It's Lent, and this is much on my mind....

Because the more things change:

Stephen Colbert before Congress:

When asked why any American worker would take these jobs, Colbert answered, “I don’t know if Americans would or would not want to work on jobs like this. I believe that Americans are tough, I agree with the congressman, Americans are tough and they do tough jobs. It is not a job I want to do and not a lot of people took Mr. Rodriguez up on his offer, and it seems from the statistics that my researchers found that there is a lack of labor in parts of the united states and that seems to say that Americans don’t want to take the jobs, but I don’t want to say definitively that they won’t.”


Colbert was later asked why he chose to speak up on this issue. He replied, “I like talking about people who don’t have any power. and this seems like one of the least powerful people in the united states are migrant workers who come and do our work, but don’t have any rights as a result, and yet we still invite them to come here, and at the same time ask them to leave, and that’s an interesting contradiction to me and, you know what so ever you do for the least of my brothers and these seem like the least of our brothers right now, a lot of people are least of the brothers right now because the economy is so hard and I don’t want to take anyone’s hardship away from them, but migrant workers suffer and have no rights.”

The Amazing Randi speaks

No one listens:

[R]eligion...is all magical thinking, thoroughly well organized and well established.

Says the magician who's only talent is in deceiving others, and who makes a profession of telling lies:  all of humanity throughout time and across space are benighted fools, except for me.

Nice work, if you can get it.  Not quite sure how so many centuries of "magical thinking" managed to produce the Amazing Randi, but I guess we should be grateful one of us isn't fooled by thinking that is well organized and well established.

Or something.

P.S.  He really is a lovely guy.  Reminds me of Richard Dawkins.

Because if it ain't in the news, it don't matter....

Can't we all just get along?

Came across yet another article about how ISIS is not "Islamic."  It was on the internet, so I'm sure it set off another round of comments about how ISIS is Islamic, because..... well, the arguments are tedious in the extreme, mostly because they are ignorant and, being ignorant, are impervious to change.

But I thought, this time:  "What about the 'Christian Identity' movement?  Why isn't that considered 'Christian' by default, the way ISIS or any Muslim terrorist is considered 'Islamic'?"  Even the most virulent New Atheists don't condemn the Catholic church because of Christian Identity, or associate it's virulently racist and anti-Semitic ideas with worldwide Christianity.  From their writings I'm not even sure Dawkins or Harris are aware of Christian Identity.  And yet ISIS speaks for and on behalf of the world's 1.6 billion Muslims, despite the fact the majority of the world's Muslims are not Arabic, don't live in the Middle East, and don't support the actions or aims of ISIS.

Still, ISIS speaks for Muslims everywhere, and is thoroughly Islamic, while most Christians aren't even aware there is a "Christian Identity" movement, couldn't name one leader of the movement or a significant figure of the movement, or identify any particular idea that denotes "Christian Identity."  And, as I say, even the most prominent atheists seem unaware of its existence.

Which is a good thing.  It's a very fringe movement that should be watched by groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center, but not by the rest of us, because it is Christian in title only.  We are not allowed to say the same thing about ISIS, however, because....

Well, because ISIS has a better propaganda machine.  ISIS is very publicly and very actively recruiting members, while Christian Identity is not.  ISIS exists in a region the U.S. almost single handedly created as a lawless, chaotic region.  Christian Identity exists in countries where, if it tried to recruit through violence and terrorism as ISIS does, its members would be arrested and jailed almost immediately.  They may share the fanaticism and bloodlust of ISIS; they just can't put it into effect without finding  a country where the central government is so weak, or so challenged by rebellion, that they could set up shop and declare they speak for all Christians.

Even then, who in the West would accept them as the epitome of Christianity?  And is that because Christianity truly is the "religion of peace" that Islam isn't?  Or is it because Christianity is familiar in the Western world, and Islam, especially since it is identified as neither East nor West but as "Middle East" (despite the fact most of its adherents don't live in that region), is even more distinctly "other" than Christian white supremacists or Buddhists (I mean, aren't all Asians Buddhists?)?

Oh, those Pastures of Plenty

Just because I found this:

laying around on the internet, and it made me think again of this.

