Unimportant Public Affairs

Apparently, we’ve run out of meaningful things to ask the Presidential candidates. It’s just not really a high priority for the President of the United States to know how many counties there are in Massachusetts, even if the candidate is from there. I might have been more interested in Governor Romney’s answer to the question “Is the surge working?” but different voters have different kinds of issues they care about.

And in New York City, apparently the East River smells good, there hasn’t been a murder in weeks, no one is jumping subway turnstiles, housing has become affordable and of high quality, and graffiti has subsided. We can know this because having solved all of these other problems, the New York City Council is trying to ban use of the words “bitch” and “ho” when used as pejorative phrases for women, which is sure to degrade the quality of hip hop coming outta da NYC, yo.

It’s all about priorities, I guess.

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Eat Dessert First

So I’m driving north on I-5 to get back to the Antelope Valley after my judging gig in Santa Clarita. It’s four lanes of traffic and the right two are filled with lines of trucks. I see one of them merging into the #2 lane (the one closest to the center divider is #1, the one to its right is #2, and so on) and I’m irritated because the trucks are supposed to stay in the right two lanes. I shift into the #1 lane to get out of the truck’s way.

That’s when I see why the guy changed lanes, and so quickly. A wheel, with a tire still on it, shoots out from the front of the truck, and veers diagonally into my lane. It’s bouncing up and down, and going in the same direction as traffic, faster than my car. Somehow, it must have come off a car or some other vehicle that was disabled; I couldn’t see what was going on since it was behind all the trucks. But there’s this wheel bouncing across four lanes of 75-mile-an-hour traffic.

I slow down to let it pass in front of me, which it does. It bounces off the center divider and back into my lane, back into the #2 lane, and then rolls for a few seconds, and then back into my lane again. By now, I’ve had to slow down quickly three times, and nearly come to a stop until the wheel’s momentum starts to decrease and it veers back to the right. Then I punch the gas and get ahead of the wheel. By then, plenty of other vehicles have caught up with me – and they don’t know what’s been going on, all they know is some idiot is doing thirty in the fast lane on I-5, so they pass me on the right.

Only after these cars zoom past me on the right do I start to realize just how extraordinarily dangerous that situation was. The whole thing took maybe twelve, fifteen seconds to play out. But all it really takes is a moment of inattention, a moment of ignoring what other vehicles on the road are up to, and that’s it, dude. Lights out. Wife has to ask about bereavement leave. When I realized how close that tire had come to me, three times, each time faster than sixty miles an hour, I got the shakes a little bit. I recovered, I was able to keep on driving, but it wasn’t until after the fact that I really understood just what a close call it was.

And there’s absolutely no way to predict that sort of thing. Take an extra two minutes to answer an e-mail and maybe you’re on the I-35 W bridge when it goes down. Maybe you don’t feel like flossing today. Will the extra three minutes you save put you past, in, or not yet at the intersection when the school bus blows the stop sign? What exactly is the risk of latent epilepsy resulting in a grand mal seizure while driving? Very, very low, I know, but greater than zero. And there isn’t a damn thing you can do about it if it happens.

The most common phrase picked up at the end of voice recordings on the "black boxes" recovered from crashed airplanes is "Oh, shit." That phrase may well be one of the most common sets of "last words" spoken by humans.

I realize all you can do in life is your best, take a reasonable amount of care and not expose yourself to insane risks – but at some point, statistically, that tire is going to come out from traffic at you, too. Today I got lucky and I was paying attention, so I avoided it. But at almost any moment, any of us could be destroyed by the uncaring machinations of chance in a complex cosmos. When you really understand what that means, unless you’re criminally insane, you’ll get the shakes worse than I got them on the freeway this afternoon.

First Judicial Act

Maybe one day I’ll be a full-fledged judge, maybe not.  But nothing will ever change the fact that my first act as a judicial officer was to sign a warrant for some guy’s arrest.  At a judgment debtor examination, the debtor didn’t show up, so I signed in the folder and said in open court that I was approving the bench warrant.

Here Come De Judge

...And that title will be the last time I go to the "Laugh-In" well of jokes. Younger Readers likely won't get the reference at all.

