Monthly Archives: July 2013
It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine
According to this website, here are the appropriately numbered 7 signs that the end times are upon us:
1. People will be going about their business as usual. (Luke 17:27a, 28)
Isn’t that every day?
2. There will be an increase in and access to knowledge. (Daniel 12:4)
Isn’t that every day as well?
3. There will be a sense of unawareness as to what’s about to happen. (Luke 17:27a, 28)
So a sense of unknowing and going about our every day business is a sign? That’s odd.
4. There will be mockers dismissing the possibility of Christ’s return. (2 Peter 3:3-4)
Indeed, as per this post, since Christ’s own disciples were led to believe that Jesus was going to return in their own lifetimes. Further, doomsday prophets have been saying Christ’s coming was imminent for centuries. So, what else is new?
5. There will be a significant rise in crime and law-breaking. (Matthew 24:12)
The person who posted this clearly did not remember the gross injustices that have plagued man for centuries, including the Inquisition, burning innocent women believed to be witches, slavery, racial injustice, white people getting off for their various injustices to black folks and many others.
6. There will be the appearance of false charismatic personalities, religions and Messiahs. (Matthew 24:5, 11, 24)7. The Jewish people/nation will again exist in their Middle Eastern homeland. (Matthew 24:32-33)
And exactly how are the existence of cults and charismatic personalities in religion a new thing (Mayan sun worship, Jim Jones, Heaven’s Gate, dying and rising god myths.)?
Poverty in America
I largely agreed with the first 1,600 words of this speech by Newt Gingrich that examines the continued persistence of racism, poverty and crime in the inner cities here in the 21st century and the fact that President Barack Obama’s high-minded rhetoric, inspiring though it may be, does not call for “real solutions.” The speech, which was originally made in 2008 after an address by Obama, was reposted by CNN this week after Obama’s most recent speech on race in the wake of the Trayvon Martin shooting and the unjust George Zimmerman not-guilty verdict.
In the earlier part of the speech, Gingrich quotes Obama then makes a cogent statement with which I can agree:
Obama said, and I quote:
“This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can’t learn, that those kids who don’t look like us are somebody else’s problem. The children of America are not those kids; they are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st-century economy. Not this time.”
Let me suggest to all of you that if you set aside the normal partisanship and cynicism of politics, that that’s a very powerful paragraph, and a paragraph worthy of response at the same level. I take up this opportunity, both to reject cynicism, but also to suggest that we find real solutions. But to find real solutions, I would argue, we have to have real honesty and a serious dialogue in which unpleasant facts are put on the table and bold proposals are discussed.
The latter half of the speech, however, goes off the rails when Gingrich uses the well-worn Republican strategy of partisanship and ignoring the facts, to make his case. The derailment begins when Gingrich, like so many in the GOP camp, criticized Lyndon Baines Johnson’s Great Society programs and ignored the sweeping impact the legislation made on poverty in the inner cities at the time.
Gingrich ignores the fact that Nixon and Reagan in something akin to blasphemy spent a good deal of their time dismantling various parts of the Great Society, thus disintegrating years of hard-won work by Johnson, Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders who led the nation, even white America, to get behind equality and social justice at an unprecedented level, so much so that all but the most odious, racist, segregationist white politicians in Washington sat with their indifferent arms folded.
He ignores the results that the Great Society had on poverty at the time. Johnson aided Joseph A. Califano Jr. addressed the myth that the Great Society was a failure in his 1999 essay, “What Was Really Great About The Great Society:”
If there is a prize for the political scam of the 20th century, it should go to the conservatives for propagating as conventional wisdom that the Great Society programs of the 1960s were a misguided and failed social experiment that wasted taxpayers’ money.
Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, from 1963 when Lyndon Johnson took office until 1970 as the impact of his Great Society programs were felt, the portion of Americans living below the poverty line dropped from 22.2 percent to 12.6 percent, the most dramatic decline over such a brief period in this century. Since then, the poverty rate has hovered at about the 13 percent level and sits at 13.3 percent today, still a disgraceful level in the context of the greatest economic boom in our history. But if the Great Society had not achieved that dramatic reduction in poverty, and the nation had not maintained it, 24 million more Americans would today be living below the poverty level.
