In Lehmann's Terms

Cart Before the Horse

I do not have the allergic reaction to campaign finance restrictions that many fellow libertarians do. I'm not convinced they have the positive effect their proponents claim, and I'm generally of the mind that attempting to take the money out of politics is like trying to take the sex out of porn. But when asked to stand up for "free speech" whenever a new restriction would make the quid pro quo of buying new laws, pork and regulation more difficult for this or that special interest.....well, all I can offer is the world's smallest violin playing for all those poor lobbyists.

But this new bill by Reps Paul W. Hodes, D-N.H., and Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., while potentially harmless, does seem to get the equation backward. Following up on the PMA scandal, Hodes and Giffords propose banning any member of Congress from taking contributions from entities for whom they have previously secured earmarks. Now, leaving aside that earmarks are but a tiny part of the budget process, and that campaign contributions for direct budget appropriations present nowhere near the problem that they do in influencing votes on legislation more broadly (meaning this bill would leave the vast majority of dirty dealings untouched)....doesn't it strike you that the mechanics are entirely backward?

An entity gives a contribution in expectation of a future favor, like an appropriations earmark. Once that earmark is granted, quid is quite fully quo. Saying you can't take any more donations in the future from that source (an easy enough rule to evade simply by routing the funds through a new PAC) means little when the damage is already done.

If we're going to get into restrictions of this sort, then make them real. I propose flipping the rule. A congressman is prohibited from securing (or even voting on legislation that includes) earmarks for any entity from whom they have received campaign funds in the past.

Are Atheists Gullible?

Like many other godless heathens, I viewed the launch of Atheist Nexus, a new social networking site billed as “The Atheist Facebook,” as a welcome development. I’ve long seen the biggest challenge facing nontheists, particularly in America, as the lack of formal social institutions around which to coalesce, placing us at a distinct disadvantage in amassing political capital and cultural relevance in comparison to our theist brethren.

But disturbing evidence has come to light suggesting the site may not be all that it seems. For one, the site shares the same fax number, mail server, and domain name registrant as something called the  Divine Christian Center, an outfit that bills itself as “an Apostolic institution of Christ” that exists “to pioneer and promote the commission of our Lord Jesus Christ the world over.” A search on the domain’s owner, one Kym Membe, reveals him as someone who has posted on discussion boards under the handle IT4Jesus, given positive reviews to A.J. Jacobs’ The Year of Living Biblically, and, as blogger PZ Myers of Pharyngula reports, as recently as a couple months ago posted this letter on a bible college Web site:

We have seen a steady increase in uncommon and deadly events around the world - most recently, the quake in China and the cyclone in Myanmar. This is a call to prayer for the suffering and the hurting. God is calling us all to humble ourselves before Him in prayer. We may not understand what is happening; we may not have answers for anyone asking. One thing we should know without a shadow of doubt is that God loves the world and all who are in it. Let's join forces and pray for those in China and Myanmar.

Let's lift them up before God and ask that He comforts those who need comfort and bring healing to those who need it. Let's pray for the little boys and girls who have lost their parents, and for the everyone who has lost someone or something.

Kym Membe

Mattoon, USA

To his credit, Membe has been out front to try to address the concerns and assuage fears of Atheist Nexus registrants that they have unwittingly signed on to some sort of surreptitious fundie prospecting service that looks to win back the unfaithful. In a letter posted to the LifeWithoutFaith site, Membe declares that he only recently left the ranks of believing Christians and credits reading Dawkins and Harris for his de-conversion. The DCC site, he says, is one that he built as a Web freelancer, but it does not represent his current religious outlook, which he describes as:

Now, I am free from the idiocy of religion. And because I have always stood up for what I believe, I did not think twice about investing my time and effort to create Atheist|Nexus. While some of my language and mannerisms might show through as “religious”, you can be sure that’s only because I have spent the greater part of life speaking that way. I understand completely the questions that people have raised. There is still work to be done, and I am open to learning what I can from the 1000+ freethinkers on this site.

