The Bible In 410 Words

Since I'm enjoying the role of officious editor of long documents, here's my take on the Bible, reduced to its essential elements and leaving in all the "good stuff":

In the beginning, the universe was created, the earth was formed, and humans and all the other animals and all the plants came to exist. Then, humans formed societies and found they have to live together. This proved more difficult than it seems, so here are the basic rules to follow:

Above all, be good to each other. This includes not murdering one another, avoiding war when possible, not stealing, not breaking promises, and not lying, or engaging in other activities which you know or should know will cause unnecessary pain to others especially when those activities involve sex. Do not buy, sell, or own slaves; one human being cannot own another like property and to act otherwise is an abomination. Parents, be particularly good to your children and this includes taking good care of the earth, because they will have to live in it when you are gone. Children, be particularly good to your parents and this includes taking care of them when they are very old, because they took care of you when you were very young. Envy is the source of much unhappiness, so make a good faith effort to be content with what you have and to acquire wealth only through honest means. Mind your own business and do not be overly concerned with what others do if it does not cause you harm.

You will need to make more rules than these with your fellow humans, and those other rules should be consistent with these ideas.

Bad things are going to happen to you in life, and life is not fair. It may not be obvious all the time, but everyone suffers at least some time. Nevertheless, life is worth living and you should take joy from the love offered by your friends and your family. There are no guarantees, but if you get an education, act in harmony with the basic rules of ethics outlined above, and work hard, you are much more likely to grow prosperous than if you do not do these things.

The purpose of your existence is to live a good life, and living a good life includes both behaving morally as well as enjoying pleasure. You have intelligence; use it. No matter what your station in life, if you devote the effort needed to make the world around you a better place, this will bring you a powerful measure of happiness. Go now into the world, and be happy.

Notice the absence of anything relating to the supernatural; no gods or prophets, no fake history, no attempts to freeze society into antiquated culture, no zombies or zombie-worship, no hallucinatory visions, no demons or bogeymen or cosmic protection rackets. What gets left behind when you trim out all the nonsense is a relatively short, sensible, and worthwhile code of ethics.

Probate to Pangloss

My firm's probate practice requires us to frequently deal with people who are facing death. Sometimes it’s their own, sometimes it’s a loved one’s; sometimes the death is in the future and sometimes it is in the immediate past. One of the ways that I’ve seen survivors of the recently-deceased deal with their grief is to note that the decedent’s “quality of life” was low prior to death, and to take solace in the fact that they are now released from an uncomfortable existence.

Does that have any meaning other than “they were in a lot of pain”? Surely, “quality of life” means more than freedom from pain; a bedridden patient on morphine feels no pain but that is obviously not a desirable existence. At best, it is less bad than one in which one is both bedridden and stricken with pain. From this, we can see that being bedridden is something incompatible with a high-quality life, whether or not pain is a factor.

Put another way, what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for that state of existence called “happiness”? This topic came up recently on an e-mail discussion group and a pretty extensive list resulted. I augment, condense, and re-prioritize the list somewhat here to try and put all of the qualitatively similar items together. If you had all of these things, would you consider yourself happy?

• Loving relationships with others, including the formation of a family unit of one’s own choosing.
• The personal liberty to act, speak, and believe as one chooses (provided one does not unreasonably harm others in one’s actions) and sufficient political empowerment so as to meaningfully participate in society, without fear of governmental retribution.
• A functioning, pain-free body, with affordable and readily-available health care in the event that one’s health diminishes, and a painless, dignified end to life.
• Meaningful ability to improve oneself by way of pursuing educational, intellectual, personal, and professional goals.
• A healthy environment, including clean air and water, access to unspoiled and beautiful natural areas, and availability of a variety of nutritious and pleasurable foods.
• Safety and security from violence to one’s person and retention of one’s possessions, and confidence in the same for oneself and others.
• Means sufficient to not impose anxiety about the financial impact of every decision in life, obtained through some form of socially useful, non-abusive employment.
• Access to travel, entertainment, and similar sorts of personal pleasures in reasonable quantity and quality -- perhaps including the giving of good things to others such as one’s family and friends or to charity.
• Revenge against one’s enemies. (That one is a joke, and not an original one, either.)

I have difficulty imagining an existence in which I possessed everything on this list which would be unacceptable to me for some reason. The next step, then, is to take a measure of what’s on that list.

The first thing that strikes me about the list is how much of it is founded upon social interaction. The bulk of these criteria for a high-quality life appear to be predicated upon the ability to communicate and meaningfully interact with other people. Happiness seems inherently tied up with one’s relationship with other human beings. Perhaps I’m just that much of an extrovert, but a solitary life does not seem to be one in which happiness is possible. At most, solitude can be tolerated – but it normally cannot lead to real happiness.