I'm excited to finally have my first pro tem opportunity today. It came at an inconvenient time; I had to stay up late last night getting some things written that I otherwise would have done this afternoon. I also have a presentation to prepare for tomorrow morning (in 24 hours I'll be before an audience, needing to look well-groomed, intelligent, and confident). And Friday morning I'll be on an airplane.

I got some good plans put in place yesterday. Unfortunately, tours of the Denver mint are booked up for months in advance. I can't think of anything else to do in Denver that's particularly distinctive to the city, although the guidebooks and online posts all mention something about a very large blue fiberglass bear. Strange. But, I got us a fabulous bed and breakfast and dinner reservations at CIA for the Napa Valley segment of our trip. I'm really looking forward to dinner at CIA next week.

And, tomorrow night I'm the master of ceremonies at the Toastmasters meeting. (Confusingly, the master of ceremonies is called the Toastmaster, but each individual member is also called a Toastmaster.) The Wife roped me in to joining but I figured if I did join I might as well do something with it. There is already some politics going on with someone who doesn't like the time limits I've imposed on him. I've laid the groundwork as much as I can and now my challenge will be to find a way to gracefully keep things moving along. I suspect I know a few people who can give me advice.

So it's a lot on my mind and a lot of stress right before vacation. But for now, I need to finish my presentation (and a little discovery) and get down to Santa Clarita to meet with the courtroom staff before I take the bench for the afternoon. Sadly, I'm not allowed to discuss any pending cases in any fashion, but I will be able to report on some other aspects of the experience later.

Can We Quit Talking About Barry Bonds Now?

He finally hit #756. The record is his, all his. Yes, he took steroids (although I doubt he'll ever admit it). But he still hit 756 dingers, more than anyone else ever has. In a few years after he retires, we'll forget all about the controversy and just look back on a long, statistically impressive career of a vaguely unlikeable yet oddly charismatic power hitter. (This from a fan of the Dodgers, who are the Giants' arch-rivals.)

Hank Aaron had prepared a video recording congratulating Bonds for his achievement -- he wasn't there, but then again, you couldn't keep on dragging the guy to game after game forever. Classy guy, that Aaron; he said he'd move over to make room for Barry and his family in the record book. Some fans have not been so classy, but then again I think Barry is probably used to getting some pretty cruel heckling. I was at a Dodgers game once (with my buddy who is a Giants fan) when a guy shouted at him, "You couldn't hit your wife with that bat!" He started to turn around in reaction to that, but stopped after an instant and kept his cool.

No one would have heckled Hank Aaron like that. He got a different kind of abuse during his playing days. My grandparents once told me a story about him. Back when he started playing for the Milwaukee Braves, he bought a house about a block away from my grandfather's, not far from County Stadium. My grandfather moved. I asked why, and was appalled to learn the answer. Seeing my reaction, my grandfather explained that when a black man moved in to a neighborhood, property values dropped quickly and he was really trying to preserve the value of the home. I protested that this was Hank Aaron, for crying out loud, and being his neighbor would have made the house more valuable, not less. My grandfather didn't explain it any further; apparently I was too young to really understand these kinds of things. But I understood it just fine. It would have been very cool to have had Hank Aaron for a neighbor.

Would I want Barry Bonds for a neighbor today? Damn straight I would. That would mean I would have attained sufficient wealth to become a member of the idle leisure class. So unless I win the lotto, it's just not an option. Back in the day, a player like Aaron could aspire to live in a nice house in a nice neighborhood and then be dismayed at the white flight.

But more to the point, the money that's in baseball today is immense compared to what was going on in the 40's and 50's, even adjusting for inflation. As late as the mid-1960's, Sandy Koufax held out for a million dollars to be paid over six years, and that was thought by many sports fans to be extortionate even for a player of Koufax's caliber (this was after his third no-hitter). These days, if you have an OBP of more than .250, your clutch fielding error rate is not obviously worse than Bill Buckner's, and you don't drool on yourself during the seven or eight interviews the press gives you a year, that's a million bucks for 162 games -- and if you play for the Royals or the D-Rays, you just might be considered a squad standout.

