Some time ago I wrote a review of the documentary Marjoe of a Pentecostal child evangelist/faith healer in which Marjoe Gortner (an unbeliever and now an adult) gives an insider’s account of how the racket works.
You can now see the entire film online. It is quite fascinating
I have often made the claim that the world would be a better place without religion. This seems to me to be self-evidently true for many reasons, the most immediate one being that religion causes so many deaths. Even the most cursory look at the history of the world would reveal the vast number of wars, deaths, injuries, and other forms of suffering committed by one group of people on another because of religious differences. One does not have to even look at history but just look at the world today.
I sometimes get the response that conflict between people is inevitable and if religions do disappear, that people would find some other issue to fight over. The inference that my critics seem to draw from this is that there is no point trying to get rid of religion because there is some sort of conservation law for conflicts.
This seems to me to be somewhat disingenuous. It is like saying that since we are all going to die of something eventually, there is no point in finding cures for diseases since all that will do is shift the cause of death to something else. But eliminating one disease does not create new diseases and does have the effect of increasing life expectancy.
No one is saying that religion is the only cause of conflict and so we would not expect all conflict to cease if religion disappeared. But it is a major source of conflict and eliminating it would undoubtedly help, just as eliminating or finding cures for some diseases have improved the quality of life immensely.
Steven Pinker argues that despite all the wars and genocide that have occurred fairly recently, there has been a steady decline in violence from Biblical times and that the present era is the least violent in history (via Machines Like Us). He points out that the Bible encourages the most appalling violence and cruelty against others.
While there is obviously no natural conservation law for conflicts, there is one sense in which that idea can be partly salvaged. There is no question that having groups of people fight over things like religion or race or tribe or nationality or other divisive issues diverts them from seeing the more structural causes of their plight such as rule of the oligarchy, by the oligarchy, for the oligarchy. So these conflicts serve the interests of the ruling classes. If religion, one of the easiest of ways of creating conflict, were to disappear, those who benefit from conflict would actively seek to find other ways to ignite strife.
But that still does not imply that we should not seek the elimination of religion. Religious beliefs seem to be the most combustible and the easiest to use to get people to adopt a we/them attitude and to look at people just like them as their enemies. Look at the fights between Catholics and Protestants in Ireland and between Israeli Jews and Palestinians. In both conflicts, both sides share enormous similarities but what should be a unifying glue is easily overcome by their absurd obsession with religious differences.
Nothing seems to fire up people more than the thought that they are fighting for their god and that he will reward them for their murderous acts. Look at how easy it was to incite religious people to brutally murder innocent people in Afghanistan, simply by burning a book halfway around the world. The idea that a powerful god would even need puny humans to avenge his honor is ridiculous on its face and the fact that believers actually think like that shows how religion robs people of basic common sense and encourages irrational thinking.
Taking the divisive tool of religion away would make it harder to foment discord.
An odd situation has occurred. A comment has been posted containing explicitly sexual words. I personally am not bothered by language that some find offensive but I do warn people when some of the things I link to contain such language so that those who do can avoid it.
The commenter clearly disliked what I wrote in the post The rise of racism and religion in Israel.
While I delete suspected spam without any qualms, I allow all genuine comments. This particular comment does not look like spam (it includes my name and does not contain any links to sites) but does not make any substantive point and consists of a purely personal attack on me. I did not want to delete it because people have a right to dislike me or disagree with me and say so.
I have decided that if necessary, I will censor particular words in comments using the common practice of replacing selected letters with hyphens. Those of you who are angered by a post and do want to use such language in comments can spare me some trouble by putting in your own hyphens.
While attention is focused on Libya, the authorities in Bahrain, aided by Saudi Arabian forces, are brutally cracking down on demonstrators in that country, turning it into an ‘island of fear’.
Joe Stork of the US-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) described the apparent police beatings featured in the latest pictures as “extremely disturbing”.
“Bahrain is now a state where the police are acting with complete impunity. There is no accountability, not even an effort to cover up what is going on,” said Mr Stork, HRW’s Middle East and Bahraini expert.
This is a wonderful local organization that is trying to stop the US’s endless wars around the world. You can get more information at its website or by phone at 216-736-4716 or email to noacinfo@aol.com.
They are having a demonstration to end US/NATO Military Strikes on Libya.
‘Stop US/ NATO War on Libya’ Demonstration – Come to the Rally and Judge for Yourself
Friday, April 8, 3-4:30 pm,
the Federal Bldg., Lakeside Ave. and East
9th St., downtown Cleveland
Barack Obama steadily accumulates king-like powers, an affinity for an imperial presidency that he deplored when Bush/Cheney displayed that trait in office.
PolitiFact finds that in the way he has gone to war against Libya, Obama has done the ‘Full Flop’, their term for an unambiguous 180-degree switch from what he said as a candidate, which was that, “The president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.”