Blessed are the Poor* (Offer not valid in America)

Why does this sign never seem to wear out?

Can we just say America is no country to be poor in?

Recent reports of "debtor's prisons" returning to America have come and gone.  Now they are being reinforced by stories about Ferguson, Missouri, financing it's city government on the backs of the poor.  

Pro Publica reveals how worker's compensation has been all but eliminated as a way to pay people who are injured on the job.  Worker's compensation was an idea that came out of Germany in the early 20th century, designed to replace the only recourse injured workers had: a tort claim in civil court.  It was the "no fault insurance" of its day:  the injured worker made a claim for compensation, which claim was paid based on a standard of payment for the type of injury incurred.  Although it came to involve lawyers (some of the first work I did when I was hired as a legal assistant by a law firm was worker's compensation cases), it was meant to keep contest out of the system, to lower the cost to everyone and get the money to the worker as quickly as possible.  Now it is a system for keeping money from the worker for as long as possible.

In Texas, the new Lite Guv (hat tip to the late Molly Ivins) is so concerned with the runaway cost potential of Medicaid he wants to drastically reduce the number of Texans eligible for Medicaid.  Seems the number of individuals who qualify for even the stingy Medicaid Texas allows has gone up too rapidly in the past few years.  Texas crows about the number of people who move here, a sure sign of our economic success and proper balance of government and bidness.  When that brings an inordinate number of poor people (because we have the highest percentage of population in the country earning the minimum wage), we solve that problem by making more poor people invisible.

The proposed solution is health savings accounts and co-pays placed on Medicaid recipients.  The problem with that solution is, the majority of Texans on Medicaid are children, pregnant women, the elderly poor, and disabled workers (back to worker's comp).  These are people living not paycheck to paycheck, but without paychecks.  Where they get the money to save for an HSA (or the life span, in the case of the children) and meet co-pays, is their problem.  People are too damned expensive.  Medicaid is "unsustainable," largely because the powers that be in Texas don't want to sustain it.

Sorry, poor Texans:  sucks to be you.

I'm not sure which is the greater scandal:  Ferguson, Missouri, or the absolute disdain for the poor in Texas.  The latter cuts across racial lines:  it's money that matters in the U.S.A., and without money skin color doesn't really get to be a factor.  It is hideous what the government of Ferguson did to its residents, and that it did so on the basis of skin color. But it more clearly acted on the basis of income, which makes it of a piece with Texas' disdain for the poor, and the nationwide scandal that is the worker's compensation system (each state runs and funds its own system).

This is America, where poverty and race go hand in hand.  But it's not about race, because it's never about race.  And we have no class system; to even suggest that, is to spark class warfare.

The Wasteland

Now I'm just being obnoxious to point this out, but Noam Chomsky is right:

“Is there a slave museum in the United States?” Chomsky asks. “Actually, the first one is just being established now by private—some private donor. I mean, this is the core of our history, along with the extermination or expulsion of the native population, but it’s not part of our consciousness. ”

There are a number of "Holocaust" museums in America, including one in the town where I live.  Nothing wrong with that, but America had bugger all to do with the Holocaust, yet we want to remember it.

Fine.  Well and good.  Where is the museum commemorating the "Trail of Tears"?  Wounded Knee?  Indeed, the virtual extermination of the natives who were here when Europeans first arrived?  Slavery was a 400 year old business.  It built much of the wealth of America.

Where do we remember it?

We don't, of course. We remember the Holocaust, because we should never forget.  But we forget our own historical genocides, our own complicity in slavery.  The wound runs deep, even today.  I tried to find the link for it, but BBC World Service is not so accommodating.  They've been running a series of stories from Selma, Alabama.  Day before yesterday residents of Selma complained about their notoriety based on events which happened 50 years ago.  Selma has changed, they insisted; it isn't like that anymore.

Yesterday they ran a story about schools in Selma.  Seems the public schools are predominately, and in some cases exclusively, black.  Private schools are predominately, and in some cases exclusively, white.  They interviewed an African American woman who told of getting her child enrolled in a private school.  She was invited to the first meeting of parents, before school started, and was treated to a parent standing up and castigating school leaders for destroying the "traditions" of that school; by admitting her daughter, of course.

