Tying yourself in knots to please god

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)

I was at a conference recently and during one session a sign-up sheet was passed around. When it came to my row, the woman seated next to me gave me her business card and asked me to fill in her name and information on the sheet. I noted her long skirt and the fact that it was a Saturday and realized that she must be an observant Jew and that it was prohibited for her to ‘work’ on such a day and writing was presumably deemed to be work, something she confirmed to me later when we chatted at the end of the proceedings. I did as she requested, all the while silently marveling that a highly educated person would voluntarily conform to such absurd rules by an obviously petty god who has way too much time on his hands if he worries about things like this.
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Religion and women

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)

Recently I attended a university function where several faculty members were being honored. One of them was a friend of mine and after I congratulated her by shaking her hand, we were just chatting of this and that when another one of the honorees (someone I had not met before) joined us. I congratulated him too and shook his hand. At this point my friend also congratulated him and held out her hand. He declined to shake hands with her saying that it was against his religion. He was wearing a yarmulke so presumably he belongs to a sect of Judaism that does not allow men to shake hands with (at least some) women. The rejection of the proffered hand resulted in a moment of brief embarrassment but my friend is very gracious and lowered her hand and continued the conversation with him. The man did not seem unduly disturbed, presumably because he does this to women often.
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Hindu and Buddhist absurdities

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)

Religious thuggery and silliness of the kind I described in earlier posts earlier (see here and here) is not limited to the Abrahamic religions of Islam, Judaism and Christianity. When people’s religious beliefs warp their sense of proportion, let alone their senses of logic and reason, absurdities are sure to abound. It is not hard to find examples in all religions of people who think that their beliefs must be shielded from any mockery or even criticism, and Hindus and Buddhists are no exception to the rule.
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Religious silliness

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)

In the world of the Abrahamic religious traditions (Islam, Judaism, and Christianity), religious fundamentalism and hypersensitivity seems to be getting worse, with American-style creationist ideas (though not of the young-Earth variety) even gaining ground in the Middle East.

As an example of religious sensitivities, there was the case of a US military sniper in Iraq using a Koran for target practice. This was undoubtedly a rude act done by a stupid person but it led to an equally stupid overreaction by Muslims, who became incensed because the Koran is a ‘holy’ book. As a result, the US military had to make a groveling apology once the incident became public, even kissing a copy of the Koran and calling the soldier’s actions ‘criminal’. There were even protests that resulted in the deaths of three people. All this over nothing more than shooting a book. As someone who loves books, I find the wanton destruction of books offensive in general but I am not going to riot over it and I recognize the right of people to do what they want with the books they own.
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Religious thuggery

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)

I have written repeatedly about the absurd levels of sensitivity of some religious people, who immediately get up in arms if they feel their religion is being mocked in even the mildest way. A catalogue of religious absurdities would range from the farcical to the tragic and even criminal. Most of the time, the protests merely make religious people look silly but sometimes things get ugly and even deadly.

Saudi Arabia has to be the leader in carrying Islamic sensitivities to absurd lengths, even seeking to execute ‘sorcerers’ because it considers reading horoscopes and fortune telling to be un-Islamic. Yes, in the 21st century there exists a government that does not realize that horoscopes and fortune telling are merely swindles designed to separate gullible people from their money. Saudi Arabia also planned to execute a witch.

Somali Islamists have stoned people to death for ‘adultery’, a charge so broadly defined that it is even leveled at children who have been raped.

The latest example of the absurdity of religion and the consequences of giving undue deference to religious beliefs involves the creators of the cartoon TV show South Park who have been threatened by some Muslims with a fate similar to that of Theo van Gogh because they supposedly planned to air an episode showing the prophet Mohammed in a bear suit. I did not see the episode. There is some confusion about exactly what was shown in response to the threats, whether any self-censorship was exercised and if so, whether it was by the Comedy Central network or by the South Park creators. Jesus and Mo have something to say about this.

The creators of South Park are hardly heroes in the fight over free speech. Over at Pharyngula, P. Z. Myers takes them to task for shallowness and an unwillingness to stand for anything. But even shallow speech like theirs has to be protected from religious thuggery. Those Muslims who threaten violence against those who mock their religion are taking advantage of their right of free speech to deny free speech to others.

