our extreme polarization will prevent us from affecting the change we need. If we continue on our present course we will fail to reach consensus or even define the problems adequately before it is too late.

Clear Lake, WI Not Scary, but will Cure Insomnia

2011-08-21T17:16:00.000-07:00

Clear Lake, WI

(2009)

Starring: Dustin Booth, Morgan Simpson, Grinnell Morris, Shi Ne Nelson and Carla Toutz

Director: Brian Ide

Writers: Morgan Simpson and Grinnell Morris

2 Screams

Peeeee youuuuuu! This film stunk up my living room something fierce. This film was recommended by Netflix because I had watched The Crazies. But, this movie was hardly scary except for a moment when the married couple was surprised by a startled cat. My girlfriend shrieked in my ear causing me to scream. Our dog looked at us like we were both nuts. That was the only real shocker during the whole 92 minutes of running time.

Fifteen years before the story begins the town of Clear Lake, Wisconsin is evacuated by the CDC because of a mysterious illness killing town folks. The disease is traced back to a toxic chemical spill in the lake. No one has been within the town’s borders since.

During the panic preceding the evacuation, 13 town locals disappeared. It is discovered that it is the due to the work of a mysterious clergyman known as “The Minister,” who was really just the high school basketball coach filling in for the real minister after he fell ill, and a group of his teenaged followers who refer to themselves as the Warriors. These young people helped kidnap, torture and murder these hapless “sinners” whom the Minster (Michael Madsen) sees as the cause of the plague that he interprets as God’s wrath for the town’s unbelief.

The Minister is off his nut and seriously believes that he is trying to save the townspeople and the kids are totally enraptured by his depraved message. A totally clichéd background story if there ever was one. The Minister eventually pleads guilty and goes to prison for life. His teenaged followers miraculously escape prosecution and end up scattered across the country to live tortured, unhappy lives until young PBS documentarian Kyra Sannhet decides to tell their story.

In horror film circles this is known as a really bad idea. Despite being warned off by former Clear Lake sheriff, Joe Dietzer (Paul Ben-Victor) who is inexplicably in a wheel chair, Kyra believes her project will do some good. She has the large doe eyes of a young idealist who hasn’t lived long enough to develop common sense. She won’t either, but this should not be a surprise. Sherriff Dietzer tells her that “she doesn’t know what she is dealing with” during an interview at his home. But, young idealists are crazy, especially sweet faced, pretty and earnest young idealists. Kyra somehow manages to convince four of the warriors to return to the abandoned town to relive their past in order to get at the mystery behind the events.

The problem is there is no mystery. A toxic spill caused an illness, a sociopathic basketball coach gets religion and uses his teenaged disciples to kidnap and punish sinners. The big question Kyra tries to get the answer for is why? Why would these seemingly normal, good kids suddenly fall under the spell of an authority figure that they turned to in a time of fear and uncertainty? Oh…wait a minute…

Don’t worry fans of unrelenting and unseen killers. Clear Lake has one of those too except that it’s so obvious that you are yawning the whole time the filmmaker and her subjects get picked off one at a time. Actually, rather than building suspense by stalking each victim after stranding the group with no way to leave, he sort of rounds them up and makes quick work of them in the high school.

Normally, I try to avoid spoiler alerts, but I am hoping to avoid you losing 90 minutes of your life you won’t ever get back. The killer is the crazy one. They’re all a little crazy, to be sure, and who wouldn’t be after what they went through 15 years ago? But, the killer is a bit of an asshole and a little crazier then the rest. He’s also impotent. When he gets his chance to get a little ass from Beth, the girl he has longed for since high school, while checking out the church he flips. Potential serial killers should always avoid sex. It seems to trigger homicidal rage.

Speaking of homicidal rages this film is so bad it will trigger a homicidal rage in you providing that you don’t fall asleep first. The real mystery in Clear Lake, Wisconsin is not the horrific events in the past, but how Michael Madsen and Paul Ben-Victor, both competent actors, agreed to appear in this film. Perhaps, just as Lawrence Olivia and Burgess Meredith who appeared in Clash of the Titans, they just needed the work. Sending children to college is expensive. The film has one redeeming quality. Watch it if you have trouble falling asleep. Avoid it if you are depressed otherwise you will find yourself sticking your head in a gas oven just to make it all stop.

The Double Whammy of American Economic and Climate Illiteracy

2011-08-19T10:32:00.000-07:00

As far as the general population goes, Americans are poorly informed on the issue of climate change – a neo con term coined to help cast doubt on the issue of global warming. Thanks to a successful campaign of misinformation the public seems to believe in great numbers that scientists are still debating whether or not global warming (climate change if you prefer) is happening. They’re not. Among climate scientists the number of researchers who debate its reality is pretty close to zero.

There is truly no debate among researchers as to the reality of global warming. It’s here. It’s happening. It poses a real threat to the survival of our species. Part of the neo-con misinformation campaign is the very real fact that climate change is a part of our planetary history. This is correct. It many ways global climate shifts are inevitable and we can do little, but adapt.

But, and this is the part they want you to forget about, our species plays a huge role in the hastening of these processes. Our contributions we can do something about. But, that would mean radical change in many ways. We have to change our approach to energy, agriculture, transportation, and industry. The neo-con love of capitalism actually blocks the innovation they believe it fosters. The necessary changes will be costly and it will erode profits making it hard for the true innovators to implement new technologies. Yet they would profit immensely in the long run if they would get behind it.

Sadly, Corporate America and our government fail to understand that they are costing us our competitive advantage. In the future, should our species survive the United States will not be on the top of the economic food chain. Rather than our capitalist system being the source of innovation and prosperity it is the seed of our destruction. It actually kills competitive edge and innovation in preference for the unhealthy accumulation of wealth and “easy profits” made through the manipulation of currency and other questionable investment devices.

In addition to being poorly informed on global warming, the majority of Americans are economically illiterate. This includes those who are currently elected to office and those aspiring to be there. How often does the economic advice or warning of economists go unheeded in congress? The so-called budget crisis created by the GOP found conservatives ignoring conservative economists warning that cutting federal budget in a recession is problematic and unsound. Spending in a recession is important to recovery and the stablilizing of a wounded economy.

This double whammy of illiteracy – on climate change and economics – is the proverbial writing on the wall. Our past prosperity was based on the abundance of cheap fossil fuels, which are quickly approaching peak production if we haven’t already, and accelerated by the destruction of the European infrastructure following World War II. In the 1950’s the United States was in the inevitable position to take advantage both technologically and politically, which we did with aplomb. Then we were without peers. There will be no tears shed for the U.S. There will be cheers from our enemies and anger from those who have come to rely heavily on us, as our end spells their end as well.

The real nightmare isn’t the present situation we are in. The nightmare is that we have the technological know how. We have the ability, the talent and the capital to move forward and make the changes that are needed to ensure our survival and prosperity. We just lack the collective political will. Progressives and conservatives shout each other down across lines created by pure ideology and status quo. This problem is exacerbated by the mass media proliferation of talk shows and bellicose pundits who simply offer their opinions as if they were facts (as I do here in many ways). Truthfully, I am presenting you with my best educated guess as to what our future will most likely hold.

The problem is actually political. We have the smarts to come up with the innovations. That is really not the problem. It never has been. If it was we would not have been a successful species. It is human nature expressed as politics that is killing us. “Politics” ties us to the polis - our social clumps. It is an expression of human nature and unless we can find a way to change our nature dramatically and soon, or at least override these impulses long enough to affect change we are in big trouble.

I know of no real political solution. Americans have grown soft and complacent because of our long term prosperity. Even as it is threatened many of us are still doing well enough to do little else, but carry on as usual and bitch and moan along side our favorite talk show hosts. We have lost our thirst for adventure first hand. We have little pioneer spirit. It’s always the pioneers that innovate, not the moneyed few who finance them.

We are certainly intelligent enough and clever enough to survive and prosper. Whether or not we will stop bickering long enough to do so remains to be seen making my unpopular observation about democracy actually impeding progress the larger and more diverse a population becomes seem like the real threat I believe it to be.

Jack & Madi and A Peculiar Turn of Events: Story Evokes L Frank Baum with Clever Dialogue and Evocative Prose

2011-08-16T14:06:00.000-07:00

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I have a confession to make. I am 44 and I still love kid lit. Jill M. Hohnstein’s, Jack & Madi and A Peculiar Turn of Events, is the reason that I will never give up reading novels intended for younger audiences. Stories such as Jack & Madi reach far beyond a mere intention to entertain. They reconnect us with long ignored archetypes and the neglected landscapes deep within our psyches that we often deny and neglect.

Jack and Madi are ordinary kids that “lived ordinary lives, with ordinary parents, in an ordinary town, in Oregon” until the day their father accepts a promotion and moves them cross country to a boring, one horse town in Nebraska, where attending church is the highlight of the week’s social calendar – much to Jack’s dismay. But, things change pretty dramatically. First Jack experiences a weird feeling that earns him a trip to the aging and walleyed Dr. “Booger” and then, quite by accident, he learns he can fly.

His twin sister Madi just up and disappears. Actually it turns out that she travels back in time, way back. Together with her brother, the twins seek the help of the Minotaur in an odyssey reminiscent of L. Frank Baum, spiced with a little smart alecky, smarty pants sarcasm that the youthful reader of today will appreciate, in order to find their way back home. The narrative is peopled with wonderfully odd characters including, Medusa, who just happens to be misunderstood, that will stay with you long after you finish the last page.

Hohnstein’s prose is clean and evocative. She wonderfully resists the urge to overwrite, a common problem among many first time fantasy writers, letting the world of Jack and Madi stand on its own. The author’s ear for dialogue is excellent and her characters speak believably. This book has earned an honored place on my shelf among other great works, A Wrinkle in Time, The Phantom Tollbooth and The Golden Compass. If you know young children who love to read or you still have a young heart, Jack & Madi and A Peculiar Turn of Events comes highly recommended

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I Am Not A Serial Killer - Genre Busting Crime and Coming of Age Tale

2011-08-15T08:13:00.000-07:00

I Am Not A Serial Killer by Dan Wells

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Imagine Holden Caulfield if he lived over the family mortuary with his mortician mother, had a fascination with serial killers and slightly less angst and you would have John Wayne Cleaver. A rather apt name for a budding young serial killer at that, as the young man points out to his therapist.

Salinger’s own mental illness infused Caulfield with strong anti-social tendencies making an easy comparison between his famed protagonist and Dan Well’s in his debut, I Am Not A Serial Killer. But, this is where the comparisons end. John knows that he is not like other people and has developed a set of rules for attempting to fit in. He understands that he cannot give free reign to Mr. Monster, the name he gives for his inner demon – a moniker he borrows from the Son of Sam. Cleaver has a sense of honor and a respect for law and order even as he fights the desire to unleash his murderous hunger.

Well’s prose is clean and it sparkles like a light in your darkest nightmare as he weaves a deep and insightful characterization portraying the young man’s struggles to keep his darker nature in check and to understand the incipient traits of the psychopath within himself. The novel is not just another entry in the genre of crime fiction. It is genre busting. I AM Not A Serial Killer is strangely wonderful coming of age tale told with compassion, beauty and served with dark humor, gory descriptions of embalming and plenty of rendered corpses and missing organs.

John Wayne Cleaver’s voice is cogent and he is possessed of a self-awareness that we would not expect other 15 year olds to have and at the same time Well’s manages to make it a very believable teen aged voice. You understand that John is still a boy creating empathy for someone who could be the next monster. That is one of the remarkable things about this narrative. You care about John Wayne Cleaver. One reviewer refers to him as a teen aged sociopath with a heart of gold (Kirkus Reviews).

Indeed! When his hometown becomes the killing ground for a particularly gruesome killer John decides that the only choice he has is to discover who is responsible and put an end to the horror. Perhaps, the only disappointment comes in the form of a hint at the supernatural, which given the publishing house (TOR), should have been expected. However, the theme grows on you as watch young John attempt to answer the question as to who is the real demon, the relentless killer or the young adolescent boy who longs for human connection, but cannot feel love or empathy.

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The Only Moment that Matters

2011-07-26T09:01:00.000-07:00

God exists, god does not exist, but the matter of your enlightenment remains the same.
~ The Buddha

When I first started reading philosophy in college I was enchanted by the grand imponderables. How did I get here? What is the meaning of life? I was drawn to mysticism and esoteric schools of thought. God and the nature of god were the most important things to me. In my post adolescent angst I was missing the point of life.

That changed gradually over the years. As I have matured the more important question isn’t “how did I get here,” but rather, “I am here so what do I do about it?” I still am fascinated by the grand imponderables. But, they seem more a speculative game of metaphysics. They’re an entertaining way to pass the evening instead of watching television or playing cards. But, they no longer carry the import they did for me in my youth. They don’t really provide an effective way to live. Too much contemplation and you may find yourself riddled with angst to the point of depression and unable to move. I have “been there, done that,” as we like to say.

When you get right down to it that “there is something” instead of “nothing” regardless of whether you choose to believe that god created the universe out of nothing or that the big bang theory, natural selection and quantum physics can explain everything, our existence is no less a wonderful absurdity that could just easily be the opposite. It’s just as likely or absurd that we never came into existence as it is that we did. We may eventually answer the question how we got here, and some believe they already have, but the wonderful absurdity of existence will still remain. A mystery solved is no less breathtaking.

When I was 22 I remember reading an essay on Buddhism that echoed the Buddha’s admonishment to his followers to not get caught up in idle metaphysical thought. Our enlightenment, the way we live our life now that we are here is what counts. There is a story that says the Buddha was questioned as to whether or not he believed in god. His response is reported to be, “God exists. God does not exist. The matter of your enlightenment remains the same.” God just doesn’t figure into the Buddha’s equation. Nor should god figure into our equation either. It gets us bogged down in things that don’t necessarily matter.

Theology is a strange discipline to my rational, humanist way of thinking. It’s an absurd fantasy, but one I have been caught up in from time to time even now as an atheist and humanist. But, overall I concern myself with what I refer to as practical ethics. How do I live my life? For what do I live? Some will answer, “I live for god.” But, I cannot do that reasonably. I see no evidence of god – at least not the god I was raised to believe in and then developed conceptually in my mind. Proof becomes a subjective self validating process. It’s only meaningful to me – the thinker – and may not have any value for someone else. In the end we all have a different god, to a certain degree, even if we are of the same religion or faith. That is the danger of subjective validation.

Having been raised in the Christian religion that is post modern, post Vatican II Roman Catholicism it seems believing in the god of the West is to believe in a being that cares more for itself and it’s needs than it does for the needs of its creation. Humanity is always secondary. This god, Yahweh is a fascinating archetype of the human psyche that says a lot about us, but doesn’t seem to reflect ultimate reality…whatever the hell that is anyway. My humanist perspective impels me to reject any philosophy or religion that does not put humans as its primary concern.

“Spiritual” people, in my estimation, waste a lot of time trying to be spiritual (or pretending to be) when they really need to turn their attention to the life they are living in this moment. Karma, reincarnation, heaven and hell are all speculative ideas for which we have no actual proof. Once again, what you may call proof is really just a subjective self validating truth that may or may not have any bearing on reality. Here is what I know for certain….I am ignorant. The more I learn the less I find that I really know nothing at all. Empirically all I am certain of is that I was born, am living and will die sometime soon never to exist again in this world as I understand it. What happens after my terminal breath is beyond anything I can know with certainty.

When one studies the words or teachings of those so-called spiritual people that we tend to esteem – Jesus, Mohammad, Buddha, Lao Tzu and others – we see an undercurrent of how to live in the here and now. Sometimes, as in the case of Jesus and Mohammad, those teachings get imbedded in a cultural morass of doctrine, theology and moralizing. We miss the larger ethical message underneath the religiosity of our time and place. We become too dogmatic for our own good worried more about the label of Christian or Muslim then about the truth.

The practice of mindfulness allows me to clear away all of this supernatural and cultural detritus so that I may see myself and others more clearly. This is the key to ethical living. Stripping away culture, time and place I experience others as I experience myself. These, largely superficial cultural assignments, are simply veils that obscure the faces of others. It’s like looking in a steam coated mirror. What I see is a distortion of myself.

When we return to the words of the great masters we hear a call to treat others as we would be treated. The so-called Golden Rule is not a Judeo-Christian innovation but came into being before Jesus walked the earth. Feeding the hungry, taking care of the orphan, the sick and the oppressed are offered to us as sacred duties to be embraced with zeal.

Today we have other concerns to add to our list of sacred duties. We need to be better stewards of our planet and of our resources. We need to close the gap on the wide disparity between wealth and poverty. Our consumption of energy and other consumer products as well as the way we produce food and provide medical care all need to come into our focus.

I no longer look to an undetermined future in this life or the next. I assume that this moment is the only moment I will ever have in which to live and act. That makes this moment the most important moment there is. What I do matters. How I treat others matters. There are no do-overs. But, I am compassionate with myself when I make mistakes and I treat others with that same attitude. Let’s not be type A. But be clear on this, the only meaning my life has is the meaning I give it in this present moment in time and space.

Looking to an entity that may or may not exist does not give great meaning to my life. Likewise worrying about what happens after death is a waste of time. If I choose to live mindfully with compassion for all sentient beings; if my actions come from this enlightened place then the next life, if there is one, will surely take care of it self. If at the end of my life my consciousness snuffs out like a candle burned to the end then the darkness can take me because the memory of my life in the hearts of others will have created beauty and love regardless of what awaits me at the grave.

How Starbucks Saved my Life - A Remedy for Life Malaise

2011-07-11T08:36:00.000-07:00

How Starbucks Saved My Life: A Son of Privilege Learns to Live Like Everyone Else by Michael Gates Gill

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Having just finished Michael Gates Gill’s, How Starbucks Saved my Life, I wish my father were alive to benefit from this humble and insightful memoir of life lost and life regained. I discovered this wonderfully humble and charming book quite by accident browsing the shelves of my local Barnes and Noble. I am grateful that I am alive to benefit from Mr. Gill’s deep and simple wisdom.

My father, like so many men of Mr. Hall’s generation, spent their lives toiling away in the cruel, unkind machine of corporate America only to be found that upon reaching middle age, with a salary and benefit package far from cost effective, that they were unceremoniously turned out on to the street. My father spent the final decade of his life trying to climb back remaining in denial that he was no longer wanted. In the end my father succumbed to pulmonary fibrosis and died having not regained even a glimpse of the life satisfaction that we all so desperately want.

My father literally died working. His disease had progressed to the point where he was constantly on oxygen carrying a portable tank with him wherever he went and living in dread fear of getting sick. A simple common cold or a bout of the flu could be fatal and in the end that is most likely what killed him. He had been suffering from a cold the week before he died.

One afternoon my father left the job many grades below his former career and checked himself into University Hospital in Seattle. He never went home. A week later my family watched in agony as my father, who had slipped into a coma, passed from this life. Hour by hour the medical staff attending my father turned the respirator down until, no longer able to breathe, my father died. My suspicion is that dad died because he was ready to. He had gown tired of fighting life and didn’t know what else to do about it.

My father’s last years and final days have been a rather depressing cautionary tale for me. It exemplifies everything that I have come to find wrong about our society and how it operates. I knew for many years before my father got sick that I didn’t want to end up like he did. I just didn’t know what to do about it. Then along came, How Starbucks Saved my Life.”

Unlike my father, Michael Gates Gill, son of Brendan Gill (The New Yorker), was born into high society and a life of privilege. He grew up rubbing elbows with the likes of EB White, who once bent down to tell the young “Gatesy” that is was “a shame to have to grow up.” One summer the young Gatesy and friends even threw apples at Ezra Pound (if anyone deserved such treatment it would be Pound) at an exclusive lake retreat for the wealthy. From the 25+ room mansion he grew up in, to Yale, Skull and Bones, and a post graduate job at an international advertising firm, Gates had what many have come to think of as “it all.”

But, then, one day he was fired, by a young woman he had championed and mentored no less, and turned out onto the streets. Over the next decade he tried to develop a consulting business, got divorced and was diagnosed with a rare brain tumor. Naturally, he no longer could afford health insurance. It was quite by chance that he stumbled into a Starbucks that happened to be hosting a hiring event.

How Starbucks Saved my Life is filled with insight and self effacing humor as Mike (as he is referred to these days) went from being a stuffy, pompous, entitled white man to a barista working with largely young African Americans.

This delightful memoir recounts how Mike learns to live like everyone else and actually comes to experience a life satisfaction and purpose he had never known in all his years growing up and as an advertising executive. As the author puts it so well, “My part time job gave me a full time life.”

How Starbucks Saved my Life, offers a remedy for the life malaise so many of us suffer in our work-a-day lives. The only question is whether the reader will take the lessons learned by Gill to heart and apply them to his or her own life before they find themselves where he did.

I also highly recommend the author’s follow-up book, How to Save Your Own Life.

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Soul Packaging

2011-07-07T08:12:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I am asked, “How long have you been a Buddhist?” I will often reply, “Oh, I am not a Buddhist. However, I do practice a form of Buddhist meditation.”

I try taking to heart the venerable Thich Nhat Hanh’s advice to “be a Buddha not a Buddhist.” Frankly, I am not very comfortable affixing labels to myself. I am always that person at workshops and conferences that balks at writing my name in Sharpie on one of those, ‘Hello My Name Is’ stickers. Except that isn’t exactly a true statement, is it?

If I label myself a Buddhist exactly what type of a Buddhist am I? Zen, Shin, Tibetan…what am I to say about my Iyengar yoga practice, which I am also committed to or my love for the wisdom of Rumi? I love the Gospels of Mark and John and the Epistle of James. What about them? In fact I have come to believe that James is a mini spiritual tradition in and of itself. Perhaps, I am a Jamesian?

We become too attached to labels. If I label myself a Buddhist not only do I show my ignorance of Buddhism, in general (which is great to begin with) but, I close myself off to the possibilities available in other “isms” and traditions.

In the west many of us are running from the traditions of our time and place, which for a lot of us is some form of Christianity, and running toward the exotic philosophies of the east. But, in so doing we forego the sage wisdom of our elders.

Thomas Merton, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and C.S. Lewis have much to offer us as we journey through our post modern world. So does Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Reinhold Niebuhr. I am also kind of partial to the scholar Elaine Pagels and theologian Matthew Fox. The Bishop Shelby Spong is another voice that we may not wish to ignore.

Because we are so close to Christianity we see its glaring faults of culture, practice and politics. We fail to see that the traditions of the east are besotted with the same problems. We assume the philosophical superiority of traditions foreign to us because we don’t see them at a cultural level. Reading a dialogue of the late Krishnamurti may help us gain some perspective here.

Be a Christ not a Christian.

Be a Buddha not a Buddhist

If you encounter the Risen Christ on the road to Emmaus crucify him.

If meet the Buddha along the path kill him.

We are much too enchanted by our labels. We mistake them for our true identity, but often we are simply showing the world our hubris. Even this post of mine is more hubris then humility. Once I was on a meditation retreat and an older woman whom had befriended me started sharing her “spiritual autobiography” with me as we walked to the dining hall for dinner.

“I was raised a Swedenborgian,” she announced to me with a gleam of pride in her eyes. There was also something of a challenge to me in her voice. I was a young man who took great pride in studying philosophy in college.

Speaking of arrogance…

She was stunned that not only had I heard of Emanuel Swedonborg I had read his seminal book Heaven and Hell among other works. I took great pride in showing off my knowledge, which was book smarts and theory. There was no practice and thus no transformation.

Years later I would finally see that I had preferred my label of “philosophy student” over being present in the moment with a fellow sojourner on the path of life. As a lover of books and knowledge it is often a painful lesson that the great jewel of dharma or of the gospels and the Koran is not knowledge of some arcane and erudite discipline. It’s in the present moment. Life not books.

To completely and totally misappropriate the words of Thomas Jefferson, we need to cull the diamonds from the dung heap. The diamonds are found in giving up labels (to the best of our abilities) and living life. Chogyam Trungpa used the metaphor of dung in the field of dharma to describe this. Manure is a foul thing yet it fertilizes the soil and wonderful things grow. The lotus flower blooms in the muddy and brackish water. Our spirits come wrapped in labels. We need to remove this bit of hermetically sealed soul packaging and expose what is underneath to the fresh air.

Casey Anthony - Examining the Higher Morality of Due Process

2011-07-06T16:57:00.001-07:00

The Casey Anthony trial illustrates both the strengths and the weaknesses of our judicial system. No doubt there are many who were quite stunned that she was acquitted of first degree murder. None seem more shocked then the prosecutors whom, AP reporter Kyle Hightower described as “looking stunned.”[1]

Is Casey Anthony guilty? Not beyond a reasonable doubt, which the stunned prosecutors failed to create for the jurors. This is the strength of our judicial system of due process. The burden of proof falls on the state. A person isn’t guilty because they look guilty or don’t display the expected emotions or, and this is perhaps the most important of all, because they are not a likeable or sympathetic person.

A person is also not guilty because the so-called court of public opinion deems them guilty. If Casey Anthony is truly guilty of murdering her daughter then that she got away with murder is the fault of the investigators and prosecutors who simply did not present a fact based case proving their assertions. News sources have reported that the medical examiner could never determine how little Caylee died. That’s a big problem if you want to convict someone of first degree murder.

We don’t have to like the outcome. But, we should be grateful that our system worked. It doesn’t always. Innocent people are convicted of crimes they didn’t commit on flimsy and circumstantial evidence. A good example can be found in the Frontline® [2]documentary, Death by Fire, detailing the controversial execution of Todd Willingham after having been convicted of murdering his children.

Mr. Willingham was not a likeable person. He was quite unsympathetic and there is a good possibility that he was a minor sociopath or at least scored fairly low on the empathy scale. But, this didn’t make him a murderer and the facts did not necessarily fit the case that prosecutors presented. There was a good possibility that he was actually telling the truth, but the investigators, the prosecutor and the jurors didn’t like him. So he was guilty. Their science was flawed. Arson investigators were behind the times in their methodology. But, that didn’t matter.

Todd Willingham’s final words were not contrite. They were a crass, vulgar “death curse” of sorts aimed at his wife that only cemented the poor public opinion around his character and his guilt. Frankly, I didn’t like his wife at all. I’d be inclined to curse her too if I was strapped to a gurney about to be given a lethal injection.

Regardless of Willingham’s likability the case against him was flawed enough that Innocence Project co-director, Barry Scheck issued a statement following Willingham’s execution.

There can no longer be any doubt that an innocent person has been executed. The question now turns to how we can stop it from happening again[3]

Our system is set up to serve a higher morality. In the case of Todd Willingham it failed. In the case of Casey Anthony it’s difficult to say. The higher morality of our system of due process allows that sometimes the guilty go free to ensure that an innocent is never convicted and sent to prison or, God forbid, pay the ultimate price with their life.

What about Caylee? Well, what about her? Justice doesn’t matter to the dead. Justice serves their memory and that is a good thing. But, justice is really about punishing criminals and getting some sense of emotional closure when heinous crimes are committed. The Casey Anthony Trial isn’t going to give that to those involved. But, what if Casey is innocent? That is the crux of the matter.

Casey Anthony, like Todd Willingham, is not a likeable person nor is she very sympathetic in the public eye. But, that doesn’t make her a murderer. We should all be glad that our flawed legal system works the way it does. How many innocent people would be convicted if it were up to the general public getting their information from CNN, Talk Shows and People Magazine?

I understand that a sweet, innocent little girl is dead. This is tragic no matter how she actually died. Her mother is hardly mother of the year. She was caught in lies and subterfuge. The way the case came to light does not leave me convinced of Casey Anthony’s innocence. I certainly don’t like her anymore than I liked Todd Willingham or his wife.

But, that is my interpretation of “facts” gleaned from news coverage and not from being personally involved in the case. So while, I am not a totally convinced that a murderer escaped justice, I can’t be certain either. And neither could the jurors who had the benefit of sitting through the trial and examining the full weight of the evidence presented to them by the prosecution. That, my fellow jurors in the court of public opinion, is what we must all realize. We – despite our personal opinions – did not get to see the full case presented.

Do I think Casey Anthony is guilty? I don’t know…at the very least she is culpable in the cover-up of whatever happened to her daughter. This is one of those emotionally unsatisfying cases that fail to comfort us in the end. Justice was not served – not for Caylee Anthony. But, in many ways a higher justice was served. The prosecution did not do their job and a person was not convicted on personal feelings or hunches, but the evidence was considered and it was found wanting. Imagine being innocent and having your life in the hands of 12 of your so-called peers.

