{pic by Loren Javier}

The death of that most holy of con men, the televangelist Oral Roberts, is certainly welcome news to all who value reason over superstition. However, there is no cause for celebration considering that millions of his followers remain, of whom many are convinced that he was actually a faith healer and could even raise the dead. The head has been removed, but the serpentine body remains. Multi-millionaire charlatans of faith like Roberts could not flourish in this country if not for the presence of so many troubled souls willing to believe almost anything, no matter how outlandish or unsubstantiated.

Anyone wanting a truly terrifying glimpse into the fact-free collective consciousness which is shared by much of the American public should peruse a recent survey by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life. The survey found that roughly one-quarter of Americans believes in reincarnation and astrology. Moreover, many Americans “mix multiple faiths” and “blend Christianity with Eastern or New Age beliefs.” As one benighted Catholic participant in the survey told The Washington Post, “even in the Bible, you have ghosts, you know the Holy Ghost. And with astrology, didn’t Daniel mention astrologists? Didn’t the Three Kings follow a star to Jesus?”

The intellectual problem with all of this isn’t the mixing of disparate religious traditions, but the fact that so many people choose to believe any of the empirically baseless gobbledygook that is so innocuously referred to as “faith.” Of course, if your plumber chooses to believe that magical fairy dust is the key to his drain-cleaning success, who cares? But what if your emergency room physician would rather not replace the two quarts of blood you lost in that auto accident because his book of religious fairy-tales says transfusion is unholy? “Faith” is a slippery slope. Once you choose to embrace one belief for which there is zero evidence, it becomes much easier to embrace other baseless beliefs. God and ghosts, gremlins and the Grim Reaper… it’s all pretty much the same from a rational perspective.

We generally expect children to let go of their imaginary friends as they get older. Apparently, this does not apply to adults…

{pic by luna715}

The idea of secession from the United States is often bandied about in Far Right circles as if it were the dire Nuclear Option within the conservative political arsenal. Just last week, on September 4, conservative economist Walter E. Williams broached the topic on the Rush Limbaugh Show. Williams—an occasional fill-in and hand puppet for the Dark Lord himself—was discussing the not-quite-mass movement for secession that is afoot in New Hampshire and opined that secession didn’t work “last time” (that unpleasant Civil War incident), but it did work “the first time in 1776,” and it would be nice to “see whether we could break the tie” and “have a sovereign nation.” Similarly, Texas Governor Rick Perry, appealing to the nebulous Right Wing populist rage at one of the Fox News “Tea Parties” last April, floated the possibility of secession “if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people” (apparently, he forgot which party won and which party lost in the elections last November). And there is no shortage of neo-Confederate hate groups, such as the League of the South, which are devoted to the idea of secession as a means of escaping federal intrusion upon the God-given right of states to enslave human beings for fun and profit.

Implicit in Right Wing chatter about secession is the assumption that it somehow constitutes a “threat”; that the inhabitants of a newly shrunk United States would bemoan the day they lost the invaluable contributions which the Far Right makes to Human Progress. But let us consider what would actually be “lost” were the United States of America (U.S.A.) to jettison the original 11 members of the Confederate States of America (C.S.A.): Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. Even a cursory examination of available data indicates that the U.S.A. might benefit enormously from a southern-style divorce of this kind.

For instance, at a time when reigning in health care expenditures is a top priority for nearly every policymaker in the country, the Secession Option makes fiscal sense. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimate that the U.S.A. spends more that $75 billion on obesity-related medical expenditures each year, and the C.S.A. states account for roughly 30% (or $22.3 billion) of that total. In fact, the C.S.A. states have some of the highest rates of obesity in the nation. Based on my own calculations using the CDC’s obesity-rate data for each state and the U.S. Census Bureau’s state-population totals from the 2007 American Community Survey, I estimate that secession would permit the U.S.A. to shed roughly 26 million medically expensive obese individuals, which would reduce the size of the obese population in the country by one-third.

However, the benefits of secession go far beyond the fiscal advantages of shedding excess baggage from the health care system. Allowing the C.S.A. states to secede would eliminate nine of the 22 “red” states that swung Republican in the 2008 election. More precisely, based on popular-vote totals compiled by the U.S. Electoral College, secession would remove 36% (or 21.6 million) of those U.S. voters who thought that a McCain-Palin administration would have made a nice sequel to eight years of Bush-Cheney.