And, I'm looking forward to Friday night's game at Coors Field. The Cubbies will be in Colorado. It ought to be fun. Zambrano will pitch tomorrow, so I won't see him, and Soriano is injured. But hey, Matt Holiday and Todd Helton are fun enough players. Helton might not be so much of a wild card if he played at sea level all the time, but he doesn't, so I'll enjoy it.

Chupacabra

A woman in Texas insists that she has the corpse of a chupacabra -- an animal that allegedly lives off of the blood of livestock. Some more skeptical animal experts suggest that she may have a dead fox, with an advanced case of mange. Like Fox News, I just report. You decide.

Two breakthroughs

First, I figured out how to post from my cell phone.  (See post below.)  Second, I finally got called up as a temporary judge!  My first assignment is tomorrow afternoon in Santa Clarita.  That means I need to really crank out a lot of work this afternoon and tomorrow morning so I can have everything done by noon tomorrow.  But I can do it and this ought to be fun.

This is a test post

This is a test post sent from my cell phone. If this works, blogging from the road will be possible if not easy.

Bad Compromise, Bad Law

At least temporarily, the President is getting his way with domestic wiretapping after all. An astonishingly passive Congress passed a "temporary" revision to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and gave the power to authorize monitoring of communications between the U.S. and other countries in the hands of the Director of National Intelligence and the Attorney General, rather than with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The fact that the law was proposed and passed just before Congress' summer recess suggests some clever legislative maneuvering by the advocates of the bill -- and some astonishing spinelessness by the rest of Congress, who seem to value their vacations and fund-raising times more than they do the Constitution they are sworn to uphold and protect.

According to the linked CNN article, civil liberties advocates claim this represents a "vast expansion of government power." That's not true. The government had the power to monitor such communications before this change in the law. What's changed is who in the government got to make the decision -- that authority has moved from the judicial branch to the executive branch. That's the basis for my objection to this "temporary" bill.

The "temporary" bill divides communications into three categories: 1. U.S. citizen to U.S. citizen, which requires (as it always did) a search warrant. 2. U.S. citizen to foreign citizen, which now requires DNI/AG approval if the "target" of the search is the foreign national, and which requires a judicial warrant if the "target" of the search is the U.S. citizen. 3. Foreign to foreign communications, which may be monitored without prior review by anyone (as they always did; we are not in the business of safeguarding the civil liberties of other nations and their citizens). It's the middle class -- U.S. to foreign communications -- that is really changed by this new law.

I can see how this would seem a reasonable compromise to politicians, but that's only from the point of view of reaching a settlement of a disputed issue given the starting points of the parties to the dispute. The problem is that the position of one of the parties was unreasonable to begin with -- namely, the administration's position that getting a warrant to monitor a communication to which a citizen is party was unreasonable and cumbersome under the then-extant wording of FISA. The government had the ability to immediately monitor and then apply for a warrant up to 72 hours afterwards, and there were (and still are) lawyers on staff whose job consists solely of applying for those warrants. What's more, the U.S. citizen has a reasonable expectation of privacy during those communications, and that citizen's expectations were not made part of this compromise. This doesn't strike me as a good compromise and it certainly doesn't strike me as a good law.

As I've expounded on before, the Constitution sets up a separation of powers for this sort of thing for a very good reason -- we distrust, and rightly so, a concentration of power in the hands of any single branch of government and particularly in the hands of a few individuals. This "temporary" measure gives the executive branch sole unchecked and unmonitored discretion to abrogate an individual U.S. citizen's entirely reasonable expectations of privacy in communications with friends and relatives abroad. Whether "temporary" or not, this is a violation of your Constitutional rights, and you should be upset about it.

I put the word "temporary" in quotes because, in theory, this is only a four-month stopgap to permit continued intelligence-gathering after a sunset provision in the prior version of FISA had expired. However, these kinds of "temporary" measures have a way of becoming "interim" and then "experimental" or "feasibility-study", and then eventually become permanent. When the republic does not come to a screeching, smoke-rising-from-the-tires halt because of this new law within four months, the President and his men will be able to say, "See, this wasn't such a big threat to civil liberties after all," and bypass the more accurate argument that this represents an erosion rather than a sudden destruction of the guarantees of our freedom.