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

[1] Casey Anthony acquitted of killing young daughter by Kyle Hightower, July 5, 2011.

[2] Frontline - Death By Fire / http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/death-by-fire/
[3] New Report Shows that Cameron Todd Willingham, Executed in Texas in 2004, Was Innocent

http://www.innocenceproject.org/Content/New_Report_Shows_that_Cameron_Todd_Willingham_Executed_in_Texas_in_2004_Was_Innocent.php

Closer to The Light: Beautiful and Compassionate Call to Courage

2011-06-03T15:33:00.000-07:00

Closer to the Light by Melvin Morse

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Carl Jung said, “We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect; we comprehend it just as much by feeling. Therefore the judgment of the intellect is, at best, only half of the truth.” Nothing could be truer when speaking of Near Death Experiences and is perhaps the reason Melvin Morse quotes it towards the very end of his book, “Closer to the Light: Learning from the Near Death Experiences of Children.”

From the first word Dr. Melvin Morse’s compassion and self effacing humor is evident. Here is a former “rodent brain” researcher, as he refers to himself, who has found something deep and meaningful in NDEs and sees the dramatic possibilities they possess for transforming modern medical science. Dr. Morse dispenses a prescription to cure our society from the fear of dying and to return us to a more compassionate and enriching way to incorporate the dying experience as part of our living experience.

He makes this point quite eloquently by quoting the French philosopher, Pere de Dainville, who is reported to have looked around at all the tubes and devices attached to his body while he lay dying in intensive care unit saying, “They are cheating me out of my own death.”

Among the most impressive achievements of Closer to the Light is the way that Dr. Morse presents his data and case studies with the integrity of the professional scientific researcher yet, all the while, unafraid to courageously speculate and theorize on the spiritual and psychological realities of the dying process.

Dr. Morse reminds us that once not too long ago humanity viewed death as a natural and integral part of life. Presentiments of death and pre-death visions were part of the process and expected. Today, physicians medicate their dying patients seeing such events as the delirium brought on by the pain of dying. He makes an excellent case for the return to the deathbed scenes of yore when friends and family once gathered around the dying person. This is a great time of healing. Instead in modern times it has been clearly documented that as a person becomes closer to death his nurses and physicians spend less and less time with them; they get fewer visits and phone calls from family and friends. When they do get visits they are of much shorter duration. Thus the understanding and accepting of these events can help us bring back dignity to dying.

The hardened empiricist or reductionist thinker may be inclined to reject the NDE wholesale, as is often the case, as simply the death throes of a dying mind deprived of oxygen or a delusion created by the mind to help the dying person cope with their impending end, but a careful reading of Morse’s book will demonstrate, with good, reason, why the NDE should not be dismissed offhand.

For one thing Dr. Morse, as Dr. Raymond Moody (Life After Life et. al.) and other notable researchers, understands the evidence they are gathering and correlating is anecdotal. NDE’s are not subject to the rigors of the scientific method, yet the careful collection of patient experiences should give everyone but, perhaps, the most dogmatic of thinkers pause.

Dr. Morse goes through the list of objections offered by NDE debunkers such as hallucinations, drugs, anesthesia, and others and explains clearly why these are not NDE’s and why they do not mimic the NDE.

For me the most interesting revelation was that of the Sylvan Fissure, a structure located in the right frontal lobe above the right ear, which has been determined as the physical location where the events of the NDE occur. Patients undergoing neurosurgery have reported out of body experiences, tunnel experiences, “seeing” god, seeing dead relatives, hearing beautiful music etc when the Sylvan Fissure is stimulated with electricity. This gives us a brief introduction into the so-called seat of the soul hypothesis.

Whether or not NDEs are truly spiritual experiences that prove life after physical death is hard to say. Science may not be able to answer that question satisfactorily for some time to come, if ever at all. But, one thing is clear. The NDE is a profound psychological process that does occur and studying it will give us a greater understanding of the dying process. This understanding will lead to more compassion when dealing with dying loved ones and eventually to understanding and accepting our own eventual entrance into that dark tunnel at life’s conclusion.

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Recalling Mass as the Theatre of Blood

2011-05-26T10:16:00.000-07:00

Theatre of Blood is the first horror flick I recall ever seeing.
I saw this film in the early 70’s when a network station broadcast it edited for television. I was 7 or 8 and my older cousins were all hanging out in the dark with the eerie glow of the old color television set casting sinister glows on their eager faces. The older teens, naturally, had no common sense and didn’t think to scoot the young boy out of the room.

The adults were all drinking and laughing raucously or viciously debating Nixon in my aunt’s living room. This was the year prior to Watergate – I think. Gin martinis, bourbon, beer and political pique reduced the adult’s common sense to the same level as the teenagers in the television room. No one thought to check on the kids and see what they were up to. We weren’t bothering them and that was fine for the moment.

Because of my age I didn’t understand the camp sensibilities of the film or it’s cheeky, dark humor. It scared the fucking bejeezus out of me. Every so often when a climax of horror appeared on the tiny screen, slashed for general viewers groans of disappointment from the older kids and phrases such as, “Man, if this was in the theater they would have shown everything overlaid the noises of teen snacking. In particular I remember great disappointment during the scene where a board of critics received a box with a freshly cut out heart in it. I didn’t need to see the actual heart to feel the full impact of horror in my 8 year old psyche.

I find it interesting that I can recall Nixon and the breaking of the Watergate scandal at such a young age, but the nuances of a low budget horror film were beyond my cognitive abilities. Well, at least that is how I recall it looking back at childhood through the filter of adult eyes and memories.

The next morning was Sunday and during Mass when the priest starting preparing the Eucharist and saying the ritual prayers about the body and BLOOD of Christ and whatnot I started flashing back to images of this film. I had my first panic attack and let out a scream, much to my mother’s button down embarrassment, and fainted dead away hitting my head on the back of the wooden pew in front of us.

When I came to I was in the back of the family station wagon - a white Ford Galaxy 500 - with my dad hovering over me nervously. It goes without saying that I was a squeamish kid with a vivid imagination. This may be one of the many reasons why I have always found the Roman Catholic Ritual of Communion creepy.

Ironically, as an adult, Theatre of Blood is one of my all time favorite horror films. I get a thrill when I watch it. Rather than turning me away from such vicarious pleasures of horror and fright it seemed to create an intimate love of such experiences.

I guess I am just fucked in the head. What more can be said? The horrors of a Vincent Price film are much more soothing than the horrors of the Catholic Mass. For the young child that I once was, the Catholic Mass was the real Theatre of Blood.

Socrates v. Jesus: Why Jesus’ Historical Existence is more important than Socrates

2011-05-25T09:35:00.000-07:00

I often refer to Jesus as a quasi-historical figure, a statement which drives the Christians I know into fits of apoplexy. Jerry the Evangelical Neighbor likes to fall back on the most tired of all the basic refutations.

“There is less proof for the existence of Socrates or Plato than of Jesus.” He once responded to a Facebook post of mine.

I don’t know that to necessarily be a fact. I rather doubt he does either. At least I was a philosophy major in college; he did not go to college. Not that my liberal arts background makes me any more of an expert than him. I just like to toss that dart to get his goat.

Needless to say Jerry’s refutation is not unique to him nor does it prove that Jesus existed. It’s simply intellectual foolishness on the order of my mother and your mother were hanging up clothes; my mother socked your mother right in the nose…I can’t prove my truth so you prove yours, nyah, nyah, nyah. I don’t have to prove my “truth” because I am not making extraordinary claims about either Socrates or Plato.

I would imagine that the proof of existence of any of these men is beset by the same challenges, contradictions and missing direct evidence. As Thomas Carlyle quips, “History, a distillation of rumor (I know – I use this quote constantly).”

I will leave the proving of each man’s existence in the purview of historians and other antiquarians whose training and intellectual gifts make them better suited to such pursuits. For me, whether or not Socrates or even Plato existed in flesh and blood changes nothing. It doesn’t diminish or devalue the Socratic Method as a device of philosophical inquiry nor does it demean the Dialogues of Plato. The same cannot be said of the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament.

If there is no historical Jesus than the whole of Christianity is for naught. As the Apostle Paul allegedly wrote:

But if it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? 13 If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. 14 And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. 15 More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead. But he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not raised. 16 For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. 17 And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. 18 Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ is lost. 19 If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. [1 Cur 15:12-19 NIV]

Those of you who know me personally or have occasionally read my blogs know that I do believe it quite likely that a historical Jesus existed. It’s the mythology of Paul’s risen Christ and the traditions of Christianity that I doubt. However, I am not bothered by Christian mythology. Perhaps, it is my long association with it, but I rather see it as just another expression of deep human longing for a meaning in life. The story itself was unique from a Jewish perspective, but not unique to Paul in the ancient world of first century Palestine. Jungians and other depth psychologists might interpret the myth of the risen Christ in archetypal fashion. Again I will leave that to the experts.

Now let’s make some important distinctions between Socrates and Jesus.

Socrates allegedly said (paraphrase), “The only thing I know is I know nothing.”

Jesus allegedly said (paraphrase), “I am the way, the truth and the life...”

Both men could be argued to have hearts filled with hubris. Socrates comes across as having a sense of cheeky humor where he is poking fun at those discoursing with him. As for Jesus you would need to be filled with arrogance to make such claims as being the “bread of life,” and such. You might even say delusional. There are progressive and liberal Christian’s who claim that Jesus never actually said that he was the Messiah, but the statements that he makes about himself and Peter’s confession that Jesus is the Messiah all come from the gospels. It’s a difficult argument to maintain. If nothing else the existence of such possible contradictions speaks volumes about the historical accuracy of the gospel accounts.

The most important distinction between these two men comes from Christians themselves. They claim that Jesus, born of a virgin, was the only begotten son of God and that he was the promised messiah. This despite the fact that he in no way lives up to the Jewish concept of the Messiah, it required Paul’s radical reinterpretation which branded him an apostate as far as his fellow Jews were concerned, to get him there.

And, lest we forget the most important part of the Christian creed(s), Jesus died on the cross as a final atoning blood sacrifice for humanities sins (shudder) so that humanity could be freed from the death sentence imposed upon us by original sin (a concept that didn’t exist until much later) giving us an access pass to the next life. This was accomplished through Jesus’ death and then resulting resurrection. No such claims have ever been made about Socrates to my knowledge.

Indeed, these distinctions are very important. No one claims that Socrates is the Christ or the son of God. No one suggests that Socrates is “the way, the truth and the life” and that we must believe in him and that we must accept him into our hearts as part of God’s plan of salvation. So whether or not Socrates existed and Plato’s dialogues are a faithful recounting of actual dialogues or Plato is simply elevating his beloved teacher on a pedestal using him to his own ends doesn’t change anything. It also makes no difference if Socrates is just a fictional creation, as Jerry the Evangelical Neighbor is for me, used as a foil to present the writer’s own philosophy.

Jerry the Evangelical Neighbor’s refutation is moot. Proving the existence of Socrates or Plato changes nothing in the philosophy attributed to these men as would be the case if we learned that Shakespeare didn’t exist or that Ayn Rand really didn’t write Atlas Shrugged. The literary value and philosophical inquiries of these works are separate from the creators.

This cannot be said for Jesus. Paul understood, as do Christians today, that all of what they believe had to have happened in history. Otherwise, their religious beliefs are entirely false and a waste of both time and life. It simply has to be true and, in my opinion entirely, they claim “faith” or some self-validating a priori way of “knowing” to get them around the necessity of dealing with the lack of evidence. Thus even the most intelligent and well educated of people can fall prey to Christianity’s charms.

My Humanist Recovery: A Post Mother's Day Reflection

2011-05-11T10:42:00.000-07:00

A middle aged man, undergoing psychoanalysis, returns to his therapist’s couch after a long holiday weekend where he visited his estranged mother for the first time in 20 years.

“How did your Thanksgiving dinner go?” The Therapist asked his patient.

“Well, I think I had one of those Freudian slips that you guys sometimes talk about.”

“What do you mean?” The Therapist asked.

“At one point during dinner I turned to my mother. I meant to say, ‘please pass the mashed potatoes,’” he said, “But, instead I said, ‘you ruined my life you fucking bitch’”

This joke describes my relationship with my own mother except that I have yet to make such a Freudian slip. I also have never undergone psychoanalysis. But, the general attitude of hatred and hurt expressed by the patient has been part of the burden I have carried around for decades.

This morning I found myself having a rather rare “post mother’s day” reflection. It comes on the heels of a warning that she will be visiting my sister’s family in Colorado Springs and a subsequent plan for me to meet up with everyone for lunch or dinner here in Denver.

I realize that I no longer hate my mother. That isn’t to say that I am not still angry or hurt. I am most definitely not letting her off the hook for her abusive behavior throughout my life. I rankle at our emerging post modern spiritualities and pop psychologies that decry blaming anyone but ourselves for the state of our lives. That type of thinking is garbage. It invalidates the damage that people can do to others and forces us to “forgive” our perpetrators long before we are ready, capable and even willing. We have to deal with the hurt and the deep wounds first or forgiveness is not possible.

Forgiveness is a process. It can’t be rushed. I blame the Judeo-Christian tradition and many New Age gurus for perpetrating this anti-human thinking on the world. Many people believe so called spiritualities without putting it to the test of critical analysis simply because it sounds good or some charismatic pastor, guru or therapist espouses it.

Certainly, take responsibility for your life. It is your life after all and no one, but you can live it. But, I am an adult. As a child my life is at the whim of my parents, schools, churches and we are sometimes left coping with the consequences of their poor judgment. Many rarely deal with these childhood wounds. We try and “let it go” and “put it behind us” at the encouragement of well meaning, but poorly enlightened friends and loved ones. At best most of us push these to the bottom and suppress these hurts, ignoring them. Even worse we continue the cycle and perpetrate the same abuses, unaware and unintentionally, on our progeny. That is the power of denial for you.

Naturally, continuously blaming others for what they did to you or what you perceived they did to you will have some negative consequences for you. Slowly, over the years of my life I have learned to make distinctions between recognizing what others have done and what I can do now. I can’t change anything in the past. I can’t undo what others did to me and they certainly can’t either. But, the “blame” stage is part of the healing process and it can’t be rushed either.

Rushing past blame to forgiveness will leave unresolved anger festering in your heart (not to wax poetically in a new age fashion myself). Unresolved anger often turns to rage and rage destroys lives. As a recovering alcoholic I can confirm that, anecdotally at least, from my own experience. My unresolved issues with my mother led to a lot of frustration where I simultaneously sought the approval and unconditional love of the women in my life and hated them for it at the same time. Paradoxically, I elevate the women in my life on pedestals and my thoughts about femininity obsess on ultra positive archetypes. I set myself up constantly for bitter disappointment when the important women in my life prove to be as human as me.

Thank god I am both a Humanist and an atheist. Forgiveness is not about following god’s commandments or about following Jesus’ example. Jesus got himself killed (if a historical Jesus exists at all) and his so-called moral teaching leads to an anti-human selflessness that serves no healthy purpose. Even the late don of Christian apologetics, C.S. Lewis, conceded that Jesus (if he was not God’s only begotten son) was not a moral man at all. In fact, he would be a lunatic at best, a demon at worse. As an atheist I suggest a lunatic.

Forgiveness is about the forgiver. You forgive because there is a psychological and emotional benefit for you in so doing. Yes, that is hardly the attitude of a saint. But, who wants to be a saint? Most of them were nuts too. Ethically you are under no obligation to forgive anyone and sometimes the damage they do is far too great to work through in a finite lifetime. You are human and despite the new age rhetoric to the contrary have limits. When you give up the belief in divinity, transcendent or personal, you free yourself up to get about the process of healing. You can set realistic goals and expectations. You allow yourself to be human.

Another lesson gleaned from my recovery process concerns making amends. And this was a hard one. I am constantly making moral inventories of myself and my life. That’s right theists – atheists can make moral inventories. We can determine what is right and wrong just like everyone else. We don’t slip into moral ambiguity just because we live without god or supernatural beings. Far from being shallow, we have inner lives too.

By making amends to those I have hurt I begin to make it possible to forgive others for what they have done to me. Part of making amends is learning to accept the fact that I have an ethical obligation to do so, but the person whom I am making amends to do not have any obligation to accept it and forgive me. I must learn to be okay with that and do it anyway. Sometimes, even a worse blow to our ego, making amends to an individual we have hurt would be more painful and destructive than not doing so to that person. We have to be okay with that too. It’s part of facing our personal ethical shortcomings and attempting to do better.

Another aspect of forgiveness is when another person approaches me to make amends for something they did to me. I have a choice to make – forgive or not to forgive. Early on in my recovery I rushed to forgiveness before I gave it some deep thought. Often it leads to a reattachment to the perpetrator. These days I try to ascertain the motive of the person seeking forgiveness. My mother, however, is not one of them. She never seeks to make amends. Throughout my life it has been me that has sought to make amends to her for every injury, real or otherwise. I no longer make amends to her. As a woman with an untreated and possible undiagnosed personality disorder and both a pill junkie and alcoholic she has yet to make any fearless moral inventory of her life.

In fact my mother is convinced that everyone else is to blame. Her four children are all selfish, ungrateful assholes. Perhaps, we are. Perhaps, we have good reason to be. My experience is that from my childhood on my mother has ended any therapeutic relationship the moment her therapist refocuses the attention back on her. Once they no longer allow her to blame her children or her husband and so forth she leaves. She only maintains relationships that reinforce her self delusions. In the years since my father’s death her relationships have failed and changed rapidly. My father, no longer alive, was the only person who indulged her faithfully over the 45 years of their marriage.

When I was a child my mother often used me as the focus for any family difficulty we were having. I was the problem. I was causing the disruption, the upheavals and the turmoil. My siblings now share similar stories with me about their experiences.

As a child I was forced in and out of many therapeutic relationships intended to end my disruption of our otherwise happy home. However, the minute the therapist suggested that my mother might be a part of the problem that ended the relationship. My mother would often tell me that the therapist ended it because they “knew I was lying” or “making things up” and others. My mother couldn’t handle any threat to her self-image as the perfect mother.

Several years ago, while my father was still alive, she told one of my brothers that she and our father had stayed up all night talking about their relationships with their children wondering if there was something they had done wrong. By the break of dawn, sunlight piercing the edges of their bedroom drapes, they determined they had done nothing wrong at all. It was all their children’s fault. Now, that may be, but it begs the question about what kind of parents they were if all four of their children turned out rotten.

I thought you didn’t hate your mom anymore?

I don’t, but I didn’t say I wasn’t still angry. I still haven’t forgiven her, at least not for everything. Just because I am a middle aged man doesn’t mean I have suddenly “outgrown” these wounds. Healing doesn’t happen without deliberate focus and acts of will. I am suspicious of any adult who likes to pretend any different. The challenge of sustaining trauma or having a substance abuse problem is you stop maturing emotionally at the onset. I may be chronologically 44 and intellectually close to that age, but emotionally I am much younger. When I started my recovery 12 years ago I would have placed my emotional age at 22-24. Most likely I am now somewhere in my early to mid 30’s.

But, despite my anger and my stunted emotional growth I love my mother. We all love our parents even as we hate or resent them. This is the jewel of my post mother’s day meditation. I love my mother because she gave me the greatest gift any son can receive. She helped make me who I am today. Beauty and warts; I am the product of this relationship. It makes me the person whom my friends and family love and respect.

It has helped me foster a sense of deep empathy and connection for others. She helped teach me the art of introspection. An awareness of my own imperfections allows me to make allowances for other imperfect people even as I have not fully forgiven my own mother. It has given me a true passion for seeking out the true meaning of justice and compassion and to live them actively in my own life. I have even begun to learn how to take responsibility – real responsibility – for my life.

Some of you may bristle at what you might feel is the immature ranting of a petulant teen. And, once again, perhaps it is. I have a lot of work still left to do – a lifetime of it. Over the years of my recovery I have been advised as such by those well meaning friends and, quite a few, strangers who think they are more wise or complete then me. Some most definitely have been and I am grateful for their insights and wisdom.

But, largely most of them are spewing store bought wisdom gleaned from books, tapes, seminars, churches and various “metaphysical” classes (however, not one of these folks truly knows what metaphysics is). They fool themselves by thinking they have already done the work I am now doing and are much farther along. They may be wiser and more mature then me, I can hardly claim wisdom or maturity, but at least I am more honest.

Dreaming oF My Death Sets Me to Contemplating My Mortality

2011-04-28T16:25:00.000-07:00

The past couple of nights I have been having dreams seemingly involving death and my own mortality. Whether it is just my subconscious responding to my rather morbid way of thinking during the day, my conscious mind having relaxed, being free to regurgitate a symbolic jumble of meaningless nonsense or there is a true value to these dream images I don’t know. Perhaps, like Mr Scrooge believing the specter in front of him is merely a piece of undigested beef, instead of a reality he wishes to not believe, I am in the same position being the eternal skeptic that I have become.

I am not prone to finding hidden meanings in symbolic dream representations. The meditation tradition I practice instructs to disregard symbols, dreams and other occult manifestations as distractions presented by an ego invested in keeping you from enlightenment. As things arise from the field of the mind we simply, gently push beyond them focusing on the horizon and travel the length of our out breath. The ground of being is the point where the out breath and the in breath meet.

Nonetheless these particular dreams have been disturbing to the point that upon waking it feels as if I have truly died during the night (although my dream consciousness shifts prior to the point of death each time preventing me from experiencing my own death).

“Have I died?” I ask myself. The world that my eyes perceive is muted grey like a thin gossamer curtain separating me from the color of reality. It seems a place of transition; a bridge between the world of the living and whatever awaits us in death. It is a place of sadness and isolation. Is this what the scriptures mean when they speak of a “veil of tears?”

Once the warbling of my waking consciousness steadies and the veil drops revealing the colors of wakefulness I breathe deep finding satisfaction in the fact that I am still among the living. For a brief moment the world seems serene, the light is warmer and the colors more vivid. I imagine that this is what the world must look like for a blind man who suddenly regains his vision – the textures and construction of the world suddenly appearing differently that he has previously experienced or dreamed.

I am halfway through my 44th year (almost) and there is a certain dawning realization of my mortality. Death or thoughts of death have preoccupied me. I am aware that my own death is the only uncertain certainty in existence. I know I will die; I just don’t know when. My eventual death is what makes living so sweet. It’s what makes each moment precious in its own right and, if I would allow it, it makes each irritation, disappointment and failure nothing to cling to or pine over. What could have been is not nearly as important as what is and what is to be.

I fear death.

And that at the same time I don’t

I think it is the uncertainty that is most terrifying.

Actually, I think I fear living more than I fear dying

That seems odd given my reaction to my dreams of late

But it seems true

Living and dying (especially dying) is about loss of control

And control is an illusion

In my limited and myopic experiences those who live and die well seem to have overcome the illusion of control. They live moment by juicy moment and their deaths are just as vibrant.

The philosopher Simon Critchely speaks of the fear of annihilation. We fear the obliteration of our personality more than the decline of our bodies. We fear the loss of conscious awareness, the snuffing out of the “I” like a candle flame as we suddenly dissipate into the darkness of nothing.

I wonder if that is what will happen when I die. Will my field of vision get narrower as the light in my eyes goes out, darkness playing bout the edges of my sight until I fall into a dark, dreamless sleep never to wake up again? Or is there some type of afterlife?

The afterlife envisioned by my native Roman Catholic Church haunts and terrifies me. I certainly hope that this is a falsehood. The psychic Sylvia Browne says that when we die all of our beloved pets are the first to meet us as we cross over even before relatives and other loved ones come to greet us. As preposterous as this seems if an afterlife exists that is the version I am hoping for.

I have embellished upon this fantasy and draped it with my own desires. A paradise for humans seems hardly plausible, but dogs seem worthy of an eternal paradise. If I have a choice I’d rather go to dog heaven than people heaven. I prefer most dogs to most of the people I have known. Every dog is pure dog, while people are less than pure and often not what they seem. Spending eternity surrounded by all of the wonderful dogs I have known in my life would be heaven.

I imagine a vast meadow lushly carpeted with green grass surrounded by tall beautiful shade bearing trees and beautiful wild flowers where dogs romp, roll and chase after each other, butterflies and squirrels happily all day, pausing only to drink from the cool babbling brooks and streams or to receive belly rubs and treats from me.

That is as childish as Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy!

I know.

And I don’t care.

But, it’s just a child’s fantasy!

I don’t know how to break it to you, but quite possibly what you believe is a fantasy too. It’s that you are so invested in it you can’t be objective. Perhaps your beliefs are founded upon an interpretation of ancient scriptures and the hoary, enduring nature of these writings give for you a sense of permanence, a sense of the absolute truth we all opine exists.

What makes you think what you believe is any less absurd than my beliefs?

I was actually asked this question as a young philosophy student in my early 20’s when I had the poor manners to laugh at an older man who believed, quite earnestly, that what humanity thinks of as god or gods is residual race memory of an advanced race of people who either existed before us or visited from some far away galaxy (or dimension).

When I reviewed what I believed I saw that what I took to be “evidence” of my faith’s veracity was equally absurd. Which beliefs are sillier?

An advanced civilization visited primitive humanity, teaching and educating us.

Law givers

Invisible effable super being creates man out of dust and give him law

A virgin girl is impregnated by a formless god and her progeny is god in the flesh and his blood sacrifice upon a wooden, splintery cross redeems humanity cleansing them of their sins.

Preposterous

And yet each compelling in their own way

I have observed something over the years, which is hard for most people I know to accept. You make it up as you go….spiritually speaking at the moment. What you believe is choices you make drawing from the rich sources of religion, mythology and spirituality that has accumulated over the millennia since humans first created writing and began recording their thoughts, musings and beliefs. You pick and choose from a buffet of religious imagination. Your choices subjectively bear out according to your experience. They are also influenced by the circumstance of birth. Your parents, your culture and the prominent religions or beliefs it holds play a big role in what you initially believe.

But, at the time of your birth you are an atheist

A natural atheist, to borrow from Dr. David Eller

An infant knows nothing of god, death, good, evil or religion. The newborn must be taught all of these things.

As a born again skeptic I shudder whenever I hear someone say, “I am not religious, I am spiritual” or some similar inane post modern piece of nincompoopery. They generally don’t understand that religiosity and spirituality are tied together having little to do with orthodox creedal based religions and everything to do with our psyches. Spirituality requires religious imagination and a proclivity for mythmaking. We make our own myths even those who think they are living the “true gospel” or by the “Koran.”

God is a concept that exists in your mind. God exists in no other place. This is why mystics tell you to go within to seek truth. Your concept may be based on the tenets of the Judeo-Christianity, Islam or Hinduism, by way of example, but what happens to them within your own mind is unique to you. The god you believe in is not necessarily the same god the person sitting on the pew next to you Sunday morning believes in, even though you profess the same creed, read the same bible and listen to the same sermon. But, then your experience of the color blue is hardly the same either so why should god be different?

God wants no graven images depicting him

But, we are never free of graven images even if we never fashion a golden calf or carve one out of wood or stone.

An impossible, impractical and unfair commandment…

Thou shall not kill

Thou shall not steal

Thou shall not bear false witness

I can live with these. These are good, fundamental principals necessary for an orderly and just society. They are not a Hebrew innovation either. Humanity had figured these out long before Moses came down from Mt Sinai, face covered because it was transformed by the majesty of god’s light, bearing the Ten Commandments. In fact Israel may have been a little late in developing these prohibitions.

I read the words of the prophet Isaiah and see an angry, vengeful god thirsty for blood and destruction. This is the prophet whom Christians believe foretold the birth of Christ right down to the virgin birth. I see where they get it. But, even in the New Testament this god has hardly changed. It’s that rather than dealing directly through us as he did with Israel, he places the mantle of his power on his anointed one, who he sacrifices to himself to satisfy his lust for blood.

Marcion, an early Christian and among the first to collect scriptures, believed that the god of the Christian scriptures and the god of the Jewish scriptures were two separate gods. But, remove the talk of “God is love” and you see this is not true. It is the same god he has just disguised himself.

This god scares me.

But, then the beginning of wisdom is fear of the Lord.