Shedding surplus Republicans from the U.S.A. would be advantageous not only from a partisan political perspective, but would vastly improve the general state of knowledge among the reduced U.S. population. The base of the Republican Party consists of Evangelical Protestants, a rather Taliban-esque group that tends to frown upon Enlightenment-era ideals such as scientific discovery and the use of human reason. For instance, 65% of Evangelical Protestants believe that all forms of life have always existed in their present form ever since a magical Supreme Being zapped them into existence—the fossil record and genetic mutation be damned. Not surprisingly, Evangelical Protestants are heavily concentrated in the C.S.A. states. Based on state-level estimates of religious affiliation from the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, and adult-population totals reported for each state by the 2007 American Community Survey, I conclude that secession would remove 44% (or 25.5 million) of all Evangelical Protestants from the U.S.A.

In short, the secession of the C.S.A. states might be just the sort of fiscal, social, and intellectual stimulus that the U.S.A. needs to move forward into the 21st century rather than backward into the Middle Ages. There is an apocryphal quote that is widely attributed to Miriam “Ma” Ferguson (Governor of Texas, 1925-1927 and 1933-1935), and is said to have been uttered in response to a question about the use of the Spanish language in Texas schools: “If English was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for Texas schoolchildren.” I think that pretty much says it all.

{pic by stallio}

People who are accustomed to thinking for themselves often experience confusion upon visiting the virtual salons in which Arch-Conservatives share their erudite observations concerning history, science, and current affairs. This confusion stems in large part from the vastly different evidentiary standards by which Far-Right Wingers tend to evaluate different beliefs. Some beliefs require no supporting evidence at all to be accepted as Truth in the Uber-Conservative Consciousness. But there are other beliefs for which no amount of evidence can ever suffice. For instance, no evidence is necessary to support the belief that Barack Obama is an illegal Kenyan immigrant born in Mombasa. But no amount of evidence is sufficient to support the belief that Obama is a U.S. citizen born in Honolulu.

There are no hard and fast rules among Super Conservatives as to when a belief requires evidence and when it doesn’t. Such knowledge is more of an art than a science and requires experience to master. For those readers unfamiliar with the unpredictable empirical twists and turns of the Paleoconservative Worldview, here is a handy topical guide for distinguishing Fact-Free Truth from Evidence-Based Heresy:

Cosmology

Fact-Free Truth: A magical and invisible Supreme Being created the universe about 6,000 years ago.

Evidence-Based Heresy: The universe as we know it came into being 12-14 billion years ago with an event called the “Big Bang.”

Biology

Fact-Free Truth: The magical and invisible Supreme Being created all forms of Life just as they exist today.

Evidence-Based Heresy: All forms of life change over time through the interplay of genetic mutation and natural selection; a process known as “evolution.”

History

Fact-Free Truth: The stories of The Bible tell the literal truth about the history of Humankind.

Evidence-Based Heresy: The stories of The Bible are parables created before the existence of a clearly defined “non-fiction” genre in literature.

Climatology

Fact-Free Truth: “Global warming” is a hoax perpetrated by a vast international conspiracy designed to undermine U.S. sovereignty in order to create Word Government.

Evidence-Based Heresy: Emissions of carbon dioxide and other “greenhouse gases” from industrial processes are causing the average temperature of the earth to rise over time.

Politics

Fact-Free Truth: The Obama administration is “socialist.”

Evidence-Based Heresy: The Obama administration is “centrist Democrat” by U.S. political standards (which qualifies as “moderate conservative” by global political standards) and does not come close to fitting the actual definition of “socialism.”

Patriotism

Fact-Free Truth: The United States of America is the greatest nation that has ever existed or ever will exist and is uniquely favored by the magical and invisible Supreme Being.

Evidence-Based Heresy: The United States of America is number 15 on the Human Development Index of nations as ranked by average health, knowledge, and standard of living—right after Iceland, Norway, Canada, Australia, Ireland, the Netherlands, Sweden, Japan, Luxembourg, Switzerland, France, Finland, Denmark, and Austria.

Sexuality

Fact-Free Truth: Homosexuals choose a deviant and hedonistic “life style” that is frowned up by the magical and invisible Supreme Being.

Evidence-Based Heresy: Homosexuals are attracted to members of the same sex.

Sex

Fact-Free Truth: Sex outside of marriage is wrong.

Evidence-Based Heresy: Sex outside of marriage is fun.

{pic by Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com}

Many of the Republican Party’s more Paleolithic conservatives viewed the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court as an opportunity to re-inspire their demoralized ranks by invoking the rhetoric of the so-called “Culture Wars.” If there’s anything worse than having some over-educated liberal black dude in the White House for the next few years, it’s the prospect of having some over-educated liberal Latina chick on the Supreme Court for the next few decades. From said judicial perch, there is little doubt that this woman will seek to undermine the Biblically mandated right of all white-skinned anti-abortion extremists to own automatic weapons. And that’s why the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee—which conducts the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominees—tried without success to persuade her to admit her sinister views about gun control, affirmative action, and the right to choose.

