With the race for the Oval Office in full swing it becomes ever more difficult to maintain a sense of balance and a sliver of sanity under the constant assault of charges, claims, counter-claims and pure bullshit. We were told the last time that the world would come to an end if Obama made it to the White House. He did. It didn't. Now we are being told that the world will come to an end if Obama remains in the White house for another 4 years. Mmmm... Of course the other side tells us that the world will come to an end if Romney wins. Mmmm...
The first step in maintaining, or regaining for that matter, a bit of sanity is to turn off the TV. (A good idea even during off election years. That drivel is flat bad for you.) If one must watch the TV, keep in mind that they make money off conflict - so stirring up strife puts pesos in their pockets. It need not be real conflict either, as evidenced by the barrage of complete bullshit that passes as "Reality TV". A corollary to this, no one in the media wants to see a pole that says Mitt is going to get clobbered come November, or that Obama has taken his best shot and can't get it done. It has to be a close race or else Americans will just go about their lives while the massive egos of the media and political class go un-stroked.
Anything the other guy's team says about the other guy is a lie; flat out, made up, bullshit. Everything is spun. Everything is taken out of context. Both sides are lying to us with complete abandon. (Which, in a rational, moral world, would make them both ineligible for being the POTUS, wouldn't it?) I'm going to pick on the Romney tax return flurry for a moment...
According to Mitt there is nothing of interest in his tax history and the American public already knows everything it needs to know about his personal finances. Which has the other side howling that, if there is nothing of interest, why keep it hidden? As much as I suspect there is a bunch of stuff in there he would not want us to know his accusation is that, should he provide them, the other side will go nuts with false claims and accusations. I suspect he is right. The Democrats will certainly shred his personal finances as all the evidence necessary to prove that Mitt is part of the problem, not part of the solution. (As if the Democrats actually have a solution to a failing capitalist system.)
My guess would be that part of what Mitt doesn't want us to know about his taxes is that he didn't pay any for several years, or at least didn't pay very much given his level of income. But I know that already; though not so much about Mitt personally. What I do know is the corporations and very rich long ago had the tax code written in their favor. Even if Mitt paid ZERO federal taxes for years, he did it completely within the law. (Either that or he needed to spend more money on tax attorneys and money managers.)
How do I know this? According to Forbes.com, in 2010 Exxon, Bank of America, City Bank, and Valero paid ZERO federal income taxes. Ford had a tax rate of less than 10%. This is public knowledge; no one is in jail, no one is accused of breaking any laws, no one even seems the list bit embarrassed by this corporate chicanery. This is how the people who wrote the tax code want it to be, and we Americans must be fine with that because we keep re-electing these very same people to office.
What is not happening in the campaign is a debate about how and why the tax code is the way that it is. Why would that be? Could it be that both parties want it this way? Does anyone really think that the rich Democrats that are in office want to pay any more taxes than do their rich Republican counterparts?
So we know that anything either side says in the campaign is a lie, and we also know that neither side is actually interested in changing very much about who the government serves. But many Americans still think that they need to make some effort at casting an intelligent, informed vote for the person who gets to live at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue; how to do that?
A good start would be by ignoring the campaign, particularly anything that shows up on TV, and really in particular anything that is less than a minute in length. It is surly the highest grade bullshit talented spin masters can produce. Besides, why should I listen to what Mitt Romney says about what Barack Obama said? I can listen to Barack Obama for myself and know what he said. The same for Mitt Romney. There are position papers available and web sights. For example I went to Mitt Romney's web sight and looked up "labor", guess what I find...
"Mitt Romney believes in the right of workers to join a union or to not join a union. To exercise that right freely, workers must have access to all the relevant facts they need to make an informed decision. This means hearing from both the union about the potential benefits and from management about potential costs. This also means being able to act on that decision in the privacy of the ballot booth."
You still have to decide if he is telling the truth about his positions on unions, but this is (at least part of) what he says; not what Mr. Obama says Mitt says about unions. If you are pro-union I don't see how you can have any real heart burn with Mitt's position. People should be free to join a union if it is for their benefit. And to not join if the union is going to cost them more than it is worth. Free disclosure here - I am pro union to the point of thinking the people who actually do the work for a company should actually control how their work is marketed and distributed, and where the profits for that work go - and yes, that probably makes me a socialist.
If you are rabidly anti-union and think Mitt must be as well given his background, history, and party affiliation, then you must think he is lying in order to trick the stupid union types into voting against their own best interests. If so I'm not sure what that makes you - other than a miserable excuse for a human being. And yet I am anti-union in that I know unions are often bastions of coercion, abuse and skimming-off-the-to-top; and no, I don't know what that makes me other than anti-corruption in all its forms.
Just for fun, here is Mr. Obama on Corporations:
Right now, companies get tax breaks for moving jobs and profits overseas. Meanwhile, companies that choose to stay in America get hit with one of the highest tax rates in the world. It makes no sense, and everyone knows it. So let's change it.
If you're a business that wants to outsource jobs, you shouldn't get a tax deduction for doing it. That money should be used to cover moving expenses for companies that decide to bring jobs home.