This is not the heart trembling awe that is fear or wonderment

This is fear of the raw primal power that is often unmerciful and unjust

He’s a perfect god of the desert; a god of storms and war. But, as a god of enlightenment?

This god is death

But, his death is not a quiet annihilation. It’s hell, a living annihilation.

God is as the world appears to his believers. This is how the medieval church saw the world. Its how the world appears too many post modern evangelicals.

God is a concept that exists in your mind and no place else.

It occurs to me now that ideas of an afterlife are not useful. They create fantasies that prevent us from embracing life now. It creates a disingenuous morality as people curry favor to escape punishment. Afterlife dreams keep alive a false hope that we don’t die and that our existence beyond physical mortality is guaranteed. It keeps us in fear of death rather than embracing it as a bosom lifelong companion.

We have sterilized it and tried to make it invisible except in our more visceral forms of entertainment where it is a surreal experience that is a mere phantasm. We have taken death out of the home and made it institutionalized. We prolong life unnaturally through life support systems because we cannot bear to let our loved ones come to their normal end.

We no longer die.

We pass over

Cross over

Make our transition

Go to our heavenly reward

We go to heaven

And others

The famous doctor and writer, Bernie Siegel MD writes about one of his textbooks that devoted 2 pages to talking about dying without using the word die.

Simon Critchely observes that once upon a time people took their hats off when a hearse passed by. Now we ignore death until we absolutely are forced to face it. Victorians took pictures of the dead. I believe, as does Critchely, that if we can’t accept death and live in the embrace of its knowledge we are not really living, we are sleeping.

Sleeper awake

I vaguely recall from the works of Carlos Castaneda, that I devoured in my youth, the supposedly illiterate Yaqui, Don Juan (who often sounded suspiciously like a Stanford educated ethno biologist or anthropologist) tell his young protégé, Carlos that he needed to make friends with his death. The wise old shaman emphasized “his death” and not just death in general.

Death is uncertain and that is what makes it scary

In my mind I suspect there is no afterlife, at least not one where the “I” that I am in this world consciously transitions from mortality to spirit and continues to exist. I suspect it to be just the extinguishing of the light of my consciousness. My body becomes food for the worms and microbes that will eat me and recycle the material that was once me into countless other things.

Efficient

Nothing going to waste

The ultimate annihilation of me is not what scares me. I am comfortable with losing consciousness. It would be like one of those seemingly dreamless nights where you wake up as from the dead or are reborn into the world as you awaken with no dream images remembered, just darkness. Only this time you will never awake. Once I am gone my problems, fears, desires, hopes and disappointments are left behind no longer a concern.

It’s the final moments of anticipation as your heart, brain and consciousness stop resisting the embrace of death that scares me. Will it hurt? Will I feel distress? Will I be at peace or will I be in fear?

Fear of death is normal. To not be in fear of it is to not be human or to be an enlightened saint. But, then religion is a gamble. The trick is to embrace it without being obsessed like the late Ingmar Bergman who was purportedly frightened of death.

But, what frightens me more than my own death, which I basically accept, is the death of those closest to me – my girlfriend, my dog, a cherished friend, whose death is at once an inescapable and painful loss. I selfishly pine to be the first to die. I much prefer to die first than cope with the death of those closest to me. I am a coward.

Fear of death is then the fear of loss of control

The illusion that I am in charge of my life

I have to give in to death

We all do

The Pseudo History of Dave Barton & the First Amendment (Part II)

2011-04-27T17:05:00.000-07:00

The Religion of Thomas Jefferson & the English Deists

As we continue to make our case for a constitutionally guaranteed separation of church and state it’s important that we look at the religious beliefs of Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson is currently among the list of revisions being made to United States history in states such as Texas. Late last year I wrote a series of blog posts about the Texas Board of Education’s decision to delete Thomas Jefferson from their history curriculum. Never mind that he was the one who penned the fabulous Declaration of Independence and forget that he was the 3rd president of the United States, Jefferson’s views on politics, morality and religion are not in keeping with the extreme conservative Christian worldview.

The Huffington Post article posted on March 12, 2010 reported that not only did the board vote 10-5 to remove Thomas Jefferson they sought to replace him with the great murdering theocrat of Geneva, John Calvin. This is preposterous to the point you have to hope it was a joke or dismiss it because the liberal skewed Huffington Post reported it. But, this was reported in more mainstream publications and by the conservative right as well who considered it a victory. Sadly, it is true.

John Calvin does not belong in the annals of U.S. history except as a cursory footnote. He never set foot in the new world just his terrifying theology which has informed the faith of many conservative and evangelical religious groups from the beginning of our history.

Removing Jefferson from the study of our nation’s history is akin to removing Jesus or the Apostle Paul from a study of the Christian New Testament. Evangelical Christianity prefers ignorance to truth; darkness to learning. Extremist groups often rewrite history to support their worldview.

It’s much easier to pretend that the separation of church and state never existed when you delete one of the principal proponents of it from history. Whether or not this new Texas curriculum will stand up is still open. It its quite contentious and creationist Don McLeroy lost his election bid for Chairman for Texas Board of Education. McLeroy, like Barton, denies that separation of church and state exists. Thank the very god I don’t believe in that he lost. Perhaps, some intelligence exists in the land where everything is larger than life, including stupidity.

While it is much easier to debate Madison’s personal religious beliefs, Thomas Jefferson’s views are far more concrete. He was raised as a member of the Episcopal (Anglican) church, but he was also deeply influenced by the English Deists. This included the so-called 5 Articles of Deism: [1]

1.Belief in the existence of a single supreme God
2. Humanity’s duty to revere God
3. Linkage of worship with practical morality
4. God will forgive us if we repent and abandon our sins
5. good works will be rewarded (and punishment for evil) both in life and after death

Deism of the time might be best summed up by what Benjamin Franklin referred to as his creed.
Here is my creed. I believe in One God, the Creator of the Universe. That he governs it by his Providence. That he ought to be worshipped. That the most acceptable Service we can render Him is doing good to his other children. That the soul of man is immortal and will be treated with justice in another life respecting its conduct in this. These I take to be the fundamental principles of all sound religion. [2]

Modern deists often go into fits of apoplexy over such assertions as in its modern versions deism is closer to pantheism. The also prefer Humanist ethics. In later versions of deism God is nearly a non-event. He, she or it created the universe and then abandoned it, leaving its creatures to their own devices. There is no reason to worship or pray to this god as one has no recourse to it. It becomes then, a pantheistic reverence of nature and an ethical movement far less religious then its predecessors.

But, Jefferson’s and Franklin’s deism was not divorced from a transcendental god and their morality, for the most part was typical Judeo-Christian, although Franklin would hardly be a poster boy for clean living. The point is Thomas Jefferson believed in a god and was not atheist as some seem to assert.

Unitarians love to hang Jefferson’s cloak in their church closets, but Jefferson, while quite sympathetic, was never a Unitarian. He once remarked that he would like to have attended a Unitarian church but none existed nearby where he lived in Virginia. Our 3rd president was also never a member of any organized deist group despite deism’s influence on his thinking. In regards to Jefferson deism should be considered a theological position rather than a religious affiliation.

Another interesting consideration is that some evangelical groups (albeit not Texas) have even tried to reclaim Thomas Jefferson as an evangelical. But, this is not in keeping with historical fact. First, evangelicals of his time were not particularly fond of Jefferson except when he supported certain tax exemptions for church organizations in furthering the separation of church and state. Most importantly, Jefferson’s views of Jesus were not in keeping with a traditional Christian theological view evangelical or otherwise.

Jefferson did a little cut and paste number on the scriptures that is aptly named the Jefferson Bible. In it he removed all stories of the miracles, virgin birth and the resurrection, leaving only the parables and straight out ethical teachings. Jefferson was highly skeptical of Jesus as the Risen Christ or second person of the trinity. Rather than being divine, Jesus was a highly ethical teacher and good man. Thomas Jefferson referred to this little exercise as similar to culling diamonds from a dung heap. These views cannot be construed to be evangelical by any stretch or revision of the truth.

Later in his life Thomas Jefferson would have no official church affiliation. He would no longer consider himself an Episcopal, but both a deist and a follower of Jesus. Thomas Jefferson was a freethinker of his day.

To be continued…

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

[1] Deism: God and Reason without Revelation, The English Deists –Introduction

[2] Ibid

The Pseudo History of Dave Barton & The First Amendment

2011-04-26T16:47:00.000-07:00

Dave Barton is the most dangerous enemy to American History currently alive today. Among his most preposterous revisions is to deny the separation of church and state as guaranteed by the First Amendment. This is a rather popular view among the most extreme Christian evangelicals who cannot cope with the secular reality of our democratic republic. Continuing to insist that the United States is a Christian nation defies the clearly documentable facts. It requires willful ignorance of the many and capricious criminality of those who perpetrate the lie. Barton is among the later.

Barton, one of the principals behind Wall Builders, touts himself as a historian of America’s forgotten history and heroes, emphasizing the moral, religious and constitutional heritage of our nation. Most Americans outside the extreme religious right probably have never heard of him. But, you can bet the Republican National Convention, who hired him as political consultant in 2004, has and so has Glenn Beck, Michelle Bachman and many other Tea Party nincompoops who eat up his false view of history. If the Christian Satan is the Father of all Lies, then Barton is his offspring. If the GOP consults with him we must be concerned. All consultants shape the political landscape they work on.

Over the past 3 years I have begun to watch, listen and read the works of the high profile conservatives at work in our country and have also read the source material for which they draw their inspiration such as, Glenn Beck and W. Cleon Skousen’s The 5,000 Year Leap, an unconscionable piece of alternate history. You should be worried that Beck and many others have taken this book to heart. The GOP and the religious extremists in this country are a party that has succumbed to the paranoia of conspiracy theories. No longer are outrageous and preposterous ideas relegated to the fringe groups where dwell the delusional and the paranoid; conspiracies have made the mainstream in the years following 9/11. And there is an amazing tendency for those to hold beliefs in conspiracy theories to due so with a religious like reverence. Present them with solid evidence to the contrary they will deny it in favor of their version of the truth.

I mention the above to impress upon you that I am not simply having a knee-jerk liberal reaction to something I have read or seen in the so-called liberally biased media (another great conservative myth). I have checked it out for myself and in its proper context. I am not satisfied with mere sound bites.

The problem with history is that isn’t just a list of dry facts; it’s the interpretation of those facts and the ascribing of motive to each of the principal participants in any series of events. Our own biases and worldview taint the truth. The way the world occurs to us past and present is not necessarily how the world occurred to those long dead members of our race whom we study. Often time’s artifacts are discovered that defy context or simply don’t present us with enough information to supply it properly. However, in the case of the United States Constitution we have the letters, writings and historical accounts of those involved, such as James Madison, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams as well as the historical accounts of their contemporaries who witnessed the events.

So let’s leave Barton alone for the moment except to say that as an historian he is unqualified and self educated, which is not necessarily a bad thing. There are many great self-educated men and woman in our history that have shaped this nation and the world. But, there is also an inherent danger in self education. A non-scholar doesn’t always have access to all the extant materials and access to the ongoing active debates among peers over the subject matter. It is easy to miss something when you are intellectually and academically isolated from a diverse peer group.

My father always loved to quip that the winners write history, but I always add that the losers cry foul, cover-up and conspiracy and try to revise history to favor their worldview. They will cry that the winners are lying and omitting the truth. The winners will scoff and dismiss the loser’s overwrought version of history. It calls to mind the Scottish wit Thomas Carlyle who wrote, “History a distillation of rumor.”

So let’s distill the rumors spread by Dave Barton and see if we can eke out the truth – reasonably.

James Madison and Thomas Jefferson

James Madison is often referred to as the Father of the Constitution. Initially he proposed 12 amendments that ultimately became ratified as the ten amendments that make up the bill of rights. There is no question that Madison wrote what is today, the First Amendment, which reads:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Initially Madison stood by his original draft of the constitution. He did not believe that a series of amendments were needed because he simply did not believe that the federal government would become large enough to warrant them. Madison saw no need to expand upon the rights which he felt were implicit and explicit in the body of the newly drafted constitution.

The Bill of Rights, while authored by James Madison was not necessarily his idea for the reasons state above. Thomas Jefferson, nearly obsessed with the exercise of free speech and free religious practice, had affected such protections in his home state of Virginia convinced Madison that they were necessary. The First Amendment was Jefferson’s primary concern.

It is easy to forget the past when our only encounters with it are dusty, well worn high school textbooks (for the majority of us) as we sit in US History classes that we often find boring or irrelevant that these two issues – free speech and freedom of religion – were not the norm in the world of our founding fathers. We take these civil liberties for granted in our post modern age. We often use them recklessly without regard for others. But, that is the right that was obtained for us in blood and in fierce debate. Many ignore the warning signs that these liberties are often in danger.

It’s easy to forget that groups such as the so-called Puritans and the Quakers (The Society of Friends) escaped intense persecution for their religious beliefs in places such as Britain, where the Church of England dominated or the European continent where the Roman Catholic Church dominated. People were arrested, tortured, imprisoned and often executed for daring to openly espouse beliefs different than those of the official state. This included religious and secular matters as well.

The First Amendment was not written to eliminate religion from our political process. As long as people have the right to vote democratically according to their conscience and hold religious beliefs these will effect the voting decisions that they make. Neither Madison nor Jefferson sought to bar religious people (mostly protestant Christians) from the political process or preventing them from sitting on juries or running for public office. Rather, they sought to prevent the corruption of our republic by making it possible for one particular group to become all powerful. They wanted to prevent the situation in Europe where two powerful churches, The Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church, had a monopoly forcing their worldview and politics on the populace and silencing and eliminating the opposition.

The best way to ensure this was to establish a secular republic free from the dogma of any particular faith, which is not the same thing as to say free from the religiously held moralities of the time. There could be no official state religion this means that Christianity, despite being the predominant religious group of the time, could not be considered the official religion. Protestant Christians may have been the founders, but there were deists (not a Christianity), atheists and Freemason’s in the intellectual elite that created our nation as well.

The Religion of James Madison

Officially James Madison was Episcopalian, as was Thomas Jefferson, and while president he attended St. John’s Episcopal Church, although many assert that our 2nd president was a deist. Most likely, Madison held deist sympathies or was at least influenced by deist thinking despite his membership in a traditional creedal religion. This type of influence is not uncommon in the day and the religious right tends to deny the vast array of liberal thinking prevalent in the lifetime of our founding fathers that shaped the form of our federal government and its constitution. They are as likely to misunderstand the term liberal as they are the concept of Republican Theory which informed the likes of Madison, Jefferson and others.

The 18th Century, often referred to as the European Enlightenment or simply The Enlightenment, was an age of secular thinking where the authority and worldview of the church was being challenged. Science and reason were replacing the scholasticism and superstitious thinking of the church or influencing it deeply. Reason was no longer seen as incompatible with a belief in god, even if god remained ultimately ineffable. The 18th century was an age of skeptics and open doubters, who often suffered for their doubt.

Thomas Paine – journalist and revolutionary pamphleteer – provided the philosophical impetus behind both the American and French revolutions was often reviled for his deist beliefs and outright skepticism of traditional theist religions. When he died very few people attended his funeral or honored his contributions. However, today it is amusing to see such a devout theist (as opposed to deist) as the Mormon Glenn Beck publishing a collected volume of Paine’s works no doubt eliminating his scathing criticism of religion called Common Sense.

But, was Madison truly a deist? That seems to be one of those “distillations of rumors” that Thomas Carlyle joked about. At least one source, Table of Religious Affiliations of American Founders 1997) classifies Madison as a theist, which would be in keeping with his church membership.

Perhaps, part of the problem is the tendency to view secularism as being primarily atheist and corresponding that to the separation of church and state. While, it may be that all atheists want religion out of their lives and the machinery of our government (a wholly unrealistic goal) it doesn’t mean that people who hold religious views, theist or otherwise, don’t value separation of Church and State. There are many religious who see the value of keeping the state and church separate and understand the value to maximum civil liberty it ensures.

Frankly, I don’t have enough information to satisfy the deist v. theist debate about James Madison. Theists often use Madison in support of their Christianizing of our secular republic by taking words out of context or omitting key paragraphs (as revisionists often do). For example:

There has been another deviation from the strict principle in the Executive Proclamations of fasts & festivals, so far, at least, as they have spoken the language of injunction, or have lost sight of the equality of all religious sects in the eye of the Constitution. Whilst I was honored with the Executive Trust I found it necessary on more than one occasion to follow the example of predecessors. But I was always careful to make the Proclamations absolutely indiscriminate, and merely recommendatory; or rather mere designations of a day, on which all who thought proper might unite in consecrating it to religious purposes, according to their own faith & forms. In this sense, I presume you reserve to the Govt. a right to appoint particular days for religious worship throughout the State, without any penal sanction enforcing the worship."

Advocates of the controversial National Day of Prayer have used Madison’s own words in support of their cause which seems problematic and quite contradictory given that the same man who wrote this also authored the First Amendment. Naturally, Dave Barton and other Christian revisionists, who deny the existence of separation of church and state to begin with, see no conflict. They often leave out the first paragraph that speaks of “deviations from the strict principal in the Executive Proclamations of Fasts and Festivals…have lost sight of the equality of all religious sects in the eyes of the Constitution.”

A proper reading of Madison’s words confirm his position in the First Amendment, provides clear proof of the separation of church and state and creates a strong case for the unconstitutional nature of the National Day of Prayer. Madison clearly distinguishes the right of an individual to practice in public or private religious observances, but still insisting that congress make no such official or legislative proclamations.

One of the main issues around the continuing cultural battle over separation of church and state is those involved are divided among truly polemical camps of bellicose far right believers and equally bellicose secularists. The secularists are often guilty of seeing doubt or even atheism in the founding fathers despite evidence to the contrary. Yet, the religious right assumes that simply writing or using the term god or creator implies their understanding of such things.

Madison may have openly expressed doubt. He may have had deist sympathies, but he also went to church, prayed and had a belief in some sort of theological metaphysic. And he wrote the First Amendment and supported the separation of Church and State.

But, let’s not be satisfied with just the meager words noted above.

To Be Continued…

My Favorite Label

2011-04-15T10:06:00.001-07:00

Human beings love labels in describing ourselves. The blissfully agnostic Gnostic is my favorite label for me. When I was younger and breaking free from my post modern Roman Catholic upbringing I tried on all kinds of different labels. I especially loved one word summaries – Wiccan, Neo-pagan, Buddhist, Atheist, Christian, Gnostic Christian, Existentialist, Nihilist, Occultist, Ceremonial Magician and Fool. I tried these and many more in the attempt to answer that most ego centric of questions – who the hell am I? What am I? Each of these questions being interrelated is essentially the same question.

Looking back “Fool” is the best label – both in the sense of the Major Arcana and in the most derisive sense as well. I was a big fool; I still am. Labeling oneself is largely an egoistic enterprise. In many ways it’s about wanting recognition from others for being special. We loathe our ordinariness so are ego likes to inflate itself to seem more important. It wants to be the primary “I” in my relationship to me. It wants to distinguish its bland ordinariness above everyone else’s bland ordinariness.

We want others to see how smart and spiritual we are. We want distinction – to stand out in the herd of sheep that we belong too. When I was freshly initiated into the Sant Mat practice in the lineage of Sant Thakar Singh, I ran into a long time initiate at a Manav Kendra (man making center) on a weekend retreat. As we were walking to lunch she began giving me her spiritual autobiography. Good Lord the pretensions of spiritual people and “seekers.” I am certainly no exception.

“I was raised a Swedenborgian,” She said looking at me with a mischievous twinkle in her eye. She was used to no one in her circle of friends knowing who Emanuel Swedonborg was. She was crestfallen as I explained to her my encounter with the life and works of the man and my opinions of his work Heaven and Hell, which I had read, among others, as a philosophy major in college.

Each of us playing the fool…

Both of us inflating our egos instead of expanding them with our little game of spiritual one-up-man-ship…

None of it remotely spiritual or useful…

All of it hubris and nothing more…

Labels can be useful. They are not all bad. They can serve as mileposts on our walk through life. Labels can let us know where we’ve been, where we are now and where we are heading. Labels can even describe who we are at the moment. But, labels are just a function of language and it is best to not get too attached to them.

We are not labels. We cannot be easily labeled. To label something is to define a thing, thus limiting it. Yes you are a mother, a doctor, a student, a daughter, a son, a lover and a spouse. And you are not these things. You are sometimes something else…multiple “something else’s.” At any given moment you might be experiencing one or more labeling events.

To further demonstrate my spiritual hubris I would suggest that this corresponds to Gurdjief’s notion that we are a “multiplicity of “I’s.” The “I” that is making love to my spouse, is not the “I” that drives to work or the “I” that is sitting on the toilet first thing in the morning and so on.

Our personality is somewhat of an illusion. It is fragments – bits and pieces – that accumulate as we walk through life. Because the change from each “I” is seamless and instantaneous it seems to us that our “host” personality is the only “I” there. Yet, the phenomenon of Dissociate Identity Disorder might suggest otherwise. However, I have no professional training in psychology so I’ll stop right here.

As for my favorite label – the blissfully agnostic Gnostic or atheist – that describes the present state of befuddlement that I am in and nothing more. My beliefs are changing (actually have been changing for years. I was 14 when I first began to question whether or not god – as I was raised to believe in – was real).

The search for absolute truth is my avocation, foolish and arrogant as that is, even as I understand that if such a thing as “absolute truth” or “god” exists I doubt very much given the epistemological boundaries we are hemmed in by we could ever reach such knowledge – definitively. It certainly doesn’t solve many of the present day problems that humanity is facing – real, practical problems.

But, the existential questions still plague us. They make us anxious and ignoring them serves no healthy purpose. This anxiety we feel is the dizziness of freedom, to paraphrase the morose Dane Soren Kierkegaard. But, having struggled with major depression and anxiety my entire life I choose to retain a sense of blissfulness about life in the face of its overall absurdity. I live a life of giddy conspiracy. I am in cahoots with both god and the devil simultaneously. Sweet Oblivion is my friend in this endeavor.

Therefore I am a blissfully agnostic Gnostic; a serious skeptic doubting an intelligent universe with a supernatural oversoul who has a carefully orchestrated “divine plan” that we are all a part of. That speaks of specialness. The ego holds us hostage with our existential anxiety in its efforts to bolster our “special” purpose in God’s plan.

If you want your life to have meaning and purpose it’s up to you to provide it. Your life means what you decide it means. As for your purpose, you have many purposes and they change as you walk through life. Some “purposes” stay with you for a long time such as your choice to be a teacher or member of the clergy or a parent. Others change as new situations arise and occur to you.

I know that what I believe seems preposterous and even arrogant to you. I would agree. But, what makes you think what you believe is any less preposterous or arrogant then what I do? Shall we review what it is you truly believe? I am not saying you are wrong.

You could be 100% correct as far I know. Experience tells me I am generally WRONG ABOUT EVERYTHING. My track record is pretty dismal. So I am never going to tell you that you are wrong. I have plenty to learn from you (Political ideologies are exempt from this provision). After all I am a fool.

Ultimately very few people who parrot the New Age maxim, “I am not religious I’m spiritual” have no idea what they are talking about. They aren’t spiritual at all. They are simply specialists that have acquired a peculiar set of knowledge from which they use to live outwardly while pretending to live inwardly. We all do it. Think about it and you will see that for yourself. We are all specialists. We are all generalists when it comes to living this life.

You will see that you are as big fool as I am. Labeling is your verification of this. Your ego will be tempted to tell you that you are free from labeling. But, that is a lie. Even if you are not creating your own labels, you are defining yourself by the labels that other choose for you. So you might as well choose your own and live more honestly.

Shutdowns and Thievery - Taxation and Our Republic

2011-04-08T12:59:00.000-07:00

The Tea Party rhetoric of “taxes are thievery” held by some of the angrier and extreme members of the polarizing group is not necessarily in keeping with the truth of our Democratic Republic. While often a view of the far left and far right on the libertarian spectrum it is not part and parcel of the republican theories that contributed to the construction of the United States governmental infrastructure.

The common error made by Libertarian extremists is that our founding fathers were all libertarians. Many were definitely libertarian idealists, but libertarian in the framework of the emerging Republican Theory of the 18th century. And these Republican Libertarians such as James Madison and Thomas Jefferson clashed with the Federalists, best typified by Alexander Hamilton.

I know that will gall many people especially this time of year as we are all rushing to file our personal income tax returns with the oppressive Internal Revenue Service. This is the first year in many years that I have had to write a check out to the IRS instead of getting my customary refund. I am not happy about this. The irony here is that I also paid less in personal income taxes this year than I did in 2009. This pain is made more outrageous by the reports that General Electric has managed to avoid paying hardly any taxes if none at all. It is certainly a condemnation of our current corporate tax laws.

But, at the end of the day, whether we like it or not, governments need to assess taxes. And as citizens of this democratic republic we have a responsibility to pay our fair share. That is part of the social contract. This is our government. We have a broad scope of civil liberties. We need to contribute to the upkeep of our national infrastructure. You want a voice in the democratic process you pay taxes for the privilege.

Certainly as one of the thousands of rank and file “little guys” I take umbrage at the vast amounts of corporate and personal accumulated wealth that escapes taxation while the vast majority of us struggle to get by. The reader should not mistake my tone as one of compliance or willingness to pay taxes. Taxes are an ugly reality, especially income taxes. I have often doubted the constitutional validity of the IRS…it does seem to be constitutional much to my chagrin. To be very certain some taxes are more unreasonable than others. The issue isn’t that we should never pay taxes, but what constitutes a reasonable tax and how much we should be required to pay. The Boston Tea Party, the iconic example of American tax revolt and the event from which the bellicose Tea Party takes its name, is the primary lodestone that laid the foundation for our revolutionary war -taxation without representation.

Taxation without representation is most definitely thievery. Taxation without representation is slavery. It is the world of lord and serf. The issue of taxation is pivotal to that most American of political questions. How large should are government be and how broad of scope should their involvement be in the lives of citizens? Even if we take the extreme position that the US Constitution, as stated in its preamble, exits only to provide for the common defense and keep the wheels of commerce rolling we still need to concede that a certain level of taxation need to exist. One of the necessary requirements of commercial enterprise is roads and highways. There are many others.

The problem that we are facing as a shutdown of the federal government is looming is that Americans are largely fiscally and economically illiterate. This is true of Joe Main-Street as it is of the majority of our elected officials. On one side we have the Republicans who are forming their ideology around discredited ideas and the Democrats whose centrists have largely adopted Reagan era fiscal policies – also discredited. Yes, I am talking about Clinton and Obama.

On the extreme left we have progressives that, while intelligent and socially concerned, also operate from ideas that have not proven to work readily as well. The most offensive of these Republican ideas is the constant refrain of cut the budget, cut taxes and lower taxes which is akin to saving a company from bankruptcy by cutting both expenses and revenue – Quixotic! As concerned as Republicans and Tea Partiers are over the Federal deficit they are more concerned with their own bottom lines. This guarantees that they are not after the best interest of our nation. The stark reality is that despite the budget cuts – upwards toward $60 billion in proposed reductions – both parties are doing precious little to mitigate the crisis and right size our federal government.

It is a myth perpetrated by conservative ideologues that liberals don’t like budget cuts. We are all for cutting pork barrel spending and redundant and unnecessary programs, especially those demonstrated to not work. Our concern is that congressional conservatives and libertarians of the right want to eliminate all entitlement programs such as Medicare, Social security and continue to support a health care system that makes insurers wealthy while breaking the backs of hard working middle class and working class Americans. As expensive as Medicare and Social Security are in terms of federal budget dollars, the cost of reducing and eliminating them create a potential humanitarian crisis that is unacceptable. Not to mention we have all had hard earned money taken from our paychecks in FICA contributions to help fund these programs.

No one in congress seems to want to address this or the reality that when you have a large deficit you can’t decrease taxes. In fact you might even need to increase tax rates. But, here is the thing – if corporations and private accumulated wealth are forced to pay their fair share of taxes rather than taking advantages of loopholes in the tax code, the federal government could see – theoretically, an increase in revenue that would be helpful in resolving our current federal budget – deficit crisis. Reasonable and necessary budget cuts are important, but that is only part of the solution. Generating tax revenue is also necessary.