This reduction in poverty did not just happen. It was the result of a focused, tenacious effort to revolutionize the role of the federal government with a series of interventions that enriched the lives of millions of Americans. In those tumultuous Great Society years, the President submitted, and Congress enacted, more than 100 major proposals in each of the 89th and 90th Congresses. In that era of do-it-now optimism, government was neither a bad man to be tarred and feathered nor a bag man to collect campaign contributions, but an instrument to help the most vulnerable in our society.
I’m aware that Califano would, of course, want to defend the president for whom he worked, but the proof is in the pudding:
I shouldn’t need to point it out but I will, that poverty plummeted drastically in the mid-1960s as the chart shows and rose during the ill-begotten Nixon and Reagan administrations.
Killing in the name of
This chilling chart shows the likelihood that killings will be found to be “justifiable,” compared to white on white crime:
Here is a study conducted by John Roman and Mitchell Downey in 2012 and a related study, conducted at Texas A&M, suggesting that the “Stand Your Ground” laws enacted in various states may actually lead to more, not less, deaths.
More skullduggery from the conspiracy crowd
Any hope that Michael Coffman, a supposed expert in forestry science with a doctorate from the University of Idaho, has anything important to say about politics was long since discredited when he began speaking — namely in a 2010 interview for the fringe Republic Magazine — about what he perceived as the global warming scam. Of course, one has to look no further than the front page to surmise that the Republic Magazine has long since discredited itself too with headline teasers like “The New World Order,” “The Order of Skull & Bones” and “The Bohemian Grove.”
In any case, during an interview for his screed, “Plundered: How Progressive Ideology is Destroying America,” Coffman argues that liberals will purposefully work to create an “economic collapse” so that in the end, one world government will be established:
When it hits it’s going to hit hard and it bothers me that people are going to be destroyed because these people have this agenda and this blind reality. …(This government will supposedly) ride in on the white hat with a solution as people are starving and so forth around the world, but all you have to do is sign on this dotted line and give us all of your of rights, and we’ll decide what you can or cannot do.
Here’s the whole loony interview:
This, of course, is old school New World Order nonsense that crazies, particularly religious crazies, have been crying about for ages. Of course, the conspiracy theorists incorrectly claim that the Latin phrase in the American seal found on the $1 bill, “Novus ordo seclorum,” means “New World Order” in English. Actually, the phrase was suggested by Founding Father Charles Thomson in 1782, and was always coined to mean the creation a new America. The phrase means, “A New Order of the Ages,” and as this site explains, translating “New World Order” back to Latin would not render, “novus ordo seclorum.” Rather, according to Google’s translator, it is “novus ordo mundi.” I say that with the understanding that modern translators can miss nuances in the language that are all but lost to history.
The New World Order drivel and the one government notion by and large originated, like so many dangerous ideas, with religion. According to more evangelical, watching-the-skies Christians, Revelation 13 shows that one day, the world will be ruled by one religion — according to this site Islam — as well as one government. According to that same site, the evangelicals are saving us from certain doom by way of a one world government. When they are gone, they say, there goes the neighborhood:
The logical (logical?) conclusion is that the Rapture of the Church has to precede the demise of America. Only the elimination of Evangelicals from the electorate will permit the rest of the country to sink into the cesspool of amoral liberal politics, and create the conditions necessary for America to subordinate its sovereignty to any international body.
Amoral liberal politics, ay? I wonder what North Koreans or the Chinese would say to this one world government imposed by those nasty liberals. If anything disproves the nearly hallucinatory notion that the entire globe will be led by just one person, it must be North Korea. Sure, North Koreans will follow their dear leader, but unless the antichrist — or whatever — actually turns out to be someone in the blood line of Kim Il-sung, don’t count on North Korea bowing the knee to anyone else. More accurately, though, don’t count on any of it.
A ‘common sense’ approach to the demonic threat, huh?
Next time you board a plane filled with strangers, just think, “New levels. New devils.” Notice the oxymoronic title of this video:
First, exactly how does one go about measuring demonic activity? Is there a gauge, like a Geiger counter?