No American company should be able to avoid paying its fair share of taxes by moving jobs and profits overseas. From now on, every multinational company should have to pay a basic minimum tax.
If you're an American manufacturer, you should get a bigger tax cut. And if you want to relocate in a community that was hit hard when a factory left town, you should get help.
My message is simple. It's time to stop rewarding businesses that ship jobs overseas, and start rewarding companies that create jobs right here in America.
That doesn't sound particularly "anti-business", unless one actually thinks corporations should get tax breaks for shipping jobs overseas. And again, this is what Mr. Obama says about corporations and the tax code, not what Mr. Romney says he says.
The good news is, if one looks for one's self neither one of these guys appears to be the inept fool the other side would like the public to believe.
That bad news is, if one looks for one's self, neither do either of them look to be anything other than money and vote grubbing politicians who lust for nothing but power. And who are also very adept at getting what they want.
Too bad for us.
Still, if we all decided to listen to what the parties are saying, rather than what others tell us the parties are saying, we might strip at least one layer of bullshit off the cover of this election.Not much, but it would be a start.
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
Tuesday, July 24, 2012
Felling the tree ...
A pessimist (which I am regularly accused of being) might suggest that the failings of the United States are astonishing. We will not even provide for our children to go to the movies without being murdered by a mad-man with a 100 round (One-hundred-fucking-rounds!) assault rifle. The NRA was in full throttled defense of such weapons before all the bodies were removed from the theater. The voice of the American People? “Yep, we need these weapons to protect ourselves from the government …
… in a democracy, where we are the government.
Then again, we have elected a government who hates government and then makes sure that the government doesn’t work. Well, that isn’t exactly true. We have elected a government that works for the rich and the elite. (Though that is ultimately untenable, when the riots come and the cities burn, a lot of the rich will be rich no longer.) A democracy who hates its government is a people who hate themselves; which is a pretty good description of America right now. (And is also why the riots are coming and the cities are going to burn. We do so hate ourselves.)
You would think that would puzzle most Americans since they all claim to be good Christians. But it doesn’t work that way. Christians are pretty intolerant with anyone who isn’t a Christian, and they seem to be as intolerant with about half the “other” people who also claim be Christians. It is only Christians who get their knickers in a twist over gay people. It is mostly Christians who demand the world’s biggest military in order to be protected from the un-godly Muslims. (I just love the fact that it is the right-wing American Christians who think that the middle-wing Christian Obama must be a Muslim in Christian drag.) It is white Christians who find immigrants intolerable (though they are all sons and daughters of immigrants themselves). It is the rich Christians who bitch about paying a pittance in taxes when those taxes go to helping poor people. (They don’t mind when the taxes buy weapons.) And, of course, public education is a particular target of the American Christian right; who apparently think that “bible school” and “education” are somehow synonymous.
Which sounds like I really don’t like Christians, but nothing could be further from the truth. There are parts of Christian ideology that I find childish and egotistical, but some of the people I love most in the world are Christians. Once upon a time in America there was a branch of Christianity that was progressive, anti-war, and pro-civil rights for all human beings (as they were all created in the image of god). There was a Christianity that had no fear of learning about the cosmos and our place in it, a Christianity that believed theirs was a God of social justice, of caring for the poor, of educating the uneducated, housing the homeless and clothing the naked. They even found some parts of the Bible that described such a God, and held those parts up as “truth.” To those Christians love was the watchword; a word that meant tolerance, compassion, and justice. If we were that kind of “Christian Nation” we might still be a shining light for the world.
But we’re not.
Apart from our ideological baggage, we are suffering from just horrible decision making and management. The country’s infrastructure is collapsing. Public services are being abandoned. (The Mail Service is going bankrupt? Someone actually imagines you can have a first world society without mail service?) Millions are uninsured, and poverty is spreading at record levels. Poverty? Isn’t capitalism supposed to be raising all the boats? These are not ideological problems, just basic management and leadership. Unfortunately management and leadership are impossible in an atmosphere as poisoned with religion, fundamentalism, and shear bile as is ours. It’s hard to imagine how we go into this political, mutual suicide pact. But we have.
So this is a society that cannot survive … and saying so makes me a pessimist.
Yet I don’t see it that way. A tree grows in the forest; rot invades its very core. The outside looks strong but the inside is hollow, yet it towers over the rest still laying down a shadow of its former glory. As it begins to falter insects take up home and then threaten all the trees in the area. What little fruit that grows is small, shriveled, devoid of nutrients and poor food for the animals and birds. Every puff of breeze brings down limbs that threaten the small, new trees trying to take root and any creature not quick enough to get out of the way. The tree has become a kind of cancer seeping illness into the very ground from whence it grew. Nothing within reach is completely immune from the effects as the tree poisons everything around it.
When a strong wind finally brings the old giant down there is a horrendous crash, animals and birds flee in panic, new growth lying too close to the old giant gets crushed.