It’s not necessarily easy to quantify these things – do you live in a society that rates “4” or a “9” on the “ten-point liberty-meter”? – and some of these criteria are abstract and ill-defined through my lawyer-like reliance on the concept of “reasonability.” What you think of as a reasonable amount of access to entertainment might seem parsimonious to me. A sufficient amount of money to get all this is obviously (and in my formulation, explicitly) a necessary condition, but there is clearly a point beyond which additional money becomes superfluous. By using a weasel-word like “reasonable,” I know I'm being inexact and imprecise, but please forgive me for that, because this sort of exercise is inevitably and inherently inexact and imprecise.

And, this looks like a generally inter-dependent set of criteria. A “boost up” in one area will probably assist in another; a “drag down” in one area will probably impact another. One can acquire financial means from a good job which results from a good education and a substantial network of social and family contacts, which in turn opens up travel and entertainment possibilities not previously available as well as greater access to health care, personal security, and political empowerment. Without personal security, though, the risk of property loss can be high enough that one’s financial means, even if otherwise good, are imperiled. It doesn’t matter how much money you make if someone else is just going to steal it.

Finally, it strikes me that a lot of this list is framed, or at least frame-able, in negative terms – we’re talking about the absence of hunger, the absence of crime, the absence of sickness, the absence of solitude, the absence of repression. Only in personal improvement and in the pleasure of giving to others are truly affirmative activities to be found; the rest of it might legitimately be seen as keeping the wolves at bay. But without finding some kind of self-identified and affirmative purpose to one’s life, it doesn’t seem possible to me to be truly happy.

Now, I’ve tried to frame these criteria in a timeless sort of manner, so that they might be a useful index to measure things in historical time. It’s clear that, at least in the industrialized western world, we have longer, faster, more productive, and more pleasure-filled lives now than at any point in the historical past – but are we happier today than our ancestors were? I have to say that looking at the list, yes, we do. We have more and better food than ever before; more and better health care than ever before; more and better education than ever before; we are wealthier as a society than ever before (at least, when averaging out for the ups and downs of economic cycles, which is not always easy to do while we’re still in a “down” phase of that cycle). And there are simply more of us around than ever before, which means we have more opportunities for social interactions than before (including more opportunities to make enemies upon whom we might revenge ourselves).

While it’s not been without significant costs, if my list is correct, then our modern, technologically-advanced society indeed does make us happier than the generations who have preceded us – and we can reasonably anticipate that our descendants will be even happier still.

Amway For The 2010's

The other day I was escorting a prospect through the firm's lobby. There were several people there, including another attorney who was talking with an attractive woman in her forties, and this attorney said, "You might want to talk to TL here about that, it seems like the sort of thing he might be interested in," and practically shot out the front door. So I was left talking with this woman who first established that we had some common social acquaintances, and then proceeded to pitch me on MonaVie.

A quick glance at the glossy 8 by 14 sheet of written material revealed to me that 1) it was badly out of date in that it indicated that "very few baby boomers are now in their 40's,"* 2) the product in question was fruit juice, and 3) this was a multi-level marketing scheme. Is MonaVie a scam? If you ask me, anything sold through a multi-level marketing mechanism becomes a scam sooner or later. There are certainly appreciable numbers of people who have stuck their necks out to explain why they think it is a scam.

Now, it's not hard to see how when you sell fruit juice for forty dollars a quart you can get to a fairly high amount of revenue in the first place or how there would be considerable profit left over for the various tiers in your marketing pyramid. As a business model, I approve of huge profit, all other things being equal. But I have real doubts that this is a particularly ripe business opportunity.  The real flaw I see here is that competing products are readily and cheaply available. Who the hell is going to pay forty dollars for 750 ml of something they can get in a 2 liter bottle for about a tenth of the price at their supermarket, bearing a label that reads "Ocean Spray" instead of "MonaVie"? Suckers, that's who. So how are you going to sucker them?

By touting your product as possessing magical qualities, that's how. The marketing material dwells on the pseudoscience of antioxidants as an anti-aging measure. Drink MonaVie and you'll never get old! Well, sorry, but you will. Fruit juice may contain a large concentration of helpful nutrients and essential vitamins, but super fruit juices sold on the strength of their antioxidant content are the modern version of snake oil and there are potential harms -- there are hints that certain kinds of antioxidants in large enough doses can actually suppress your body's immunodefense system; the most commonly-touted antioxident, resveratrol, may actually increase the risk of the very harms it is deployed to mitigate or prevent when not used appropriately. A morning of looking around the science available on the internet tells me that there is no substantial scientific consensus on any of the purported health benefits of any particular antioxidant, much less that of an antioxidant cocktail like MonaVie. There may be some health benefits, and there are some hints of real promise and progress to be made. But "science" doesn't know for sure that any of the four varieties of antioxidants (ascorbic acid or "vitamin C"; tocopherols or "vitamin E"; polyphenols like resveratrol; or carotenoids like lycopene from tomatoes) does anything even resembling the claims made in fundamentally dishonest marketing materials associated with products.

My conclusion after a very brief survey of scientific literature is that MonaVie sells sweet, purply woo at forty dollars a bottle. Your mileage may vary, but no sane consumer of even average intelligence would buy the stuff without having first had their critical thinking skills suspended through the use of dishonest claims (largely based on testimonials rather than cited scientific reports in peer-reviewed journals) about its purported health benefits.