In further efforts to reestablish trust, Membe has tapped LifeWithoutFaith’s Brother Richard to serve as administrator of Atheist Nexus, and he had a personal sit-down with Phil Pherguson of CUFree.net to discuss concerns and vouch for his own sincerity. 

I’d like to believe Membe is above board, and I hope this little foofaraw doesn’t detract from the worthy goal of helping atheists network with one another. But I can’t argue too much if my fellow nonbelievers feel the Atheist Nexus brand is compromised and choose to focus that goal elsewhere. As in all things, a healthy skepticism would not be out of order.

Hitchens on Stalin

Though I bought it the day it came out, I didn’t get around to reading Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great until a recent weekend jaunt up to the old familial homestead in Jersey. As I expected it to be, it is a far superior tome to either Sam Harris’ Letter to a Christian Nation and The End of Faith, or Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. Right off the bat, Hitchens clearly outclasses either in eloquence, leaving it not much of a fair fight on that score. But the book also outperformed its predecessors in ways I did not expect.

For one thing, though I am probably closer to Harris’ conservatism than Hitchens’ socialism, I found far fewer objectionable polemic tangents in the latter’s work. Particularly in The End of Faith, Harris is apt to go off the deep end when he moves into the subject of the War on Terror, going so far as to essentially condone torture, so long as it is a Muslim fundamentalist on the receiving end of the scabbard.

And while Dawkins is obviously a more esteemed scientific mind than Hitchens, I actually found Hitchens’ forays into philosophy of science questions far more satisfying, and much less condescendingly smug. This is remarkable in that there are few public figures MORE famously smug than Hitchens, but it seems the difference-maker is that Hitchens retains a sense of humor, both about the world and about himself, that the good professor utterly lacks.

Sitting down recently for a 20-minute chat with Hoover’s Peter Robinson on the Uncommon Knowledge program, Hitchens offers around the 15-minute mark a brief recap of what I think was one of the best sections of his book, tackling the difficult question of the evil done in the name of nominally “godless” communism, particularly by Josef Stalin. As Hitch puts it:

Until 1917, millions of Russians had been told for…hundreds of years that the czar is the head of the church – which he was, the Russian Orthodox Church. That the leader of the country should be something a little more than human. Not a god, but a little more. He’s not divine, but a holy father.

If you’re Josef Stalin, you shouldn’t be in the dictatorship business if you don’t know how to exploit an inheritance like that: millions of credulous, servile people.

And what does he do? Lysenko’s biology – miracles, we can have three harvests a year if we believe in Lysenko’s biology. Inquisition, heresy hunt, orthodoxy. Everything comes from the top and must be thanked for, and groveled for. A complete replication of the preceding theocracy.

For your argument to have…any force at all, you’d have to point to a society that adopted the teachings of Lucretius, Spinoza, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Albert Einstein…and then fell into famine, dictatorship, torture and genocide. And you won’t, I think, be able to point to such. 

It is an important point, and one that free thinkers do not make often enough. The fact of some deity’s existence is ultimately less important a question than the societal framework in which that question is permitted to be answered. Logic, reason, the scientific method, free inquiry, pluralism -- organized religions have, in all times and in all places, sought to suppress these things. That they are not the only institutions to engage in such suppression is not a credit to religion, particularly not when those other institutions inevitably get away with it by mimicking religion’s installation of an autocratic god-figure…in this case, Stalin himself.

No God, eh?

Our northern neighbor is losing its religion.

From “Who’s Religious?” by Warren Clark and Grant Schellenberg, a Statistics Canada article from its summer 2006 issue, using data from Statistics Canada’s General Social Survey:

• 19% of Canadians 15 and older reported belonging to no religion in 2004, up from 12% in 1985.
• More than 50% of Canadians aged 15 to 29 reported they don’t go to religious services.

From the Canadian Social Trends-Statistics Canada graph “The importance of religion to one’s life, Canada, 2002":

• 20% of men and 15% of women reported having no religion.
• 25% of Canadians aged 15 to 29 have no religion, the highest percentage of any age group.

Stark Speaks

Six months (or roughly the typical interval between my posts on this here blog) after Rep. Pete Stark broke Congress’ proverbial “color line” and became the first member in history to acknowledge publicly that he lacks a “God belief,” the California Democrat is finally ready to talk about it.