But then things get better. What was poison and illness and death is absorbed back into the ground and turned into good soil. Something new grows in place of the old and corrupted, something slightly different and (so evolution teaches us) likely a bit better adapted to the environment. It will be just that little bit stronger and just that little bit healthier for the forest as a whole.
America is rotten in its core. It has sold out to dollars and ego; to the weapons manufacturers and the war mongers. In spite of all the evidence to the contrary we, the American people, still claim to be the best in the world and demand the rest of the world treat us as such. We are a country ruinously out of control, killing ourselves off with the same enthusiasms as the Muslims. A Shite carries a bomb into a Sunni funeral and murders as many as he can. A man walks into a Denver movie theater and murders as many as he can. A sizable portion of each population approves. Not directly of course, but there are no serious demonstrations by either Muslims or gun owners at the carnage carried out by one of their own.
Has the NRA voiced a single concern that Denver killer had access to such firepower? Of course not, their answer is that everyone in the movie theater should have pulled out their own weapon and opened fire. Which is, let us be perfectly clear, utter and absolute insanity. But you know that in today’s America their argument is going to carry the day. The only way that happens is that Americans are utterly and absolutely insane. (If the Christian god that could make us a great nation once again actually existed, His heaven would be off limits to any card carrying member of the NRA. If the Christain god that the NRA worships actually existed, we would be living in an cosmos of unimaginable evil and hope would be unknown to human kind.)
This tree has to fall soon – and that is an optimist talking.
It could be that Americans will find a way to drop the tree in a controlled manner. We might still decide that allowing mad-men access to portable weapons of mass murder is shear stupidity. We could find a way to drive much of the corruption out of our political system in spite of the Supreme Court. The Republican and Democratic parties are not sacred institutions that will last forever. Once upon a time the Republican party was the one that freed the slaves while the Democrats retreated into Jim Crow states. There was a time when the Democrats were actually anit-war. And once upon a time they worked together to build a first world society that reached the moon and tried to insure that capitalism actually did raise all the boats.
We may (it is just barely imaginable) find a god to worship who loves knowledge and progress and justice once again. It might be that we empty the jails of people who have done no real harm and fill them with people who have. (Let the pot smokers out and put the Wall Street managers in.) It isn't out of the question that we remember the Gross National Product as the least important measurement of a healthy society; that celebrity is meaningless, and it is the people who actually do the work who matter. It may be that we reject the idiots who claim that greed is good, and look again to those who know that a people divided against themselves cannot survive. We might even realize that war is an enterprise in which both sides lose while the truly evil among us make a profit.
Such a society would be far different than the one we live in now; it would not be the same tree. Corporate managers would not make 100 times what those on the shop floor do, and pay fewer taxes. We would not care about “big government” or “small government” but rather “good government”. And we would realize that bad people do not a good government make.
We could, but we probably won’t.
Either way, the tree will still fall.
… in a democracy, where we are the government.
Then again, we have elected a government who hates government and then makes sure that the government doesn’t work. Well, that isn’t exactly true. We have elected a government that works for the rich and the elite. (Though that is ultimately untenable, when the riots come and the cities burn, a lot of the rich will be rich no longer.) A democracy who hates its government is a people who hate themselves; which is a pretty good description of America right now. (And is also why the riots are coming and the cities are going to burn. We do so hate ourselves.)
You would think that would puzzle most Americans since they all claim to be good Christians. But it doesn’t work that way. Christians are pretty intolerant with anyone who isn’t a Christian, and they seem to be as intolerant with about half the “other” people who also claim be Christians. It is only Christians who get their knickers in a twist over gay people. It is mostly Christians who demand the world’s biggest military in order to be protected from the un-godly Muslims. (I just love the fact that it is the right-wing American Christians who think that the middle-wing Christian Obama must be a Muslim in Christian drag.) It is white Christians who find immigrants intolerable (though they are all sons and daughters of immigrants themselves). It is the rich Christians who bitch about paying a pittance in taxes when those taxes go to helping poor people. (They don’t mind when the taxes buy weapons.) And, of course, public education is a particular target of the American Christian right; who apparently think that “bible school” and “education” are somehow synonymous.
Which sounds like I really don’t like Christians, but nothing could be further from the truth. There are parts of Christian ideology that I find childish and egotistical, but some of the people I love most in the world are Christians. Once upon a time in America there was a branch of Christianity that was progressive, anti-war, and pro-civil rights for all human beings (as they were all created in the image of god). There was a Christianity that had no fear of learning about the cosmos and our place in it, a Christianity that believed theirs was a God of social justice, of caring for the poor, of educating the uneducated, housing the homeless and clothing the naked. They even found some parts of the Bible that described such a God, and held those parts up as “truth.” To those Christians love was the watchword; a word that meant tolerance, compassion, and justice. If we were that kind of “Christian Nation” we might still be a shining light for the world.
But we’re not.