But wait, it gets worse.  A spokesman for Alabama schools told the BBC that Brown v. Board had tried to force people to do what they didn't want to do, and the federal government can't mandate that.  State governments, of course, can mandate racial segregation, but the federal government can't override that mandate.  White private schools and black public schools are just a result of Brown v. Board, of the federal government meddling where it doesn't belong, of not understanding what people really want.

In short, the very same racist arguments I heard as a child, unchanged by time, undimmed by the passage of the years.  But challenge that man, call him a racist, and you would offend him; as you would had he been making those arguments 50 years ago.

As Charlie Pierce says, it's not about race, because it's never about race (especially in Ferguson).  As Wendell Berry says, we have a hidden wound, and that wound is how much our country was founded upon, and still depends upon, racism.

We work very, very hard to keep that wound hidden.

Sunday Mornin' comin' down

So Alternet (via Salon) tells me, once again, that religion is in sharp decline in America, and it's all over but the crying as we are now a "post-religious" country, and soon atheism will rule the land with Richard Dawkins as our acknowledged savior.

Okay, some of that might not be true.

But via Thought Criminal I get this link, and this fascinating chart.  It seems that, as of 1906, 41% of the population (per the Census Bureau) considered themselves members of a religious organization (I'll presume this is self-reported, rather than derived from an analysis of church records).  92 years later, that percentage was 70%.

And I'm supposed to believe, in 17 years, that number has plummeted to a record low?  Or at least low enough to indicate we are all atheists now, or will be by the time my grandchildren are around?

Yeah, right.  So, what were we in 1906?

I've said before that the massive increase in church attendance after World War II was an historical aberration, and that, if anything, we are slowly returning to a normal level in the population.  Per the information at that link, we are returning very slowly, indeed.  You can see in the charts there that the percentage of the population claiming religious membership leaps forward in 1940, a climb that is unabated until about 1970, and begins to rise again in 1980.  It's probably true, as Alternet says, that fundamentalism is loosening the death grip on American society it seemed to have in the last decade or so (although neo-atheists still insist it is being rammed down our throats somewhere, somehow), but that's hardly the same thing as saying we are all "nones" now.

Let me just point out the Salon/Alternet article makes much of the fact that "unaffiliated" is the second largest category of the population in some states.  In 1906, it was the largest category in the nation, and stayed that way until sometime in the 1950's.  What Baby Boomers have grown up with is the aberration, not the norm.  But that norm hadn't shifted much by the end of the century:

At the end of the century, eight of every ten Americans were Christian, one adhered to another religion, and one had no religious preference. The non- Christians included Jews, Buddhists, and a rapidly growing number of Muslims

10% had "no religious preference," which is not the same thing as no religious belief.  If that has changed dramatically in only 14 years, where are all the empty churches and synagogues and mosques?  A mere addition of 1% would be over 3 million people.  Surely that would impact the number of people attending worship, even if the percentage of those attending worship didn't change.

Speaking of which, in 1939, 43% reported attending worship regularly; by 1988, that number was at 40%.  It climbed to around 50% in the late 50's,  but pretty much stayed around the 40% mark for half a century.    The shifts over that time are barely statistically significant.   That seems to be a fairly culturally set number.  I see no reason to expect it has plummeted since 1998.

There have been changes in American attitudes toward religion:

As recently as the 1920s, church membership was routinely inherited and implied obedience to a set of behavioral rules. Over the years, church membership became elective and behav ioral rules lost their importance.

American religion lost much of its authoritative character. The mainline Protestant churches no longer applied their traditional sanctions against fornication, illegitimacy, divorce, homosexuality, suicide, and blasphemy. The majority of Catholics favored and practiced birth control, contrary to church doctrine.

The growth of evangelical denominations committed to biblical literalism can be interpreted as a reaction against this general trend, as the 1999 figures in the two charts suggest (see page 108). But even in that conservative sector of the religious spectrum, some old prohibitions—including those against fornication, illegitimacy, drinking, dancing, gambling, homosexuality, abortion, and illegal drug use—often appeared less enforceable by the end of the century.