Taxation is a necessary requirement of our democratic republic, but insomuch as the moneyed and privileged classes, by the fact of their wealth, have more power and influence it is only reasonable that we expect them to pay their share of the tax burden. In many ways it is they that are the thieves among us. They are not only robbing from us on Main Street, but from future generations as well. Taxation is not thievery as long as we have a say through our electoral process, the reasonableness of certain taxes and the use of tax dollars is another issue altogether.

Do you believe in the death penalty for capital crimes?

2011-04-02T18:50:00.001-07:00

The morning following the electrocution of Ted Bundy I made the decision that I could never, ever support the death penalty. I remember laying in bed waking up to a news report that featured the jubilant cries of joy over his death. As monstrously psychopathic as Bundy was the party atmosphere of those outside the prison where he was executed was even more monstrous. In their joy they lost a little of their own humanity. Their grief subsumed them and warped their hearts. They became like the monsters they sought to slay. One man even shouted exuberantly, “He’s dead. Hallelujah he is finally dead.” He was the most insidious of the lot. I was beyond horrified.

I decided then and there that opposing the death penalty was a moral imperative. Even as people have shouted at me, “How would you feel?” I knew that as insane with grief and filled with burning white hot rage as I would be if someone I loved had been murdered by a Bundy, my desire to murder or have the state murder for me the perpetrator would only serve my need for revenge. In lucidity I could clearly see the thin, nearly invisible line drawn in sand between revenge and justice. Capital punishment is murderous lie that disguises vengeance as a clinical and methodical act of justice. I hope that I will never have to experience such loss as I am certain than in my grief my high minded idealism will be discarded. This is all the more reason to abolish the death penalty once and for all.

The death penalty is a moral travesty that no enlightened society can tolerate regardless of how monstrous the person convicted may be. If we are to become a truly just and enlightened society then we must strive to be better individually and collectively than the lowest common denominator among us. Killing someone because they killed someone is a puerile justification that serves our instinct for revenge, but not the noble calling for justice.

As Coretta Scott King has said, “An evil deed is not redeemed by an evil deed of retaliation. Justice is never advanced in the taking of a human life. Morality is never upheld by legalized murder.”

That is all capital punishment is - legalized murder. Even worse given the imperfect nature of any justice system and the reality of human error it stands to reason that any state that executes its prisoners will on occasion execute an innocent man or woman. In fact since 1900 there have been at least 24 documented cases were people were innocent for the crime they were executed for. Since the reinstatement of capital punishment in 1976 over 60 condemned prisoners have been released from death row and in each of these cases they were all wrongfully convicted.

It is better for our humanity and for justice that a hundred criminals go free than one innocent person suffer for a crime they did not commit. Whether we like it or not this is the higher morality that our criminal justice system serves. Hated as they are the defense attorney is a necessary evil in our quest to be a just and enlightened society. One of the many prices we pay for a free and open society is that we can not entirely rid ourselves of our monsters.
In the United States the mentally ill and the mentally retarded can be executed. We also execute juvenile offenders and since 1990 six such executions have taken place. The United States is one of fewer than six nations that executes Juveniles.

It is well known that the death penalty is not an effective deterrent. Countries such as Canada also report declining homicide rates in the years following the abolishing of the death penalty. While correlation does not prove causation it is an interesting finding nonetheless.

The death penalty is not about victim’s rights. I am a firm believer in the necessity of victim advocacy and their right to seek justice. However, murdering someone via the state should not be among those rights. It demeans their humanity; it demeans all of our humanity.

Sources:

Amnesty International
American Civil Liberties Union
National Coalition Against the Death Penalty
Religious Tolerance.org

Recommended Reading

Death at Midnight: The Confessions of an Executioner, By Donald A Cabana. Northeastern University Press.

For a kiss I will answer all your questions.

Do you believe in the death penalty for capital crimes? If Yes, Why? If No, why not?

2011-03-31T12:58:00.001-07:00

Do you believe in the death penalty for capital crimes? If Yes, Why? If No, why not?

Answer here

Why do you atheists proyselytize for atheism. This is a christian nation and that is how people want it. Can't you realize that no one wants to hear your crap?

2011-03-30T11:34:00.001-07:00

I don’t know if I proselytize for atheism so much as I speak out in favor of reason. But, if I proselytize, I proselytize. Christianity and Islam have been doing so for centuries. Sometimes their proselytizing became violent as they forced conversion on people of other faiths (i.e. Jews and pagans) on pain of death and in some cases that still goes on around the word. Fortunately, in places such as the United States proselytizing is generally done in the form of polemics and apologetics and the use of legislation.

So I won’t apologize for offending anyone for my viewpoint. However, in the spirit of reason I will do my best to not be deliberately offensive, although I won’t promise that. I will do my best to not turn into Christopher Hitchens, who blames religion for EVERYTHING, or so it seems. I believe that is an extreme view that is not always fair nor generally in keeping with reality. Secularists and non-theists can be as cruel and unjust as a believer.

Frankly, I don’t see the need to confront and challenge religious people on their beliefs. It’s pointless and causes angry argumentative clashes between people I often genuinely like and care about. Going out of my way to hurt or offend others is an unkind thing to do and completely unnecessary. I certainly don’t hate people of faith, any faith. Disagreement on the issues of the day and the nature of reality seem a poor reason to react so strongly.

That being said, one area that I will make an exception is in the practice of democracy. There is no one, myself included, who has the right to remain unchallenged for our viewpoints if we use them as guidelines when we fill out our ballots. If you support legislation that I feel is unjust or poorly conceived I will call you out. Disagreement and dissention are a price we must all pay for the privilege of participating in a democratic republic. It’s loud, bellicose and sometime offensive. If you don’t like it then keep your mouth shut and/or don’t participate.

We have this weird attitude in our country that religions and people of faith shouldn’t be unchallenged. My mother used to say if you want to keep your friends don’t talk about sex, religion or politics. That’s terribly unrealistic. Let’s keep quiet about three of the most important things that affect a person’s life and affect the course our nation is taking at any given time. My mother’s generation liked to “be careful of what the neighbors thought.” Good old days my fat hairy white ass. No wonder my generation inherited so many serious problems.

Religions are only sacred to those who believe them. I see no reason to exempt faith from the national discussion. If it is going to play a role in shaping our nation, than it must be up for grabs. The reality is religion in the United States, most especially the peculiar brand of evangelical Christianity of the far right, has been struggling to dominate the culture at large. We see their machinations in the classroom and in the bedroom among other places. I am sorry, I won’t stand by and let that continue happening without a fight.

As for The United States being a Christian nation that is simply not so as any thoughtful reading of our history will demonstrate. What we are is clearly a secular democratic republic with a constitutional separation of church and state originally founded by Protestant Christians. Of course you have to use a very broad definition of Protestant Christian as the ideas of deism and Freemasonry played a huge role in the ideals that shaped our nation. Modern evangelical Christians ignore the profound impact of the thought of the 18th Century, which was quite antagonistic to church and state, most especially the deadly combination of the two.

Finally, evangelical Christians only make up to about 25% of all people who identify themselves as Christians. That means 75% of Christians are something else. That hardly qualifies your group as being “everybody.” Not to mention that the increasing diversity of our nation brings other groups and ways of thinking into our national dialogue. This is as it should be.

For a kiss I will answer all your questions.

Isn't Libertarian Socialism just a fancy term for Anarchism?

2011-03-28T10:15:00.001-07:00

Yes and no. Libertarianism, as I am fond of saying, is a spectrum of ideology. Anarchism is on the extreme left end. Frankly, Anarchism is a foolish concept based on the anger and petulance that keeps certain individuals in a semi-permanent state of emotional and mental adolescence. First and foremost the idea of using violence to overthrow government so that a peaceful and just society can emerge is not based in reality or firm understanding of human nature. And make no mistake in order for anarchist utopia to be implemented violence is necessary.

For a kiss I will answer all your questions.

In the search for libertarian voices on Tumblr I came across a bit of dialogue that doesn't sit right with me. Could I get your take on it? http://libertarians.tumblr.com/post/4091948680/in-a-libertarian-society-what-would-stop-corporations

2011-03-26T16:26:00.001-07:00

It seems a tad overwrought and infused with conspiratorial paranoia. Point no 1. I would disagree with pending the writer's explanation of what he means by "a free society." My assumption is that his is on the extreme of the libertarian specturm and embraces anarchism or he is a Tea Party advocate. Given that he is located in Arizona I may have to side with Tea Party.

In fact the whole post sounds very much like Tea Party rhetoric. The Tea Party, in my opinion, is a pseudo libertarian movement. Most of them don't embrace the actual spirit of libertarianism beyond the vauge anti-federal government, anti taxation platform.

I have never cared much for the "taxation is theft" belief. Taxation, for the most part, is a necessary part of running a state. We submit to taxation in exchange for representation and a vast scope of civil liberties. That being sad, I don't believe that all taxation is necessarily just or reasonable. The preamble to our constitution states that the federal government's basic roles are to keep the wheels of commerce turning and provide for a common defense. These functions will require a certain level of taxation. What that exactly should mean and what is fair and reasonable is always up for debate.

However, I don't totally disagree with the notion that large corporations via their lobbyists have had a tremendous impact on the government. Sadly, corporate lawyers have managed to use the 14th Amendment to get their client's corporations to be treated like individual citizens, albeit artificial ones. However, I believe that this is still quite a fixable problem - but not able to exactly suggest a fix for you at this time.

The corruption of our republic by the moneyed and powerful few was one of the concerns of James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, which pitted them against Hamilton and his Federalists. It often feels like the corporations are winning. And why wouldn't they given how easily both Democrats and Republicans both accept sizable donations from these lobbying groups - often the same ones.

States, being comprised of humans, are subject to corruption. Our political machinery is the manifestation of our human interactions. This is what Aristotle meant by his often misunderstood axiom, "man is a political animal." Politics, from polis, from which we get the concept of city (metropolis among others) bespeaks the fact that humans are social creatures and we gather together in clumps. Social orders rise out of this clumping.

Humans will always create a "governing" body of some kind and as far as my present level of knowledge goes it seems that every society from the most primal to the most advanced does this. True libertarianism requires a high level of ethical conduct that I have yet to witness in the Tea Party movement or even my fellow Libertarians. My personal belief is that until our basic nature evolves a fair and just libertarian society is a great concept on paper worthy of striving for, but still out of reach.

Who will protect the weak from the remorseless. Most so-called libertarians are just wanting an excuse to be ruthless. Until we can eliminate the sociopathic from among us we will never achieve true libertarianism.

For a kiss I will answer all your questions.

What is an Atheist?

2011-03-22T14:45:00.000-07:00

a•the•ist [ey-thee-ist] N a person who denies or disbelieves the existence of a supreme being or beings.
Origin:
1565–75;

Our seemingly religious culture in the United States has a hard time with atheists. The problem stems from the deep Christian influence on Western culture. Theists, most especially the religious apologists, want an easy way to categorize all non-believers. It makes “debunking” them and defending their peculiar faiths much easier.

The problem is that an atheist is the opposite of a religionist. A religionist – as the root religion suggests – is “bound” or tethered by a set of principals or creeds that allows them to cleave to communities of likeminded individuals through a set of stated beliefs, customs and practices.

Atheists are not bound that way. In fact all it really means to be an atheist is to be a-theistic or without god or gods. In my estimation the truest definition of an atheist is someone who lives without any gods or belief in the supernatural. At least that is how I would apply it to myself if you were to ask me. I am godless. Not only am I godless, I take an agnostic worldview. Even if god were to exist it is doubtful to me that its existence would be provable as the current estate of deity based world religions suggest (at least as I experience them here in the West).

The fact remains that even philosophers with religious tendencies such as Kant and the mathematician Blaise Pascal concluded that god was beyond our capacity to reason. This lead to the ultimate intellectual suicide referred to as Pascal’s wager. The reality is that god is a concept that exists in the mind of the individual believer. That concept is not even 100% the same among similar groups of believers despite their adherence to the same creed. It is entirely subjective and therefore it makes perfect rational sense to demand some form of empirical proof. The religionist’s insistence that there are other ways of “knowing” is all well and good, but unless you can establish the difference between actual knowledge, wishful thinking, fantasy and often downright delusion it is an irrational and even irresponsible way to live your life. Since we know that our physical senses can deceive us, how much more caution should we place in the exercise of our subjective reasoning?

My favorite story attributed to the Buddha tells of a young man who asked whether or not god existed. The Buddha replied, “God exists, god does not exist. The matter of your enlightenment remains the same.” If god is beyond our ability to reason it seems pointless to speculate about his or her existence. Furthermore the inability to reason god into existence suggests the high probability that god does not exist at all. The Buddha has been said to have discouraged his followers from such idle metaphysical speculation. It serves no useful purpose and can drag us away from reality.

My present grasp of the natural world suggests to me that it works just as well without a supreme deity or supernatural forces at play. It is mind boggling to consider the big bang as the start of the universe which implies that all matter and energy that exists now has always existed in some form or other. But, this imponderable reality is no less absurd and, perhaps less so, then the notion of an ineffable and eternal being who created everything ex nihlio or out of nothing. That kind of reasoning seems more like a form of mental retardation than anything else. Where did god come from?

After years of being steeped in religion, first as a Roman Catholic, and later in a variety of New Thought and non-Christian faiths I reached the conclusion that religion has served no functional or useful purpose in my life. I have not found any productive element to attending Mass, praying, eating unleavened wafers, going to confession and fasting or any other religious practice. In fact religion played a huge role in my being afflicted by depression and anxiety. Giving me the permission to discard the yoke of faith my mental health has greatly improved. However, this is me and I am just one of many atheists or nonbelievers. I don’t speak for all atheists or freethinkers.

I suppose if you asked a hundred different atheists to describe what it means to be an atheist or what their atheism meant to them personally you would get nearly a hundred different answers. That is one of the defining characteristics of free thinking non-theists as a group. We are quite independent in our thinking and don’t rely on the improvable and always improbable notions of the theist. We think for ourselves. When we don’t know we say, “I don’t know.” We don’t play subjective reasoning games trying to shove imaginary spiritual beings into the gaps created by our lack of knowledge or understanding.

Atheists don’t have a centralized creed or a set of universal principals that we are all bound to by agreement. This is the biggest stumbling block for many theists or supernatural enthusiasts who try to understand atheism from a religious or spiritual perspective. Atheists can’t be understood this way. We don’t have a set group of principals that define us as a whole like Roman Catholics or Orthodox Jews have. Atheists are just as likely to disagree with each other as any religionist. In fact, as a whole, we can be quite irascible, especially if we disagree with you. However, we are not all nasty militants like Christopher Hitchens.

That being stated it doesn’t mean that I am unprincipled. I have a very sharp sense of ethics and ethical conduct. But, it’s not a creed that I must swear by to gain entrance to the eternal bliss of an afterlife.

Despite my mother’s concerns I didn’t suddenly become an immoral criminal and sexual deviant. Rather I live by a code of personal enlightened self interest, which takes into account the effects of my actions on those around me. I find it personally important to consider both my intended and any potential unintended consequence to my actions. I don’t need a god’s approval or fear of his punishment to do the “right thing.” My ability to make emotional connections to other human beings and even animals helps me do so and behave in a fair and just manner.

But, this is not religious practice. My ethics and subsequent conduct will change as my information changes. It changes through open interaction with others. But, ethics is not religion although most religions concern themselves with a sort of “ethics light” called morality. Morality prescribes certain approved behaviors and sanctions for unapproved ones. Secular society does this as well, but it doesn’t make the practice of democracy a religion.

Perhaps this sounds like a set of principals to you. In some ways you are correct. Any thoughtful person could be said to have a set of beliefs or principals that we live by. But, that is not the same thing as a dogmatic religious creed, which so many try to suggest that atheism has. Some of the confusion may result that there are atheistic religions such as Buddhism, which has no central beliefs in god or gods. But, Buddhism is a religion that happens to have an atheistic or agnostic, at the very least, worldview.

Buddhism is another spectrum on the world religion tree with its own set of principals or creeds and prescribed rituals and behaviors. It is a religion that simply has no gods just as some aboriginal groups in Australia have no gods, but have religious practices. Atheism is not this way. Not all religions are centered around any god or gods and despite our monotheistic biases a religious spectrum such as Christianity is actually a rarity in comparison to the many forms of religious expression. So while there exist, non theistic religions that does not equate to atheism, having a creed of itself.

Over the years I have heard some fantastic and amusing misunderstandings of this. One friend recently suggested that to be an atheist means you reject only the Christian god. Not really – if you reject one god, but accept others you are still a theist. You may not be Christian, but you don’t qualify as an atheist. The only exception might be someone such as the fictional fantasy character Conan the Barbarian, whose deity Crom disregards Conan’s prayers to the point where the warrior simply chooses to disregard the worship of Crom as not useful to him. Conan lives without god or gods, but his otherwise acceptance of the general reality of Crom or in other supernatural events eliminates him form the category of the true atheist.

Another amusing statement was that an atheist is someone “who thought that you have to believe that everything in the bible is true to be a Christian” or believer. That is patently ridiculous. That statement describes a type of fundamentalist literalism that is not shared by all believers. Many post modern Christians view the bible as an ad hoc mixture of history, myth, poetry and prophetic uttering that is not always reliable.

Personally, as an atheist my studies have suggested that even the so-called history in the bible is rather revisionist if not downright crackpot. Tradition gets confused with actual fact based history all the time. Despite more than a century of archeology there is little evidence to support much of what is written in the texts of Exodus and Joshua. Even Jesus is little more than a quasi historical figure whose real existence is confused by the mythical imagery of the risen Christ of Pauline Christianity.

My being atheist has nothing to do with how I personally view the bible or what I think of other people’s views of holy writ. These views are as much a spectrum as Christianity is a spectrum and will vary, sometimes greatly. The biggest mistake our culture makes with Christianity is to consider it one religion. It is not. You may think that your Christian beliefs are the true form of the religion, but that is a matter of personal opinion. Christianity is a branch of monotheism off the world religion tree. You can start making distinctions such as Orthodox, Roman Catholicism, Catholicism and Protestantism. Each of these categories has sub categories making Christianity a very diverse type of monotheism that shares a few characteristics.

Atheists need to help non-theists make clearer distinctions. It will help when we stop using the language of Christianity in our discussions. The fact is debating Christianity, while entertaining, is non-productive because Atheism and Christianity are not apples and apples. One is a religion based on supernatural premises; the other is the absence of gods and the supernatural. It is not a religion at all. Now there are atheistic philosophies such as Secular Humanism and non-theist religions such as Buddhism, but these are not the core of atheism, which is, as our definition suggests, is to be or to live without gods. That is all.

When I say I am an atheist all I am saying to you is that I don’t believe in any gods or supernatural things. There is nothing more to it.

The GOP's Trojan Horse: Public Broadcasting & the Budget Crisis

2011-03-10T13:22:00.000-08:00

James O’Keefe, self described “citizen journalist,” is really just a marginally ethical conservative whose recent piece of “guerilla theater” sums up, in total, the attacks on NPR and PBS. This is a polemical battle aimed at silencing the moral enemies of the ultra-right. They have been taking pot shots at public broadcasting for years. This is not the first time that conservative members of congress have sought to curtail funding for public broadcasting. However, the federal deficit and the attendant budget crises is really just a Trojan horse hiding the real motivation behind their attacks. This is a battle of ideology. America is in the midst of a cultural war and the conservatives have been winning gradually over the past 30 years. That they believe to the contrary is not the issue nor is it true.

At first glance it is difficult to criticize the theatrics of O’Keefe’s latest stunt where he captures on camera an NPR executive making incendiary comments regarding the Tea Party to two men posing as potential Muslim donors. Professional investigative journalists have been using the infiltration and hidden camera method for many years. When the cameras are rolling to reveal the despicable happening at organizations that appear on my “shit list,” I cheer. Therefore, it is rather hypocritical for me to take umbrage with James O’Keefe. He is simply doing what has been considered acceptable by those of us on the left and considered common practice. Many of television’s prime time news magazine shows have used this confrontational method successfully. Therefore, I suppose my referring to him as “marginally ethical” really exposes my hypocrisy rather than righteous outrage.

What surprises me, although it shouldn’t, is the outrage over NPR Senior Vice President, Ron Schiller’s (no relation to Vivian Schiller) anti-Tea Party remarks. Seriously, who really cares? Those of us on the left tend to agree and do consider much of the Tea Party membership to be “Islamaphobic, xenophobic and seriously racist” as well as speaking for much of “gun toting” America. Liberal bloggers both professional and amateur, such as me, have said as much and, in my case, a hell of a lot worse.

Ron Schiller should grab his gonads and say, “Hell yes I said that. I believe it.” He’s not the only one. How is it suddenly a scandal that a left leaning member of the media openly holds a movement that runs counter to his beliefs in contempt? Should we put hidden cameras in conservative organizations? We would find much to be outraged about there as well. Perhaps, it’s not the beliefs Mr. Schiller holds that it is the trouble, but the fact that he uses a platform funded by public money?

Yet, it is interesting that O’Keefe used Muslim imposters to expose NPR. It lends very well to the belief that the far right’s anti-Muslim fear is part and parcel of their attacks on the left. Why Muslim donors? Why not white corporate donors? American corporations give grants to public broadcasting all the time. It’s an interesting question worth contemplating. At least I have justified my earlier remark calling O’Keefe “marginally ethical.”

A lot of the blame must lie on NPR and Vivian Schiller who has officially resigned and stepped down as the president of National Public Radio. I love NPR. I am a good leftist after all. I cannot disagree with conservative opponents who decry its bias to the left. It’s very clear. Ron Schiller was unprofessional. But, that isn’t a crime nor is it a reason for public outcry. Whether or not he played down to “every single stereotype of the liberal left, sneering, close-minded, arrogant, contemptuous of the rest of the country, convinced anyone who disagrees is evil and stupid,” as Tucker Carlson (Daily Caller) states is a mater of opinion. A lot of these allegations can be leveled at the right too. NPR clearly lacks leadership. They are running scared because for the first time in decades their budget may be decimated under the GOP attack. They need to go on the offensive.

Ultimately, the recent attack on NPR is nothing more than polemical. It’s about an attempt of right wing activists with the aid of congress to silence a moral enemy to their position. If there is anything awry with NPR it is the lamentable liberal bias given that they receive a large portion of their funding through the federal budget. There should be a vigorous attempt at editorial balance when public money is involved. I, for one, would be upset if a public broadcasting forum took public money and then broadcast largely a right wing Christian bias. This is a valid subject for rational debate.

Despite that failing, destroying the trust of public broadcasting is short sighted and lamentable. Radio and television were correctly viewed as powerful media for learning and the dissemination of information. Pioneers such as the late, great Fred Rogers understood the value of public television. Mr. Rogers’ singular mission was to bring his gentle, human message of kindness to children. And he did so. I read an amusing anecdote recently that described a news report after Fred Roger’s car had been stolen. The next day it was returned to him with a note saying, “If we had known this was your car we would have left it alone.”

Perhaps, this is not the most perfect example of the success of both Mr. Rogers and PBS, but it is still quite telling. It speaks to the efficacy of a content rich media designed around learning, compassion and information. The truth is public broadcasting is the last content rich form of media in our country. Content suffers at the hands of commercial broadcasters and internet providers. For the executives that control these outlets it is the revenue generating advertisements that are the true content. The rest is just filler to keep viewers hooked until the next round of commercials. Even news broadcasts and informational news magazines have devolved into a shrill infotainment that distorts truth and polarizes the nation to the point that reasonable discourse is near impossible.

If the GOP succeeds in defunding PBS and NPR it could bring the end to public broadcasting altogether. It is inconceivable the corporate sponsorship and viewer/listener pledges alone will be able to cover the gap. This would be tragic. The fact that public broadcasting has a recognizable liberal bias is a non issue. This may have more to do with the fact that it was liberal minded people who were quick to see its value so many years ago. If conservatives can’t exploit something for obscene profits they tend to show no interest. Yet, their children have all benefited from PBS programming at home and in school.

As for James O’Keefe’s pretense at being an investigate journalist…it’s laughable. He is no more an honest investigate journalist than is Wikileaks Julian Assange. Both men are cranks; toilers who have clear anti establishment agendas who occasionally get something right, as one can argue that O’Keefe did with ACORN. But, most often they misunderstand what they are seeing and cause more harm then good

The Invisible Hand of Adam Smith – The Myth of the Morality of the Free Market.

2011-03-07T16:10:00.000-08:00

My attitude about the free market is polemical. I don’t deny it. It is preposterous to assume that the free market is the most moral economic system. For one thing it is completely amoral. This is neither bad nor good in and of itself. The amorality of free market economies implies that it is only as ethical or “moral” as the people who adhere to the principals of its practice. The reality is that free market economies create situations where the owners of capital exploit for their benefit all that are without voice or are weaker then them. This was the world that Marx lived in. This was the world that laborers in the United States found themselves in at the turn of the 20th century. It’s a world that we seem to be rapidly returning to.

Secondly, the falsely assumed morality of the free market is an absurd quasi supernatural notion that speaks to the religious imaginations of many on the far right of this country. Taking the writings of Adam Smith at face value they imagine their Judeo-Christian god as Smith’s poorly named “invisible hand” blessing and controlling the economic fates of his creations. Christianity, in the extreme, has embraced capitalism as if it was a gospel truth supported by Christ and that their god blesses and guides such activity.

The behavior of capitalists since the beginning of the industrial revolution has been exploitational in the extreme, the exact opposite of how most people view the morality of Jesus the Christ. Most importantly in order for a person to behave ethically or morally they must possess a conscience. There are plenty of sociopaths, ruthlessly ambitious, in the fields of business and politics. Sociopathy was not something that figured into the writings of Adam Smith or many of the enlightenment period thinkers who believed in the perfectible nature of man.

In his treatise, the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith’s view of the invisible hand was more practical then spiritual, resulting from the self interest of negotiating parties rather than divinity. There is nothing supernatural about it. The so-called invisible hand was conceived as an invisible force that guides free market capitalism through competition for scarce resources. According to Smith each participant will attempt to maximize their self – interest. He then supposes that this will lead to mutually beneficial exchange of goods and services. The problem is that Adam Smith presupposes that this invisible hand will be ethical. In his estimation no regulation is needed because with everyone working to maximize their own self-interest the most mutually beneficial trades will result. This kind of nonsense is to be expected from the optimism of the 18th Century intelligentsia.

Self-interest, in general, is not moral. It doesn’t take in the needs and interests of other parties expect by participants who have a high sense of ethical standards or, if by law, they are forced to. If there is any invisible guiding hand it is the psychology of the participants. Greed, avarice and excitement are the invisible hand that controls the market. Just as fear and anger control the market as well and as we saw in the near collapse of the world financial markets in September 2008. Left to itself the market is governed by the forces of accumulated wealth and the world suffers at the whims of their ambitions and their fears. There is no guaranteed, natural mechanism protecting the world from the abuses of laissez faire. Economic problems are man made and therefore it follows the solutions must be man made as well. The protections must come in the form of government regulation.

There is nothing wrong with self-interest providing it is an enlightened self interest. However, corporations cannot do this in their role as artificial persons. The corporate structure exists simply to insulate and protect the moneyed interests who control the organizations. In fact the legal efforts of corporate attorneys are aimed at protecting the sovereignty of their artificial personhood thereby limiting the liability of all involved. It decreases personal accountability which without any true ethical system of conduct cannot be enacted.

Tied closely to the myth of high morality is the myth of innovation. The free market fundamentalist argues that if you allow the government to come in and regulate with too free a hand you will slow down the ability of the markets to innovate and remain competitive. Yet, after September 2008 how anyone can argue in favor of deregulation is beyond me.

Innovation as, my pro business brother argues, comes from people. There is no other source. Our machines don’t innovate and our corporations don’t innovate. But, the people working independently or within these corporations are the source of innovation. I would agree and add to my brother’s argument I would add that the free market doesn’t create innovation either. It can actually do the exact opposite as we are seeing in the case of big oil and energy policy.

The free market like a river follows the path of least resistance. That path is profits. Innovation costs money up front and it may even be years before it will translate to cost savings or profits. It often gets put off. In the case of big oil we see their lobbyists at work directing national energy policy. Instead of developing a true alternative fuel economy they have been protecting the interests of oil, coal and natural gas, which is ruining ecosystems and polluting potable water through the practice of hydraulic fracking. Our government has largely rewarded these efforts rather than forcing innovation as they should.