Apart from our ideological baggage, we are suffering from just horrible decision making and management. The country’s infrastructure is collapsing. Public services are being abandoned. (The Mail Service is going bankrupt? Someone actually imagines you can have a first world society without mail service?) Millions are uninsured, and poverty is spreading at record levels. Poverty? Isn’t capitalism supposed to be raising all the boats? These are not ideological problems, just basic management and leadership. Unfortunately management and leadership are impossible in an atmosphere as poisoned with religion, fundamentalism, and shear bile as is ours. It’s hard to imagine how we go into this political, mutual suicide pact. But we have.
So this is a society that cannot survive … and saying so makes me a pessimist.
Yet I don’t see it that way. A tree grows in the forest; rot invades its very core. The outside looks strong but the inside is hollow, yet it towers over the rest still laying down a shadow of its former glory. As it begins to falter insects take up home and then threaten all the trees in the area. What little fruit that grows is small, shriveled, devoid of nutrients and poor food for the animals and birds. Every puff of breeze brings down limbs that threaten the small, new trees trying to take root and any creature not quick enough to get out of the way. The tree has become a kind of cancer seeping illness into the very ground from whence it grew. Nothing within reach is completely immune from the effects as the tree poisons everything around it.
When a strong wind finally brings the old giant down there is a horrendous crash, animals and birds flee in panic, new growth lying too close to the old giant gets crushed.
But then things get better. What was poison and illness and death is absorbed back into the ground and turned into good soil. Something new grows in place of the old and corrupted, something slightly different and (so evolution teaches us) likely a bit better adapted to the environment. It will be just that little bit stronger and just that little bit healthier for the forest as a whole.
America is rotten in its core. It has sold out to dollars and ego; to the weapons manufacturers and the war mongers. In spite of all the evidence to the contrary we, the American people, still claim to be the best in the world and demand the rest of the world treat us as such. We are a country ruinously out of control, killing ourselves off with the same enthusiasms as the Muslims. A Shite carries a bomb into a Sunni funeral and murders as many as he can. A man walks into a Denver movie theater and murders as many as he can. A sizable portion of each population approves. Not directly of course, but there are no serious demonstrations by either Muslims or gun owners at the carnage carried out by one of their own.
Has the NRA voiced a single concern that Denver killer had access to such firepower? Of course not, their answer is that everyone in the movie theater should have pulled out their own weapon and opened fire. Which is, let us be perfectly clear, utter and absolute insanity. But you know that in today’s America their argument is going to carry the day. The only way that happens is that Americans are utterly and absolutely insane. (If the Christian god that could make us a great nation once again actually existed, His heaven would be off limits to any card carrying member of the NRA. If the Christain god that the NRA worships actually existed, we would be living in an cosmos of unimaginable evil and hope would be unknown to human kind.)
This tree has to fall soon – and that is an optimist talking.
It could be that Americans will find a way to drop the tree in a controlled manner. We might still decide that allowing mad-men access to portable weapons of mass murder is shear stupidity. We could find a way to drive much of the corruption out of our political system in spite of the Supreme Court. The Republican and Democratic parties are not sacred institutions that will last forever. Once upon a time the Republican party was the one that freed the slaves while the Democrats retreated into Jim Crow states. There was a time when the Democrats were actually anit-war. And once upon a time they worked together to build a first world society that reached the moon and tried to insure that capitalism actually did raise all the boats.
We may (it is just barely imaginable) find a god to worship who loves knowledge and progress and justice once again. It might be that we empty the jails of people who have done no real harm and fill them with people who have. (Let the pot smokers out and put the Wall Street managers in.) It isn't out of the question that we remember the Gross National Product as the least important measurement of a healthy society; that celebrity is meaningless, and it is the people who actually do the work who matter. It may be that we reject the idiots who claim that greed is good, and look again to those who know that a people divided against themselves cannot survive. We might even realize that war is an enterprise in which both sides lose while the truly evil among us make a profit.
Such a society would be far different than the one we live in now; it would not be the same tree. Corporate managers would not make 100 times what those on the shop floor do, and pay fewer taxes. We would not care about “big government” or “small government” but rather “good government”. And we would realize that bad people do not a good government make.
We could, but we probably won’t.
Either way, the tree will still fall.
Sunday, July 22, 2012
Seventy more ...
Years ago the Mayans (so the story goes) used to sacrifice children to the weather god, hoping for a favorable response and thus a good corn crop. It was crazy stupid of course. Dead children and gods have nothing to do with the corn crop.
In the United States we sacrifice our children to the gun violence, hoping to protect our "freedom". It is crazy stupid of course. Gun violence has nothing to do with freedom. In fact, just the opposite is true. In Aurora 12 people had their freedom to live another day taken from them by a mad man armed to the teeth. There will be some hand wringing over this latest butchery, but no serious effort will be made to make our society safer. I think we should abandon the hand wringing and admit the obvious. We, the good people of the United States of America, love our violence. We love the killing. We love the idea that any one of us can buy a portable mass murdering machine whenever the fancy strikes. That has become our definition of freedom.
We are not born this way. Babies do not come pre-wired with a love of assault weapons coupled with a callous disregard for the lives of others. The relentless propaganda of the weapons manufacturers,voiced through the National Rifle Association, and coupled with millions of dollars of bribes to keep the political system from interfering with profits, makes sure we grow up this way. We hate to admit it, but propaganda works, and it works really, really well.