Stark will deliver an address titled “Government Without God?” as he is presented by the Harvard Humanist Chaplaincy – a 30-year-old group devoted to “ministering,” as it were, to the university’s Humanist, agnostic, atheist and non-religious community – with their 15th annual Harvard Humanist of the Year award. The address is set for Thursday night, Sept. 20, from 7:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. in Emerson Hall’s Room 105.

On the reaction to his decision to come out of the nontheist closet, the program’s flyer states:

Despite the numerous surveys showing atheists to be the group Americans would be least likely to elect to political office, Stark denies that it takes courage to become the first admitted non-theist in the House. "What is courageous," he adds, "is to stand up in Congress and say, 'Let's tax the rich and give money to poor kids."'

Ahhhh, Fortney. I so WANT to like you. But then you gotta go and say something dumb like that.

Ghettoes of Superstition

Our British cousins – under the leadership of Ed Balls, secretary of the Department for Children, Families and Schools – currently are mulling an expansion of the number of state-funded “faith schools,” which currently number 6,850 and make up about a third of all state-funded institutions nationwide. Operating with grant money from Balls’ department, representatives of the Church of England, Roman Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Greek Orthodox and Sikh faiths studied the issue and issued a consensus position document on the proposal. Great shocker here – they were for it!

Writing at the Guardian Unlimited, University of London philosophy professor A.C. Grayling lays out his objections, and in so doing, perfectly encapsulates what so frustrates me each and every time I hear self-proclaimed “libertarians” in my own country make the absurd claim that they are striking a blow for “markets” by agitating for massive new public subsidies to the church, in the form of tuition “vouchers.”

That is, representatives of an active constituency of weekly worshippers of 8% of the British population, all of them votaries of ancient superstitions, all of them with grubby hands rummaging in the pot of public funds, and some of them doing it with the useful background threat of violence and civil unrest unless the rummaging pays off. The spectacle is appalling.

The question is not solely one of public policy, or the fact that the government's otherwise admirable desire for social cohesion is going to be negated, not enhanced, by paying to keep children apart from one another in competing ghettoes of superstition. There is the point also that if parents wish to bring up their children in their own traditional superstitions, they should do it on their own time and at their own expense. The secular majority in this country should bitterly oppose the use of their tax money for this misconceived policy. Religion, the bane of the modern world in so many respects, has got to be relegated to the private sphere and kept there.

Brownback spreads greenbacks for his fundie friends

Buried deep in the text of H.R. 3074, the $106 billion transportation and HUD porkfest the Senate passed Wednesday by an 88-7 margin, one will find an $850,000 appropriation, originating with the office of erstwhile presidential candidate Sam Brownback, for the renovation of one Morning Star Ranch in Florence, Kan.

The camp is situated an hour northeast of Wichita on a 650-acre site that includes, according to its Web site, “facilities for 72 campers and a year-round retreat lodge for 40…a dining room that seats 120 and a meeting room that seats 110 “ as well as “a swimming pool, a basketball/tennis court, a sand volleyball area, a horseshoe pit, hiking trails, biking trails, a baseball/softball diamond, playground equipment, and a park area for games.”

Oh, and one more thing. It is owned by the Los Angeles-based World Impact Ministries, whose stated purpose is to “minister cross-culturally to people unreached by the gospel of Jesus Christ through evangelism, follow-up, discipleship and indigenous church-planting.” (Well, if nothing else, they certainly won’t lack for fertilizer.) The camp is used as the headquarters for the group’s Christian Leadership Training Program, which describes itself thusly:

This two-year program is for single, urban young men, ages 18-25, who have made a commitment to Christ and want to grow in their walk with Him. Applicants are encouraged to have a church sponsor them. 

But lest you heathens think this is just a gift from Brownback to help some fundie group back home repaint the tennis courts at their personal propaganda resort, oh no no no. While this may be a faith-based initiative, these guys are inclusive! After all:

The facilities are available to other Christian groups.

You see, they have both kinds of music…country AND western!