The amount of money that the oil and gas industry is spending to protect itself against innovation is madness given that we are rapidly producing peak production if not having already past it in most of the world’s active oil fields. For these artificial persons the answer is to destroy or, at least, endanger, what is left of pristine ecologies in an attempt to get at the oil. The United States is not the only country guilty.

If the free market guaranteed innovation as is believed we would be seeing it already. Rather, it often impedes it and silences would be innovators to protect current market share and profits. In a free market economy the major motivation for change is greed. If it can be exploited for profit, innovation will occur seemingly overnight as we have seen with technology. But, if it can’t then any useful innovation will be forestalled.

Free Market fundamentalists are hopelessly naïve in assuming that greed is the sole motivation for innovation. Greed and ethical conduct cannot coexist. One will supplant the other. People can find motivation to innovate in all human endeavors other than purely monetary gain. Despite my anti-corporate stance I still largely support free enterprise as the best vehicle for commerce. It also provides the opportunity for people to have more choices about their livelihoods and how they will spend their days as opposed to more programmed economies.

In keeping with my free enterprise attitude I subscribe to the notion that too much regulation is as bad as too little regulation. The interests of the general public need to be represented by the government as a counterbalance to the interest of the moneyed few. The problem is that in laissez faire the tendency of a powerful, able few to accumulate and hoard resources is painful reality.

This always increases power for their class while diminishing it for the less fortunate. This great imbalance is not only a threat to civil liberty, but it threatens the stability of democracy. When power in the form of property and resources is allowed to accumulate too heavily in one economic subset democracy, while remaining the general form of a republic, becomes an oligarchy not unlike we see in Mexico and other failed states across Latin America.

State bureaucracies are lamentable necessities. Yet, the warnings and criticisms from libertarian voices are justified and need to be addressed. But, the fact remains that without regulation the corruption of our democracy by the wealthy is inevitable. It is this corruption that has prevented us from truly addressing the merging global crises of climate change, health, and agriculture and resource depletion. In order to do this we need to stem the tide of reemerging laissez faire and create constitutional limits for corporations. Governments need to force by any means necessary the much needed innovations and not simply pander to the moneyed interests who finance their campaigns.

Next: The Myth of the Emerging Green Economy – A case of too little, too late.

Artificial Persons: Corporations and the 14th Amendment

2011-03-07T11:37:00.000-08:00

Corporate America needs to change the way they show up in the world. Thanks to a tragic unforeseen consequence of the 14th Amendment, corporate attorneys, abetted by the Supreme Court, have done a tremendous job arguing for an artificial personhood that sees these often megalithic oligarchies enjoying the same legal status as individuals. The problem for the world is that these artificial people show up as sociopaths despite the fact that there are decent people, even noble at times, running and working for these companies. This corporate sociopathy is a result of cognitive isolation that removes them from the reality experienced by the eternal stakeholders where they do business. Corporate leaders must be forced to accept increased liability and not be shielded from it.

As a brief historical note it is interesting to consider that the corporation is truly a modern device of laissez faire capitalism. Prior to the 14th amendment corporations were quite rare. They were often charted by the government for a specific public works purpose such as laying railroad tracks or building a bridge. Once the project was completed the corporation would generally dissolve. This changed as the industrial revolution pummeled through our country as owners of capital sought to exploit every available resource in the name of making profits.

Thomas Jefferson was in favor of Constitutional regulations such as limited life spans, but the monetary interests championed by Hamilton and his Federalists managed to successfully lobby against such regulations. Following the end of the Civil War the 14th amendment was ratified which increased the scope of corporate power rather than holding it in check. It is in this unforeseen consequence that gave birth to Marxism and the modern labor movement.

The passing of the 14th amendment was intended to aid the federal government in overturning legislation at the state level that attempted to limit the civil liberties of the recently freed slaves during the civil war. The challenge of our democratic republic is that states have tremendous legislative power while the federal government is often hobbled, preventing decisive action in respect to individual states. The freed men and women of reconstruction America often found that, while they were no longer slaves, their so-called freedom was dubious at best in many places. It would take another 100 years of oppression before the civil rights movement broke the hard invisible shackles that remained. Even now at the start of the 21st century discrimination and racism is still being battled.

The discrimination is not just limited to blacks. In Arizona we have seen the most unjust and aggressive immigration legislation in post modern America targeting Latinos enacted while the federal government barely stammers and stutters over the very obvious and blatant injustices occurring there. The unconscionable attack on collective bargaining by ultra conservatives in Wisconsin is the epitome of a crass capitalist state and the attendant abuses heaped like hot coals on the heads of the middle and working classes by the wealthy. Again our federal government does little but stammer. Given the structure of our democratic republic in respects to state and federal powers this is to be expected.

We are not suggesting that we undo the power of the state. Madison and Jefferson saw that our current set up with checks and balances and limiting federal power was a safeguard from the corporate states of Europe, as admired by the Federalists, that those who had come to the shores of this new world hoped to avoid. Unfortunately, our republic has difficulty in protecting people from the tyranny of the states. Rather than advocating a federal government with increased powers we suggest constitutional safeguards that protect the civil liberties from legislation enacted by individual states that are discriminatory and unjust – the actual spirit of the 14th amendment.

Fortunately, the constitutional protection of corporations is being hammered by legal challenges, but regardless, the power of modern corporations is immense and it will take cooperation more than forced legal battles to make necessary changes. Given the image of corporations around the world and the converging crisis’s such as energy, health, climate and agriculture, those who make up the executive teams that control the direction and fate of these artificial persons are going to have to step up, be accountable and become true leaders.

One of the most important issues is accountability. Corporations limit the liability of the officers and investors. The tragic results of bad decisions are often met with little more than fines or a loss in stock value. These are mere slaps on the wrist that can often be easily overcome given time and a good PR campaign. Artificial persons cannot be given prison sentences, only flesh and blood persons can. Despite some notable scandals such as Bernie Madoff, Enron and the Savings and Loan debacle of the 80’s far more corporate officers go unpunished for their tragic mistakes and cons then ever see the inside of a prison cell. When they do get hard time it is in a reasonable environment in a federal prison.

Corporations should only exist for the benefit of the public. It isn’t that shareholders shouldn’t be able to realize a decent return on their investments it’s that the external shareholders in the communities where they do business should reap a benefit as well. The eroding regulations that have been returning us to the era of laissez faire and the unprincipled owners of capital who exploited men, women, children and the land for profit must be halted permanently. Corporations must redefine how they look at profitability to include sustainability. Sustainability must be a global outlook and not just targeted to increase the life of the corporation for the benefit of shareholders.

Sustainability, going green and corporate stewardship need to become more than the mere buzz words that show up in mission statements and advertising. They have to become part and parcel of how we do business in the 21st century. This needs to be done sooner rather than later. As well intentioned as much of this language is we are still not seeing a viable change that will help us deal with the onslaught of the various crisis caused by our previous corporate structures and through over consumption and exploitation of natural resources.

The starting point of all this change is with the myths that we seem to be holding on to for dear life. The first is the myth that the so-called free market is the best source of innovation, self regulatory and the most moral economic system created by man. The second great myth is that there exists an emerging “green economy,” which is non existent except in the rhetoric of certain politicians and advertising slogans of the corporate oligarchs that control our political and economic machinery. If this were true we would be seeing far different results in the real world.

Next: The Invisible Hand of Adam Smith – The Myth of the Morality of the Free Market.

Our Quixotic Proposal Against Creeping Theocracy

2011-03-03T13:13:00.000-08:00

Given the recent attacks by the GOP on Planned Parenthood and the constant meddling of religious conservatives in the marriage rights of others I think it is high time we begin looking at the tax exemptions provided to churches under 501(c) 3 of the federal tax code.

I am not a tax expert and therefore not informed enough to know for certain exactly what tax exemptions churches are entitled to. I have just begun researching this and find, as to be expected, the tax code to be befuddling to all but the most conversant tax attorney. However, it does seem that under 501(c) 3 organizations that use their property for charitable purposes are exempt from property taxes. I find this absurd given the size of some of these so-called Mega churches and the sizeable holdings of organizations such as the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of Later Day Saints. Religious organizations are sitting on gold mines.

If you are a private property owner in this country, secular or religious, you should pay property taxes like everyone else. Churches should no longer be exempt and we need to fight to overturn this injustice. They stand to make significant profits if they should sell any property. It matters little that those transactions would be subjected to sales and excise taxes and others. The lack of property taxes deprives the state and local governments of valuable revenue that could be used for the community. Charitable organizations should be owned by the public if there is to be property tax exemptions.

For those of you who may be inclined to argue the First Amendment in favor of the churches I ask that you hear me out. Requiring churches to pay property taxes does not interfere with their freedom of religion any more than a pastor, priest or rabbi being required to pay income tax interferes with the individual clerics first amendment rights. Taxes are simply a burden of all who live and participate in our democratic republic. This should include the organizations that seek to lobby and legislate for change. If you have the ability to impact the democratic process you must pay for the privileges just as the individual tax payer does. The big difference is that most taxpayers cannot summon the resources that larger organizations can. They should not be let off the hook.

For those of you who would be inclined to remind me that any church who gets involved in politics could lose their tax exemptions and that some do is hardly the point. Not enough churches get sanctioned in this way. There are way too many involved in politics and soliciting support and political contributions anyway. Thanks to the 14th Amendment and the cleverness of corporate attorneys Corporations are often treated collectively as if they are “individuals,” being granted the same legal status as people. Since individuals pay taxes, corporations should pay them too.

As suggested this is quite beside the point. Our nation’s founders created a secular democratic republic with a constitutional guarantee of a separation between church and state. But, they did not seek to remove the religious minded from the political process. Every one of us has the constitutional guarantee to vote our mind at the ballot.

The religious minded person cannot be excluded. As long as people have religious beliefs they adhere to they will be used to inform their decisions in life and at the ballot. This means that wherever people gather they might be inclined to discourse about the political issues of the day that concern them. This should be their right and to try and exclude certain venues because of tax exemption status is undemocratic and disingenuous. Remove the tax exemption and you remove the barrier. Nothing will change much except that these organizations will have a larger share in the tax burden of the citizenry. This is as it should be.

The separation of church and state prohibits the government from having any opinion and influence over religion. That means no religious holidays, no religious biases and no official state church. That’s it. It was created so that all Americans could choose to believe or not believe according to their conscience and custom. This means that it will bleed over into the political arena. It can’t be helped.

This constitutional separation does need further amending to include a prohibition of any faith based legislation. Passing legislation that, for example, prevents same gender couples from getting married and enjoying the rights and benefits of such a union is prejudiced by faith. There is no other logical reason to be against it and the preponderance of organizations created to propose and lobby for such legislation have roots in the religious sector of our country. Indeed their rolls of supporters are almost all religious.

If there is a need for any additional amendment to the constitution it is an amendment preventing anyone from attempting to use the legislative process to clearly discriminate against a particular group – ethnic, religious, atheistic and by sexual orientation. It simply has no place in a just and democratic society.

Secular lobbying groups are working to overturn former President Bushes faith based initiatives. But, we need to go further. Given that the attacks by the House of Republicans – I mean, house of representatives, on Planned Parenthood is clearly motivated by religious biases rather than any concern over national health issues, and given that conservatives have been seeking to overturn Roe v. Wade since the landmark decision, it is time to introduce a tax on religious organizations that can be used to deal with health issues that will result if Planned Parenthood should successfully be defunded.

We propose that should something like this occur and, what we hope is an unlikely event, Roe v. Wade should ever be overturned religious organizations should be required to pay for the care of all unwanted children that will be a result of such legislation. Religion should not be able to force legislatively their morality on to others who do not share their beliefs without dire consequence.

You might view our modest proposal as rather crazy and antagonistic toward religion, especially religious conservatives. We cannot deny either of these allegations. I would actually be surprised if we got much support for this proposal and if we did it most likely would be those, angry like ourselves, who hold views seen as somewhat crackpot. Even if we were to be successful in getting support we would not expect any success of passing legislation such as this.

That being said we should still make an intense effort. There is a cultural battle going on in our country and the theocratic minded religious conservatives are currently winning. They have been doing so for some time. These theocrats actually believe that the United States is a “Christian nation” and some even deny the separation of church and state even though it is blatantly obvious in the First Amendment.

Yet, take their rights away and these religious minded folk would suddenly become all about their first amendment rights – that is a guarantee. It is time that we force them out from behind the first amendment and push back these barbarians at the gate. Even as you are reading these religious influences can be seen behind the current attacks not only on Planned Parenthood, but NPR, PBS, the EPA and the National Endowment for the Arts – our opponents see us as their moral enemies and they seek to silence those organizations that often speak for us. Religious morality is always anti intellectual and we must stop it dead in its tracks if we are to preserve the tradition of a secular democracy.

Who will join us in this fight? Who will stand up and support this Quixotic tipping of windmills?

A Hymn of My Post Faith Awakening

2011-02-25T17:36:00.000-08:00

Once I thought I needed to find God
So I found a book,
A church
A temple
And then I found a guru
He told me to sit and count

my breaths and so I
counted and I counted
and I breathed and I looked into
my third eye. And all I found was me looking
back at me. That was all. There is nothing more
Cogito ergo sum
Amen

I may have a Career as a Revolutionary Pamphleteer

2011-02-25T12:09:00.000-08:00

A careful reading of Marx tells us that capitalism is a necessary development in the class history of humanity. The bourgeoisie lifted the world out of its feudal bonds to a stale and privileged ruling class. They innovated through the ownership of capital and helped launch the industrial revolution. It is only after industrialization that a society will be ready to implement the socialism of Marx. In fact, to try and do so with out a sound industrial base will fail.

This is one of the primary failures with the Soviet Union. They implemented the rule of the worker before they had a sustainable industrial and thoroughly modern infrastructure. The same goes for China that was even more backwards then the defunct Soviet Union, but having learned their lessons well have managed to hang on as they have struggled to modernize now using the capitalist games of the west to their advantage. But, the PRC is also a corrupt and debased communism that betrays Marx and the civil liberties of the working class. It is nothing more than a crass dictatorship of sociopaths.

The world is now at a tipping point. We are going through a wave of political unrest as people across the Middle East stand up against their tyrannical oppressors. In Wisconsin as the GOP strikes to oppress the working class and break the spines of its unions they fail to understand the danger they have wrought on themselves.

It was the success of the labor movement that made true Communism for the United States undesirable. The working class didn’t care much for the rich, but didn’t seek to depose them as long as they got a fair and just break. They just wanted a shot at security. But, this success didn’t come without casualties and blood shed in tears and rage. Factories had to be burnt to the ground and men murdered and maimed; martyrs to the cause of the worker arrested, tried and executed.

In recent decades violence such as this was not necessary as the worker could seek justice through the exercising of their civil liberties and through the democratic process and judicial system. Today CNN reports that Wisconsin passed a GOP bill that further strips the unions of their power. Shall we now take a step back to a more violent time where the struggle for worker’s rights had to be shrill and unreasonable?

Unions and especially union leaders are corrupt. They are part of organized crime. No doubt some of this has been true throughout the past. But, what can we say of our politicians, our government? Are they not corrupt and in bed with corporate special interests giving hand jobs and blow jobs for money? Corruption affects all human endeavors given enough time. But, the corruption in the government of a democratic republic is truly satanic. We must not allow it to stand. The political will of the people has been supplanted by the capricious corporate oligarchs who have infected our government.

It is time to renew the worker’s movement. It is time to break the shackles of the chains that bind us with the mendacity of hope and promises sold to us by the political hacks in this capitalist regime.

Let the workers rise and take back what is theirs!

Intolerance as a Value of Democracy

2011-02-24T13:54:00.000-08:00

The desire for tolerance in a democratic society is a lot like trying to walk barefooted across a razor sharp wire suspended over an abyss. If you lose your sense of balance you will plummet to your death and with bloodied feet. Tolerance is a value based concept, as all such moralities are, that can both impede and propel a democracy. Politeness is nice and we appreciate those who are able to communicate their ideas and beliefs without offense. But if tolerance is valued too sternly we run the risk of becoming too brittle making us unable to openly dialogue because we are too busy policing our thoughts.

I am not sure I truly know what tolerance is. My fellow liberals bandy it about accusing our opponents in conservative circles of being intolerant with every misspoken word or angry utterance. We confuse anger and the fear of uncertainty in our political opponents with being bigoted or racist. Indeed, that may often be the case. But, I can’t honestly say I know that to be a fact each time. Bigotry, racism and intolerance are easy accusations to make in a heated argument. It leaves the accuser feeling morally justified and puts the accused in an indefensible position regardless of whether the accusation is well deserved or not. It most often derails any attempt at productive dialogue reducing it to a push and shove match between playground bullies.

Conservatism today, in my experience, seems to be too closely rooted to the impossible theology of their religious beliefs. The intolerance of many conservatives could be seen as coming from their closed belief system. Conservatives quite naturally accuse liberals of the same intolerance as well and, much worse, hypocrisy because of our nearly inane insistence on tolerance. I cannot say that I disagree with them. We liberals are just as guilty, but like good ideologues we justify it because of what the enemy is doing. After all we are simply being intolerant with intolerance, which is really just intolerance. Intolerance is the invalidation of another person’s views or beliefs regardless of our justification.

I cringe at the Clinton era term “political correctness” which is a horrible lampoon of language albeit having good intentions. The political right get upset, it often seems, because it means they can’t be openly racist and insulting. They view political correctness as an infringement upon their first amendment liberty of free speech. I often suspect that they get upset because they can’t openly use words like nigger, spic and faggot in the general arena. But, in one regard they may be close to the target – political correctness is really an attempt to police thoughts in order to usurp rather than manage a dialogue.

The more bellicose anti-intellectuals on the far right argue that blacks can call us honkies, however I am certain no white person has been called a honky since the jive era of the 1970’s (except by other honkies trying to make this rather puerile point). But even so a black person calling me honky or cracker does not have the same emotional and historical impact that using the N- word has. And in the interest of free speech a person or persons have the right to stand up to the world telling us it’s not all right to refer to them with such and such a word. If we are decent people we will respect that. But, racial slurs are not really what political correctness is all about. It falsely convinces its proponents that it is about preventing discrimination, which I have seen no real evidence that it does.

Political correctness is an attempt to manage our political and social conversations by forcing us to become aware of the language we use and how we are using it. My recent reading of “The Three Laws of Performance,” by Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan have me rethinking the value of political correctness as I have come to see that language is the key to life and as we go through life all we are really doing, on a subjective level, is managing the conversations we are having. The challenge is the most of us are doing so unconsciously. It is this lack of awareness that makes political correctness so dangerous.

Foremost political correctness comes strictly from a place of ideological orthodoxy rather than any innate sense at decency. It’s an attempt to control language and ultimately the dialogue by seeking to minimize offense to particular groups, ethnicities and institutions in the most extensive ways through the use of language, expression of ideas and behavioral sanctions. Political correctness actually has no place in a democracy. Political correctness is not really about decency at all. Decent people don’t need such constraints to be decent and when they err they are often able to make the necessary amends to rebuild the broken bridges. Those lacking in such niceties are among the costs associated with a free and open society whether we like it or not. What the whole PC movement does is impede effective conversation management in order to prevent the most brittle among us from being offended. Democracy will wither under this practice.

The challenge for us today is they way we view political dialogue. Democracies are bellicose, loquacious and messy. They often are reminiscent with the experience that many families have around the Thanksgiving dinner table. Democracies are slow and inefficient and seldom act quickly until every last voice is heard and a dominant consensus can prevail. Even when consensus is achieved the minority position often expresses injustice and contempt for the majority as they set about trying to undo or thwart the consensus position.

We need to give up this notion that democracy will be anything other than it is – at least in this regard. Democracy is probably the worst form of government ever conceived as far as efficiency goes and the larger and more diverse your population becomes the more difficult it becomes to achieve any true consensus – at least without a great deal of negotiation and compromise.

Democracies are great when the population is small and fairly homogenous, but it begins to break down once diversity becomes a reality. It is quite probable that a democracy can even have an expiration date – certainly in the parliamentary form practiced in so much of the world we see this happening as Prime Ministers can be ousted with votes of no confidence and as, the Prime Ministers themselves often do, dissolve present governments forcing a sort of social hard reboot of the political operating system.

Yet, I can think of no political system that gives us a better opportunity to achieve humanities dream of justice, equality, economic prosperity and harmonious human relations. The problem is that we often mistake conflict as being undesirable in the attempt to achieve harmony and equality. This is very difficulty for many people to accept because we have been sold an impossible dream of democratic utopia built upon bipartisan cooperation (for those of us in the United States). Our current president, Barack Obama has sacrificed his impossible and unrealistic campaign promise to fundamentally change the business of politics by using bipartisanism in attempt to protect his policy agenda and keep alive the possibility of his future reelection bid in 2012. I have never been certain that he actually meant this promise other than as a mere ideological standpoint. His career in the senate and as president is in agreement. I have opined on this elsewhere so we will leave what is unsaid here for later.

What we want to get down to here is on the issue of tolerance which is intimately related to language and how we manage it. Frankly, if we are managing our conversations efficiently and, this requires conscious awareness, we will not eschew even the most vitriolic debates. Rather, conflict will be seen for what it is – an opportunity or as Patricia Heaton’s character on the sitcom The Middle refers to it - a “probletunity.” In other words we have a chance to get an alignment of values. Until we do nothing truly will change or move forward.

This has been Obama’s biggest misstep in his dubious quest for change we can believe in. The reality has been that the failure to achieve value alignment first has literally forced him to shove policy changes on his opposition. The smooth taking eloquent Obama knows how to give a great speech, but as so many of us he has not managed the conversations his administration is having productively. It has cost him and the Democratic Party dearly. Part of managing our conversations is understanding the underlying cost if we continue operating as we are currently doing. Then by understanding what it is costing us we then begin going about redirecting our course.

Naturally, this is messy or it can be at times as each side is not going to agree 100% and we will have to agree on some points and “agree to disagree” on others. In a democracy there is little else we can do. Values speak to the moral core of each of us and compromise feels like a betrayal. For some concession is seen as a necessary evil in the scheme of the greater good. Others cannot be as flexible. This inflexibility is where the issue of tolerance rears its many horned head. Our guiding principals create and limit the field of possibilities we work from. This quite literally creates a difference in language and therefore creates obstacles to resolution.

If we manage our conversations effectively we can prevent the anticipated shouting matches that often become excuses to express ire laced with ugly, counterproductive words. We need to understand where the perceived intolerance is coming from. What causes it?

If we are truthful with ourselves we will see that we have moments of intolerance ourselves and sometimes for what seems good reason to us. An attitude of total tolerance demeans a democracy and makes standing up for justice next to impossible. For example I tend to value what is often referred to as cultural diversity. But, I am quite intolerant of female circumcision, honor killings and various other injustices that women and children across the world are subjected to it. I don’t care that it is considered part of a culture it is wrong from the viewpoint of my own values and needs to be prevented. I have no problem in my fits of pique of referring to such practices as indecent and places where they occur as cultural backwaters. If you wish to see me as a bigot because of my view, so be it. Now, to be fair, these moments of pique are great examples of not managing the conservations I am having. I am behaving very unconsciously and therefore acting in ways that are counterproductive to the realization of my goals.

The key to becoming conscious can be found in Zaffron and Logan’s 1st principal of performance. “People perform according to the way a situation occurs to them”. It doesn’t matter how I feel about what they are doing. As far as they are concerned they are behaving consistently with the morals of their culture. I am the one with the problem Now the use of these principals and the subsequent actions of having what we call a conversation for completeness and filling in “what’s missing” in order to get at what is so vs. what I believe to be happening will have to be the subject of another blog post. In fact the terms I have tossed out will be quite unfamiliar to many of you and need to be clearly understood first.

Let’s leave off with the concept that tolerance does not always have the desirable effects that we truly want. When people seem tolerant or pliable with each other that is often a sign that something is wrong; things are going unspoken. From a business perspective astute executives and team leaders recognize that they have no “buy in” and unless they achieve it they will have to implement their plans from a place of authority. Buy in is not achieved without a certain level of disagreement. And so it is with our body politick in a democracy.

Intolerance like its favored bedfellow, conflict, is actually valuable. For one thing it allows us to get at what is broken and needs mending. A tolerant culture stays at the surface never digging deep enough to the broken things needed fixing so rather than being a sign of a flawless society it is indicative of its flawed one. Tolerance defends the status quo. Intolerance moves us forward – we just have to manage our conversations forward.

So for those of you who are inclined to refer to the intolerant in your midst (which is basically anyone who loudly differs from your accepted worldview) as “haters” I would like to suggest that without feelings of intolerance there might have never have been an American Revolution, an emancipation proclamation, a Civil War and the Civil Rights movement. If there was no intolerance there might never have been women’s suffrage.

Intolerance and anger is part of democracy. I am not certain that you can eliminate it effectively given human nature. The best chance we have is to manage our conversations consciously. But, times will exist where that will not always be possible and loud ideological showdowns will be necessary. It has been this way from the start of our republic. Democracy is not for the weak willed or the faint of heart. A review of our history bespeaks intolerance serving us quite well.

I’m curious of the Libertarian perspective when it comes to Non-Aggression and where Non-Aggression stops and Pacifism begins. From a Libertarian’s point of view, when is it okay to declare war? When is hurting another human justifiable?

2011-02-23T13:19:00.001-08:00

This is a great question. I am not certain that there is a central Libertarian doctrine regarding war and aggression. My experience is that most true libertarians prefer non-aggression, diplomacy, compromise and democratic solutions to problems as they arise. However, I am not certain if my experience or perspective would hold up to scrutiny. For example if this is true than what are we to make of our American revolution who’s engine was fueled by the libertarian values of our founding fathers? If there is any axiom that could be considered “central” to libertarianism in general it is to be found in the state motto of New Hampshire: Live free or die. Liberty itself is the central concern of libertarianism. Patrick Henry stated, “Give me liberty or give me death.”

As for me, I am not a pacifist. I am not going to lie down in front of approaching tanks and let my entrails be used as grease for their wheels. But, I am not a war monger either. I rather hate war and find it to be stupid and indicative that much in our nature as humans has not changed much in several thousand years. I prefer diplomacy and rational discourse in an attempt to reach peaceful compromises, but as history demonstrates time and time again sometimes the violent and powerful have their way (all too often, perhaps). I suspect if I were to have to go into battle I would wet my pants and shoot my own foot off. Yet, I despite my personal fear and possible cowardice I never have adopted a peace at all costs mentality, which is at the root of pacifism.

To my way of thinking pacifism is largely naïve and often ineffective. Many might be tempted to point to Gandhi and credit him and his followers for the emancipation of India from British rule. We might even offer up the current events in Egypt as another example. In regards to Gandhi, history tells a different story. While he certainly is important and significant in the story of India’s liberation he really did very little.

Indian liberty was already a foregone conclusion. Boiler room negotiations had already taken place. The fact is Britain loosed their grip because the colonial system had collapsed under the weight of two world wars. Empire was no longer viable and Britain had to rebuild her infrastructure after a devastating war. Gandhi gave the world a way of resisting tyranny in non-violent ways, but in the end a lot of good people got cracked heads and even murdered by the heavy handed armed forces of their occupiers. In the end if you want to fight a revolution you need to be willing to point a gun and shoot.

As for Egypt…it is really too early to tell what the outcome will be. We must remember that it was essentially a military coup in the end. The military leaders aligned themselves with the will of the people and assumed control. There is still no democracy as of yet. The current government has been dissolved and the military has taken charge for supposedly the next six months or until the next elections can be held. We have a lot to be cautious and skeptical about. This wouldn’t be the first time that a military power usurped the energy and will of a people. Most often the events in Libya these past few days are the commonplace.

As for when aggression or hurting someone might be justified I am not certain I can offer you a clear moral case. The preamble of the United States Constitution allows that one of the purposes of the federal government is to provide for the common defense. Defending the boarders of the United States and those living peacefully within our borders is acceptable. A strong national defense is not problematic with libertarianism although some purists might thin otherwise. Purists often fail to be realistic.