Barely a generation ago Nazi propaganda was so effective that the German people supported the attempt to rule the world with military might. They also agreed that the Jews were scourge that had to be eliminated. In that same generation American propaganda painted the Japanese as sub-human and fanatical in their desire to destroy the West. The exterminations of a few hundred thousand Japanese civilians by nuclear holocaust was a political possibility that became a military reality.
Over the last decade thousands of Muslims have maimed and killed tens of thousands of innocents with a relentless wave of suicide bombers. So pervasive, so insidious, so effective is that propaganda that even I, an atheist who can't credit Islam with a single redeeming bit of value, uses the term "suicide bombers" rather than "Muslim murders", though the latter is certainly the more truthful description.
The gun propaganda is just as effective.
In the United States we sacrifice our children to the gun violence, hoping to protect our "freedom". It is crazy stupid of course. Gun violence has nothing to do with freedom. In fact, just the opposite is true. In Aurora 12 people had their freedom to live another day taken from them by a mad man armed to the teeth. There will be some hand wringing over this latest butchery, but no serious effort will be made to make our society safer. I think we should abandon the hand wringing and admit the obvious. We, the good people of the United States of America, love our violence. We love the killing. We love the idea that any one of us can buy a portable mass murdering machine whenever the fancy strikes. That has become our definition of freedom.
We are not born this way. Babies do not come pre-wired with a love of assault weapons coupled with a callous disregard for the lives of others. The relentless propaganda of the weapons manufacturers,voiced through the National Rifle Association, and coupled with millions of dollars of bribes to keep the political system from interfering with profits, makes sure we grow up this way. We hate to admit it, but propaganda works, and it works really, really well.
Barely a generation ago Nazi propaganda was so effective that the German people supported the attempt to rule the world with military might. They also agreed that the Jews were scourge that had to be eliminated. In that same generation American propaganda painted the Japanese as sub-human and fanatical in their desire to destroy the West. The exterminations of a few hundred thousand Japanese civilians by nuclear holocaust was a political possibility that became a military reality.
Over the last decade thousands of Muslims have maimed and killed tens of thousands of innocents with a relentless wave of suicide bombers. So pervasive, so insidious, so effective is that propaganda that even I, an atheist who can't credit Islam with a single redeeming bit of value, uses the term "suicide bombers" rather than "Muslim murders", though the latter is certainly the more truthful description.
The gun propaganda is just as effective.
Sunday, July 8, 2012
New Atheist?
"New Atheist" is a label now being hung on non-believers that are a bit aggressive when it comes to challenging the claims of religion. And as much as I am not a fan of labels, if someone insisted on calling me a "new atheist" it would be hard to suggest they are wrong. I see the claim "god exists" as much the same as claiming "Santa exists". Insisting that only religious people can properly evaluate the truth behind the claim for god is like suggesting only a 4-year-old can tell you the truth about Santa. The big difference is the 4-year-old will not subvert every available social structure in order to make writing letters to Santa mandatory; in English mind you, on white bond paper (20# letter sized), using hand written cursive, blue ballpoint pen, and with a promise of cookies to be waiting by the fireplace. (I'm not sure what label is used for someone who has recently abandoned belief in god without being very aggressive in challenging religion.)
Though some believers might be quick to hang the label on me, it may be that other "new atheists" would pause. It is true that I have absolutely no god belief. It is equally true that I lump magic, religion, superstition, and the super-natural together as discredited ideas born of a still childish species. But many of the most vocal "new atheists" seem to be pretty hard-core materialists, seeing the cosmos as some kind of machine winding down in compliance with deterministic laws. That doesn't describe the cosmos as we find it to be. Einstein moved space and time from the stage on which history unfolded to being part of the unfolding. When Planck, Bohr, Schrodinger, and Heisenberg threw Quantum Mechanics into the mix the determinism that seemed unavoidable under Newton turned out to be malleable after all. The laws of physics may be immutable, but they do not dictate the future.
Material is not bits of hard stuff bouncing off each other in focused and narrow trajectories, but rather bubbles or bundles of energy without a fixed place, endlessly interacting. For the most part the avenues of those interactions are mystery. Push the language a bit and discover we don't really know what is meant by the phrase, 'bundles of energy". (So far as I can tell much is known about how light - energy - functions; but no one knows what it is.) Unwind the universe back to the beginning, let it start again, and a different history would unfold.
Materialistic determinism is not part of the cosmos.
In a like manor new atheists, atheists in general really, are often assumed to hold to a form of reductionism; claiming that emergent phenomena can be entirely understood in terms of more fundamental processes. Some atheists do just this, but not all. Maybe not even most. Sometimes emergent phenomena can be explained by more fundamental processes, but that is not the same as being either understood or experienced. Explaining is knowledge. Understanding is wisdom. Atheists are big on understanding; but that doesn't mean the pursuit of wisdom is abandoned.