Pat Condell tells them where to get off.

Of course, issuing threats because they are offended is not the province of only Muslims. They are abetted in their sense of entitlement by people of other religions who try to claim some kind of privileged status for religious beliefs in general. American Christians, in addition to the deadly violence they use against abortion providers, can be as eager as Muslims to threaten anyone who offends them. Glenn Greenwald lists Jewish and Christian religious people who murder because they think their god wants them to. He describes the case of Yaakov Teitel who was charged with two murders, three attempted murders and other acts of violence. “It was a pleasure and an honor to serve my God,” said Teitel at the Jerusalem courthouse. “I have no regret and no doubt that God is pleased.”

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that:

Just weeks after the arrest of alleged Jewish terrorist, Yaakov Teitel, a West Bank rabbi on Monday released a book giving Jews permission to kill Gentiles who threaten Israel.

Rabbi Yitzhak Shapiro, who heads the Od Yosef Chai Yeshiva in the Yitzhar settlement, wrote in his book “The King’s Torah” that even babies and children can be killed if they pose a threat to the nation.

Shapiro based the majority of his teachings on passages quoted from the Bible, to which he adds his opinions and beliefs.”(my italics)

In an NPR interview recently, a young woman in Pakistan said that people who commit violent acts cannot be ‘true’ Muslims because Islam is a religion of peace. Christians and Jews often say the same thing when confronted with people who commit similar acts in the name of their god. But such people are missing the point. It does not matter what they think. The people who commit these acts of intimidation, thuggery, and murder think that they are the true believers. This is why religions are so dangerous. True believers actually take their religious texts seriously and think they are being faithful to their god’s commandments by doing these unspeakable acts.

POST SCRIPT: Jon Stewart on the South Park incident

<td style='padding:2px 1px 0px 5px;' colspan='2'South Park Death Threats
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Making up stories about god

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)

On my last trip to get a haircut, I overheard a different barber talking with his customer in the next chair. The barber was telling a joke that was aimed at atheists. I could not hear all of it because my own barber was making conversation with me and I did not want to seem rude by telling him that I was more interested in what was going on in the adjacent chair, but I managed to get the gist.

The joke was about an atheist who goes on a hike alone in a remote area and confronts a bear who overpowers him and is about to kill him. The atheist cries out to god to save him from an awful death. At that point god freezes time (and the bear) and has a conversation with the atheist where he essentially asks him why he should save him now, given that he did not believe in him until the atheist really needed his help. I missed hearing the next bit but the punch line was that the bear got on his knees and gave a prayer of thanks to god for the meal that he was about to enjoy. So presumably the atheist dies because of his denial of god. The barber and his customer shared a good laugh at the joke.
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The health care scam

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)

So after much drama, the health care bill finally became law. If anything demonstrated the fecklessness of Obama and the Democratic Party and their willingness to sell out of their supporters in order to appease their corporate overlords, it is the way that the health care bill was constructed and passed.

There is no question, as Robert Weissman writes, and which I have repeatedly pointed out, that a single payer system, the system of choice for almost every other country in the industrialized world, is more humane and more efficient than what the US currently has. (See here for all my previous posts on health care.) Even candidate Obama conceded as much during his presidential campaign. T. R. Reid’s new book The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care also debunks the myths of the alleged superiority of America’s health care system. Even Sarah Palin admits that when she was a child, her parents took advantage of Canada’s system, saying, “we used to hustle on over the border for health care”, adding “I think isn’t that ironic now.” Yes it is, Sarah, yes it is.

The pressure for health care reform comes largely from the fact that the private, profit-seeking entities that dominate the system (insurance and drug companies and hospitals and specialist doctors) are driving up the costs and employers want to shed themselves of this burden. (Also see another comparison of costs.)