The real proof, though, is that most any MonaVie representative you come across has a day job. The woman I spoke to was employed as a mortgage broker. If she was really making such good money selling a healthful product that actually excited her and gave her joy, why would she keep her day job? No, at best this is a sideline and most likely she got suckered in by a sales pitch from her upline in the MLM pyramid and bought hundreds of dollars worth of this fruit juice, realized that she can't sell the product and that the only way to do anything worthwhile is to sell "the system" instead, and therefore is now looking to unload these bottles of grossly overpriced blueberry smoothies on the next, greater fool.

Who isn't going to be me.


* Really? Very few boomers left in their 40's?  What is this, the Clinton Administration? A baby boomer is someone who was born in the several years after World War II ended, from around 1945 to some indeterminate, arbitrary date in the early 1950's. As I can personally attest, the children of baby boomers are now entering their 40's. Boomers are entering retirement age although thanks to the financial crash of 2008, many are postponing retirement for a few years so as to recover their assets before ceasing work, and who could blame them?

† According to the corporate website, the ingredients are a proprietary blend of: "Açai, white grape, apple, acerola, aronia, purple grape, cranberry, passion fruit, prune, kiwi, blueberry, wolfberry, camu camu, pomegranate, lychee fruit, pear, banana, cupuaçu, and bilberry." Cupuaçu is probably the trendiest ingredient in that list; açai used to be almost totally unknown ten years ago but now you can get açai juice fairly cheaply and without much difficulty at grocery stores all over California. Not that MonaVie cares about that, particularly.

Ravi Zacharias' Six Questions Answered!

At The Atheist Experience, I find a set of six 'questions' from Ravi Zacharias, an evangelical Christian apologist.  Matt D. at Atheist Experience does a fine job on his own behalf and I commend his thoughts on the issues Zacharias raises to you.  But I'm also offering my own stab at them, one that I hope is somewhat briefer while still being thoughtful enough to be meaningful.

1.  If there is no God, “the big questions” remain unanswered, so how do we answer the following questions: Where did everything come from, and why is there something rather than nothing? Why is there conscious, intelligent life on this planet, and is there any meaning to this life? Does human history lead anywhere, or is it all in vain since death is merely the end? How do you come to understand good and evil, right and wrong without a transcendent signifier? If these concepts are merely social constructions, or human opinions, where do we look to determine what is good or bad, right or wrong? If you are content within an atheistic worldview, what circumstances would serve to make you open to other answers?

Zacharias pumps a lot of questions into this single question. Fortunately, all of them are susceptible of brief answers:

• Where did everything come from? Science doesn't know yet. And that's OK.
• Why is there something rather than nothing? Science doesn't know yet. And that's OK.
• Why is there conscious, intelligent life on this planet? Because it evolved here.
• Is there any meaning to this life? The question implies the word "transcendent" as a modified to the word "meaning" and the answer is no, there is not. There is only the meaning that we pick for ourselves. If the modifier is "objective," then yes, there is -- the transmission and propagation of the chemical sequences known as "genes" within the deoxyribonucleic acid embedded within our cells.
• Does human history lead anywhere, or is it all in vain since death is merely the end? False choice. Death is not necessarily the end of the human experience. Nor does death as the terminal experience of human existence (whether individual or collective) necessarily deprive that existence of meaning.
• How do you come to understand good and evil, right and wrong without a transcendent signifier? Through reason, empathy, and experience.
• If these concepts are merely social constructions, or human opinions, where do we look to determine what is good or bad, right or wrong? See the immediately previous answer.
• If you are content within an atheistic worldview, what circumstances would serve to make you open to other answers? (Query as to the grammar here; an "atheistic worldview" is not a question, but I understand what he's getting at -- what would make an atheist previously comfortable with his atheism question it?)  Substantial evidence of the existence of an interventionist supernatural entity, viz. a prayer-induced spontaneous regrowth of an amputated human limb.

The rest of Zacharias' "questions" are really arguments:

2.  If we reject the existence of God, we are left with a crisis of meaning, so why don’t we see more atheists taking their worldview more seriously like Jean Paul Sartre, or Friedrich Nietzsche, or Michel Foucault? These three atheists recognized that in the absence of God, there was no transcendent meaning beyond one’s own self-interests, pleasures, or tastes. The experience of atheistic meaninglessness is recorded in Sartre’s book Nausea. Without God, these three thinkers, among others, show us a world of just stuff, thrown out into space and time, going nowhere, meaning nothing.

Existentialism requires that you explain and justify your own existence on your own terms and not resort to hiding behind fictions like a supernatural overlord. It seems natural that you would sneer at existentialism if you do not possess such a justification for yourself and your actions. If, on the one hand, an atheistic world view necessarily has as its only transcencent meaning other than "one’s own self-interests, pleasures, or tastes" then ultimately the justification for why one does action "X" is either the atheistic answer "because it pleased me to do so," or the theistic answer "because I believed that it pleased God that I do so," which ultimately is really the same thing as the atheistic answer because the theist takes pleasure in pleasing God.  And who says that there aren't a lot of atheists who take the existentialists seriously?  Understanding existentialism, at any level of sophistication, does not require that one become joyless.