But those changes reflect changes in culture, not the authority of religion.  Many of the strictures that were less enforceable in 1999 have become even less enforceable 15 years later, especially with the rapid acceptance of same-sex marriage.  But shifts in church or culture, if anything, have still changed worship attendance (decline in attendance to Catholic Mass is attributed to the changes wrought by Vatican II) only slightly.  The fact that the attendance number is so steady indicates the role of religion in individual lives hasn't changed much in, well, my lifetime, at least.  Same as it ever was, in other words.

These statistics, to me, reflect social approval and opprobrium, set in a culture accepting of religious belief.  The shifts over time reflect shifts in the society, not shifts guiding the society.  The chapter I've been quoting starts off noting:

More than 150 years ago, in his Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, “America is still the place where the Christian religion has kept the greatest real power over men’s souls.” That might still be said at the close of the twentieth century. Tocqueville attributed this phenomenon to the multiplicity of independent sects in the United States, unmatched anywhere else in the world, and to the equally unusual separation of organized religion from the state.

I think Tocqueville is right.  This year marks the 180th anniversary of the publication of the first volume of his most famous work.  I don't think there has been any change in American culture to fundamentally change his observation in all that time.  However it seems there has been a fundamental change in religious sentiment, one that began during the Baby Boom, and while that change may be ebbing, it is not rapidly receding.

It hasn't really receded since the rise began, and that rise now constitutes about 1/3rd of the time that has passed since Tocqueville's observations.  In the succeeding 10% or so of that total span of time, which constitutes the new century, there is no reason to think there has been another fundamental change, or even that one is about to occur.  Unless the change is to a rapid disinterest in theism, or even a fervid embrace of atheism, the only possible change is a return to the status quo at the beginning of the 20th century.

But it's far too early to decide whether even that is happening.

Born in the USA

So I go to see the "feel good" movie "McFarland USA," not because I want to, but because I know somebody who knows somebody who is related to one of the actors (no, I'm not saying more than that).

And I was pleasantly surprised by the "Pastures of Plenty" vibe the whole story gave off, since it is set in California's agricultural region where Mexicans (by and large) are "pickers" in the field, back-breaking labor that starts at dawn and continues without relent all day.  When Kevin Costner's character joins them for one day (there are reason), he asks if they get paid by the hour.  No, they tell him; by the field.  So the faster they pick, the better.  It's a hard-knock life doesn't begin to cover it.

It isn't long before Costner's character understands that he understands almost nothing about the lives of the members of his track team.  He goes from trying to motivate them with toughness, to realizing nothing could be harder than the conditions they live under.  He finally motivates them from his respect for them, his willingness to acknowledge they are human beings whose lives matter.

But I see this movie about how invisible such workers are (and it's set in 1987; nothing had changed since Woody Guthrie's song, nothing has really changed since), and then I read this:

More recently, writer Michael Shermer has expanded on this idea. In his new book, “The Moral Arc: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity Toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom,” he argues that “moral progress” can be directly attributed to the values associated with the West’s embrace of science and reason, which he traces to the beginning of the Enlightenment in the 17th century. As an example, he cites the famous “golden rule” — that we should do unto others as we’d want them to do unto us. The rule is hardly new — it’s found in the Bible — but it is no mean feat to actually put it into practice. To fully wrap your head around the golden rule, you have to mentally place yourself in someone else’s shoes. It is a cognitively demanding task, and one that calls for abstract reasoning.

Today we recoil from the idea of inflicting harm on others — but it is far from clear why we would have evolved such a stance. 

Actually what we recoil from is images of harm being inflicted on others, especially when it is done in our name.  Like the Romans, we still prefer to pay people to inflict harm for us:  be they soldiers or police. We don't recoil from inflicting harm; we don't even recoil from the death penalty.  What we recoil from is getting our hands dirty.