As I have found necessary to do in the past, I clarify my position: I don't object to the fact of the monitoring. If there is reason to believe that someone is up to no good, I want, expect, and demand that the government to use all of its considerable powers to learn more and protect the country and the people in it (including me). I want the government to wiretap the bad guys and I want the government to act on information it learns during such wiretaps. A key phrase that some overlook, though: If there is reason to believe that this is a bad guy. I'm not a bad guy and there is no reason whatsoever to think that I am. Therefore, the government has no business reading my e-mails or listening to my phone calls.

But at this point, all we can do is hope that some members of Congress are able to somehow locate and re-insert their vertebrae in the next 120 days and start doing their jobs.

Beauchamp Recants

And it's about time. Conservative bloggers have been in the forefront of criticizing this guy and are positively gleeful at this development -- but then again, this should not be a cause for partisan rejoicing, it should be a reason for Americans in general to breathe a sigh of relief.

The men and women who serve in our military are an honorable and exceptional bunch of folks, almost by definition. Not all of them are heroes, not all of them are free from personal problems, and not all of them are warm and cuddly and full of empathy. But all of them are worthy of our respect for one reason: they have sacrificed their own freedom so that the rest of us can have ours. And all of them have gone through a relatively selective screening process -- even in a time when the military confronts some sharp personnel needs, you still can't just walk in to a recruiting office and expect to be given a uniform and three squares a day. Criminals and blithering idiots need not apply.

If Beauchamp's stories had been true, that would suggest that there was a systemic degradation in the moral fiber of the military, a dramatic decrease in the quality of people wearing the uniform. But they aren't true, and now Private Beauchamp has admitted that he lied. My strong suspicion is that this affair is not over for the unfortunate Private Beauchamp, and that he will face "conduct unbecoming" charges for having falsely cast the military specifically, and the United States generally, into disrepute.

We have enough problems to deal with, both within the military, within our society, and as part of the global stage upon which we collectively act, without having to deal with these sorts of lies. What was this guy thinking?

Correction

I wrote before about Jeri Thompson, Presidential non-candidate Fred Thompson’s smoking-hot wife and the subject of the “ogling” non-controversy.  Now, it turns out I got a detail wrong (although it also turns out I’m in plenty of good company): apparently, Jeri Thompson is not a lawyer.  She worked at a law firm, but in the capacity of a PR consultant, the same as when she worked for Burson Marsteller (one of the largest PR houses in the country).  She may be very smart and Thompson and his non-campaign staff insist that she’s more than a trophy wife, but she isn’t licensed to practice law.

Harry Potter the Humanist

A great assessment of the humanist virtues of the Harry Potter books, courtesy of the Misanthropic Bastard, and by way of the Uncredible Hallq.

Packing Plans

Next week we're leaving for seven days out of town -- to visit our friends from Tennessee who have moved to San Francisco, and to go to our other friends' wedding in Colorado.

As I start to contemplate the realities of the trip, I'm realizing that we'll have to make some concessions for our travel. Carry-on luggage is a thing of the past, so there's no particular reason to not take stuff. But I still prefer to travel light. There's going to be a wedding, so that means looking nice for at least one day. And we'll be spending some time in San Francisco, so that means at least one outfit that is reasonably warm. Warm clothing and dressy clothing are bulky.

Shoes are particularly annoying. They take up a lot of space in a suitcase. Normally, I'd prefer to have a single pair of shoes and wear them all the time. But for this trip, I need good shoes to wear to the wedding and I also need very comfortable shoes for San Francisco and all the walking up and down hills that a trip there implies. So that's at least one pair of shoes I have to pack.

With no online class to teach, I could leave the computer at home. But chances are that no, that won't happen. Both The Wife and I will want to check our e-mail, handle pictures, blog, and otherwise use the thing. And I may need to tap in to the office once or twice, vacation or no.