The logical thing would have been to go to a government-run single-payer system that would be cheaper because it would spread the costs over the entire population, have the power to negotiate lower prices, reduce bureaucratic duplication, and eliminate the profit element that plagues the current system and results in such horrors as the rescission of coverage after one receives a diagnosis of a disease. The despicable insurance companies also find sleazy ways to drop coverage for people who discover they have breast cancer:

They had no idea that WellPoint was using a computer algorithm that automatically targeted them and every other policyholder recently diagnosed with breast cancer. The software triggered an immediate fraud investigation, as the company searched for some pretext to drop their policies, according to government regulators and investigators.

Once the women were singled out, they say, the insurer then canceled their policies based on either erroneous or flimsy information.

Of course, Congress and the Obama administration will not do anything to harm the interests of these companies since these very organizations that profit greatly from sick people are major contributors to their coffers. And so what we finally ended up with was a mere tweaking of the existing system.

It is not that there are no good features at all in the bill. There are, such as expanding coverage and restricting some of the worst industry abuses. But these were the bones that were tossed to the Democratic Party supporters to mask the fact that the resulting plan has internal contradictions that will eventually wreck it. The Democratic party deliberately sabotaged the one big chance the country had to enact the kind of reforms that are necessary to prevent the looming catastrophe that will occur because the basic causes of cost increases have not been addressed. As Marcia Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, says:

What this bill does is not only permit the commercial insurance industry to remain in place, but it actually expands and cements their position as the lynchpin of health care reform. And these companies they profit by denying health care, not providing health care. And they will be able to charge whatever they like. So if they’re regulated in some way and it cuts into their profits, all they have to do is just raise their premiums. And they’ll do that.

Not only does it keep them in place, but it pours about 500 billion dollars of public money into these companies over 10 years. And it mandates that people buy these companies’ products for whatever they charge. Now that’s a recipe for the growth in health care costs, not only to continue, but to skyrocket, to grow even faster.

Glenn Greenwald quotes a Kaiser Health News report that “details the massive benefits each industry [Doctors, Hospitals, Insurers, Pharma] receives (compared to their mild costs), the success they had in killing any real competition and reform in the bill (i.e., the public option, Medicare expansion, drug-reimportation, bulk price negotiations, and an end to the insurers’ anti-trust exemption)” and that the bill was enacted by “invoking and strengthening precisely the same corrupt, sleazy practices that have long driven Washington.”

There have been many analyses detailing how the Democrats sold out on health care, calling the Obama strategy essentially a scam on the American people. Angell says of Obama that, “He gave away the store at the very beginning by compromising. Not just compromising, but caving in to the commercial insurance industry and the pharmaceutical industry.” Glenn Greenwald and Norman Solomon lay out in detail exactly how the scam by Obama and the Democratic Party was executed. It was the shocking loss of Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat in Massachusetts to Republican Scott Brown that exposed the scam for all the world to see, while paradoxically hastening the passage of the final bill.

While the Democrats still had sixty votes in the Senate, they could play out this charade that they really and truly wanted real reform as represented by a single-payer system or Medicare for all (or at least expanded) or a public option, but that they had to overcome this darned filibuster threat by the Republicans, which meant that they had to appease the most reactionary elements in their own party in order to hold on to every one of their sixty party members and thus were forced to give up on the more ambitious plans. Oh, but they were so sad that they had to compromise their ideals like this.

But as Greenwald says,

[A]dvocates of the public option kept arguing that the public option could be accomplished by reconciliation — where only 50 votes, not 60, would be required — but Obama loyalists scorned that reconciliation proposal, insisting (at least before the Senate passed a bill with 60 votes) that using reconciliation was Unserious, naive, procedurally impossible, and politically disastrous.

But the win by Scott Brown meant that they could not overcome the filibuster after all because of the unanimous opposition of the 41 Republicans. Faced with the possibility that they might not get any health reform bill at all through the Congress, which would have meant political disaster for them, they suddenly decided that they would use the reconciliation path to passage after all. So given how much they had said about their desire for more sweeping reform plans, you would think that now they would bring back all those elements they so ardently desired and spoke so passionately about. But no. They went with the health-insurance industry friendly bill, thus exposing that this was the bill they had really wanted all along and that everything they had said suggesting otherwise were nothing but lies. If one needed any more proof, along the way it was revealed that Obama had made a secret deal early on with the pharmaceutical industry to kill the public option, thus confirming the existence of the scam.