Values associated with the West's "embrace of science and reason" led to the near extermination of the natives in this country; to an international slave trade whose fruits our Enlightenment Founding Fathers enjoyed robustly, as well as the industrial scale genocide of the Holocaust and such delights as forced sterilization ("three generations of imbeciles is enough!"  "Imbeciles" was a legal term incorporated from science at the time) and the nuclear annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not to mention the fire-bombing of Dresden.  I don't mean to pick on any particular country in that catalog, but we are so prone to exclude ourselves from such accountings that it bears focussing on our sins.

As for the "Golden Rule," it's quite an old one (it was old when Jesus cited it), and to this day few have managed to "wrap their heads" around it.  I have no idea how science and reason create the abstract reasoning possible to realize the implementation of that rule, but then abstract reasoning is hardly a product of the Enlightenment alone.  If Mr. Schermer, or  Mr. Falk, think it is, then they need to go back to grade school and start over; they really missed something.

What's primarily missing is any respect for the "other."  What's primarily missing is any ability to wrap their heads around the golden rule, no matter now capable of abstract reasoning they think themselves.  No matter what, like Kevin Costner's character, they are reasoning from their experience; and their experience, they think, is both universal, and privileged.  Privileged because it is correct; and correct, because it is theirs.

That Golden Rule really is no mean feat to put into practice, is it?

Holier than thou

I think this pretty much gets to the objection most atheists have with religion:

Obeisance to imaginary celestial despots and faith in ancient Middle Eastern “holy books” of whatever kind have never owned a place in my life. If believers should try to convert me, I would respond with one or another version of Lucifer’s fabled retort to God’s command to submit to Him or be cast out of heaven: Non serviam! I shall not serve!

That comes in the context of quoting Christopher Hitchens, that "the influence of churches, and the effect of religious belief, is positively harmful.”  There's already a lively debate over that subject (and I think the answer is "human nature," not "religion"), but interestingly that quote is used to justify the assertion "I shall not serve!"

I would counter, with Dylan, that "you're gonna have to serve somebody."  But that's merely to raise a point of opposition; the real issue is, for most atheists, religion involves some kind of crooking of the knee.  It's one reason Nietzsche, in undiluted form or in some watered-down variant, is so appealing to them.

It's the reason prayer is despised as:

...sitting for a quiet moment and beseeching his or her Lord for intervention in matters of grave import...with lowered head and genuflections and other toadying gestures of obeisance — behavior that without faith’s halo would be classified as symptoms of mental derangement. 

This, by the way, is presented as an "objective" view of the activity of prayer; and note the behavior, complete with "toadying gestures of obeisance" is "objectively" classified as "symptoms of mental derangement."  Mr. Tayler writes on the internet, which makes him an expert in diagnoses of mental states.

But there we have it again:  "toadying gestures of obeisance" is a dismissive an attitude as one can have.  It isn't just dismissive, it's hostile.  One has to wonder why the quiet action of prayer produces such anger in Mr. Tayler, why "obeisance" requires "toadying gestures".  Of course, he also wants to identify himself with Satan, prompting one to point out:  you ain't that important.  And to wonder:  do you have a boss?  Do you recognize the legitimacy of authority at all?  Because you're starting to sound like the most radical of the anti-government crowd, who use this sort of argument to deny the authority of anyone but the county sheriff, and then only when the sheriff isn't coming for them.

There is worthwhile discussion to be had here, somewhere between the strident defiance of Nietzsche and Merton finding in Abbey Gethsemani "the four walls of my freedom."  What's interesting is the refusal to admit that complexity, as if anyone anywhere who kneels to pray is impinging on the identity, the very personhood, of Mr. Tayler.  I find this kind of "boundary violation" very often in cases of such stridency.  Ironically, it may be the reason for the shooting in Chapel Hill which is the subject of Mr. Tayler's latest screed, although the boundary may have been merely the stripes between spaces on a parking lot.  One boundary is as abstract as the other, and it may well be Christopher Stephen Hicks was very concerned about the boundaries around a parking space that he imagined were inviolate.  It's a bit ironic that his atheism would be identified with the protection of a "holy space."  'Holy," after all, is not a theological term; it means something that must remain pure, undefiled, set apart.

It's an easy enough term to apply to Mr. Hicks' apparent obsession with a designated area of a parking lot.  As I said, violence has a lot less to do with religion, than it does with human nature.