We still need to make lodging arrangements for a night in the wine country, which is a pleasant prospect, but that's not nailed down yet. Much of everything else is -- we found a good kennel for the critters, which charges a reasonable rate and will do an "exit groom" so they come home clean and shaven. That's right, shaven -- we'll have them take off lots of hair from the animals. We've both been sneezing up a storm with all the shedding the animals have been doing, thanks to the height-of-summer high temperatures one gets here in the desert. So the fur comes off and next year, we'll shave them again in April.

For now, I'm looking forward to a week off work. I haven't taken any vacation for a year, and some time away every now and then is important. After a few intense weeks, I've got things to a point where that's a possibility. Spending some time away from work of any sort and with my wife and old friends will be a very good thing. And we'll have a chance to explore Colorado, somewhere new for both of us, and I'll make good on my promise to show my wife San Francisco at last. Two days of urban tourism there should be enough, I would think.

Jason Does Manhattan

The Wife and I went to see The Bourne Ultimatum this weekend. Good movie. Tense. Fun. Realistic. Fast-paced. Smart.

Okay, not realistic so much as occasionally cartoony, but yes, it's a fun ride. The cool thing about all three Bourne movies has been the willingness to show what it's really like in Europe -- there's some cool things and some not-so-cool things, and some parts of Europe really suck. We're still talking about how bleak Moscow looked in The Bourne Supremacy.

The Wife was quite impressed with Matt Damon. He's in great shape and was, apparently, quite easy on the eye. There are some really, really good fight scenes and an amazingly intense, if not quite believable, car chase.

Go see it already. You'll have a good time.

Religion and Child Custody Disputes

One of my great intellectual heroes has written about a disturbing phenomenon: courts using the religious activities of a parent as a factor in deciding child custody disputes.  Churchgoing parents are, in many states, more likely to be awarded custody because they go to church than less-observant parents.  This is an easy decision to me: whether one goes to church, or not, is a constitutionally-protected liberty, and so the government must be neutral to it.  A court cannot take into account whether a parent is religious or not when balancing the many factors that equate into a “best interests of the child” decision regarding custody. 

 

If you don’t believe me, consider a hypothetical court opinion that Prof. Volokh wrote today for discussion purposes:

One factor we count in favor of awarding custody to the father is that mother is a devout Christian, who takes the view that sex before marriage is immoral, that homosexuality is immoral, and that people who don’t accept her so-called Savior are going to end up eternally damned. Moreover, mother not only practices this in private, but expresses her views in ways that the child will surely learn about, for instance by going to Christian churches in public places, and discussing her religion online where she has two to four websites of so-called “blogs.” And we have reason to think that as the child gets older, mother will actually try to teach these views to the child.

In our view, such teachings are distinctly against the child’s best interests. We believe that they may cause unnecessary psychological suffering during adolescence, especially if the child finds himself sexually interested in the same sex. The fear of eternal damnation -- both for the child and for the child’s love ones -- strikes us as especially likely to cause needless suffering, especially since it seems to be entirely lacking in any factual evidence.

Finally, we would be remiss in ignoring that the mother’s views are decidedly out of step with the views of the diverse yet oddly ideologically homogeneous City and County in which we live. If the child adopts such views, the child may find himself having a hard time interacting in productive and nondiscriminatory ways with his neighbors, whether they are gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender, heterosexual but engaged in premarital sex, non-Christian, or just simply tolerant and open-minded. It is therefore clear to us that it is, all things being equal (or even nearly equal), far better for the child to be raised by the agnostic father than by the Christian mother.

Are you upset by this?  You should be.  Prof. Volokh cobbled the above from a series of actual court opinions awarding custody to Christian parents against their pagan or non-religious ex-spouses, turning it around to rule against the Christian to more dramatically illustrate the point.  At minimum, this underlines the reason why it is so objectionable to equate religion with morality, and more particularly of equating religious observance with moral behavior.

Book Review: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is a fitting and enjoyable, if underwhelming, conclusion to the exciting series of books.  Deathly Hallows was an enjoyable read, and a lot of fun.  But I have three problems with it now that I’m done; overall, I’d give it a “B” grade – above average but not excellent.  Some spoilers follow these thoughts.