Atheist, materialist, reductionist ... labels that probably do fit some people, but not everyone, and not even every atheist. Ours is an endlessly creative cosmos, neither materialist or reductionist, churning out new processes and emergent phenomena all the time. We are both expressions of and participants in that creativity. The hubris of religion lies in the claim that this universe isn't big enough or complex enough to account of creatures such as ourselves. This in spite of our growing understanding that the universe is limitless, may be just one of a limitless number of universes, and is complex in ways that are beyond our grasp.
There was a time when religion fostered the human desire to understand god's universe. It is hard to imagine that any of the early pioneers, like Newton, ever dreamed that their inquiries would lead to an understanding that there is no god in the cosmos. But that is where understanding lead; and a species that created elaborate mythologies of a personal god to explain the misunderstood, (and - let us be honest - to satisfy our ego) now stands at a crossroad. The religions of our ancestors were first attempts, but wrong. Insisting those mythologies are "The Truth" to the point of oppression, suppression, and war, now compromises the chances that we can survive our own history. The religions of the future will have to fit a cosmos indifferent to any particular evolutionary path. "Chosen", in the sense that one is special to the universe, (or the creator thereof) is no longer a label that fits any human tribe.
So I guess I am a "New Atheist" after all.
Though some believers might be quick to hang the label on me, it may be that other "new atheists" would pause. It is true that I have absolutely no god belief. It is equally true that I lump magic, religion, superstition, and the super-natural together as discredited ideas born of a still childish species. But many of the most vocal "new atheists" seem to be pretty hard-core materialists, seeing the cosmos as some kind of machine winding down in compliance with deterministic laws. That doesn't describe the cosmos as we find it to be. Einstein moved space and time from the stage on which history unfolded to being part of the unfolding. When Planck, Bohr, Schrodinger, and Heisenberg threw Quantum Mechanics into the mix the determinism that seemed unavoidable under Newton turned out to be malleable after all. The laws of physics may be immutable, but they do not dictate the future.
Material is not bits of hard stuff bouncing off each other in focused and narrow trajectories, but rather bubbles or bundles of energy without a fixed place, endlessly interacting. For the most part the avenues of those interactions are mystery. Push the language a bit and discover we don't really know what is meant by the phrase, 'bundles of energy". (So far as I can tell much is known about how light - energy - functions; but no one knows what it is.) Unwind the universe back to the beginning, let it start again, and a different history would unfold.
Materialistic determinism is not part of the cosmos.
In a like manor new atheists, atheists in general really, are often assumed to hold to a form of reductionism; claiming that emergent phenomena can be entirely understood in terms of more fundamental processes. Some atheists do just this, but not all. Maybe not even most. Sometimes emergent phenomena can be explained by more fundamental processes, but that is not the same as being either understood or experienced. Explaining is knowledge. Understanding is wisdom. Atheists are big on understanding; but that doesn't mean the pursuit of wisdom is abandoned.
Atheist, materialist, reductionist ... labels that probably do fit some people, but not everyone, and not even every atheist. Ours is an endlessly creative cosmos, neither materialist or reductionist, churning out new processes and emergent phenomena all the time. We are both expressions of and participants in that creativity. The hubris of religion lies in the claim that this universe isn't big enough or complex enough to account of creatures such as ourselves. This in spite of our growing understanding that the universe is limitless, may be just one of a limitless number of universes, and is complex in ways that are beyond our grasp.
There was a time when religion fostered the human desire to understand god's universe. It is hard to imagine that any of the early pioneers, like Newton, ever dreamed that their inquiries would lead to an understanding that there is no god in the cosmos. But that is where understanding lead; and a species that created elaborate mythologies of a personal god to explain the misunderstood, (and - let us be honest - to satisfy our ego) now stands at a crossroad. The religions of our ancestors were first attempts, but wrong. Insisting those mythologies are "The Truth" to the point of oppression, suppression, and war, now compromises the chances that we can survive our own history. The religions of the future will have to fit a cosmos indifferent to any particular evolutionary path. "Chosen", in the sense that one is special to the universe, (or the creator thereof) is no longer a label that fits any human tribe.
So I guess I am a "New Atheist" after all.
Saturday, July 7, 2012
Let the debacle continue...
According to some who pass as progressive or liberal voices in US politics, if Mitt Romney wins the White House the world will come to an end. Mr. Romney might win the White House, and the world might then come to an end; but it is unlikely the two events would be related. I suppose it possible that Mr. Romney is even more a religious lunatic than was Bush II and, in an attempt to hasten the return of his war god, he would push the Big Red Button to launch the all-out nuclear exchange that could end civilization. Assuming some skilled use of propaganda, (something the right wing mastered as long ago as the Reagan era), the support of the religious nut-cases that make up the T-party, the proclivity of religious Americans to think god is on their side, and the admitted religious lunacy of several nations that would make likely targets, it is just barely imaginable that he could pull it off. If so it might even lead to the end of the human species and not just civilization as we know it.