3.  If people don’t believe in God, the historical results are horrific, so how do we deal with the regimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot who saw religion as the problem and worked to eradicate it? Countless millions lost their lives under these godless regimes, regimes more influenced by Nietzsche’s concept of the ubermensch (superman) than they were by transcendent morality.

If people do believe in God, the historical results are also horrific. If you are going to lay some of (but not all of) the genocides of the twentieth century at the feet of atheism, then you must answer for a dozen or so Crusades launched by Christianity, dozens if not hundreds of jihads launched by Islam, hundreds of pre-Nazi pogroms against Jews across Europe, the riots of religion that separated Pakistan and Bangladesh from India, the Wars of the European Reformation, and debatably, the massive extermination partially unwittingly perpetrated on Native Americans by European conquerors, most of whom were motivated by the desire to spread Christianity to the New World. Violence and death are at least as much the result of the presence of religion as its absence.

And for the fifteen thousandth time, Hitler was not an atheist.

4.  If there is no God, the problems of evil and suffering are in no way solved, so where is the hope of redemption, or meaning for those who suffer? Suffering is just as tragic, if not more so, without God because there is no hope of it being rendered meaningful or transcendent, redemptive or redeemable, since no interventions in this life or reparations in an afterlife are possible. It might be true that there is no God to blame now, but neither is there a God to reach out to for strength, transcendent meaning, or comfort. There is only madness and confusion in the face of suffering and evil.

This "question" presupposes that God is benevolent. If what you are concerned with is succor from suffering, then a malicious or even an indifferent deity is probably worse than no deity at all. And if what you are concerned with is succor from suffering, merely wanting a deity to provide that succor does not mean that such a deity really exists. I would like it very much if Santa Claus really did give toys and presents to good little boys and girls all over the world on Christmas Day. How marvelous that would be! But wanting it to be true does not make it so. In the original article, Matt D. points out also that succor is available from other people, and that the existence of suffering in a theistic universe raises questions about the true benevolence of God, which are also points worth considering.

5.  If there is no God, we lose the very standard by which we critique religions and religious people, so whose opinion matters most? Whose voice will be heard? Whose tastes or preferences will be honored? In the long run, human tastes and opinions have no more weight than we give them, and who are we to give them meaning anyway? Who is to say that lying, or cheating or adultery or child molestation are wrong — really wrong? Where do those standards come from? Sure, our societies might make these things “illegal” and impose penalties or consequences for things that are not socially acceptable, but human cultures have at various times legally or socially disapproved of everything from believing in God to believing the world revolves around the sun; from slavery, to interracial marriage, from polygamy to monogamy. Human taste, opinion law and culture are hardly dependable arbiters of Truth.

This is simply another way of rephrasing Zacharias' earlier question, "How do you come to understand good and evil, right and wrong without a transcendent signifier?" My answer remains the same: through reason, empathy, and experience. I'll also add that religion (which is not necessarily the same thing as belief in God in this context) has been uses as the justification for every one of the historical evils Zacharias mentions in his question, and indeed more than that. Religion, therefore, is at least as much a perpetrator of evil as a force to ameliorate it.  God's existence (distinguished from religion) does not resolve the problem of evil, either, because we are left with Epicurus' quatrain about God and evil:

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then He is not omnipotent. Is He able, but not willing? Then He is malevolent. Is He both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is He neither able nor willing? Then why call Him God?

To be sure, Epicurus is a way of rephrasing the classic issue of the problem of evil, but at least in this argument, Zacharias has not dealt with that issue in any meaningful way.

6.  If there is no God, we don’t make sense, so how do we explain human longings and desire for the transcendent? How do we even explain human questions for meaning and purpose, or inner thoughts like, why I am so unfulfilled or empty? Why do I hunger for the spiritual? How do we deal with these questions if nothing can exist beyond the material world? Atheists, particularly atheistic scientists go way beyond their scientific training when they depart from the “how” questions to prognosticating about the “why” questions. Even terms like “natural selection” seems a misuse of words, since only an intelligent being can assess options and choose. How do we get laws out of luck, or predictable processes out of brute chance? If all that makes us different from animals is learning and altruism, why do the brutish still widely outnumber the wise in our world?

This question is packed to the gills with false premises. Even if there is no God, human beings make plenty of sense when understood for what they are: animals which are the current product of an ongoing process of evolution which has produced a confluence of self-awareness, tool-building, logical thought, long-term memory, and opposable digits as traits assisting survival of the organism. Like many apologists do, Zacharias again confuse the desired answer to a question with its premise. His desire for a transcendent purpose to life (which exists, or does not, independent of his desire for it to exist) is universalized, incorrectly; his lack of ability to imagine a world without such a transcendent purpose is universalized, incorrectly; his failure to discern that human existence, while perhaps more complex than that of a "lower" animal, is really no different than that of any other species of social animal, is universalized, incorrectly. Indeed, Zacharias presumes that free choice exists, which is a far from certain proposition and one of which I have grown increasingly dubious.