On a personal level “hurting another human being” could be seen as justifiable if the person hurt posed mortal threat to you or someone else. Rape, murder and other violent crimes against a person or persons is unacceptable and if we cannot prevent it peacefully then we must do what we can to protect the innocent. Darfur and Rwanda remind us that genocide demands response. How are we to do deal with such crimes?

The challenge to Libertarians is always ethical. There is often no black or white answer and we must find the solution in the heat of the moment with whatever information we have available at the time. Violence may be “acceptable” even though morally uncomfortable in one situation and completely wrong in another.

I’d like to make a final note on pacifism. I don’t believe that pacifists are necessarily cowards or faint of heart. It has been my privilege to know a couple of Quakers who were full on pacifists. I have tremendous respect for the witness of their philosophy. No cowards, these individuals put themselves in harms way to stand up for justice and have not been content to sit on the sidelines and wring their hands. They meet challenges head on, but are committed to not respond to violence against them with violence.

For a kiss I will answer all your questions.

I have noticed in your blogs you compare Obama & Clinton to centrist Republicans even though they are liberal democrats. Why?

2011-02-22T16:29:00.001-08:00

If you have really read my blog posts you will hopefully be able to answer the question for yourself. Whenever I find myself in a discussion regarding liberalism or conservativism I find it is both helpful and enlightening to ask what a person means when they describe themselves or someone else (in this case) as liberal.

My experience is that most of us are truly unaware of the history of liberalism, which goes back to the enlightenment of the 18th century and whose thinkers influenced the founders of our nation. Today, it seems that most people think “social liberal” when they think of liberalism at all. In other words a liberal is for all those lefty kinds of ideas such as pro-choice, gay rights and such. And they would be correct to a certain degree. These are issues that concern liberals. But, moderates in the Republican Party and especially the way out in right field Libertarian Party (Right Wing libertarians) share similar values to many democrats and progressives on social issues.

So oversimplifying a complicated and involved discussion there is more to being a liberal than being pro-choice and pro-gay rights. It’s also important to note that not all democrats are pro-life or are comfortable supporting rights for same sex couples. A final distinction I’d like to make is that not all “leftists” are truly liberals either. There is a point when the far left and the far right reaches out and touches each other. Fascism is a problem through out the extremes of both left and right. In fact, Fascism had its birth on the left side of the political spectrum, which runs counter to our visions of Ann Coulter, George W. Bush and the Nazis. Fascism is a tendency, in my estimation, of authority then an actual philosophy itself.

Now in regards to Obama and Clinton my opinion is based on the history of their fiscal policies and agenda. Now, to make a distinction I did not call either man a Republican. What I did was to compare them to moderate republicans and noted that they both have embraced the general fiscal policies of the GOP that had begun to take shape during the Reagan administration. It might be correct to suggest they are social liberals, but fiscal conservatives. Clinton not only embraced NAFTA he actually shrunk the size of government which is not a liberal tendency in governance. I have described this in larger detail in my blog posts the past couple of days.

For a kiss I will answer all your questions.

Bill Clinton: Moderate Republican in Centrist Democrat Clothes

2011-02-22T10:52:00.000-08:00

The lingering horrors of the Bush Administration have many a Democrat and progressive looking back fondly on the era of our clown prince, William Jefferson Clinton. Indeed, the economy boomed under President Clinton and when he left office he was lauded as having created a supposed 10 year budgetary surplus. It’s almost a sacred tenet of the Democratic Party and to question it is political heresy. We use it in our trashing of the Republican’s last eight years under their leader George W. Bush who increased government size and spending and managed to wrack up an alarming national deficit.

I, for one, have accepted this tenet of my liberal political faith without question. However in doing so, I have always conceded that the so-called dot-com bubble fueled our economy during Clinton’s second term (especially) and balancing a budget is much easier when you have good tax revenue coming in. But, it takes more than revenue to create surplus. You have to slash spending too. Bill Clinton cut federal spending or, rather congress did, which many GOP and ultra conservative opponents of Mr. Clinton are loathe to admit. In fact, they often ignore it outright because it negates their view of him as a big government liberal who loves to spend, spend, spend and spend some more of your hard earned tax dollars. In this view Clinton is more in keeping with there central small government doctrine then George W. Bush ever was.

The exact opposite is true – mostly. It would not be entirely incorrect to view our former president as a moderate Republican in centrist Democrat clothing. Yes, it is true when he first entered the Oval Office he tried to govern from a more left of center position, but Newt Gingrich and the Republicans brought him back to center and that is where he governed until he left office. Naturally, Rush Limbaugh and the other members of the absurd conservative punditry still, to this day, harp on about Hilarycare and Don’t Ask – Don’t Tell (freshly repealed in 2011) and various other moral enemies of conservative doctrine that they conveniently hang on the Clintons.

Senor Limbaugh conveniently misses the inescapable fact that Bill Clinton – as our current president Obama is doing – championed largely GOP economic policies. Bill Clinton was an easy target. But, mostly we argued about his character. When Bob Dole and the Republicans tried to defeat him in his reelection campaign it was heavy on the character issue. But, Americans were doing really well economically and we didn’t care that the erstwhile Governor from Arkansas couldn’t keep his little troublemaker zipped up in his pants. The scandals were entertaining and Saturday Night Live and Conan O’Brien made us laugh at the foibles of our infidel president’s sexual misadventures being exposed so brazenly to the public

Special prosecutor Ken Starr tried to throw every lump of shit he could find and nothing stuck to old Slick Willy. Even Hilary’s embroilment in the White Water Scandal barely scathed the first couple – politically (although one might successfully argue that Hillary’s career has been indelibly affected by White Water and by the antics of her husband – at least as far as the presidency might be concerned). But, Bill’s veniality is well documented so we need not linger here any longer.

Bill Clinton was something new for the Democratic Party. His ideology was not that of the rank and file New Deal Democrats that the largely older, white blue collar backbone of the party tended to side with. There constituents were a younger, hipper crowd that had traded their radical anti-establishment politics of the 60’s and 70’s for Beemers, mini vans and 2.1 kids and a nice tract home in a suburban cul-de-sac. The baby boomers were hitting middle age and were worried about their future. They were not content to trust in the New Deal programs that their parents valued. They wanted more. They were business friendly and many were entrepreneurs in their own right. Many were even quiet admirers of Ronald Reagan –the great Satan of the Conservatives.

It is not entirely political hyperbole to claim that Reagan started a conservative revolution when he came to Washington as a newly minted president elect. The former California Governor who had started his political career as a Democrat came bearing the gifts of deregulation and minimal government influence. The New Deal had just been dealt a raw deal if you are inclined to view it that way.

These “New Democrats” saw wisdom in Reagan’s message that the liberal welfare state had become complacent. It was time to deregulate business and expand the economy. However, they stopped short at entirely embracing his total outlook on welfare these clever new Democrats under Clinton started talking about “empowering” public assistance recipients and reducing welfare ranks. But make no mistake they sided with conservatives that liberals were too busy cutting up the economic pie into smaller slices when they should have been busy baking more pies.

Ronald Reagan’s war on deregulation started with AT&T and moved out like a ripple radiating from a rock thrown into a pond. Twelve years later Clinton picked up where Reagan successor, Bush, sr. left off – NAFTA. Albeit Clinton did not start his political career this way, but when he left office at the end of 2000 he had not only signed NAFTA into law, but had worked with the Republican dominated congress to cut taxes, gut the welfare system and had, in full public view, embraced the right’s rhetoric of small government

Clinton’s final betrayal of his liberal roots was when, along with his Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin, negotiated with Republicans the repeal of the FDR era Glass –Steagal Act in 1999. The so-called Financial Services Modernization Act was hailed on the hill as the most important piece of banking legislation since the Depression. What it happened to be was the dismantling of the last of the New Deal protection on abuses of the banking industry and the Free Market.

The public was told not to worry about another bank meltdown like what happened in 1929. The concerns of New Deal democrats and progressives were largely overblown. We were told that in this age of globalization we needed this legislation if we were to maintain our dominance and prevent China and Europe from becoming the principal financial centers in the world.

This landmark legislation also led to the development of questionable investments and lending products. Flash forward to September 2008. Now flash back to the early moments of the George W’s presidency (before 9/11) and you might remember warnings that our current lending practices were going to lead to an economic crisis if they weren’t reformed. We don’t bring this up to put any sort of stamp of approval on the Bush administration in anyway, but to acknowledge that centrists from both sides of the aisle recognized the danger – a fear that has since become a horrible reality for many. My biggest criticism of the Clinton era, next to NAFTA, has been the deregulation of the banking industry. Some of it was done in the guise of fair or “equal opportunity lending” because certain financial requirements and regulations were keeping many from achieving the American dream of home ownership. After all private property ownership is one of the central tenets of Fundamentalist Free Market Capitalism.

There is nothing fair about opening up the financially illiterate or those with credit challenges to being preyed upon by Wall Street sharks. Another fine example of good intentions being destroyed by unintended consequences and the prevailing greed of unrestrained capitalism – buyer beware, right? Another tenet from the Conservative creed is personal accountability. You pay your money and you take your chances. If you didn’t have the money or financial resources then you shouldn’t have bought a house now should you have? True enough and at the same time pure bullshit.

Yesterday we opined that Obama has not differentiated himself fiscally from Bush. Obama simply has repackaged those policies. Bush simply carried on what Clinton started – he was so ensconced with the war effort he actually did very little economically except for the disastrous tax cuts named after him – and Obama, coming from the “Clinton wing” of his party has simply followed suit with economic policies fashioned after the ideas of Robert Rubin.

As for Clinton’s most lauded achievement – a budget the first budget surplus since 1969, former Harper’s editor, Roger D. Hodge refers to it as a dubious accomplishment. I am not certain where my feelings lie on this. I have been among the Democratic faithful who have held it up high with pride. He achieved this holy grail of governance through tax revenue and the cutting of expenses with welfare and the military largely.

As I look back at the Clinton years I have a difficult time understanding why the GOP bitched about so much. This was a leader that could have been one of their own for all intents and purposes. I am also amazed by the number of those who call themselves liberals or progressives that seem to admire him as some kind of progressive champion. Perhaps, they are confusing the Clinton of his early activist years with the Bill Clinton that became president? The facts don’t really add up.

Change we can believe in - Deconstructing the Obama Myth

2011-02-21T14:06:00.000-08:00

I find it fascinating that Obama’s opponents are certain that he is a far left radical. Perhaps they are only focusing on the rhetoric of this extraordinarily eloquent man rather than looking at the actual evidence that can be harvested from his time in congress and his current tenure as President.

There is a large gap between the rhetoric of Obama and the actions of Obama the politician. In his speeches, both on the campaign trail and in office, he often comes across as a left leaning populist champion. But, the truth of the matter is that Obama is every bit “business as usual” despite his often over the top promises of transformation and change we can believe in. If Obama had not succumbed to business as usual he would not have been able to finance his campaign in the first place. His most ardent supporters seem to ignore this. It is important to note that Goldman Sachs is his no. two campaign investor. How can that not be “business as usual?”

Obama emerged early on as my candidate of choice. I stand by that decision and most likely will feel compelled to cast my vote for his reelection. But, I also was quite vocal about his rock star persona that got him tossed up on a pedestal as if he was the promised one, a political messiah or second coming of James Madison. None of that was true and I kept warning everyone that if we allow this to continue many of us would be sorely disappointed and even disillusioned before too long. No one can live up to the image that Obama and his handler’s created.

The Myth of Popularity

The reality of Obama is that he is intelligent, well educated and well meaning. He is handsome and has a beautiful charming wife and two lovely daughters. By all counts they are the quintessential family unit. Perhaps, even the poster family for traditional family values although the far right might not like to concede that based on ideological differences. I like the man. You would hope so given that I voted for him. But, he is far from the president of my dreams. I wasn’t expecting it. For my part casting a vote for Obama was the lesser of the two evils and not a vote of confidence.

Obama’s chief talent is speaking and writing. He is a superb orator; a master of the craft when compared to McCain or former President George W. Bush, who’s linguistic and semantic missteps are legendary. By comparison Obama appears to be a giant among American political leaders. The fact is Obama is one hell of a campaigner, but as a policy maker he is, at best, mediocre. His time in congress proved him to be pliable to investors, lobbyists and a bit of a flip-flopper on issues. Being well spoken and intelligent does not necessarily guarantee a great leader.

Men with lesser native abilities and eloquence have occupied the Oval Office and led this country quite well. A beloved and ardently adored leader may be populist, but not all leaders are popular. George W Bush was a circus of buffoonery and yet was a leader in ways Obama has yet to be (forget for a moment my leftist friends that we have policy and moral disagreements with the man). Popularity certainly plays an important role in the things that politicians and their advisors care about – image, approval ratings and electability – but, seldom says anything about their actual leadership abilities.

None other that the great lion of Britain, Winston Churchill, if he were alive today, would verify this truth of leadership that unpopular leaders can lead well. Churchill’s popularity with the public was a bit of a roller coaster. History shows that prior to World War II the British subjects reviled their future Prime Minister as something of a war monger. His strong anti-Nazi rhetoric and warning that Hitler must be dealt with was met with derision.

As a War Time leader Churchill was extremely popular. Then the post war election of 1945 saw him losing the election to Clement Atlee of the Labor Party. Yet, who today could really say Churchill was not as a great a leader as any democracy has ever had? And speaking of oratorical skills – Churchill is at the top along with FDR, Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama in their skills of speaking to the populace and galvanizing the trust of a nation behind them.

Popularity is often a myth created by the media as in the case of Ronald Reagan. Looking at his approval ratings for his two terms in office he was not remarkable, yet his speaking abilities made him seem that way. Two decades later, George W. Bush would become one of the most “unpopular leaders” of our time with sub par speaking skills and yet managed to serve two terms.

Who Elected Obama?

Obama sold himself to the American people as a liberal reformer. But, he has been anything other than that despite his botched attempt at health care reform that is now under siege. As an ardent supporter of health care reform and a believer in singer payer as the potentially best solution, I believed that Obama’s biggest mistake was to lead too early on in his presidency with this issue despite how desperately we need it. It was a strategical misstep that allowed conservative activists of the Tea Party and the GOP to galvanize the fear of a nation to help them regain lost power.

No doubt that there is much in this porcine health care legislation that should be defeated. It is more costly than a reform should be and really does not address the twin issues of affordability and sustainability. Supporters incorrectly have adopted a “something is better than nothing” attitude. Because of it we have lost quite a bit of real estate and Obama is on shaky ground. He has yet to exhibit the ability to correct his course and turn failure around as did Bill Clinton.

The debacle over health care reform demonstrated clearly that Obama forget who elected him. The absurd punditry of Beck, Limbaugh and Coulter opine endlessly to the eager and paranoid far right who believe that Obama is a left wing socialist conspiracy to undermine our Constitution and to impose a total European style socialist democracy on an unwilling American populace. The most ridiculous conspiracy theorists continue to debunk Obama’s eligibility status to be president even though it has been proven time and time again that he was, indeed, born in the United States and is a naturalized citizen. There is often no proof that will convince a conspiracy minded person to relinquish their most cherished paranoid mythologies. Other conspiracies include that Obama is a secret Muslim and has connections with Bill Sayers, the notorious college professor and former member of the now defunct Weathermen - a radical far left group in the early and mid 1970’s. All of this due to a one time $200 donation to an early Obama campaign by Sayers and that both men once served on the same committee in Chicago.

Yet, if one really looks at the actions of Obama the politician he is really not far left at all. The more his career advanced the more centrist he became. In fact, Obama has taken one lesson from the Clinton administration despite his failure to examine the strategic importance of health care reform – a president must lead from the center (wherever that might be during his tenure) if he has a chance at getting anything meaningful done. Once again we have business as usual.

So who actually elected Obama? If not the far left and progressives than who elected this man? We have opined ourselves from the beginning that Obama was not the darling of the far left or even progressives. They had plenty of concerns about who Obama was and what he would do. Given the number of progressive newsletters that fill my email inbox and postal box I would say they still do and the concerns are growing by the minute.

Some might suggest that blacks and Hispanics, that came out in record numbers, helped boost Obama into office. They did play a role. But, there are conservative Latino and Black caucuses and committees that, while proud of his accomplishment as a man of color, did not and do not subscribe to his policy agenda. In the end the so-called minority vote did not ensure his election.

Obama won due to the most hardly fought after voting demographic – the so-called “Swing Voters,” the often silent majority of moderates who do not have a preferred party allegiance and, in fact, have a growing cynicism about partisan politics in general. These, largely middle class and upper middle class folks taxed to death and concerned over the tanking economy and financial securities were fed up with years of seemingly failed conservative fiscal policies decided something needed to be done. They were losing their homes and their retirements and often their jobs. They feared the mounting federal deficit as Congress continued to spend money on Homeland Security and two unwinnable and expensive wars.

Swing voters are a fickle group. They often have the most to lose and are not swayed often by political rhetoric. The wealthy elite can weather the capricious storm on the political landscape and the very poor or working class has very little at all. These groups can afford the ideological certitude of politicking. It’s the middle class, rightly considered the backbone of America, that find themselves sliding toward the lower end of their class group and into financial devastation.

The mistake that pundits on the far right make is that they deem America to be this out of control liberal nation. However, as any progressive can attest we are quite conservative all around. There is an underpinning of conservative values that is part of our collective consciousness. Most people today assume that liberal is just what might be referred to as “social liberalism,” but even that is not entirely true given the trouble same sex couples have in getting the same basic rights that their heterosexual counterparts enjoy. The list goes on.

In the end the middle class swing voters and moderate GOP defectors, fearing for their livelihoods and futures took a risk on Obama. They were also the same people who delivered the GOP and Tea Party to Congress in the mid-terms. The confidence they had in Obama was replaced by increased fear and, in part, to the crazy over the top rhetoric of the far right. There has been very little in terms of common sense the past two years politically and both parties have failed to genuinely step up and lead.

What did Obama Forget?

The economy! Obama forget that it was the economy that got him elected. It wasn’t health care reform, repealing don’t ask don’t tell or even the costly war effort despite its horrific impact on the federal budget. It was Wall Street. Main Street felt betrayed. Certainly health care and DADT are important issues, but they were secondary. Obama failed to lead in regards to the economy first.

Yes, the middle class is concerned about the rising cost of health care. But, they are not, as a group, completely sold on government legislative solutions. Some of it is a misguided fear of socialism, but mostly it is a lack of knowledge. The mistakenly believe that if they have a secure job and financial future the cost of their health care will resolve itself. They miss many of the underlying issues that are leading us to a system collapse. This is partly due to effective campaign against health care reform by the insurance lobby and their far right patsies.

Obama seems to take his successful campaign for the presidency for granted. However, in August 2008 as the Republican National Convention was closing having nominated Senator John McCain the fledgling race was a statistical dead heat between the two candidates. Even McCain’s impetuous choice of Sarah Palin as a running mate didn’t prove to be problematic at first, although later she would prove to be one of many campaign errors that tanked McCain’s campaign. It was the meltdown of the lending industry and the near collapse of Wall Street that propelled Obama forward faster than a pig covered in grease. But, to date Obama has done little to distinguish himself from his predecessor.

The Reality of Change we can believe in

My argument for sometime has been that Obama is nothing more than a centrist Democrat who has more in common with the so-called Blue Dog Dems than with the more radical or progressive elements of the party. Former Democrat turned Independent Senator Joe Lieberman was Obama’s mentor in his early days in congress. Obama, along with his mentor Lieberman and John “the wrong war at the wrong time” Kerry was an adamant supporter of the war in Iraq and in Afghanistan. The difference is that Lieberman has stayed the course with his support while both Obama and Kerry changed their polemics when it became politically expedient to do so. Kerry, got called on his hypocrisy while Obama’s was hardly noticed except by his biggest opponents, and only barely so.

The mendacity of campaign promises is they are often made by well-intentioned leaders who don’t have the capacity to guarantee they will be implemented. The reality is that the candidate ends up telling his or her constituents what they want or need to hear in order for them to get elected. This is especially true for the office of president. A challenger to the incumbent or, as was the situation in 2008, where we had two candidates who have never occupied the Oval office making promises without all the information.

I cautioned my more hopeful friends at the time that Obama’s campaign promises regarding Iraq would most likely look radically different to him on his first day in office once he suddenly had access to Intel he had not had previously. Sadly, no one seemed to notice that Obama actually never promised to bring our troops home and end the war. What he suggested was that he was going to shift our effort toward Afghanistan. But, many took his promise of a timetable to bring our troops out of Iraq as a promise to end the war effort. In this regard Obama has lived up to some of the promises he made on the campaign trail.

Halfway through his presidency this black hole in our federal deficit crisis continues to threaten our nation’s solvency allowing the GOP to go after – at long last – their moral enemies such as Planned Parenthood, NPR and PBS among other things. Social Security and Medicare – also thorns to the GOP – are dangerously close to receiving potentially fatal budget cuts. Yet, the real problems have yet to be addressed. It is true that Social Security and Medicare is the biggest chunk of the federal budget, yet they hardly caused the current crisis, but no one is talking about that. We forget that when the Clown Prince of the Democratic Party – Bill Clinton – left office we had a national budgetary surplus. In only 8 years the GOP and the Bush administration managed to rack up the debt. Two years into his presidency Obama has failed to plug the holes and his bipartisan deficit committee is recommending dangerous budget cuts to vital programs.

I know it’s easy to blame the Tea Party and the GOP for the current nightmare. Certainly they have a large share of culpability. I hold them mostly responsible for the out of control rhetoric and fear mongering from their most bellicose and loquacious pundits at their fringes and the more fanatic of the Tea Party enthusiasts who all but drowned out the more reasonable and libertarian voices that originally gave impetus to the movement. But, the democrats and specifically Obama have failed to lead.

Yes the GOP placed a lot of stumbling blocks in their way, but it was not the fringe element that gave back power to the GOP. It was the mainstream swing vote crowd who still struggling economically began to wake up and see a president that was hardly different from our former one. This will be a bitter pill for those liberals who cling desperately to their hatred of our former president.

Obama has all but assured the end of New Deal legislation, but that is unsurprising given that among his top 20 campaign investors are lobbyists for high finance. Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase and Morgan Stanley have all contributed handsomely to Obama’s campaign. Ironically, Goldman Sachs was among the corporate backers of FDR’s New Deal program originally.

Once again a bitter pill to swallow, but to simply leave the blame on the doorstep of the GOP is disingenuous. They have been loud and aggressive to be certain, but then the Democrats arrogantly assumed they could ram anything they want through congress. They have learned a hard lesson. I knew we were in trouble when Obama made some concessions regarding the Bush Tax cuts. Fiscally Obama has not proven himself to be different from George W. Bush. It makes me wonder why I have criticized Dennis Kucinich so much. Now there’s a progressive Democrat if there ever was one.

Dennis Kucinich brings me to our final point and that is in regards to the essence of republican liberty as conceived by our founding fathers and championed so tirelessly by James Madison himself. Recently the Democratic gadfly Dennis Kucinich worked with conservatives from the Tea Party to defeat three of the provisions of the Patriot Act. This illustrates another failure of the Obama administration, which is to deal with the erosion of constitutionally protected civil liberties that have occurred since 9/11/2001.

Under Obama Guantanamo remains open and even though water boarding has been abandoned the Obama administration still sanctions other torturous interrogation methods such as sleep deprivation. Homeland Security and the questionable Patriot Act remain in tact. Under Obama’s watch security measures have even been increased and have become more invasive.

Where is Obama’s commitment to ending politics as mere business and return it to a mission oriented enterprise? What about his tough rhetoric on lobbyists? Well…lobbyists played a role in financing his campaign. That is not all, under Obama NAFTA has been expanded, more jobs are disappearing overseas and trade agreements remained unbalanced. That was to be expected given Obama’s lack of foreign policy expertise.

Ultimately, in the final analysis of the past two years we have a president who looked a lot like a leftist, progressive champion (to the gullible) but seems to find substance in many Republican policies, enough so that he is simply repackaging them and reselling them to a tired and fearful populace hungry for change they are not truly getting.

In the end the biggest mistake Obama’s opponents made was to be so damn loud. They were right to be concerned, but not for the reasons they believed. Rather than implementing an agenda of sustainable liberal change he has defaulted to the standard centrist agenda pursued by Republicans and conservative Democrats. Policies that have already proven to be problematic and ineffective – if the GOP had been less noisome and more cooperative they would still have ended up where they are today, with their power base increasing. Today things are the same as before. Oil companies influence energy policy and corporate lobbyists still pull the strings.

I, for one, am thoroughly disgusted.

Being a libertarian…I am guessing you are all for no gun control. I know it is a constitutional right, but the constitution can be amended. Why do people need more than one gun?

2011-02-18T12:05:00.001-08:00

I am torn on the issue of gun control. Partly because of the 2nd amendment and my value of holding the Constitution and its amendments to be sacrosanct insomuch as you can call a secular document sacred…It’s one thing to amend the constitution to increase liberty or to protect liberty from being oppressed, but another thing altogether to use it to curb liberties or to take them away.

It’s unconscionable how conservative religious elements have attempted to deprive the gay community of civil liberties by using the constitution. Because, of my stance on this I feel somewhat compelled to oppose gun control. To be pro-gun control feels somewhat hypocritical to me.

However, your concern about the proliferation of guns does not fall on deaf ears. I personally do not believe in guns. I have never owned one. Let’s face it a gun’s created purpose is as a weapon. In this case a weapon that kills people. Even if you own one for the purpose of personal defense you are saying that you will exercise your ability to kill or maim someone to protect your own life. Certainly we all have the moral “right” to protect our life and property if we are in mortal danger. But, we must be at least honest about the purpose of a gun.

Gun ownership is a part of American culture and civil liberties from the start. Whether we like it or not we need to acknowledge this. You can’t just curb liberties because you don’t like it. Where does that stop? There are plenty of people who want to curb freedom of religion and freedom of speech and such. In some ways gun ownership is part of a “higher morality” that protects all civil liberty.

That being said I am not sure a private citizen needs to own an AK-47 assault rifle. Once upon a time in our democratic republic’s early days there was a need to own guns to protect life, property and to aid in the common defense. States and territories often maintained militias of volunteer soldiers. Today, we have the National Guard for that purpose and we no longer need people to be armed in this way.

I would agree with you that it isn’t necessary for a person to own more than one gun. In fact, I question the need to own any gun. It is a delightful irony that more people each year are killed by their own weapons than by another gun owner. But, on this issue I would submit that the majority of gun owners are responsible and safe.

The old NRA adage that guns don’t kill people, people kill people is really true as much as I hate to concede that – the idea that we should amend or curb liberty because someone might behave irresponsibly or do something horrible is unthinkable to me. Ultimately you can’t have a free an open society and force upon it a desire to be safe from those who may behave violently or without conscience. If we let this fear overtake us we will find more liberty at stake than just gun ownership.

For a kiss I will answer all your questions.

With Obama Selling Out Progressives need their own Tea Party

2011-02-18T09:29:00.000-08:00

Obama is starting to convince me that bipartisanism is not what it is cracked up to be. I voted for Obama as the lesser of the two evils. I didn’t expect him to be a great president and I certainly never bought into the hype. He is well spoken, intelligent and well intentioned. But, he is also arrogant and inexperienced. I honestly did not expect him to live up to even my more modest expectations let alone really be the impetus for “change we could believe in.”

Obama sailed into the White House on a storm of fear blanketed in false hope created by campaign promises, smooth well delivered oration and an infotainment industry that knew just how to package him. Had it not been for the lending crisis and the near collapse of Wall Street in September of 2008 the election might have had different results. The economic crisis was the engine that propelled him forward. Prior to the economic crisis the race had started as a near statistical dead heat between him and McCain.

Okay – enough history…

Despite my misgivings about casting my vote for Obama the one thing I felt compelled to be in agreement with him on was the idea of bipartisan cooperation. I have long preached about building bridges. My blog posts reek of discussions about the value and necessity of compromise. I am critical of the people I deem to be ideologues – those folks who cling so desperately to their professed beliefs and ideals that they are unable to consider new ideas. Yes – I am aware that I am an ideologue myself at times. Yet, the value of letting other people get what they want so we can get what we want is still important.

I have always accepted Zig Ziglar’s maxim that if you can help enough people get what they want out of life you can get what you want out of life as part of my personal mission statement.