Second, consistent with the treatment bestowed on that poor fellow, Job, in the Old Testament, God, according the awkwardly videotaped Cindy Jacobs, will knowingly throw believers into a “new arena,” whereby they will be given more “spiritual responsibility” amid high demonic activity for the purpose of maturation in the faith. Assuming demons are real for a second, in another circumstance, one might call this cruel. Just as it might be considered cruel for God to send earthquakes and hurricanes to kill thousands of people just to prove a point. But no. In the backward world of religion, it’s perfectly permissible and indeed, important for believers to undergo tests such as this to gauge their mettle, as if an omniscience God didn’t already know the level of spiritual devotion of his followers.
The really funny — and sad — part is that she’s completely serious.
Boehner and climate change
Rep. Henry A. Waxman, D-Calif., along with 21 members of Congress sent a letter this week to Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, requesting a debate on climate change. The letter is available in PDF form here. The lawmakers who signed the letter are Reps. Henry A. Waxman, Bobby L. Rush, Chris Van Hollen, Doris O. Matsui, Jared Huffman, Earl Blumenauer, Rush Holt, Raul M. Grijalva, Peter DeFazio, Jim Moran, Barbara Lee, Steve Cohen, John Garamendi, Donna F. Edwards, Ben Ray Lujan, Peter Welch, Paul D. Tonko, Lois Capps, Hank Johnson, Carolyn B. Maloney, Keith Ellison and Adam Schiff.
Of course, given Boehner campaign contribution interests, don’t expect the speaker to be baited into holding a debate. Based on data from Open Secrets, I calculated that Boehner received at least $1.2 million from oil and gas and other related energies from 2011 to 2012, and according to MapLight, a nonpartisan research organization, that figure could be higher. Conversely, the lawmakers who sent the letter to Boehner received 77 percent less money from carbon polluting industries than representatives who did not sign the letter.
As this chart shows, the non-green energy sector is Boehner’s fourth largest contributor, just behind “miscellaneous,” which could just as well include other cardon-related industries:
The Obama Administration has been working on a plan to address climate change that is largely geared toward energy efficiency and renewable resources, which Boehner, to no one’s surprise, has called “absolutely crazy:”
Why would you want to increase the cost of energy and kill more American jobs at a time when the American people are still asking where are the jobs? Clear enough?
Notwithstanding what he sees as the economics of energy reform, Boehner has long ridiculed the notion that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is harmful to the environment, ridiculously citing cow farts as an example, and well, our own respiration:
Here he is in 2009:
The idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen that is harmful to our environment is almost comical. Every time we exhale, we exhale carbon dioxide. Every cow in the world, you know when they do what they do you’ve got more carbon dioxide.
It’s clear we’ve had change in our climate. The question is how much does man have to do with it and what is the proper way to deal with this? We can’t do it alone as one nation.
At least he admits that some type of climate change is happening, although he has been refuted many times over (Here and here, to name a couple examples) for his stance on the damage carbon dioxide is causing to the environment. As the letter to Boehner suggests, the Republican strategy on climate change seems to be, like most other issues of import, to do nothing and hope the problem goes away, meanwhile collecting their big checks from energy interests.
Here is a portion of the letter sent to Boehner:
The Safe Climate Caucus is comprised of 25 members of the House who have made a commitment to talk every single day on the House floor that we are in session about the urgent need to address climate change. Every day, we have given speeches on topics relating to climate change, including the importance of preparing communities to mitigate the impacts of extreme weather events, the potential for clean energy technologies, and the threats of rising temperatures across the country.
But despite our continued and ongoing efforts to speak out on this issue on the House floor, no Republican member of the House has shown up to explain why House Republicans refuse to accept the views of every scientific institution or to justify their inaction to future generations.
Like evolution, the best approach the GOP seems to be able to come up with is to put their fingers in their ears and hope the scientific community and people who care about the long-term effects of climate change will simply go away, which is a good reason why, if the Republican Party itself doesn’t evolve and step into the 20th century — much less the 21st — the Grand Old Party might turn into the Grand Dead Party and may not even exist in 30 years as smarter, more conscientious voters come of age.