Boiled down to its essence, Zacharias basically argues with his six questions as follows: "Existence without God would be a horrifying absurdity, therefore, God must exist." I can't think of any facet of that proposition which can be intellectually redeemed.

It's Not A Victory For Animal Cruelty

I'm a bit tired of the headlines. Today's Supreme Court case is not about the Supreme Court striking down a law prohibiting animal cruelty.  No one on the Court is in favor of animal cruelty.  It's about Congress overreaching and writing bad laws and intruding on a basic, fundamental American right.

And of course the speech in question is awful.  Stomach-turning.  That's not the point.  The point is that if the majority gets a veto on speech simply because it is distasteful, the next step after the dog fight videos will be movies with children and sex, and you've lost not only Lolita but Romeo and Juliet too.  And after that, it becomes speech that is critical of the government because that tends to be unpopular too -- and now you've created a police state.

Popular, unobjectionable speech doesn't need the First Amendment.  A movie about well-groomed schoolchildren who like their parents, stay out of trouble, study and get good grades, respect the President and their Congressman, and play cooperatively and quietly together will offend no one -- and will never, ever, ever be in danger of being censored or getting its authors in any kind of trouble.  (Other than financial trouble because such a movie would be of so little interest to anyone that it couldn't help but lose money.)  It's the people who say and do things that offend and make people upset who are the ones that are at the vanguard of our freedoms. The Clarence Brandenburgs and Paul Robert Cohens and now the Robert J. Stevenses of the world who do and say really reprehensible things are the ones to whom the law must look to show the boundaries of our freedoms -- because our freedoms are as against the government, and it is the Brandenburgs and Cohens and Stevenses who attract the government's attention precisely because what they do is so reprehensible.

So we must send Congress back to the drawing board to combat the national emergency of "crush videos."  As repellent as I find crush videos and other depictions of animal cruelty to be -- and let there be no doubt that it I join all right-thinking people in finding them really, really awful -- it is a small price to pay for affirmation of the vibrancy of the First Amendment.

Project Reason Video Winner

True Stumble

I've literally no idea how I found this story.  But it sent chills up my spine.

Am I Just Phrasing The Concept Badly?

To call something an inherent good is to say, at some level, that an intellectual examination of a moral value has reached a stopping point.  But it is certainly possible to at least try to explain why something is held to be an inherent moral good.  One could argue in terms of consequence -- to give money to charity is morally good because it relieves another human being's suffering, and the lack of suffering is to be morally preferred to suffering.  Or one could argue in terms of reciprocal duty -- to give money to charity is morally good because were one to be in a position to have to rely on charity, one would prefer that others had made donations so that the charity could be effective.  Maybe I've picked a bad example here -- perhaps I should be examining why the lack of suffering is morally preferable to the presence of suffering, or why I should care about a hypothetical role-reversal situation.  But even so, you can get at least a shadow of an idea from these two explanations about why giving to charity is a moral good.

What's the point of that concept?  I've noticed that whenever I get into a discussion with an apologist, I am never, ever told that worshiping Jehovah is an inherently moral thing to do.  Nor will the apologist ever react to my contention that his or her claims are based on the idea that worship or belief are inherently morally good.  Instead, the apologist usually (at least to my impression) winds up tied in knots trying to explain why things which are obviously morally bad are, in fact, morally good so as to avoid the undesirable result of concluding that [pick one or more: Jehovah, Allah, Jesus, the Bible, religion, faith] are sometimes morally bad.

Am I just not expressing myself well?  Is the concept of "inherent moral worth of belief" too obscure or too abstract an idea?  Or has it just been a coincidence that dozens of apologists over the years have been so concerned about responding to other parts my arguments that they've let this one fly by?  That seems unlikely.

Well, I want to take on that point directly.  Believers -- do you contend that worship and/or belief, by itself and with all other factors of human behavior being equal, elevates the moral worth of the believer?  If so, can you offer up at least some idea of why that should be the case?

Why I Hate The Culture Wars

The American culture wars strike me as astonishingly silly and yet deeply scary at the same time.  It's hard to say what recent volley is more bothersome to me.

Could it be people who are getting The Diary Of Anne Frank pulled from school curricula because of its sexually explicit content?
Or could it be people who are getting the dictionary pulled from classrooms because of its sexually explicit content?

Or maybe bigots who want to literally criminalize homosexuality here in the United States, based on a tortured reading of the Bible?

Or could it be my elected representatives, who really ought to know better, unthinkingly saying that he's being "inclusive" when he proclaims his jurisdictions to be a "Christian city"?  (Lots of details here.)

All of this "culture war" nonsense seems to be predominantly powered by a simplistic, aggressively evangelical, and intolerant brand of Christianity.  Well, not all of it.  There's also Glenn Beck leading his Beckhead minions to decry fundamental principles of law.  Hey, Glenn Beck -- what you're criticizing in that segment is what lawyers have been doing since 1066!  It's not anything new and it didn't start with Roscoe Pound!*

I have a number of friends who are not religious or, among those who are religious, who somehow manage to not be frickin' insane about it and respect that other people might want to live their lives in different ways than them.  It is absolutely beyond me why anyone would want to reach in to my house or your house or anyone else's house and tell them how to live their lives or what books to read or what religion they ought to publicly subscribe to.