But that is not the only ‘Full Flop’ by Obama. As a candidate he advocated strong transparency and praised whistleblowers as important in preventing waste, abuse, and inefficiency and promised them greater protections. As president, he now attacks whistleblowers and journalists with a passion that exceeds even Bush/Cheney. The mainstream media did not seem to care as long as the targeted whistleblowers were merely government employees. Now that the ever-deferential New York Times is also being targeted, it will be interesting to see how they respond.
Glenn Greenwald talks about how Obama is now even attacking our Miranda rights. But everything is sunny in Obama Land where he can do no wrong and his reputation as a constitutional scholar remains unsullied.
[T]he good thing about being Barack Obama is that you’re justified in what you do even when you first do X and then do Not X.
Thus, when you argue that wars need Congressional approval, you’re standing up for the Constitution; when you start a war without Congressional approval, you’re a humanitarian. When you announce you will release torture photos in the government’s possession, you’re a stalwart defender of transparency; when you change your mind two weeks later and announce you’ll conceal those photos, you’re standing up for The Troops. When you give Miranda warnings to Terrorism suspects, you’re honoring the Rule of Law and protecting American values; when you turn around and deny those very same rights, you’re showing your devotion to Keeping us Safe.
Barack Obama must be channeling Mel Brooks as King Louis XVI in the film The History of the World, Part 1 who did anything he wanted without suffering any consequence, all the while saying, “It’s good to be the king.”
Obama is enabled in this by the amount of deference he receives from his followers, which is similar to what Bush/Cheney received from their fans. For example, Kevin Drum is a blogger at Mother Jones who can be labeled a centrist. He recently wrote about his concerns about Obama’s decision to attack Libya:
So what should I think about this? If it had been my call, I wouldn’t have gone into Libya. But the reason I voted for Obama in 2008 is because I trust his judgment. And not in any merely abstract way, either: I mean that if he and I were in a room and disagreed about some issue on which I had any doubt at all, I’d literally trust his judgment over my own. I think he’s smarter than me, better informed, better able to understand the consequences of his actions, and more farsighted. I voted for him because I trust his judgment, and I still do.
This is quite extraordinary. It is one thing to say that when someone whose judgment you respect disagrees with you, it gives you pause. That pause presumably makes you investigate further until you can justify your prior judgment or learn something new that changes your view. It is quite another to say that you would simply take that judgment over your own when you disagree.
One could also say that on an issue which one has no expertise to evaluate and arrive at a reasonably informed judgment because of the technical knowledge involved (say climate change or details of evolutionary theory or cosmology or monetary policy), one goes with the judgment of people whom one trusts to have the required expertise and judgment.
But that is not the case with Libya, which involves principles and policies that can and should be publicly articulated as part of the process of persuading the Congress and the nation that going to war is justified, unless one thinks that Obama has reasons that he cannot divulge to the country. But then we are entering “We have secret information that Saddam Hussein has WMD” territory and we know how that ends up.
James Madison got it right when he said, “I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedoms of the people by gradual and silent encroachment of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.”
The Obama Department of Justice has announced that it is giving up on the original plan to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged leader of the 9/11 plot, in a regular court in New York City and will instead use a military tribunal in Guantanamo. This is shameful. As Glenn Greenwald says:
Indeed, as I’ve documented before — virtually every country that suffers horrible Terrorist attacks — Britain, Spain, India, Indonesia — tries the accused perpetrators in its regular court system, on their own soil, usually in the city that was attacked. The U.S. — Land of the Free and Home of the Brave — stands alone in being too afraid to do so.
Related to that: the notion that political opinion in America would not allow Obama to do anything differently on these issues is empirically disproven; he ran on a platform of opposing all the measures he now supports and won decisively. By itself, that proves that — when these debates are engaged rather than conceded — these positions are politically sustainable. Obama adopts Bush Terrorism policies because he wants to and has no reason not to — not because doing so is a political necessity.
Finally — and as is usually true for this excuse — the notion that “Congress made him do it” is totally false: aside from the fact that the Obama administration long ago announced that it would retain the military commission system, the White House — long before Congress acted to ban transfers of detainees to the U.S. — removed decision-making power from the DOJ in the KSM case and made clear it would likely reverse Holder’s decision.
[UPDATE: Dahlia Lithwick also excoriates the Obama administration on its reversal.]
Elsewhere, Jason Ditz recounts the history of excuses on not closing Guantanamo.
In 2007, Louis Theroux from BBC2 spent some time with the people of the Westboro Baptist Church who gave him considerable access to talk with all their members. The resulting documentary called America’s Most Hated Family provided for some absorbing and informative television that I wrote about earlier.
[Read more…]