On the Illuminati conspiracy
The guy who made the following video makes the claim that performers like Jay Z, Kanye West and Rihanna are actually co-conspirators in some kind of global New World Order or Illuminati. If you can bear it, watch these seven minutes of hot air:
If you couldn’t, indeed, bear it, I’ll summarize for you. Mark Dice, who appears to be nothing more than a charlatan peddling fear, attempted to make the case that Jay Z was all things a satanist, a mason, an Illuminati puppet or just a run of the mill heretic. Dice apparently can’t be bothered with the fact that each of those are very different. In fact, the original Bavarian Illuminati in the 18th century promoted Enlightenment ideals to oppose prejudice, superstition, personal freedoms, etc. While I imagine that Jay Z would support all of those, so do I. Does that make me a member of the Illuminati? After reading the Wikipedia page, I only have a vague idea of what it is, other than some kind of fraternity that exists only in theory rather than in reality. Here is a sentence from the Wikipedia page:
Central to some of the most widely known and elaborate conspiracy theories, the Illuminati have been depicted as lurking in the shadows and pulling the strings and levers of power in dozens of novels, movies, television shows, comics, video games, and music videos.
Pulling the strings for what purpose? A take over? By who? Satan? Dan Brown? Martin Sheen?
In any case, the likes of Jay Z and Kanye West probably stoke the flames and give clowns like Mark Dice fodder for their YouTube videos, but that’s about all that is going on here. The rappers are well aware of the conspiracy theories and the mystique behind crackpot theories like the Illuminati and the New World Order, so they play on people’s fears by way of social commentary and to get people talking. Clearly, it’s working.
File the Illuminati under “stupidity,” which I will henceforth call “The Vacuous Vault.” Expect many entries.
Now enjoy Jay Z’s track, “Heaven,” which includes lyrics from R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion:”
Policinski on fear and the First Amendment
I agreed with this whole column, so I’m posting it here. It’s available on the Newseum website as well.
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Fear Greatest Threat to First Amendment Freedoms
By Gene Policinski
Senior vice president, First Amendment Center
At various times, every American likely has wished for less of some things that the First Amendment protects. Less hateful speech. One less noisy protest group. Or maybe even the swift departure of a media outlet or personality whose stance or voice is just grating on a personal level.
For the most part, those wishes come and go — or the targets do — as media fortunes or political trends wax and wane.
But wishes don’t change Constitutions. There’s no impact on what we can say, what we write, how we worship, or our ability to challenge and seek to change government policies and practices.
And the same 45 words of the First Amendment exist today as when they were ratified by the fledgling nation as part of the Bill of Rights in 1791.
But the just-released 2013 State of the First Amendment survey by the First Amendment Center gives us reason to worry about the future, because of a repeating threat to our core freedoms: fear.
In this year’s survey, conducted in May — about a month after the Boston Marathon bombing — 34 percent of Americans said the First Amendment goes too far in the rights it guarantees, up 21 points from the 13 percent recorded in the 2012 survey.
The increase is the largest one-year rise in the survey’s history, and more than double the point increase seen in the wake of 9/11, when those fearing too much freedom went from 39 percent to the all-time high of 49 percent.
Fear has been a powerful force in American history. A mere seven years after we gained the Bill of Rights, amid fear that a critical press would tilt us into war with France, Congress passed the Sedition Act, authorizing jail for those who criticized Congress or the president. Some editors were jailed, but a nation repelled by those actions allowed the act to expire two years later.
President Abraham Lincoln suspended certain civil rights during the Civil War. Japanese Americans were interned during World War II. There were blacklists during the McCarthy era. The unprecedented national security restrictions and regulations adopted quickly after 9/11, embodied in the Patriot Act, resulted from wide fear of future terrorism. Even seven months later, in the 2002 SOFA survey, 49 percent of us said the First Amendment went too far — still the highest result recorded in the annual sampling.
We have been reminded many times by public officials — from former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich to several attorneys general — that “the First Amendment is not a suicide pact.” But protecting and preserving fundamental rights preserves the very character of the nation —those qualities of religious liberty and freedom of expression that make the United States unique in the world.
As the old joke goes, “You’re not paranoid if they really are after you,” and certainly there are forces that aim to do this nation harm. And no constitutional rights are absolute. But history shows us that political leaders may overreact to threats and gain at least temporary political support from a fearful citizenry. We’re arguing about that now, concerning the disclosure of massive government surveillance of our phone records and emails.