But…

Today as I watch the events unfold in Wisconsin and listen to bellicose conservative pundits refer to those people fighting for their very livelihoods as “parasites” I am angry. As the GOP loaded House of Representatives begins taking potentially fatal swipes at all of their favorite bogeymen: Planned Parenthood, The EPA, The FDA, NPR, PBS and others I realize that my belief in bipartisan compromise may have been a misguided sell out of what is important to me.

My belief in bipartisan compromise has been soured a great deal by the Tea Party and the more extreme GOP conservatives who have pandered to it. The challenge of compromise is only truly possible when all present are willing to be reasonable. You simply cannot reason with unreasonable people. It’s a waste of time and energy to try. Certainly not all angry people are unreasonable. Sometimes their fear of not being heard is what is getting in their way. If you create an environment in which all present can be heard without being made “wrong” good, decent and common sense compromise can be reached. It’s not perfect, but it is better than what we have now. A successful democracy requires compromise.

The Tea Party and the GOP are not reasonable. They represent the crassest form of self-governance and corporate capitalism preaching about personal accountability while stealing the wealth out of the pockets of the middle and working classes. Ignore the senator behind the curtain. While we on the left may often cry, “That’s not fair,” those in the Tea Party and GOP whine, “That’s not fair to me.” The right is not about true liberty it’s about selfish indulgence of personal liberty without concern for others.

I have said enough about the Tea Party in previous posts over the past couple of years I won’t go into it any further at this time except to say they are a faux libertarian movement that threaten the stability of the United States.

The real problem, however, is not the Tea Party or even the GOP. They are marionettes. The strings are being pulled by someone else. The real problem is that the power of accumulated wealth through donations, lobbyists and placement in congress have managed to get leverage just as they had in the days of JP Morgan and the so called Robber Barons. They want to return us to the grand old days of laissez faire capitalism. This would be a disaster for not only the citizens of the United States, but the world.

Another maxim that makes up my personal mission statement is in regard to accumulated wealth. It is unethical to accumulate more wealth than you need to sustain your livelihood. It is a fact that there are large “piles” of accumulated wealth that go nearly untaxed in this country. That needs to come to an end. It’s not enough to simply have an inheritance tax – another enemy of the GOP and Tea Party.

When Obama conceded on some of the so-called Bush Tax cuts I realized we were in trouble. Budget cuts are necessary during a budget crisis. That is reasonable enough though unfortunate. Cutting funding for programs that don’t work or are broken is also reasonable. But, going after programs that benefit all Americans in positive ways is unconscionable. And that would be bad enough if that was all they are doing.

You can’t pull an organization out of bankruptcy by simply slashing expenses. You must increase revenue. The Bush Tax cuts are the opposite of that. It’s as if the GOP told America we can restore solvency by not only cutting expenses, but cutting cash flow as well. But, that has always been one of their stated goals. They want to diminish the power and influence of the state.

I get that…

I too prefer small anti-authoritarian government. Except that the current GOP is no longer libertarian in their values except in regards to capitalism. Well…let me amend that. There are true libertarians in the Tea Party who are concerned about protecting the Constitution and civil liberties. They recently aligned themselves with the principled progressive gadfly, Senator Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) to defeat 3 provisions of the Anti-American, anti-libertarian Patriot Act.

But, in general the Tea Party and the GOP are the enemies of the people. They must be defeated and until they are true compromise and true reasonable change cannot be achieved. We on the left need our own Tea Party of sorts. Our central failing is our lack of unity. We are often just a clamorous collection of various political activists centering on issues specific to our special interest.

The single most important strength of the Conservative movement in this country is its ability to unify people under one “manifesto” of ideology. This doesn’t generally appeal to the left that often labors under a false sense of open mindedness at times and that dilutes our strength.

Now is the time to come together and drop all pretense of tolerance. With Obama literally selling out to the GOP in order to protect his agenda and to ensure a viability of a reelection campaign now is not the time to be silent. The GOP is taking big shots and some of these could actually hit a target. As a person who generally values reason and compromise it seems that this is not the time for compromise, we need to create a revolutionary fervor that outpaces the Tea Party and the GOP and stand up for the people.

Yes, we could lose some ground in the short term. We might fail to stabilize the economy or provide viable health care. But, we need to be willing to experience great pain in order to experience great achievement at the finish line. Once we have increased our power base and extended the arm of our influence then and only then can we return to the bargaining table in the spirit of bipartisan compromise. If we don’t we may wake up in 2012 and realize that we are so far behind that we have no hope whatsoever of protecting democracy and justice for all.

What was your best Valentines Day ever?

2011-02-14T17:14:00.001-08:00

I have never had a great valentines day.

For a kiss I will answer all your questions.

Do you think regulating the fast food industry, eliminating take out, delivery and drive througs as well as making people work out more will reduce obesity?

2011-02-14T17:13:00.001-08:00

There is definitely a correlation between obesity and the sedentary lives that so many of Americans lead. Do we act in the extreme and start shutting down escalators and eliminate food delivery and drive thrus? In Spain Burger King was forced to take one of their newer burgers off the menu because the fat content ran counter to their national anti-obesity campaign. Being a libertarian minded individual (generally) this appalled me. But, now I am not so sure.

Perhaps the fast food industry should be regulated better. There is an emerging body of evidence that suggests that the right combination of sugar, fat and sodium can be neurologically addictive. As an industry they spend millions of dollars in advertising targeting children and those living in poverty. When I was homeless I could eat several meals for $5.00 off of any of the local franchised fast food restaurant’s value menus.

It wasn’t about choice. If I could have eaten healthier at that time I would have. When you’re hungry and you sometimes skip a meal or two you will do what you have to in order to eat. Sometimes I made it to the local Salvation Army or Union Gospel Mission community kitchens for a meal. While better than McDonalds or Wendy’s it still wasn’t all that healthy. So called home cooked mills filled with fats and starchy foods which aren’t really good for us in abundance.

The first thing we need to do in combating obesity is stop mistaking our disgust as moral certainty. People are obese for a lot of different reasons. They don’t need our derision; they need our compassion. Health education and nutrition need to be a part of every school aged child and teenagers curriculum. In fact they should be part of a decent physical education program. Human beings didn’t evolve to sit around. Our bodies and our metabolisms are designed to be in motion (baring disability and health issues).

We need to create health and anti obesity campaigns and use the fast food industry, tobacco companies, beer and spirits and frankly, any manufacturer of “junk food” to fund these efforts. To allow people to manufacture products that can be dangerous to your health and then target specific demographics according to their vulnerabilities is unconscionable.

Sure, everyone has to take responsibility for the choices they make regarding their health and nutrition. But, they have to have the information. They have to be able to afford it as well. If we want those living in poverty to eat healthier foods then we need to put them within their reach. If you can’t afford to buy better food it does little good to talk about doing it. As it stands food prices are skyrocketing and are set to take another leap according to a recent news report I heard.

Not everyone who takes an escalator or orders pizza delivery is simply lazy. If it was that simple we could whip people into shape a lot easier. There is a psychology and spirituality to eating and exercising as well and we need to approach health from a more holistic standpoint. There is no one size fits all answer that will meet everyone’s health needs.

We also have to realize that we can’t force people to take care of themselves just because we find obesity disgusting. That’s what it gets down to for many people – disgust. It’s not about compassion over someone’s well being or concern over the rising costs to our national health and health care system caring for the obese. It’s about being disgusted with fat people and not wanting to be offended by the sight of them.

For a kiss I will answer all your questions.

formspring.me

2011-02-12T10:47:00.001-08:00

I have the gift of oracular vision. What do you wish to know?
http://formspring.me/EzraPMiracle

if socialism is so great , why is greece in a economic crisis? Also Obama is a socialist you communist moron, he has connections with the weathermen underground(a group of radicals inc. bill ayers).

2011-02-08T15:33:00.001-08:00

A couple of things off the bat here – calling me a moron is unfair. I am more than happy to engage in a spirited debate with someone that is ideologically opposed to me. Spirited debate need not always be polite, but calling someone moron is the type of angry nonsense that does nothing positive. Using such language is a good indication that you are not dealing with a reasonable person who is capable of rational discussion with someone they disagree with. Are you one of those people who talk over others when they try to dialogue with you? Do you listen thoughtfully before you respond?

I hope you don’t truly believe that Obama is a socialist and connected to the weathermen via Bill Ayers. These are not true. Obama was a young teen during the time of the weathermen. Hopefully you are also not one of those conspiratorial minded “Birthers” who also believe Obama is really a Muslim.

The fact that Bill Ayers and Barack Obama sat on the same board does not in any way suggest that Obama shares in any of Ayers radicalism. Oh and a 1X $200 donation by Ayers to Obama’s campaign fund. Neither of these events is scandalous given the types of things that go on politically in our country throughout the ideological spectrum.

That being said, you assume that I am a great supporter of Obama. I am not. In fact, Obama is proving himself to be, what readers of my blog will recognize, nothing more than a centrist president. He would have to be in order to build the type of bridges that he has been falteringly doing. That all being said I did vote for Obama and most likely will do so again in 2012. He was the lesser of the two “evils” so to speak. But, I have not bought into the rock star messiah image that propelled him into office.

My thought is that if the Wall Street meltdown had not occurred when it did, Obama would have a much more difficult campaign on his hands. At the end of Convention season in August of 2008 it was a statistical dead heat between Obama and McCain. However, that is all speculation.

As to your comments on Greece…I would submit that it certainly is an example of socialism not working. But, before we pronounce a death sentence on socialism we need to understand that socialism is a spectrum ideology like almost anything else in post modern western politics. Pure socialism, as far as I know, doesn’t exist anywhere in the world. There are elements of socialism that are working throughout the rest of the European Union just as there are socialist elements that are not working so well and, perhaps, even failing. This is why I harp so much on the need for comparative policy analysis.

Greece’s failure as a state has more to do with internal corruption and bad lending practices. Not too dissimilar to what happened on Wall Street during September 2008. Money was lent too cheaply and their overall spending was out of control. Again, sounds a lot like the United States, which is not a Socialist country despite the “right’s” claims that we are.

Finally, I am not a socialist – at least not as most people tend to think of it. I am quite critical of socialism. But, I am also quite critical of laissez faire as well. I am in actuality a moderate with left leaning libertarian tendencies – hence my tendency to refer to myself as Libertarian Socialist. When I first started calling myself that I thought I had cleverly coined a new term. I mean Libertarianism and Socialism? But, much to my chagrin it turned out that there is such a philosophical spectrum. The Marxists and the Anarchists make up the extreme left of the spectrum, but I am not in agreement with extremes.

For a kiss I will answer all your questions.

So I may have asked you this before, but what are your views on abortion?I’ve heard many very compelling arguments that prohibiting it is a restriction of the mother’s rights,but I can’t help but feel that allowing it is an infringement on the right

2011-02-03T09:51:00.001-08:00

I always support a woman’s right to choose. Being pro-choice is not the same thing as being pro-abortion. Pro-choice is the stance that the individual has sole moral discretion over their body and, for women; this includes their womb and their choices in regards to sex and reproductive health. The government has no business telling us what we can or cannot do with our bodies. Intervention is only acceptable in cases where the person involved is not capable of giving informed consent. This is what I believe and this is what I support at the ballot.

However, despite my ethical stance on the issue, abortion causes a great amount of cognitive dissonance for me. I was raised Roman Catholic and even though I was raised in a very liberal, post modern, post Vatican II parish in Seattle; despite the fact that I am an atheist and no longer a practicing Catholic and, am in fact, a vehement anti-Papist the issue of abortion and the churches teachings still resonate deep within me. Chalk that up to the power of indoctrination. My faith is gone, but intense fiery doubt lingers on – most likely residual guilt from rejecting my default ipso facto programming. An atheist with a lingering agnostic world view am I.

My other concern is with a man’s “reproductive rights,” which often get trampled on in the debate. In cases of rape and incest the sperm donor should have absolutely no rights whatsoever. The psycho-pathology of sex criminals is such that they should be locked away from society in a prison cell or secure psychiatric facility for the rest of their lives.

The same goes for those aptly labeled deadbeats who scatter their seed and then refuse to take their share of the responsibility when given the chance to do so by their partners. I once knew a guy who by the age of 23 had 10 children with 9 different women. As far as I am concerned he is guilty of criminal acts of procreation. He had no sense of personal accountability and did not care. Not one mother was receiving child support or any kind of assistance from him. This bastard has no rights either as he trampled over the rights of other people to get what he wanted. Yes, the women who fell for his line have responsibility for the matter if the sex was consensual, but his actions were criminal.

The man whose reproductive rights I am concerned with is the hapless impregnator who is more than willing to step up and take responsibility and meets a wall. When trying to take responsibility the hapless impregnator gets the “my body, my womb and my choice” response. In cases such as these the counter response must be equally stubborn and harsh – “Your body, your womb, your choice and therefore your problem.” This is the price of having choice. You shouldn’t get to suddenly reappear in someone’s life ten years later and say, “I decided not to get an abortion after all, meet your daughter. By the way here is a bill for ten years back child support and what your monthly contribution going forward is.”

If the hapless impregnator now turned father chooses to take responsibility and step up regardless of the unjust treatment then great – I regard him as a highly ethical person. Support enforcement is not acceptable in a libertarian society where everyone is at choice. We must all be accountable for the choices we make, good or bad. This is often missing from the legal battle over abortion. Assuming that the sex was legally consensual (please don’t muddy this with the GOP’s current unconscionable efforts to redefine rape. This is unethical, unjust and repugnant) then both parties must accept responsibility for the outcome. This ability to use reason and be accountable is what separates us from animals that rut about. We can override our passions even in the height of arousal. I know this is possible because I have done it on many occasions out of necessity myself. Simply acting in a way that is “being human” is only a poor excuse. It is a shirking of responsibility.

The man who falls afoul of our legal system in terms of childrearing is often told that no one forced him to have sex with the mother. We ask him why he didn’t use a condom. But, the same goes for his female partner. Assuming the liaison was granted by legal consent wasn’t forced to have sex with him either. Why didn’t she insist that he wear a condom? Why didn’t either of them talk about birth control and what would happen if a pregnancy should occur? If the answer is you got caught up in the moment and surrendered to passion then you must surrender to the consequences of your action and belly up to the bar. Both are “at fault;” both are responsible.

Several years before leaving the Catholic Church for good I taught Confirmation classes for young adults between the ages of 17-20 and, inevitably, a discussion about sexuality always ensued. I used to tell the young men in my care that they already knew the church’s view on sex, but what was really important was that they developed a principled sexual ethic and remained the center of accountability in their lives.

“Gentlemen,” I would say. “You must choose your partners wisely. Many of you will go to college and find yourself at some of the wild parties that happen. You should go, raise a little hell and have some fun in your youth. But, remember this: an intoxicated or high woman cannot give you legal consent. I don’t give a shit what the law says or doesn’t say. If the woman wakes up the next morning and feels violated – she’s been violated and you may be guilty. The state of intoxication impairs a person’s judgment and ability to reason. Why do you think it’s illegal to drive or operate machinery in such states?

“Just because a woman is flirting with you or you happen to think she is flirting with you is not consent. Just because she is dressed in a way you find provocative is not consent. A woman is ‘never asking for it.’ You will have no doubt when consent is really given.”

The young men were squirming in their seats by now. Some of the young women were a little abashed and turned their blushing faces to their feet. Most of them were smiling. There turn was next. But, I still had a few more things to say to the men.

“Birth control gentlemen! This is not the sole responsibility of the woman. Use a condom. Ask her what she is using. Have a discussion about it. It really doesn’t kill the moment. It makes it less worry free. Not to mention condoms aid in the prevention of STDs. You should ask about her feelings on abortion and what she would do if she was pregnant and what she would expect you to do. In short, gentlemen, don’t have sex with sex with someone whose values are not the same as yours.

“The last bit of advice I will give you is this. You don’t own a woman’s body. It is not your property. Her womb is not your property and what may be growing inside it is not your property either. Once you ejaculate your semen into her vagina it’s not your semen anymore. So if her values are different than yours – too damn bad.”

My message was take fucking responsibility for your actions and your life. What you do has consequences for other people. Then I turned to the young women.

“Take responsibility for your bodies. If you don’t trust the guy, don’t have sex with him. It really is that simple. The heart wants what the heart wants is pure bullshit. It’s true, but it’s bullshit still the same. There are also no excuses for rape. You have rights and if you are violated you need to demand those rights. You need to be unapologetic about it. You know if you gave consent. If you didn’t then its rape. Just because it wasn’t violent or you didn’t get drugged or physically harmed doesn’t mean you weren’t violated. There are more subtle violations of people being perpetrated then we realize. It’s that the violent ones are far more noticeable and get our attention easier.

“But, if you get pregnant through mutual legally consensual sex you must take responsibility for the outcome of the sex. You should ask your partner to step up; you should even expect it. That is what an ethically responsible person would do. That is what someone who cares about you would do. If he chooses to be a deadbeat then by all means you must do what you need to do. However, what I told the men goes for you as well. If you have sex with someone who does not share your values then the consequences are yours to bear alone.”

It all gets down to personal accountability. This is what makes liberty such a harsh lover. You pay your money and you take your chances as a favorite college professor of mine said to me when I complained about the grade she had given me on a paper. The reason the government steps in is because no one wants to take responsibility. The reason we want the government to step in is because we want someone else to take responsibility and we often pretend we’re seeking justice. That isn’t to say that we shouldn’t have access to our justice system and the right to seek redress for grievances – absolutely we should. But, the demands of justice must require that those who seek redress against another have previously acted with ethical integrity. If they are shirking responsibility then they must first be accountable.

Reviewing my rant I see that I have left out a major part of your question, which appears to be about the rights of the unborn. I am reluctant to consider an unborn child that is unable to exist and survive outside its mother’s womb as having the same rights as any other person. This could cause the rights, not to mention the health, of the mother to be trampled on in order to save an unborn child. During the last two election cycles in Colorado an anti-abortion group has managed to get on the ballot a proposition to amend the state constitution to define an unborn fetus as person. This is absurd and fortunately it has been defeated both times. I am not in support of so-called late term abortions, unless there is a true medical necessity. Why should the mother die so an unborn child can live without its mother? However, I put this in the same category as I do with all reproductive rights – this is not the choice of the state or a religious group. The sole decision belongs to the mother in cooperation with her doctors and anyone else she may choose to include in her decision. The state must stay out it if we are to protect and ensure liberty. In order for this to be the case every one of us must step and take ownership of our personal responsibilties.

For a kiss I will answer all your questions.

I Opine on the Origins of Morality

2011-02-02T13:02:00.000-08:00

As an atheist I am biased toward non supernatural origins of human morality. However, I have yet to discover a truly satisfying theoretical discussion of human morality based on Natural Selection and evolution. Richard Dawkins tackles the question briefly in his book the GOD DELUSION and I find it to be a good starting place.

Evolutionary biologists have touted the so-called “selfish gene” in recent years and it certainly makes sense to suggest that an organism’s drives to survive and propagate are the motivating forces of its existence. To put it in less academic terms I would submit that as human beings we are neither good nor bad when we come into the world. We are self-centered. We exist to get our needs met.

We know that for the most part the ability to share and show empathy is not necessarily “hardwired” in an infant. These are partly learned behaviors and these capacities don’t really take hold until about 4 years of age and develop overtime through adolescence. It’s one of the reasons why psychiatric professionals tend to avoid diagnosing sociopathy during a patient’s teenage years. We learn our morality from those around us and it’s dependent on our ability to make emotional connections with other people. If this ability is broken or retarded it will impede a person’s capacity to develop a conscience, which is necessary for a person to “have morality” in the true sense of the word.

My current belief (I say “belief because” I can’t really offer you any science at this time) is that Natural Selection favored those of our ancestors who were able to sublimate some of their own selfishness to work in cooperation with other people. If you consider that the so-called cradle of life is in a generally harsh and arid part of the world cooperation and specialization is needed in order to thrive. In order to do this we developed rules or laws. Human society seems to crave order. In order for people to “buy-in” to the rules they have to be handed down with some authority and there must be consequences (although we can see that consequences are not often enough to prevent people from acting against the rules).

If you look at Judaism and Islam you see not just a system of supernatural beliefs. They are both bodies of law. They are legal systems and what better authority then a supreme almighty being? In Christianity the Roman Catholics are bound by Canon Law (whether they realize it or not) and most protestant Christianity is some form of “Law light.” However, post modern Christianity has favored a more mystical stance and tends to blather on about not being held in bondage by the law while failing to recognize that they are still bound to a legal system of sorts. There are rewards and punishments and a divine supreme authority that passes judgment. These are all elements of a legal system. Ancient scriptures are, to my way of thinking, the earliest forms of lawgiving. Laws are developed out of need. They also change according to need.

The bias in our culture is to see the Judeo-Christian ethos as the perfection of morality because it was given by what it sees as the “one true god.” It tends to see the Ten Commandments as some type of Hebrew innovation. It doesn’t seem to occur to the fans of Jesus and Moses that humanity had previously figured out that stealing, murder and adultery is problematic to social order long before Moses and the Ten Commandments.

Karen Armstrong – one time Catholic nun and religious writer – has written about the development of what we refer to as the “golden rule.” Her research suggests that this ethos seems to develop almost simultaneously cross cultures approximately 6,000 years ago. At the time that Moses is coming down the mountain with the stone tablets the other cultures around them are developing ethically along the same lines. So if there is a supreme grand poobah handing down laws it would call into question Israel’s claim of most favored nation status.

The antecedents of many biblical stories and religious beliefs as well as ethical biases are found in the ancient culture of Sumer. Even the Hebrew god that most Christian’s refer to as Yahweh was a one time storm or war god from Sumeria. When we first encounter Abraham nee Abram he is leaving the Sumerian city of Ur of the Chaldeans.

The Sumerians were innovators in many ways and quite advanced when compared to other cultures around at that time – a fact that continues to confound some scholars. Among those innovations is the notion that the nobility or ruling class has an ethical obligation to protect the poor and the most vulnerable. Contrast that with the attitude of the Babylonian ruling class.

The tendency with the Judeo-Christian meme is to suppose that their ethos is universal. If you suggest any form of moral relativity they will recoil in fear and quote endless bible passages. But, anthropology and sociology clearly demonstrate that what we see as universal morality is not necessarily the case. Once again, to my way of thinking, Judeo-Christian morality is just as man made as anything else. Morality – what a culture sees as right and wrong – has more to do with the overall needs of that particular culture to keep order and to allow it to thrive. The needs of the ancient Inuit people in the frozen Arctic will not be the same as a nomadic people wandering the ancient deserts of Palestine.

The prohibition against murder is often the example offered by the believers in a universal morality. I would suggest that our aversion to murder has to do with our ability to form attachments as mammals and the accompanying capacity for empathy in the face of pain and suffering. Yet, that isn’t a fully satisfying answer given the number of murders committed.

Most often, at least in terms of ancient morality, “Thou shall not kill,” could be seen to mean “thou shall not murder one of your own ‘kind.’” Even before the Ten Commandments, God’s covenant with Noah forbade murder. Yet 40 years after Moses gave the Israelites the law, the armies of Joshua cut a bloody genocidal swath through the so-called Promised Land.” In fact, their god commanded it. This calls into question the overall morality of their supreme being.

There have been some questionable nuero science studies attempting to demonstrate that human beings come hardwired for religious belief resulting in the questionable God Gene Theory and a discipline referred to as Neuro-Theology. The results of the study were quite dubious and are not really holding up to the scrutiny of peer review. It also begs the question that if “religious belief” is hardwired into us then it is coded somewhere in our DNA. This means that mutation is also possible and that some may even be born without the genetic capacity to believe. How would we consider this? Is this an adaptation or a birth defect? I have a pretty good idea how the Pope might see this. Those who would like to find a genetic or biological disposition favoring belief should be careful to consider that those lacking it might indicate an evolution or adaption away from needing to believe in supernatural things at all.

Those of us who favor Natural Selection need to recognize that the prevalence of religious belief is not insignificant. Natural Selection suggests that traits useful for survival thrive while those not useful die out. So what is the evolutionary advantage of religious belief? Once again I have not seen an overly satisfying answer. I tend to see religious belief – as suggested by Dawkins - to be a byproduct of a trait that is useful.
Perhaps it is the ability to sublimate a portion of individual self interest in order to work in cooperation with others for survival. This might be tied into the ability follow orders and to learn from those who have previous experience. This is all speculation.

As a final postscript I ran across a small article in an New Thought magazine last month. The neurologist co-authoring it mentioned studies suggesting that “altruism” stimulates the pleasure centers in the brain. In other words doing good deeds and being charitable causes people to feel good. I am not certain what the proves exactly. It does suggest a certain flaw in the “selfish gene” model. The fact is our learning is intimately tied to our nervous system. We are creatures who seek to avoid pain and increase pleasure. For those in the study the had somehow learned to associate pleasure with altruism. But, this is far from conclusive. If altruism were pleasurable then there would be more of it.

A final speculative statement – I predict that Neuro-science will eventually demonstrate that morality is a learned behavior that is not pre-programmed, but gets programmed into us by our parents, families, society and religions. This has nothing to do with a god, who is often whimsically tyrannical and selective in his own morality.

The Libertarian Party includes the privitization of Social Security in their platform. Privitization was also supported by former president George W. Bush and several GOP members of your congress. How do you feel about privitization?

2011-01-28T16:17:00.001-08:00

I tend to disagree with the idea of privatization of Social Security. In my blog I have discussed my belief in the value of social insurance and the need for a safety net. I also recognize that Social Security was never intended to be “the be all to end all” of a person’s retirement planning. It’s there to provide a supplement to a person’s retirement income and to provide disability benefits for those who might not be able to work in order to support themselves. The fact that so many people seem to rely on it as a primary source of income is not the failure of the program, but a failure coming from somewhere else in our society. Most people have no idea what “money” really is and how it works. It’s just something that they earn in a paycheck to spend. Our education system is one of the culprits in this overall failure.

I see it as insurance and not an entitlement as many Social Security opponents see it. We fund our social security program through payroll tax deductions called FICA. An entitlement, as used when discussing welfare, is something given for free to a qualified person in need without requiring previous tax contribution from them. It is funded 100% by the tax payers, which is quite different from Social Security Insurance. My question to those who desire to privatize Social Security is whether or not I will get every last dime I contributed in FICA back along with a reasonable amount of interest so that I may invest it. If the answer is no, then I say leave Social Security the fuck alone.

Because of my insistence on the value of social insurance I am nervous about giving it away to the private sector for them to gamble on in the markets etc. That it would give the consumer more options is an advantage, but the majority of people are not necessarily capable of being successful in the markets. In the end it would allow investors and financial companies a chance to make money at the potential great expense of others. This defeats the purpose of insurance. Social Security is about risk management.
Privatizing it makes the risk dangerously unmanageable except for a select few.

In a perfect world Social Security would be there as a risk management safety net. The consumer then saves a portion of their income and invests a portion of it for future retirement income. Social Security then supplements whatever other income a retiree has. In theory this works quite well, which is why we currently use this model. However, most people I know don’t make enough to make this present model work for them, which is why so many people end up with Social Security being their primary income. The saving and investing is not always possible for families with modest to below poverty level incomes.

Sadly, as much as I disagree with privatizing Social Security we may not have much of a choice. The idea is slowly picking up momentum and progressive politicians may not be able to hold back the tide forever. The biggest problem is that both Social Security and Medicare make up the largest chunks of the federal budget and with our out of control deficit many in congress are looking at these two programs. A recent proposal by Obama’s so-called deficit commission almost created cuts in both these programs. It’s safe to assume that retirees and the disabled may eventually see cuts in their benefits.

I saw an article yesterday online that states that in 2037 Social Security will be insolvent and running a permanent deficit. That’s just 26 years from now and does not bode well for balancing our budget and reducing our deficit in these preceding years. Is this true? I am not certain. I have also read articles claiming that the furor over Social Security going bankrupt is incorrect and that there is plenty of money – that is if the government leaves it alone.

I still don’t have enough information to comfortably decide which scenario seems most likely. But, regardless the overall perception is that it is a failing program that needs to be supported (if you are a Democrat) or eliminated (if you are a Republican). That these New Deal era programs take so a large chunk of the federal budget makes it a sitting duck in these current times of out of control government spending and escalating deficits.

Frankly, I am not thrilled about either option. Do we leave Social Security in the hands of the government where fiscal incompetence and lack of true accountability in the management of money will surely screw it up in the long run or do we let the private sector have it and risk that greedy, unscrupulous people steal our golden years from us?