Even then the world wouldn't end. New species would evolve to fit the new environment and in a million years or so there would be little left to indicate that a species of semi-intelligent ape had once dominated the planet. Given the expanse of the universe, the idea that an intelligent species killed itself off out of shear stupidity isn't much of a reach. In fact it would be a pretty good bet that it has happened somewhere already. We may just be the next in line to vote ourselves off the island.
Of course Mr. Romney, even if such an unlikely chain of events actually did happen, wouldn't be able to take all of the credit. So decrying the catastrophe of a Mitt win is way overstated. Particularly since, it must be admitted, President Obama's reign has been a bit of a catastrophe of its own. The resurgence of the conservatives and the rise of the bat-shit crazy T-Party happened on Mr. Obama's watch. And it happened partly because he and the Democrats failed miserably to evidence anything at all like "Hope" or "Change" while they held both houses of Congress and the White House. The then new President didn't even change the Generals who were in charge of the wars. Hope died when Wall Street insiders moved into the West Wing instead of being hauled off to jail, when the current President became as secretive and as possessive of Executive Power and Executive privilege as any President before him, and when the Bush administration got a complete pass on lying the country into two wars and implementing torture as a policy of the government of the United States.
In other words Mr. Obama is just another President in the top-down power structure that is the sham of America's claim to be a democracy. Mr. Romney might be a bit worse, but he and the current President are cut from the same cloth. Those on the left who think a Mitt win would be a disaster just need to move a bit further to the left, far enough to leave the reservation. From here Mitt being in the race at all is a win; the election doesn't matter.
If Mitt loses the top-down power structure that has blossomed after Citizens United, that of a political system for sale to the highest bidder, takes a huge - huge hit. Imagine the hundreds of millions of dollars spent by a handful of narcissists to get their man in the White House being utterly wasted. Mitt's billionaire boys club humiliated, rejected, shunned by the very population they thought they had bullied and bull-shitted into compliance. It could be the proudest day America has seen for a long, long time. Just the possibility that might happen brings a smile.
The knowledge that a couple of these idiots have already spent millions of dollars supporting Newt and Rick makes one laugh out loud. Sheldon Adelson and his kin are reported to have spent $16 million on Newt - sixteen million fucking dollars on a has-been political hack whose major claim to fame is being chased out of the House of Representative in disgrace - no easy task that. I felt stupid spending $90 / month on cable TV and stopped. This guy spent $16M on Newt and lost. Spend another $20M or so on Mitt and lose again? That is just down right hilarious.
Foster Friess is reported to have spent something like a million dollars trying to get Rick Santorum into the White House ... really? That has to be about the dumbest money ever tossed down a rat hole. Mr. Friess reportedly lives on the fringes of Christan fundamentalism and is described as a "hawk - read that as war monger and profiteer. He should probably hope that atheists are correct in claiming the Christian god doesn't actually exist. Even the worst incarnation of the Christian god would have to think there are better ways to piss away a million than on the political aspirations of Mr. Santorum. Mr. Friess is going to have a hard time explaining to a puzzled and short-tempered god where the money went.
Of course, should Mitt lose, Obama would still be in the White House. Wall Street would sill reign, wars would go on, the military / security apparatus would continue to grow ... no change the first time around can hardly lead to helping the country toward the replacement of top-down power structures the second time around. But at least he would not be any worse than he has been. A Mitt loss might slow the failure of the American political system a little ... might.
And if Mitt wins? Well, Americans would have proved themselves to be kind of dull, pretty slow and way to trusting of 30 second sound-bite-political-ads. But how long would that last? Imagine Mitt implementing the lunacy of his backers; more tax cuts for the rich, more military spending paid for by tax increases on the middle class, an open assault on education and teachers, Wall Street completely unleashed to devastate the economy yet again, civil rights abandoned, voter purges, worker rights and protections sacrificed to corporate profits, less access to health care, fewer families that can afford collage, more jobs shipped over seas ... it is hard to imagine that most of my fellow Americans are stupid enough to put up with that very long. But even if they are, such a society is simply untenable in the world as it is evolving. Jobs shipped over seas cannot be taxed to pay for the war machine. A society that has denigrated and abandoned education, turned its back on innovation, and allowed human progress in civil rights and social progress to move to other parts of the world, will be overwhelmed and left behind as humanity moves into the future. That future will not include a top-down power structure like Obama and Mitt's American political machine.
Mitt, by being in the race and representing only the interests of the very few of the most corrupt of the political / religious / corporate / elite, has already served the country for the better. If he loses the wealthy wanna-be overlords take an instant big hit. If he wins the hit will only be delayed only a little. (I take it as a given that those who spends millions of dollars trying to buy the White House for themselves are utterly corrupt. If the SCOTUS had not declared bribery as legal, every single one of Mitt's billionaire boys club would be guilty enough to spend the rest of their natural lives in prison.)
For my money, looking as I do from off the reservation and back toward the mad-house, Mitt's top-heavy run for the White House shines a bright light on why this system can't last much longer. A win promises to bring about the fall that much faster, allowing a new thing to grow in its place.
Let the debacle continue...