I guess it's useful to be roused out of my shell and realize that indeed there are lots and lots and lots of people out there who look out at the world and in particular our own nation and see something very, very different than I do.  I may be getting a little bit too complacent, having found people with whom I have surrounded myself who do not demand that others conform in lockstep to their social example.  I had thought that tolerance for other peoples' choices and ideas and personal decisions was part of what it was to be a free people.

Godsdamn it, why can't people just learn to mind their own business?  That goes in both directions, but the aggression seems to be coming from the right rather than the left.


*  If you want to criticize Roscoe Pound and his influence over American legal education, go right ahead.  Pound didn't invent the idea of case law analysis; he formalized a method of studying law through case law analysis that had been going on for clerks who were "reading the law" in private tutelage or Inns of Court for hundreds of years in the Anglo-American legal system, and that's pretty well above criticism.  What you could criticize Pound for is his exposition of indeterminacy as the inevitable result of the vicissitudes of political power as the foundational exponent of both statutory law and a politicized judicial nomination process.  But that doesn't make for a particularly good sound bite because pretty much only lawyers and political scientists even know what the previous sentence means.

Appropos Of The Current Debate

This one's for my new friend Ennis.

Dialogue With Apologists Always Reach This Point

My latest apologist interloquitor and I are starting to narrow down the issues somewhat in a dialogue aiming to tease out the real moral lessons of the Bible.  We've agreed to cross-post our responses, and I'm concerned that stand-alone posts without context will be confusing to a third-party reader, so I provide a summary of the discussion so far first, and then my latest entry into the discussion.  I've jumped most of it because I know there are some Readers here with no appetite for this sort of thing.  If you are not one of them, please read on.

More After The Jump -->

The Massacre Of Moab

In my now-famous post Top Ten Worst Bible Stories, I singled out the Massacre of the Midianites in Deuteronomy 7:1-6 and Numbers 31:1-18 for particular criticism.  It is, in fact, a story of genocide, the bloodthirsty and unprovoked annihalation of a people who had done nothing that we can look at today as having been even remotely morally equivalent to what they suffered at the hands of Jehovah's followers.

An intrepid, intelligent, and earnest apologist has taken on my challenge to offer a justification for this story.  I suggest that if you have interest in this exchange, you read his apology for it first, and then come back to the balance of this very long analysis, that appears below after the jump.

More After The Jump -->

Liberate Prometheus

What need have we of the Gods?
We have conquered their domains
As they conquered the Titans.

I look about my own land
And I see the elements
Harnessed, domesticated.

Wind and sun are made lightning,
A lightning shorn of thunder,
Jewels bring it where we bid.

The earth yields rock, which is now
Transformed into fire, and fire,
Our old servant, is made tame.

Glass and sand are transformed to
Birds of prey, with wings wider
Than the ancient Sphinx is long.

And our birds, breathing rock fire,
Fly faster than sound itself
And become invisible.

Swift Hermes could not outrace
The speed of a message sent
Around the globe -- by a child.

Loathsome diseases and plague,
Which once felled entire nations,
We cure with needle and pill.

If a river is needful,
There it shall be, and its
Water then made pure and sweet.

In my short days, I have seen
The air turned to brown poison,
And then made wholesome again.

The chariots of the Gods
Could not transport so many
So fast or so far as we.

This parade of miracles
Grows seeming endless; and yet,
We take it all for granted.

The shepherds of the Bronze Age
Could not have even dreamt of
Our wizardry done daily.

So we’ve no more use for tales
Of magic, gods, or demons.
Our own wonders do astound.

Knowledge of good and evil
Was called the forbidden fruit.
Yet who would not have eaten?

It’s better, I say, to know
Right from wrong, and make mistakes,
For only thus will we grow wise.

We are not masters of all,
And cannot claim power with
No limits. But truly, could Zeus?

That Titan who brought man fire
Was given eternal pain
For betraying that secret.

We should now repay the debt,
And use the gift that he gave
To set Prometheus free.

The gift he gave was knowledge,
And using it has shown us
That the Gods are obsolete.

For now is humanity’s,
Air, earth, fire, water, wind,
And even life and death, our tools.

Not yet do we grasp all for
Which we reach and desire,
But I see the day we will.

Making Ignorant Choices

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:  We all make choices based on incomplete information, all the time, and that isn't necessarily a bad thing.  One's choice of religion is usually not a choice at all and is certainly based on incomplete information.  That goes for atheists, too.  There's also an amusing video from the Daily Show embedded in the essay.