In the years after 9/11, the percentage of those saying we had too much liberty “reset” to between 25 percent and last year’s 13 percent. But this year’s results warn that a single incident — even as authorities moved swiftly to arrest the Boston bombers — can endanger public support for freedoms we have had for 222 years.
The nation’s Founding Fathers didn’t waffle — or let fear dilute their support — when it came to standing behind the permanence of the First Amendment: Its first words are “Congress shall make no law.”
In 1775, Ben Franklin bluntly offered his view of balancing national security and core freedoms.
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety,” he said.
Even when faced with real threats, we need to remember who we are as a nation, and what we stand for in the rest of the world.
Finding purpose without religion
A fellow Bunch member of mine, Ben Kervin, recently said he was “surprised” that he was feeling a lack of purpose thanks to his deconversion to atheism a couple years ago:
It’s great to be free from the superstitious thinking I once had, but sometimes wonder how god belief gave me an overall mental safety net. My conclusion is that no matter what belief system you are indoctrinated in, it gives you some sort of security, even if it is fantasy thinking. Maybe its some sort of anxiety cure for the shortness and unfairness of life.
Religion is definitely a kind of “anxiety cure” for people who are unwilling or unable to face the stresses and fears inherent in life without looking to a father figure in the sky for guidance, and ultimately, for a path to eternal salvation, thus in part negating the trepidation people have about death and the dark. Notice that I said “in part” negating that fear. Believers don’t seem to spend much time thinking about this, but like it or not and regardless of whether heaven is a real place or not, they will still have to one day face their own mortality like everyone else. As I told Kervin in a response to his post, believers and nonbelievers alike will have to come to grips with the fact that their consciousness will one day end, and whatever else might be out there, their physical lives will be over, and there’s no coming back.
This is why so many of us who have left the fold don’t want to spend another second following what we feel is a delusion of the highest order. Christians often attempt a “gotcha” moment by asking atheists to consider Pascal’s wager. I’ve addressed Pascal’s wager multiple times on this site, but suffice it to say that a person has lost much if he squanders the only physical life he has worshiping a god for which there is scant, if any, proof. They often ask: “What if I’m wrong?” Notwithstanding the fact that I could equally be wrong about Allah and or any of the legions of gods that man has invented through the centuries, if I am right that religion is a waste of time and resources, I am free to spend all of my Sunday mornings and the rest of my time on other endeavors that matter to me, learning new things or making memories with friends. Believers really only have one thing to try to convince nonbelievers to return to the fold, and that is fear, the one consistent bedrock element of all religions.
Believers also attempt to convince atheists with this effusion: That life without God is meaningless, and since meaningless is bad, belief must be good. First, this assumes that God — here I am referring to the god of the Bible — is the originator of all morals and thus is the only being who can bestow us with purpose. But as far as I can tell, the purpose that God supposedly gives us humans is almost exclusively theological in nature. Our higher purposes according to scripture: Spread the Gospel to the ends of the earth, win converts for Jesus and worship God. Readers of Rick Warren’s, “The Purpose Driven Life,” learned that Warren had been given a message from on high: That the five purposes for humanity (Read: Christians) were evangelism, discipleship, ministry, worship and fellowship. If you notice, however, ministering to the flock and the community is the only one that could possibly be construed to mean that we should work to make the world a better place. Christianity’s notion of ministry in the community is only partly about helping the needy or ministering to the community. That would be the second goal … or third or fourth. The primary objective is to reach people for Jesus, and if believers have to roll up their sleeves and do some real work to achieve the primary objective, so be it. This is the disingenuous and skewed notion of purpose that emits from the church. As such, I don’t necessarily know what is meant when someone is concerned about losing their purpose for life when they leave the church. The only purpose the church offers is a thinly-veiled nod to helping the community or serving needy people overseas, all the while carrying along a Bible in case they get to tell the story of Jesus to some unwitting orphan, ESL student or African villager.
So nonbelievers, then, shouldn’t despair that they have no purpose. Atheists are free from the kind of phony life purposes offered by the church and can create individualized purposes for themselves through philanthropy, mission work without the proselytizing, community projects, etc., and they can truly give back to their communities and make the world a better place than they left it. This is purpose without religion.