 

First, it drags.  Particularly in its first act, the book’s characters just don’t seem to do very much after the first few chapters.  It’s not so much that they spend a lot of time sitting around talking about their feelings – they just plain sit around.  Also, the body count is not as high as I had initially thought; for all of there being a war going on between the wizards, there isn’t that much death depicted.  The book is not about making sacrifices to achieve defeat over evil; at best, it’s about patience in the face of overwhelming odds and at worst, it’s about patience in the mind of the reader to hope that Rowling will eventually get back to writing about some action.

 

Second, the climax of the book has a bizarre and off-balance interlude.  I would much rather that the author had found a way to realize her narrative goals for that chapter in a different way than she did and I’m sure I could have thought of at least five ways that could have been done.  Imagine if, in the big final scene of Return of the Jedi, when Luke and Darth Vader and the Emperor are all dueling and fighting, there was a three-minute flashback to a quiet moment from Luke’s training with Obi-Wan.  Similarly, the epilogue has no narrative purpose at all and could have been omitted entirely.

 

Third, it lacks the depth of the previous stories.  The story is a series of “find-the-dingus” mini-adventures rather than a single narrative, which will be no surprise to those who recall how the sixth book ended.  There isn’t a lot of exploration of Big Ideas along the way.  Previous Harry Potter books have addressed issues of morality, bravery, friendship, equality, and grief.  (And a healthy distrust of the potentially oppressive and abusive power of government.)  This book flirts with the ideas of acceptance and forgiveness, but only in a very roundabout sort of way.

 

Don’t get me wrong, there are some moments of genuine excitement, several scenes of fantastic fun and adventure, when the book demands attention and is a gripping page-turner.  The bad guys are really bad, Harry and his friends show what they are really made of and make you proud, and the story does build to a climactic finale that fans have been hoping for at the Battle of Hogwarts.

 

The movie that results from the book will be fun and exciting.  I think that the producers would be well-advised to film Harry Potter Six and Harry Potter Seven at the same time, before the actors playing the heroes grow too old to look like teenagers; Daniel Radcliffe, who plays Harry, is already 18 years old and it seems to take the producers about two years to crank one of these movies out.  I’m just saying.

 

But the senses of wide-eyed joy, wry humor, and confrontation of bigger narrative issues are, if not completely absent, nevertheless present in deficient quantities. The book feels very much like it was written because of the overpowering writer’s impulse sometimes called “fulfillment of contractual obligation” but which surely had even greater pressure behind it because of the unprecedented global popularity of the books. 

 

I’m sure lots of writers have books like this.  The muse sings when she chooses to, and she doesn’t care when the publisher’s deadlines are approaching.  The obviously-talented J.K. Rowling was surely under immense pressure to write this book, and she turned in journeyman work despite it.  It’s good, but it’s not the magnum opus you were hoping to read.

Betting Against America

James Clyburn of South Carolina is the Democrats’ third-in-charge in the House of Representatives – his job is “Whip,” meaning that it’s up to him to distribute the “party line” on particular issues that come up to vote and to get as many Democrats as possible to adhere to the party’s position on an issue.  He worries, though, that if the report due in just over a month from the theater commander in Iraq is positive in tone and provides demonstrable proof that the surge in U.S. troops in Iraq is actually doing some good, this will split a significant number of Democrats from the party’s majority and block efforts to establish a solid timetable for the withdrawal of those troops. 

 

In an unfortunate bit of wording, Congressman Clyburn said to the Washington Post that a positive report from General Patraeus “… would be a problem for us.”  This phrasing sure makes the Democrats look like they’re betting on America to lose.  I sincerely hope that most Democrats don’t actually feel that way – but if the evidence demonstrates that “the surge” really is working, how will advocates of an immediate withdrawal of troops react? 

 

Will the most strident “pull-out-now” advocates say (as I am preparing myself to do) that their initial misgivings about this strategy were not well-founded and that indeed, things are getting better over there?  An admission of being wrong in the past is not good for politics, and a lot of politicians have painted themselves into a corner.  I’d hate to think that they are more concerned about saving face than they are about getting something good out of this war at last.  If you’re going to say “I hope the surge works but I don’t think it will,” that’s fine – as long as, if it does turn out other than you expected, you be honest enough to say so.