Even then the world wouldn't end. New species would evolve to fit the new environment and in a million years or so there would be little left to indicate that a species of semi-intelligent ape had once dominated the planet. Given the expanse of the universe, the idea that an intelligent species killed itself off out of shear stupidity isn't much of a reach. In fact it would be a pretty good bet that it has happened somewhere already. We may just be the next in line to vote ourselves off the island.
Of course Mr. Romney, even if such an unlikely chain of events actually did happen, wouldn't be able to take all of the credit. So decrying the catastrophe of a Mitt win is way overstated. Particularly since, it must be admitted, President Obama's reign has been a bit of a catastrophe of its own. The resurgence of the conservatives and the rise of the bat-shit crazy T-Party happened on Mr. Obama's watch. And it happened partly because he and the Democrats failed miserably to evidence anything at all like "Hope" or "Change" while they held both houses of Congress and the White House. The then new President didn't even change the Generals who were in charge of the wars. Hope died when Wall Street insiders moved into the West Wing instead of being hauled off to jail, when the current President became as secretive and as possessive of Executive Power and Executive privilege as any President before him, and when the Bush administration got a complete pass on lying the country into two wars and implementing torture as a policy of the government of the United States.
In other words Mr. Obama is just another President in the top-down power structure that is the sham of America's claim to be a democracy. Mr. Romney might be a bit worse, but he and the current President are cut from the same cloth. Those on the left who think a Mitt win would be a disaster just need to move a bit further to the left, far enough to leave the reservation. From here Mitt being in the race at all is a win; the election doesn't matter.
If Mitt loses the top-down power structure that has blossomed after Citizens United, that of a political system for sale to the highest bidder, takes a huge - huge hit. Imagine the hundreds of millions of dollars spent by a handful of narcissists to get their man in the White House being utterly wasted. Mitt's billionaire boys club humiliated, rejected, shunned by the very population they thought they had bullied and bull-shitted into compliance. It could be the proudest day America has seen for a long, long time. Just the possibility that might happen brings a smile.
The knowledge that a couple of these idiots have already spent millions of dollars supporting Newt and Rick makes one laugh out loud. Sheldon Adelson and his kin are reported to have spent $16 million on Newt - sixteen million fucking dollars on a has-been political hack whose major claim to fame is being chased out of the House of Representative in disgrace - no easy task that. I felt stupid spending $90 / month on cable TV and stopped. This guy spent $16M on Newt and lost. Spend another $20M or so on Mitt and lose again? That is just down right hilarious.
Foster Friess is reported to have spent something like a million dollars trying to get Rick Santorum into the White House ... really? That has to be about the dumbest money ever tossed down a rat hole. Mr. Friess reportedly lives on the fringes of Christan fundamentalism and is described as a "hawk - read that as war monger and profiteer. He should probably hope that atheists are correct in claiming the Christian god doesn't actually exist. Even the worst incarnation of the Christian god would have to think there are better ways to piss away a million than on the political aspirations of Mr. Santorum. Mr. Friess is going to have a hard time explaining to a puzzled and short-tempered god where the money went.
Of course, should Mitt lose, Obama would still be in the White House. Wall Street would sill reign, wars would go on, the military / security apparatus would continue to grow ... no change the first time around can hardly lead to helping the country toward the replacement of top-down power structures the second time around. But at least he would not be any worse than he has been. A Mitt loss might slow the failure of the American political system a little ... might.
And if Mitt wins? Well, Americans would have proved themselves to be kind of dull, pretty slow and way to trusting of 30 second sound-bite-political-ads. But how long would that last? Imagine Mitt implementing the lunacy of his backers; more tax cuts for the rich, more military spending paid for by tax increases on the middle class, an open assault on education and teachers, Wall Street completely unleashed to devastate the economy yet again, civil rights abandoned, voter purges, worker rights and protections sacrificed to corporate profits, less access to health care, fewer families that can afford collage, more jobs shipped over seas ... it is hard to imagine that most of my fellow Americans are stupid enough to put up with that very long. But even if they are, such a society is simply untenable in the world as it is evolving. Jobs shipped over seas cannot be taxed to pay for the war machine. A society that has denigrated and abandoned education, turned its back on innovation, and allowed human progress in civil rights and social progress to move to other parts of the world, will be overwhelmed and left behind as humanity moves into the future. That future will not include a top-down power structure like Obama and Mitt's American political machine.
Mitt, by being in the race and representing only the interests of the very few of the most corrupt of the political / religious / corporate / elite, has already served the country for the better. If he loses the wealthy wanna-be overlords take an instant big hit. If he wins the hit will only be delayed only a little. (I take it as a given that those who spends millions of dollars trying to buy the White House for themselves are utterly corrupt. If the SCOTUS had not declared bribery as legal, every single one of Mitt's billionaire boys club would be guilty enough to spend the rest of their natural lives in prison.)
For my money, looking as I do from off the reservation and back toward the mad-house, Mitt's top-heavy run for the White House shines a bright light on why this system can't last much longer. A win promises to bring about the fall that much faster, allowing a new thing to grow in its place.
Let the debacle continue...
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