More After The Jump -->

Leave Tiger Woods Be And Brit Hume Too

Brit Hume, a former anchor and host and still part-time commentator on Fox News, suggested over the weekend that Tiger Woods should become a Christian.  He [Hume] is under criticism for saying he does not think that Buddhism offers the same sort of redeption and forgiveness as Christianity.  Some have called it already one of the most dumb things said in 2010, while social conservatives are quick to hold up this incident as an example of the liberal media mocking faithful Christians.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:  While I think Hume's comment was not particularly helpful and moderately ignorant, it was also mostly harmless and well-intentioned, so it's silly to criticize Hume.  The real issues confronting Tiger Woods are ones which confront everyone going through a tough time like a divorce. Woods has to work these issues out for himself and for the benefit of his children and there is no one-size-fits-all resolution to them.  While some churches offer positive and beneficial resources to their members, others sometimes do more harm than good.  So the best environment in which Tiger Woods (or any divorcing parent) can deal with the issues he inevitably must confront is one in which he gets help from appropriate professionals and is free from potentially-harmful religious teachings.

Full essay below the jump.

More After The Jump -->

Top Ten Worst Bible Stories Rebutted And Re-Argued!

A commenter, Ennis, has taken the time to respond to my post from a few weeks ago about the top ten worst Bible stories with some extensive comments on his blog.  Ennis is clearly smart, articulate, and intellectually committed to tackling the issues I raise here on their merits.  I have left a few comments on his blog (here and here), and I invite all my Readers to visit him and chime in there as well as here if they like. Our dialogue is entirely on the meritsand I am as pleased as ever at having a thoughtful "sparring partner."

Green Christmas

Merry Christmas to my Christian readers!  Today, I give you a Green Christmas.

We begin by debunking some ecological myths.  Well, sort of. 

Then, I'll point you to an interesting set of thoughts about global warming as an ethical and policy issue given that the science is simply too complicated for us to understand.

Top Ten Worst Bible Stories

It’s time for Bible stories. And they’re awful. In fact, they’re so bad I feel compelled to put them below a jump so that squeamish Readers can avoid them. Disclaimers first, and then the blood.  So you can skip the post if you know you're going to be offended.  But I hope you do read it.

More After The Jump -->

Squib on KSM

A nicely-thought out piece on trying terrorists -- the emphasis should be on due process and justice, and those are concerns that do not change based on the identity of the defendant.

Amateur Hour

Thank you very much, Attorney General Eric Holder, for mooting all of my high-falutin' Constitutional ideals.  I've gone to some length here and elsewhere to argue that it is very important to give even a dirtsack like Khalid Sheik Mohammed due process -- a meaningful trial, with evidence and cross-examination and a neutral finder of fact and all the other incidents of due process.

A trial in which the practical result is pre-determined, however, is not consistent with due process, and such a proceeding does not adhere to our ideals.  Which is why Attorney General Holder should not have said what he did today to the Senate Judiciary Committee:

SEN. GRAHAM:  [What happens] if, by some one in a million fluke, one of the defendants were acquitted?

AG HOLDER:  [Congress has already barred any Guantánamo detainees from being released inside the United States.  We would transfer them to the detention facility at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan.] I certainly think that under the regime that we are contemplating, the potential for detaining people under the laws of war, we would retain that ability

SEN. GRAHAM:  So in the Sheikh Mohammed case, we've never going to let him go if something happened wrong in the federal court.

SEN. CRONYN:  What if a federal judge orders the Department of Justice to release Khalid Sheikh Mohammed?  Will you defy that order?

AG HOLDER:  We have taken the view that the judiciary does not have the ability necessarily to certainly require us to, with people who are held overseas, to release them.  It's hard for me to imagine a set of circumstances, given the other things that we could do with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed” that would result in him being freed.  Under the regime we are contemplating … the ability to detain under laws of war, we would retain that ability.

Eeee-diot!  I stick my neck out on a limb to say, "Hey, a trial is the right thing to do, it's very important to be true to our national ideals even when the stakes are this high," and then I get told that the result is pre-determined?  Either he's guilty or he's not.  If he's not, then what other charges are there to levy against him?  I'm told there are lots.  If there aren't, and there is a reasonable doubt of his innocence, then why in the hell are we holding him at all?

What Holder testified about fits well into the idea of calling him a prisoner of war.  It's a non-frivolous argument that this is what KSM really is.  After all, as one of my interlocutors elsewhere insists, KSM could readily be considered a "non-citizen enemy combatant [] captured on foreign soil [who is therefore not entitled to] substantially the same procedural protections enjoyed by U.S. citizens on American soil."  That sounds a lot like a prisoner of war to me -- insisting that he have to wear a standardized uniform in order to earn that status is putting form over substance there.  If he was literally captured on a battlefield, his clothing is insignificant.  And I'd agree that a POW is not entitled to criminal due process, because a POW is not considered a criminal at all.  Rather, a POW is held until hostilities are over, during which time we treat him humanely, and after which time we let him go.  How do we know when are hostilities over against a non-state adversary?  Pretty much the same way we determined that hostilities were underway.