 

You can still argue for a timed drawdown even if we’re having success.  Yes, the “we’re bound to fail” argument falls by the wayside, but the “we have other theaters of operation that need attention” argument does not.  Neither does “it’s time for the Iraqis to start doing the job themselves.”  And most importantly, you don’t lose the ability to look a soldier in the eye and say, with sincerity, “Good job.”  Congressman Clyburn, by publicly regretting success, has come close to that point.

Ethics in Government

New media outlets are particularly good at putting facts together and reveal a larger picture.  Consider this example:  “One day after the feds rummaged through his property on a corruption probe, [U.S. Senator Ted Stevens] threatened to try to kill an ethics reform package.”

Agnosticism and Empiricism

I’m often challenged in my atheism – invariably by very religious types, often by a subset of religious types, who have bought in to the religious argument that “there is no such thing as an atheist.”*  They ask me to instead describe myself as an “agnostic,” defining that term as “One who does not know whether God exists or not.”  I typically resist this request, or at minimum, I demur to it.

 

An “atheist” is one who lacks a belief in the supernatural.  If confronted with actual evidence of God’s existence, the typical atheist would change that belief; that so few atheists do so is testament to the obscurity of such evidence (and those atheists who do adopt theological beliefs seem to do so based on emotional reasons rather than evidentiary ones).  It does not mean “one who affirmatively proposes the non-existence of God.”  That would be what humanists call “strong atheism.”  “Weak atheism” is the proposition that there is no evidence for the existence of God or alternatively that God’s existence has not been established and therefore cannot be presumed, which is different than saying “God does not exist.”

 

An “agnostic” is one who maintains that the existence of God cannot be known.  There is no possibility that evidence of God, whatever that might be, can be located which would satisfy the agnostic.  Alternatively (and not necessarily inconsistently), the agnostic thinks the question of God’s existence is not subject to objective analysis in the first place.  Thus, one could be an “agnostic atheist,” contending that there is no evidence of God’s existence, and there cannot be any such evidence, either.

 

By this definition, I am not an “agnostic atheist.”  I suspect that the existence of God could, at least theoretically, be determined.  While I’ve not taken the time to theoretically consider an experiment to test the hypothesis, it would necessarily include evidence of something that could not happen in nature; if it could happen in nature, there would be a natural explanation for it.  For instance, an omnipotent God could draw a circle (in two-dimensional space) whose circumference was measurably equal to its diameter.  I have yet to see such evidence and I do not see any reason to presume that in the absence of such evidence, I should assume the proposition is correct anyway.  (This includes Pascal’s fallacious and intellectually dishonest Wager.)

 

Notably, theists never seem able to identify any circumstance or fact in which God’s existence could be disproved to them.  That’s “faith” – belief in the truth of a proposition regardless of the state of the available evidence for or against that proposition.  It is this trait which I lack; I cannot maintain the belief in God in the absence of supporting evidence.  If you cannot come up with such a theoretical standard of proof, it may be that your faith is such that you are an “agnostic theist” – for you, there is not even the theoretical possibility that evidence exists which would convince you to modify your faith; entertaining the possibility of the non-existence of God is a meaningless exercise for you.

 

Variants of the ontological argument and the cosmological argument have failed to convince me, theistic Readers, so you need not propose them here; also, these are philosophical arguments rather than standards of proof.  What I’m interested in is what kind of empirical evidence would persuade you to give up your belief in God’s existence, as I have suggested above could compel me to do the same with respect to my own atheism.

 

* Another oft-repeated bromide is “there are no atheists in foxholes.”  An attorney with whom I work is a Vietnam veteran, and he assures me that during a time he was seeking cover from intense enemy fire, there was at least one atheist in his foxhole.  (There was one other guy in there with him.)  More on atheists in combat soon – a recent controversy about the death of CPL Pat Tillman has me pissed off enough that I want to calm down somewhat before writing about it.