inspiredbyactualevents.com

My favorite trite-but-true observation is this: When your problem is a hole, the first step to solve it is to stop digging.  Despite high (for Americans) gas prices, the economy in general and environmental problems unaddressed since the 70s, our hole is still the war in Iraq.  Once we stop digging, we might be able to get back to work that matters.  But....

I’ve heard we spend $12 billion (or so) each month in the Bush/McCain war.  Now… I wish our presidential candidates (by our I mean the Democratic ones, one of whom will be in the White House early next year) would remember this is not real money we can bring home and spend on wonderful, much-needed, tax-and-spend projects. At least stop telling us your ending the war will make solving other problems affordable.

At best, if we did not spend this money each month in Iraq, we might reduce our borrowing Chinese dollars. Worst case...and likely case...we’d slowly begin to lower the amount of interest we pay for what we already owe the Chinese for our previous six years of idiotic war-making.

We’ll get no peace dividend from this war. Our grandchildren, however, will inherit the massive debt we created by following the madman in the White House. I didn’t vote for him; I just have to pay for him. And 8 year-old Cameron and 4-year-old Sullivan and 4-year-old Gabriel and and 7 month-old Brody - my grandchildren - will pay for him for the rest of their lives.

Our next president must promise nothing but that we rebuild what we have destroyed; we need a president who will lead us to accept the sacrifices we must make to save our democracy.

R3W

A recent brief dispute, in which R3W criticized some Christians’ characterization of America as a country founded on Christian principles, prompted this inspiredbyactualevents-esque response:

Religions are dangerous precisely because they do what the government under our Constitution cannot: They condemn others for their beliefs and go many steps further.  They frequently (most of the time when you take the longer view) punish others for their beliefs.  The Isrealites, while not seeking converts, nonetheless massacred thousands (remember the Midianites and the Hittites and the Canaanites?) to steal their promised land. Once given the green light by Emperor Constantine in the 4th century, Christians regularly slew any who would not convert; and there was that wee four centuries of the Inquisition.  And how did the Muslims convert the millions of people living in the middle east in just few centuries?  I think we know how.

The argument that these seemingly endless atrocities were inflicted by a minority of ‘bad’ monotheists does not hold, given the expressed noble sentiments of the people of the Book.  While a numeric minority undoubtedly led the bloody charge, the majority (and certainly the center) of these communities all profited, and still profits, from the carnage.  Today, the comfortable middle class of all these religions, more than any other group anywhere at anytime, enjoy the blessings of prosperity, often the blessings of wealth.  Coincidence?  I don’t think so.

R3W

Sect #1 has for centuries been everybody’s whipping boy.  The Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Romans, the Christians, and the Nazis (but I repeat myself a bit), among others, have spent centuries trying to break up the the cult of Abraham to little avail. No wonder they carry a grudge. In its endless war with sect #2, sect #1 uses emotional blackmail of the most expensive kind to secure the support of the West.  Since they cannot bomb the Germans, their last big-league tormentors, they use this support to bomb their neighbors, mostly from sect #2.

Sect #2 has prospered over the centuries, conquering an empire that dwarfed Alexander’s. The Shia and Sunni varieties of the sect squabbled early over which descendents of Muhammad should be in charge.  This tussle - now, boys, settle down...your caliph will be home soon - disrupted the sect for a long time and undermined the good work of their own scholars who could not understand such stupidity. They even permitted infidels to run roughshod over their lands several times rather than heal the schism.  At some relatively recent time...and I must look this up...adherents began to support the maniacal Shia side of the house, who seem to have cornered a brilliant strategy.  This strategy (clearly discovered in a fit of Shia-like enthusiasm and partially borrowed from sect #1) is simple--since we can’t win an argument, let us scare everyone to death.  And use bombs.  And airliners.

The importance of the current conflict will be lost to history; most of its sad reruns echo centuries of conflict.  Decent people are ready to give up on these troublesome sects.  Of course, Shakespeare said it best: A pox on both your houses.

Let us beseech them to let a few of their children live.  Some may grow up to be open-minded, civilized atheists.

R3W

"Can biology do better than faith?” asks Edward O. Wilson in a not-so-recent-but-still-dangerous issue of The New Scientist. Wilson, much esteemed professor of entomology and well-published public intellectual, finds the hot third rail in disputes about evolution and creationism (or it’s doppelganger intelligent design) to be scientific humanism.  The first two rails are, predictably, the tribal, monotheistic, man-in-his-image vision of the world and the godless ennui of twentieth-century, pseudo-scientific, socially-engineered political utopia. The second, filled with failed socialism and a failing social democratic agenda, can no longer be sustained by the greying radicals trying to prop it up.  The first, Wilson writes, will always be in conflict with scientific humanism especially, it seems, as science moves into its inevitable acsendance. Wilson concludes:

So, will science and religion find common ground, or at least agree to divide the fundamentals into mutually exclusive domains? A great many well-meaning scholars believe that such rapprochement is both possible and desirable. A few disagree, and I am one of them...Rapprochement may be neither possible nor desirable. There is something deep in religious belief that divides people and amplifies societal conflict. The toxic mix of religion and tribalism has become so dangerous as to justify taking seriously the alternative view, that humanism based on science is the effective antidote, the light and the way at last placed before us.

Take heart, fellow atheists...Professor Wilson sees rational days ahead. More here..

R3W

If you haven’t heard of Steven Pinker, you will. Pinker, a shaggy, prototypically-rumpled Harvard professor, is gathering his thoughts (And the stuff of them, I suppose) on language, how it’s structured, how it works for humans, and how in its crazed confusion reveals the nature of human thought, emotion, interaction and intention.  The inborn frames of our language, Pinker contends, use prepositions, nouns, verbs, etc. to shape and inform both our inner lives and our relation to society.

I am far from understanding this; I plan to read a couple of his books, especially the most recent, The Stuff of Thought, to try and do a late catch-up. You should try him too, if only for his insightful (and colorfully spoken) exposition of the role of swearing and how it reflects and shapes our...again with the dualism...inner and outer lives.

Read more about Steven Pinker in…
Slate Wikipedia TED AllInTheMind NY Times

Allan Bloom’s provocative book, The Closing of the American Mind, warned us twenty years ago of the trivialization of American life and culture brought on by relativist thinking and the obsessive search for pleasure and longing for communion.  I thought Bloom was a right-wing nut job who just didn’t see the possiblities of a new, revolutionary, boundry-less culture. I still think lots of thinking was nutty, but now, twenty years later, Mark Steyn in The New Criterion uses rock music as a lens to see what Bloom was writing about.  And after twenty years of wondering what all the excitement was about, I’m thinking hard about Mr. Steyn’s Bloomish ideas about the culture we boomers have tolerated into existence.

“Popular culture” is more accurately a “present-tense culture”: You’re celebrating the millennium but you can barely conceive of anything before the mid-1960s. We’re at school longer than any society in human history, entering kindergarten at four or five and leaving college the best part of a quarter-century later—or thirty years later in Germany. Yet in all those decades we exist in the din of the present. A classical education considers society as a kind of iceberg, and teaches you the seven-eighths below the surface. Today, we live on the top eighth bobbing around in the flotsam and jetsam of the here and now. And, without the seven-eighths under the water, what’s left on the surface gets thinner and thinner.  - Mark Steyn

R3W