It should have been clear to the dimmest bulb that the health care bill that Obama and the Democrats finally passed was what would have been considered in the old days a Republican plan, one whose main goal was to leave untouched (and even enhance) the interests of big business and the wealthy. It is no coincidence that it is similar in philosophy and structure to the plan introduced in Massachusetts by Mitt Romney when he was governor. He now has the unenviable task of disowning his own plan in order to appease the crazies who now running the Republican party.

What has happened in American politics is that the Democratic party has become the Republican party and the Republican Party has gone nuts.

POST SCRIPT: The ignorance of health care opponents

The party groups that demonstrated on April 15 to denounce the health care bill, among other things, as part of some socialistic takeover of America’s economy are remarkably ignorant of the reality of American politics but are driven by some inchoate sense of frustration and impotence that makes them succumb to paranoia. They pose a real danger to the Republican party, risking making it into a fringe and nutty cabal.

Cartoonist Tom Tomorrow describes how detached from reality health reform opponents really are.

Passivity in the face of authoritarianism

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)

I have long since ceased to be shocked at the awful things that governments do while unctuously mouthing platitudes about freedom and democracy and the rule of law. This kind of deep and blatant hypocrisy is now so commonplace that while it still angers me, it no longer has the power to surprise. What still has the capacity to shock, however, is how people are so passive in the face of their government’s most appalling actions, letting the pro-establishment media decide for them what they should care about. While we hear about the tea-partiers all day long, how many people noticed or cared about the McCain-Lieberman bill that authorized harsh treatment for people who were merely suspected of evil intent? How many media outlets publicized its features? The media were much more excited over Tiger woods returning to playing golf, as cartoonist Matt Bors points out.
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Hypocrisy in the war on terror

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)

It is interesting how the US media is always shocked, just shocked, when they see people in other countries seem to be oblivious to the abomination of torture. A recent French TV show essentially repeated the famous Stanley Milgram experiment which found that ordinary people were often willing to obey instructions to inflict torture on other people. The French show found a similar result, the difference being that in the Milgram experiment, 62% of people obeyed despicable orders while it was 80% in the latest incarnation.

The Game of Death has all the trappings of a traditional TV quiz show, with a roaring crowd chanting “punishment” and a glamorous hostess urging the players on.

Christophe Nick, the maker of the documentary, said they were “amazed” that so many participants obeyed the sadistic orders of the game show presenter.

“They are not equipped to disobey,” he told AFP.

US commentators wondered what might be wrong in the French psyche that enabled the contestants to inflict such pain of people. They were either oblivious about the Milgram precedent or to the fact that the US government routinely practices torture and that the hit show 24 is one that unashamedly promotes torture.

While Obama has claimed for himself the kingly power to order the death of anyone whom he thinks deserves it, other fans of authoritarian rule are now seeking to enshrine some of those powers into law. John McCain and Joe Lieberman have introduced the Enemy Belligerent Interrogation, Detention and Prosecution Act that “would empower the U.S. military to arrest anyone, U.S. citizen or otherwise, who is suspected of terrorist associations and detain them indefinitely, without right to a trial.” If the captured person is deemed to be an “unprivileged enemy belligerent”, that person would be denied all rights, including Miranda rights and the rights to a lawyer. That person would then be placed in the custody of a “high-value detainee interrogation group”, which is a euphemism for people trained in the art of torture. “If there is any disagreement about a person’s unprivileged enemy belligerent according to the above criteria, the final determination goes to the President. Once determined to be an unprivileged enemy belligerent, a person, regardless of citizenship status, can be detained indefinitely, without trial, until terrorist threats against the U.S are determined to be over.”

This law hasn’t been passed yet but can we doubt that it will be, given the mood of the country? Glenn Greenwald comments:

Meanwhile, the bill recently introduced by Joe Lieberman and John McCain — the so-called “Enemy Belligerent Interrogation, Detention and Prosecution Act” — now has 9 co-sponsors, including the newly elected Scott Brown. It’s probably the single most extremist, tyrannical and dangerous bill introduced in the Senate in the last several decades, far beyond the horrific, habeas-abolishing Military Commissions Act… It’s basically a bill designed to formally authorize what the Bush administration did to American citizen Jose Padilla — arrest him on U.S. soil and imprison him for years in military custody with no charges.