Fuck if I know.

For a kiss I will answer all your questions.

Hornet's Nest Kick's Ass

2011-01-28T07:40:00.000-08:00

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest by Stieg Larsson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest is the ideal denouement for Stieg Larrson’s Lisbeth Salander trilogy. Larsson is a rare writer, a journalist who can translate his passion for truth and the facts into credible, deeply moving fiction. Salander, despite her near sociopathy, is a very sympathetic young woman that the reader will be hard pressed to not fall in love with. She is at once both heartbreaking and interesting.

Lisbeth Salander is one of the most mesmerizing female characters in contemporary fiction and the reader completely understands the beguiled infatuation of her friends, the journalist Blomkvist and her former employer Drago Aramanksy, who admire and respect her with a loyal affection even as they are often puzzled by this strange young woman who has suffered so much abuse at the hands of the state and it’s appointed representatives. We share their outrage at the violation of her civil rights and deeper emotional, psychological and physical violations she suffers.

Blomkvist himself is sympathetic as a crusading investigative journalist who risks his life and credibility to bring the truth to light. His charming, irresponsible nature when it comes to woman contrasts nicely with his affection for Salander and his outrage over the way she was treated. This makes him less than perfect a man and in no small way a strange kind of male “feminist” anti-hero who, despite his casual sex life, despises crimes against woman and children and is driven to ensure the criminals face justice.

Larsson writes with the crisp prose of a journalist that moves the story along. He deftly mixes in real world facts giving the reader a sense of Sweden’s democracy and modern political history. This gives the action a wonderful true-life context without bogging it down as so often happens with less proficient writers. His work has it all, espionage, crime syndicates, political chicanery and one brave, angry young woman who is a scrappy survivor learning that, no matter how smart and clever she is, life is much better when you learn to trust others and accept their help. It is also one hell of a great revenge tale. The good guys prevail and the bad guys get their asses kicked hard.

View all my reviews

What do you think about objectivism?

2011-01-27T09:19:00.001-08:00

Objectivism seems an excuse to be ruthless. I distrust the dominance of free market idealism that is so prevalent within this philosophical view point. To my way of thinking developed through observation and personal experience a total laissez faire free market world is a ruthless one. It’s no more morally superior, as true believers claim, than any other economic system. It’s amoral and requires the participants to be highly ethical and just in their pursuits. Morality is a human convention. We choose the template of good and evil that we overlay atop our world.

That being said, socialism is not any more moral or just than laissez faire. The abuses of socialism are as well documented as are the abuses of capitalism. Humans have the proclivity to abuse each other. Those who have the “will to power” regardless of their intentions have a much larger stage on which to inflict harm. All governments and all economic systems harm people even as they do well for others. Idealism in human relations always makes way for the realpolitik that is constantly at work.

However, there are elements of Objectivism that I don’t disagree with. I believe in a “rational self interest,” which I prefer to call enlightened self-interest that is wrapped up with a strong sense of ethical conduct and willingness to concern oneself with the consequences of one’s actions and the needs of others. Objectivism allows for a more “selfish” stance.

As an atheist I agree with Objectivism’s materialist or naturalist stance that existence is independent of the human mind (although new research being done regarding the mind and perception may ultimately challenge this) and it is through our perceptions that we experience the world. Objectivism has some interesting aesthetic concepts along with its rather Greco-Roman view of “man as a heroic being” that I appreciate, but overall the philosophy puts us at odds with the earth and other beings. The economic positions taken by this philosophy keep me wary of taking it too seriously.

As a postscript I would submit that the Objectivist tends to see the free market as the ultimate channel for necessary innovation. I disagree. Innovation derived through the free market is certainly a documentable fact, but to simply believe all problems will be resolved through this channel seems unsupportable. Free Markets seek the greatest fulfillment of profit before innovation. If whatever “widget” you have can’t be exploited it will be discarded – at least until a demand is created. But, the oligarchy of corporate conglomerates control “demand” and it is artificially manipulated by those that have something to sell. Demand is often created and corporate marketing people talk about “creating a market” for whatever they have to sell.

Not of all of this is unethical or bad, but it does make relying on the free market for all innovation unreliable. An example is seen in the need to create new energy technologies and move us away from oil and other fossil fuels. The need is definitely there, but the demand has not risen because of where the control for their development lies. Even though oil supplies are dwindling and many of the world’s oil fields have passed peak production we still have enough of it that there is no real motivation to change. If we make the mistake by waiting for the free market to get ahead of the curb the projected energy crisis may become a very painful reality. Our current way of life has been made possible by a platform of cheap fossil fuel. Oil will be needed to continue to support our current infrastructures in ways not always related to energy production and delivery. In this way the free market could be argued as impeding progress rather than aiding it.

For a kiss I will answer all your questions.

How can you have socialism without the state enforcing it?

2011-01-27T08:07:00.001-08:00

I am not sure you can. That is one of the failing points of Marxism. Rather than creating a world of individual collectives working in cooperation you get the standard default to centralization. Not everyone "buys in" to a particular philosophy so instead of achieving it's ideal it becomes, rather, a realpolitik.

This is why I value democracy as a key component. Because it makes room for people to dissent reasonably (theoretically, of course) by giving them acess to the governing process. It allows for other voices to be heard and compromises to be achieved through ballots rather than by force. However, you could make the argument that here in the United States we have a more "realpolitik" at work than an ideal democracy.

For a kiss I will answer all your questions.

Are Individual freedom coming under more complicated and sophisticated threats?

2011-01-26T16:03:00.001-08:00

It sure seems that way doesn’t it? My inclination is to believe that civil liberties are coming more and more under attack. The Patriot Act and the TSA’s new full body scanners are examples of that. The Bush Administration was documented as having violated the civil liberties of American’s in general with the aid of the NSA. This is all justified under the well meaning guise of securing the nation and making our citizens feel safer. The Obama administration seems only to ignore or reinforce these issues, which goes to show that once you lose liberty it’s hard to get it back without a fight.

But, the government isn’t the only front on the battle to maintain civil liberties. The internet has created the greatest threat to personal privacy. Then there is the sentiment of the people in general. A lunatic brings a gun and kills innocent people and suddenly guns need to be restricted and banned (not saying whether the do or not here). Often people will trade civil liberty for security. Even more disturbing is that they are not always aware or even concerned of the trade off.

The problem is that the erosion of civil liberties and that’s really what it is, gradual erosion rather than an outright fight, is so subtle that many are not really even aware that it is happening at all. Most Americans aren’t affected by the Patriot Act so it seems like a non-issue to them. The TSA scanners will eventually become commonplace as to be acceptable. They will just be one of the many inconveniences of travel. Look how quickly we have adapted to longer lines and increased security measures when flying. In fact the clamor has died down. Most likely new technology will replace these with something less invasive, but who really knows.

The volatility of ever changing geo-politics and the evolution of new technologies occur more quickly than our ability to cope with them ethically – it seems – leaving us in the position that we are in right now. What we need to decide, those of us who love civil liberty, is what we are willing to trade off for liberty? I have said this before and I say it again, emphatically, there is a price to pay for a free and open society. The price tag sometimes is soaked in blood.

That doesn’t mean that violence is acceptable or encouraged. It’s just a fact. Some people will occasionally do horrible things. The question is whether we will use this as an excuse to allow liberty to be curtailed or if we will chose a more courageous stance. Benjamin Franklin said that those who sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither (paraphrase).
I can’t disagree with that. I would prefer overall liberty to a forced sense of security or fairness. Finally, any real threat to our civil liberties doesn’t start with the government. It starts with us and what we are willing to accept.

For a kiss I will answer all your questions.

The Wiccan Rede: A Foundation for Ethical Conduct

2011-01-21T17:02:00.000-08:00

“An it harm none, do what thou wilt.” This statement, known as the Wiccan Rede by many pagans today, is the highest expression of ethical conduct. It is a complete creed within a vast spectrum of beliefs and practices that are creedless. It is the master principal that understood correctly and lived properly will create a spiritually and materially fulfilling life for those who will commit themselves to living by it. It is the timeless truth of life that demonstrates that no centralized spiritual authority is needed for people to live lives of love and goodwill.

“An it harm none, do what thou wilt” embodies the ethical principals of all the great religions that we draw from here in the west. The Jewish sage Hillel summed up the Torah by stating, “That which is distasteful to you, don’t do to another the rest is just commentary.” The Wiccan Rede is the Torah without the commentary.

Jesus summed up the secret of life for his followers in similar words.

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and all of your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” The rest of the New Testament is commentary.

If we pour through other wisdom traditions we will find similar or, at least, parallel ideas such as we find in Buddhism and Islam among others. In fact, the Wiccan Rede, to my way of thinking, is the foundation of the so-called Golden Rule. If I truly do not do to others what I would not want done to me I am living a harmless life.

Harmlessness, like meekness in Christianity, is a misunderstood spiritual trait. It is mistaken for weakness. It is often thought to be a namby pamby pacifist approach to life. Some see it as a retreat or letting others to do whatever they want without offering resistance. But, this is incorrect. Harmlessness is power. The spiritual wisdom of the Far East teaches that harmlessness compels the gods. To compel the gods or god or spiritual principal by which you live is to command great power.

Harmlessness is a power not obtained through force. Power obtained by force may be mighty for a time, but it rarely lasts. Harmlessness starts with a respect for all life and for all beings, sentient or otherwise. One could draw a parallel to Buddhist teachings. Many of the pagans I know believe that this respect is to be extended not simply to humans, animals and other critters in our phenomenal realm. It is to be extended to the invisible realm as well.

As an approach to ethical conduct no higher thought can be stated. “An it harm none”, bespeaks the idea that everything I do has an effect throughout the phenomenal and invisible realms. My actions have consequences. Therefore, I must consider my outcomes. Unintended consequences can cause pain and harm others. It matters little what my intention was. Pain is pain.

Sadly, we cannot live in this world without inflicting some harm. That is why our approach to it is very important. That is why we must cultivate harmlessness. Sometimes harm cannot be avoided. Sometimes respecting life as a whole might mean taking it somewhere else – as in self defense. But, whatever the excuse; whatever the reason and no matter how noble the intentions were, whatever we send out is delivered back to us multiplied and intensified. To live harmlessly is to understand the import of all one’s decisions. When I harm another I harm myself. When I uplift another I uplift myself.

Can I safely assume by your vehement anti-Catholicism that you are a former Catholic?

2011-01-21T16:52:00.001-08:00

Yes - is it that obvious? That being said I like to make the distinction between anti-papism and anti-Catholicism. I am an anti-papist. I want to see the end of the Vatican as a protected city state. I desire the church to be condmended and prosecuted for its crimes. I hold that the Vatican is a criminal state and must be brought to justice.

From a realistic perspective that won't happen. I think that American Catholics should split from the Vatican and engage in healing dialouge with abuse victims and also pursue the real world reforms necessary to perserve the liturigical and sacremental traditions it values while keeping it relevent for the modern age.

I am an atheist so I can't participate in that discourse, but I would live to see that happen nonetheless. Or Catholics could just become Episcopol or Lutheran. There actually lots of little Catholic Churches of the non-papist variety around as well.

For a kiss I will answer all your questions.

formspring.me

2011-01-17T10:05:00.003-08:00

For a kiss I will answer all your questions. http://formspring.me/EzraPMiracle

Under what conditions and for what reasons does one person (or, the state) have supreme authority over another?

2011-01-17T10:05:00.001-08:00

This is a scary question. It’s also not a very simple one. It is not a matter of creating a list of when it is acceptable to exercise supreme authority and when it is not. In any scenario we must ask if the demands of justice and human dignity are being served. To exercise authority over anyone is to basically limit their liberty or, at the very least, limit their freedom of personal choice. In a perfect world this would never be necessary. So it is important to consider whether restricting someone in this fashion is essential for the greater good. Without ethical discourse the demands of justice may well be trampled upon.

The real question here might well be, why would we ever exercise supreme authority over anyone? The answer to this question will help us define the conditions or scenarios for doing so. The demands of both liberty and justice must make this type of thing the rare exception and not the rule, yet even in our democracy it seems that many times we may cross this very thin line.

I am increasingly of the opinion that liberty is not necessarily for everyone. The vast majority of us do seem capable of exercising our liberty without intentionally causing harm to another. When we do cause harm we are reasonable and able to make amends or offer the necessary redress. If not then we use our legal system and generally will abide by the decisions of the court even if we are not in agreement.

However, there is always the exception to this rule. There exist the Jared Loughner’s (by way of example) who cross our agreed upon lines of conduct and cause great harm. Loughner or a Timothy McVeigh are extreme examples. But, the corner drug dealer or even a petty criminal cause their stresses upon society. No crime is ever completely victimless.

We can cite mental health, poverty or childhood abuse, among others, for the reasons why these behaviors take place. But, these are simply “reasons for” and, while the demands of liberty should consider them before sanctioning the guilty, they are not excuses for the behavior. Liberty requires personal accountability. The more liberty you have the more personal accountability you must exercise. To be a libertarian of any shade requires that you have a highly developed sense of ethics. This is where it all starts to break down.

I do believe there are situations where restricting or limiting the liberty or “exercising supreme authority” over an individual may be necessary for the greater good. Jared Loughner, in my mind, serves as a relevant example. Regardless of his motives or his mental state he is not fit for liberty and not fit to be anywhere but a prison cell or a locked down secured mental hospital for the remainder of his life. His extreme actions require an extreme sanction. But, in the long run if we are not careful and willing to engage in constant ethical discourse we will not be able to safeguard our liberty well. It is more important for the majority to remain free even if it means having to deal with the occasional Jared Loughner etc.

For a kiss I will answer all your questions.

Do you perceive the world/society to be more comprised of chaos or order? which is the more illusory of the two?

2011-01-17T09:27:00.001-08:00

Perception itself can be illusory. But, it seems to me that world society is about bringing or attempting to bring order to chaos. I suppose from my faulty perception of things I see order to be the more illusory of the two. Human nature is rather self-centered and, while some are able to sublimate some of their self-interest to live and cooperate effectively with others, there are many more that are unable to do so. Therefore collectively those who can live this way agree to impose self-restrictions on themselves to keep order and to sanction those unable to.

For a kiss I will answer all your questions.

Will Libertarian Socialism remain a revolutionary social movement or become a chic boutique lifestyle subculture?

2011-01-17T07:54:00.001-08:00

Remember that I have stated the position that Libertarian Socialism is a spectrum political philosophy rather than a “party discipline” with a set platform. On the extreme we have Marxism and Anarchism. So the answer to your question, I suppose, will depend on who the Libertarian Socialist is. It will also depend on the emotional and psychological maturity of the individual as well.

Most ideology in this spectrum seems to me to be more rhetorical than practical. It is the expression of certain anti-establishment attitudes or tendencies. The current trends in Libertarian Socialism are to be found more in the Wiki-Leaks supporters than in the thought of a Noam Chomsky. It tends to be rash, undisciplined and unconcerned with the unintended consequences of its actions. It sees everything distasteful to it as something to rebel against rather than to negotiate with. My experience with many libertarian socialist types is that they are unable to make clear, concrete ethical discernment between justified civil disobedience and criminal acts. The closer to the extreme edge they are the less likely they are to compromise and negotiate.

I am not sure it has ever been a viable revolutionary or social movement. Many lack the necessary clarity to pull off revolution or change successfully. It seems a “place to hang out” for the angry and disenfranchised intellectual who has yet to come to terms with how to play the game effectively. I suspect that in the United States, at least, it has been nothing more than just a chic boutique subculture.

For a kiss I will answer all your questions.

The Elephant in the Parking Lot: Murder, Mayhem & the Demands of Justice

2011-01-11T16:30:00.000-08:00

I would like to point my finger of blame at the elephant in the parking lot – Jared Loughner. The Tea Party did not put the Glock 9 in his hand. The hard left didn’t drive him to the Safeway parking lot where he unleashed his paranoid rage. Loughner, for reasons not fully understood or explained at the present moment, acted on his own. Perhaps, he had an accomplice and if so then his accomplice shares his guilt for the death, injury and mayhem that they caused.

Loughner may be seriously mentally ill. That would not surprise me. Some who know him have reported describing his mental condition as increasingly paranoid in recent weeks. It would take a mentally ill person to target a congressional representative with the intent to murder her and in the process uncaringly kill a district court judge, an innocent 9 year old school girl and killing and injuring several others as well.

Loughner is to blame. If you are looking to hold someone accountable for the senseless violence than hold Jared Loughner accountable for his actions – after all they are his actions. Arizona’s permissive gun laws are not to blame. There are plenty of responsible gun owners in Arizona and around the country.

Lest we forget, Washington DC has some of the most restrictive gun laws in the nation and in the week prior to the attempted assassination of Gabrielle Gifford there were at least 7 hand gun related homicides in Washington. Not to mention Representative Gifford has been a strong supporter of our 2nd amendment rights in the past. Gun control doesn’t necessarily guarantee an end to gun related violence. It’s the old clichéd adage – guns don’t kill people, people kill people

I am not a gun owner. I don’t believe in them. Yet, I am not so jaded by my own viewpoint that I will lump all gun owners into the same category as Loughner. I would not seek to restrict the liberty of anther. Yes, I am aware of Columbine. I live in Denver and there are constant reminders of this tragedy. But, once again we are talking about people – teenagers in this case – with emotional and psychological problems and irresponsible parents who made gaining access to the guns easy. Yet, it isn’t the parents who are necessarily to blame either.

That’s our problem! We want to blame someone or something. It’s only natural in the wake of a tragedy to attempt to make sense out of the senseless. However, some things may never make sense in any logical way we can understand, especially if mental illness is involved. If we wish to find an external source of blame how about the dismal treatment of the mentally ill in our country, especially those that run afoul of our so called justice system. Collectively we don’t seem to put a lot of thought or resources into mental health issues. We don’t spend much time discoursing about it until something like what happened this past weekend occurs. Then there is public outcry. Then we make demands which eventually die down until the next senseless act of violence happens.

Due process and the demands of justice are what need to be served now. Jared Loughner needs to be given his day in court and held accountable by a jury of his peers. Hopefully, but doubtful, his mental health needs to be considered when judging him. Our legal system hates mental illness. It loathes insanity defenses because it wants to blame someone. Someone has to be punished and when you allow for mental illness it feels like you are making excuses for someone’s behavior and allowing them “off the hook.” But, it doesn’t have to be the case. Compassion for the mentally ill is still appropriate and has a place in meeting the demands of justice. The challenge is keeping on the correct side of that thin almost indistinguishable line between justice and revenge. People are out for blood.

But, recognizing Loughner’s potential mental illness is not reassigning the blame to the Twinkies or the over arching hyperbole of angry political rhetoric. His mental illness does not excuse him from accountability. So let’s be clear. We can blame guns, gun laws and the irresponsibly angry political rhetoric of a the Tea Party or the hard left, but it matters very little if these things actually made a contribution to Loughner’s decision to act as he did. The majority of us are not choosing to act that way. We can navigate through these extremes and make sensible and sane decisions. We do behave ethically and responsibly. It is Loughner that can not. The only question is whether or not he is mentally competent. Regardless, he is not fit to be anywhere besides a jail cell or a locked down mental hospital. He may need psychiatric care and the demands of justice need to figure that in as well.

We need to fight the tendency of fear that is a result of such incidents. The tendency that wants to restrict how people speak or their right to own or carry a gun because someone might choose to act criminally is dangerous. We can’t restrict civil liberties simply because someone or a few might not be up to the responsibility that is attached to these rights. There is always a price to pay for a free and open society. Sometimes that price is heavy and soaked in blood. It’s horrible when that is the price. But, if we fear paying it then we do not deserve civil liberties at all.

What do you see as the most important priorities for the American peace movement at this time?

2011-01-10T21:28:00.001-08:00

The peace movement, in general, is largely ineffective. Part of the problem is that is not a centralized movement. It is comprised of individuals and indepenent activist groups that have anti-war tendencies. The top priority needs to be why, despite all their efforts, they really do very little to effect the type of change they want to see. Not being to be too overly metaphysical here, but I am not sure angry people can bring peace. You need to have a peaceful heart first.

The “movement” generally does not divert us from war in the long term nor does it shorten the wartime experience. I am not even certain we can call it a “peace” movement. Rather it is more a general tendency to be anti-war. The anti-war movement worked hard to keep the United States out of World War II and they were somewhat successful in frustrating FDR’s efforts to get us involved. Then Pearl Harbor occurred and the national zeitgeist changed.

Vietnam didn’t end because of the efforts of the peace movement. It only ended when it was no longer viable for us to be there. It isn’t like Nixon woke up in April 1973 and looked at his wife and said, “You know Pat, those goddamn hippies are right.” I suspect we will see much of the same thing in Iraq and in Afghanistan When you invade a country you create a humanitarian crisis, but when you withdraw you do so well. Ending these conflicts is not going to be harrowing and problematic to say the least.

That isn’t to say that there shouldn’t be a peace or anti-war movement. I believe this work is important and there is a need to raise an anti-war consciousness and a push to find more diplomatic ways of preventing war and ensuring peace. But, unless those involved are willing to scrutinize themselves closely instead of pointing the blame externally to others they will remain impotent to effect any real change. This should be their principal priority.

For a kiss I will answer all your questions.

On Huckleberry Finn

2011-01-10T10:52:00.000-08:00

In college I minored in American literature and I have forgotten a considerable amount, no doubt, of what I learned. But, one thing has always stood in the forefront of my mind regarding the enduring power of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.

My freshman literature professor remarked that Mark Twain had been asked on occasion why he didn’t write further adventures of the titular character. Twain’s response was that Huck would have eventually been so overwhelmed by the hypocrisy of society that he would have taken his life before he reached adulthood.

I have never seen corroboration of that statement, but it seems truthful enough given my reading of young Huck’s personality. Perhaps, it is best we leave him floating lazily down the Mississippi on raft with his companion Jim. They can remain a clarion call of where we must never return.

Huckleberry Finn & The Slippery Slope of Censorship

2011-01-10T10:49:00.000-08:00

The newly published revision of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn demonstrates an incredibly increasing American illiteracy and it is an unconscionable defacing of literature. The author’s use of the so called “N-word” has long been a source of contention among the book banning set as well as the political correctness crowd who want to cleanse our national rhetorical landscape of any word or term that offends their brittle egos. It’s also a blatant attempt at rewriting a dark moment in U.S. History.

It seems that they have won this round. But, then why wouldn’t they – a Texas state school board has begun deleting Thomas Jefferson from their U.S. History textbooks. In our cyber age of mediocrity we no longer have to accept being challenged, we can simply remove the offending thorn and not be troubled by it again. Ignorance must indeed be bliss as so many people seem to be intent on remaining in such a state.

Forget for a moment that Mark Twain was a satirist writing in a pre-civil war period when we still had a slavery institution and blacks were crassly and cruelly referred to with the N-word; forget for a moment that Mark Twain was an ardent abolitionist and a harsh critic of southern attitudes and culture. Forget for a moment that in Huckleberry Finn it is the young Mr. Finn and his companion, the escaped slave Jim, who are the only truly shining examples of a rarified and noble humanity, editing Huckleberry Finn not only defaces a great piece of American literature it softens the historical reality of the time by attempting to make it “polite,” “decent” and acceptable to easily offended readers.

Deleting the “N-Word” to make it more suitable for “black education,” as one article I read suggests, is nonsense. It belittles the whole notion of black history and assumes that African Americans, as a whole, are somehow less sophisticated than the culture at large. This, of course, is patently false. Huckleberry Finn holds up Jim as an example of true humanity and gives the book one of its noble themes – an attack on the institute of slavery. If the story was told from a strict abolitionist viewpoint it would not have the cutting impact that it does.

Being white many people will no doubt object to where I land on this issue. I do appreciate that. I have not been subjected to the dehumanizing cruelty of racism. But, let me be clear. This is not strictly about the replacing of the word nigger – let’s not be coy regarding this word as it is central to the debate – it is about allowing political correctness to whitewash truth. Just because the truth is an unsavory reality, such as slavery in this country, it is still a truth that must be examined head on.

I get the objection to the word. It is offensive and outside a discussion on Huckleberry Finn as a piece of literature and U.S. history its use is unacceptable today. I would no more use this word than I would any other racially motivated slang term. But, if I’ve learned anything about studying history it is this – history, like death itself – enjoys a delicious irony. The N-word is still so prevalent in our culture albeit in a rather subversive way. The N-word is in movies, music and popular fiction to the point that it makes the debate over Huckleberry Finn ludicrous. The illiteracy of those who misunderstand Twain and his intentions compound the problem.

If the N-word is unacceptable in Huckleberry Finn then it must be unacceptable in every other aspect of our culture as well. This is the crux of the issue. The word will still remain in use and not just among the white supremacist, KKK crowd either. In no small way, every time someone in the black community uses the N-word, regardless of what their justification may be, they continue to keep alive its use in our post modern vernacular and, in some cases, identify themselves by the word. The N-word cannot be acceptable in a sub-culture if we seek to eliminate it in the larger culture around us.

This isn’t a simple case of some angry white guy being pissed off for not being able to say what I want with whatever words I want. The N-word is an ugly word and its etymology suggests the ignorance of the white southerners who originally coined it. I don’t wish to be a part of that culture of ignorance. This is also not a slam on the black community who has endured so much throughout our history. It is not even a suggestion that they should alter or change their part of our culture. These are simply just observations.

This is just a warning to those who don’t wish to have their thoughts policed. The revised edition of the Huckleberry Finn is not exactly a first amendment issue per se. You can still readily obtain a copy of the unrevised edition. In a consumer culture such as ours it’s simply another choice. The editor of this edition does present a decent argument for his work, although I disagree with his assumption that it does not diminish the impact of the novel as a whole.

The ultimate challenge that this type of editing presents is that it places us on the slippery slope of censorship. The first amendment does not have a “decency” litmus test included although truly decent people choose their words justly. The first amendment does not protect us from being offended. However, it does give us the right to respond and to challenge those who give us offense.

Revising a work by eliminating offensive materials is not exercising first amendment rights; it’s censorship, pure and simple, regardless of the intentions behind it. Threats to liberty never come in large overt gestures it is simple acts such as the one discussed here that slowly erode liberty making room for the more overt gestures that may never happen because we willingly become beggars to our own demise. The recent revised edition of Huckleberry Finn is not only illiterate it is dangerous and may have far reaching implications to individual liberty.

The recent global credit crunch was primarily the result of a global economy that has been largely left on its own. Even after this economic catastrophe, why do you still go for a laissez faire market?

2011-01-06T10:07:00.001-08:00

I don't support laissez faire capitalism at all. Thus the left leaning nature of my Libertarianism. I believe in Free Enterprise, although often associated with the abusive forms of capitalism, does not necessarily mean that I support anything more than an individual's right to determine how they will make their livelihood.

That being said, my thinking has always been too much regulation can be as dangerous as no regulation at all. The credit crunch that created the most recent meltdown has to do with a banking and lending industry that has been allowed to target low income families and people that are poor credit risks in amoral ways.

The blame has a lot to do with the so-called American Dream being defined as the "right to own your own private property" or "home." This resulted in the deregulating of the lending industry that began with the Clinton Administration. The changing of the laws was intended to allow people traditonally unable to consider home ownership access to lending vehicles that could make this possible. However, the larger unintneded consequence that we saw was ignored. Sadly, many in our government new that this was going to happen and they did nothing until it was nearly too late.

As an aside, one of the challenges that I am facing is how to develop a cogent economic philosophy, i.e., I embrace free enterprise, but I loathe corporate capitalism. I am suspicious of private property ownership in the form of land and other real estate, yet I am not sure I want to totally eliminate it. The planned economic structures of the former Soviet Union and other Soviet era Marxist countries failed to sustain Marxism as a viable alternative. China is rethinking and retooling Marxist responses to free enterprise while attempting to continue embracing communism. Yet, who in their right mind wants to live in a regime such as the PRC?

As you can see from the answers to the questions you are posing me I am still unable to create a cogent economic ideal that is sustainable and consistent.

Keep those questions coming.

For a kiss I will answer all your questions.

What paranormal power will you work on developing this year?

2011-01-03T15:22:00.001-08:00

What paranormal power will you work on developing this year?

Answer here