Now, I think that if we had made a decisive move to classify him as a prisoner of war shortly after he was captured, we'd be on strong moral and legal ground there.  But we didn't do that' we called him an "enemy combatant" despite the fact that at the time, there was no such legal classification, and now it's nearly eight years since we captured the guy and he's been totally and completely in our power ever since.  To call him a "combatant" now strains credulity in my mind, and to call Guantanamo Bay "foreign soil" is nearly as much of a stretch.  The Cubans sure as hell don't control Gitmo -- we do.

But if he's a criminal, then he's a criminal.  That means we arraign him, get him a lawyer, put on our evidence, and hold a trial before a neutral finder of fact.  For my part, I think that's the way to go; the evidence says that he's a criminal and a murderer, and he should be treated as such.  I have great confidence that the evidence against KSM is overwhelming and a guilty verdict is the only result that can be reasonably foreseen.

There is no intermediate classification between POW and accused criminal known to our legal system.  He's one or the other.  He's either a military problem or a criminal justice problem.  Not both.  This whole "enemy combatant" label is and has always been something of a ruse, an effort to dodge dealing with the law as it is written.  An "enemy combatant" has the right to be shot on the battlefield by a U.S. soldier, and that's about it.  Once that person is captured and brought under our physical power, he stops being a "combatant" because he is no longer fighting anyone.  He is either a criminal or a prisoner of war.

I've said before and I say it again -- treat a criminal like a criminal.  Which means using due process; our own ideals require nothing less.  What if he's actually quite insane and delusional and really isn't the 9/11 mastermind?  If by some strange circumstance a jury finds that is a reasonable possibility, then we should let him go, because those are our rules.

But we aren't giving him due process if the effective result of the trial has already been determined. 

Now, there are those who will join Senators Graham and Cronyn in saying that if there is a risk that his dude walks free, that is an unacceptable risk.  I frankly disagree.

Recall what I said a few days ago about our susceptibility to terrorist attacks in the future.  We will only be attacked if the political winds shift such that someone can realize an advantage by attacking us.  Al-Qaeda attacked us in 2001 so that we could be used as an opposing force against which a new Caliphate could be organized.  That failed.  So why attack us again?  What gain do the bad guys get -- another shot at the Caliphate?

Recall also that it's not exactly difficult to get weapons on board airplanes if you really want to, that it wouldn't be that difficult to get something really dangerous smuggled into the country if you wanted to, that anyone who is clever and determined will be able to pull off some kind of asymmetric attack on innocent civilians here.  Ask anyone who lives in Oklahoma City -- all it takes is a U-Haul van and some fertilizer and you've got yourself a terrorist incident.  KSM is not and never was the only clever person in al-Qaeda.  If they want to attack us, they can.  They haven't, so it seems logical to conclude that they do not perceive any advantage ot themselves in doing so.

Recall also that Osama bin Laden and his creepy Egyptian sidekick have been at large since 2001 despite the concentrated and overwhelming efforts of the U.S. military to root them out, but somehow they haven't been able to harm us from their luxurious lodgings in some of the loveliest caves in the Hindu Kush.  If they hate us and want to destroy us so much, why haven't they done anything about it?  KSM was the #3 guy, and since then being the #3 guy in al-Qaeda is a little bit like getting issued a red uniform about the USS Enterprise.  And, hey, if KSM does return to the battlefield, maybe this time he'll get the bullet in his brain during battle that would so neatly solve all of these problems.

So if we're going to have a trial, it needs to be a trial that has meaning.  We get no advantage to ourselves in having a meaningless trial; such a thing only obscures the fact that we denied due process to someone accused of a crime and instead put on a show trial.

I'm tired right now because I've let myself get angry about this and stay up too late at night. But it seems to me that the right testimony at the hearing should have been:

HYPOTHETICAL SMARTER-THAN-REAL-LIFE AG HOLDER:  Senator, we do not consider the possibility of KSM's acquittal to be sufficiently within the realm of probability to need to prepare any significant contingency plan for that event.  The evidence against him is overwhelming.  There are no admissibility problems with the bulk of the evidence.  The defense can be anticipate to make a number of procedural objections but these are well within our abilities to handle.  I can confidently tell you that KSM will be convicted.  You might as well ask what I would do if the sun rises in the north tomorrow as what would happen if he is acquitted, because it's just plain not going to happen.

But that's not what the Attorney General said.  Instead, what he said amounted to, "Well, we made a big show of talking all about how he was going to get due process and we were going to be true the Constitution even for our worst enemy.  But the result is as pre-determined as one of Stalin's show trials."  Holy crap on a stick.  If the trial doesn't mean anything to the defendant -- if his freedom isn't really at stake -- then he's not being tried at all.  He's being forced to participate in a farce. A child can understand that. A farce of a legal proceeding is debatably worse than no legal proceeding at all. It's certainly more dangerous.

In the field of respect for the Constitution, Obama and his people have now well and truly proven themselves to be better now than Bush and his people used to be.  These guys aren't interested in justice or principles or honesty or good government or even really doing anything any different at all.  They're interested in scoring political points for themselves, and to them, the Constitution is simply an obstacle to realizing that goal.

This ought to be unacceptable to Americans of all political stripes.