This bill has produced barely a ripple of controversy, its two main sponsors will continue to be treated as Serious Centrists and feted on Sunday shows, and it’s hard to imagine any real resistance to its passage. Isn’t it shocking how easily led and authoritarian the French are? (my italics)

The hypocrisy of the US policy against terrorists is nowhere better illustrated than in the case of Luis Posada Carriles, a Cuban-born exile who worked for the CIA.

There’s ample evidence Posada tried to assassinate a world leader, hatched a plot that killed scores, and dismembered a tourist in a hotel bombing. Yet he is not being tried for any of those offenses, because the government botched the case and shredded critical evidence. In the end, Posada is being accused of lying to authorities, a slap on the hand that would outrage the nation if he were, for instance, an Arab. But he’s Cuban, and that makes all the difference.
…
[W]ith the help of millions of American tax dollars, Posada began a bloody, half-century-long campaign against the Castro government. He set off pencil bombs in the island’s capital and coordinated the 1961 Bay of Pigs attack from Central America. After the invasion failed, he was among exiles who attended an elite Army academy in Georgia; he graduated two years later as a spy and lieutenant.

He then tried to kill Castro using a gun disguised as a camera and plastic explosives stuffed into a Prell shampoo bottle. In 1976, he masterminded the downing of Cubana Flight 455 with 73 people onboard. Six years later, pressured by the United States, a Venezuelan court cleared him; then it bizarrely changed course and decided on a retrial. But the wily spy bribed guards, escaped, and two decades later bombed Havana hotels, causing millions of dollars in damage and killing an Italian tourist.
…
[T]he FBI, which spent millions of dollars over several decades probing Posada’s spy work, inexplicably shredded most of its evidence. What’s more, the Reagan administration hired Posada as part of the Iran-Contra scandal.

U.S. pressure has even had an effect abroad. A Panamanian court convicted Posada of plotting to kill Castro during an Ibero-American Summit. Then, in 2004, President Mireya Moscoso pardoned Posada. (my italics)

The US has grandly said that any country that harbors terrorists should expect to be treated like a terrorist nation and be subject to all the consequences that ensue. Indeed this is the claimed basis for many of the assassinations that the US has conducted in foreign countries. And yet the US has long provided refuge to Posada, who has actually been convicted of terrorist acts.

Cuba has as much reason, if not more, to kill Posada as the US has to target the people it has killed. But imagine if the Cuban government sent in drones to kill Posada in the US. Even if in the process they did not kill ordinary American civilians the way that American assassination attempts in other countries often do, there would be such outrage and condemnations that Cuba would be invaded within days.

And yet, when the US does exactly the same thing to others, it goes unnoticed.

POST SCRIPT: Jon Stewart vs. Bernie Goldberg and Fox News

I don’t know why people try to take on Stewart. Even an average stand-up comedian can rip apart smart and reasonable people and make them look stupid because they are good with words and can think on their feet. Stewart is not only well above average, he even has a talented team of writers at his disposal and his own show. He is always going to have the last word and you are always going to lose. Goldberg seems to be too dense to understand this and keeps getting mauled.

The clip is worth watching to the end just to see Stewart do a great impersonation of a gospel church preacher, followed by a Groucho Marx dance routine.

<td style='padding:2px 1px 0px 5px;' colspan='2'Bernie Goldberg Fires Back
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Non-believing priests and their parishioners

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)

Daniel Dennett and Linda LaScola of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University in their paper Preachers who are not believers say that one of the biggest problems that non-believing clergy face is what to tell their parishioners. It is not only their disbelief that they have to hide, it is even the stuff they learn in divinity school which is quite different from the simple biblical views that their parishioners believe. The Washington Post has a panel of writers who contribute to their On Faith column and they have all weighed in with different ideas about what they think non-believing clergy should do.

However, the priests interviewed in the study all decided that they needed to conceal their disbelief and doubts but find it burdensome to publicly spout beliefs that they themselves can no longer accept.
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