Alas, there was never much doubt that Sotomayor would ultimately be confirmed by the Democratic controlled Senate, so the Culture Warriors had to settle for the confirmation-hearing histrionics of the “Operation Rescue” anti-choice theater troupe—and the dubious star power of Norma McCorvey, the “Jane Roe” of Roe v. Wade fame, who went on to become a born-again anti-choice dim-wit.

Of course, President Obama and his advisers tend to eschew culture-war rhetoric in favor of a more pragmatic political centrism that pays homage to unity and common purpose. To which I respond, “fuck that!” If the Right Wing wants Culture Wars, then I say we follow the prescient advice of former President George W. Bush: “bring ‘em on.” The moralistic debates that constitute the Culture Wars are the Right Wing’s to lose. Fortunately for the human species, education and demographics are likely to take Paleo-Republicans the way of the dinosaurs in which they don’t believe…

Consider recent polling data from the Pew Research Center, which shows that the Republican Party’s “constituents are aging and do not reflect the growing ethnic and racial diversity of the general public.” Even more to the point, social conservatism seems to be a product of poor education rather than divine enlightenment. According to the Pew survey, “better educated respondents tend to be less conservative than those with less education.” For instance, the respondents most likely to agree with the statement “books that contain dangerous ideas should be banned from public school libraries,” and to worry “that science is going too far and is hurting society rather than helping it,” were those with the least education. Better-educated respondents who were more likely to have actually read books, and to have read about science, were the least likely to be scared of either books or science.

If we invest enough resources in high-quality education that is widely available, and give demographic trends enough time to work their magic, it won’t be long before the remaining Culture Warriors of the Right have become extinct.

{pic by stevegarfield}

Let us hope that Sarah Palin’s erratically graceless exit from the governorship of Alaska does not portend her exit from the national stage of electoral politics. We need her not merely in the same way that any village has a collective psychological need for its idiot, but in a more pragmatic, political sense as well. The woman is beloved by the GOP’s ever-shrinking “base” of angry white Bible Thumpers. In fact, a mind-numbing 84% of white evangelical Republicans profess a favorable view of Palin despite (or, perhaps, because of) her numerous and well-publicized instances of stupidity and dubious judgment. They even kept loving her after she demonstrated her foreign-policy erudition to Katie Couric by explaining that “as Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where do they go? It’s Alaska… It is from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there, they are right next to our state.” Truly inspiring words to the faithful.

At any rate, if the Republican Party is to assume its rightful place in the U.S. political landscape as a permanent minority party that provides a reliable source of fodder for late-night comedians, it is essential that Palin become the GOP standard-bearer. And, if Palin is to effectively rise to the top of the Republican Party, she must be on the GOP presidential ticket in 2012. But every presidential ticket requires two candidates, so let us hope that another conservative heavy weight can be persuaded to join her. Specifically, I’m thinking of another darling of the Republican base; the jowl-jiggling hero of the 2009 Conservative Political Action Committee’s annual meeting; the man who thinks that both global warming and the health-care crisis are elaborate hoaxes perpetrated by socialist Democrats and liberal media elites; the Right Wing’s favorite pain-killer junkie: Rush Limbaugh.

If ever there were a ticket that could energize the GOP base like no other, and—in the process—alienate most of the Democrats and Independents needed to actually win a presidential election, it’s Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh. Given Palin’s superior star power and hair styling, she should probably be at the top of the ticket, but that would probably be denounced by Limbaugh and his fans as a Femi-Nazi plot to emasculate the red-blooded American male. Real men are always Tops; never Bottoms. So Limbaugh-Palin 2012 it must be.

{pic by rafaelm}

More than 130 years ago, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts dared to suggest that the United States put an end to the legal segregation of whites and blacks in public places. In Sumner’s opinion, this was a rather barbaric custom that made little sense in the post-abolition era. But Congressman William B. Read of Kentucky knew better. Ending public segregation of blacks would be but the first step; “the next step will be that they will demand a law allowing them, without restraint, to visit the parlors and drawing rooms of the whites, and have free and unrestrained social intercourse with your unmarried sons and daughters.” Civil rights were a slippery slope… give the darkies a few rights and they’ll want more, and then they’ll come for your children.

Not quite a century later, in 1958, a black woman in Virginia, Mildred Jeter, was engaging in all sorts of “unrestrained social intercourse” with her white husband, Richard Loving. So, naturally, Caroline County Sheriff R. Garnett Brooks and two of his deputy thugs entered the couple’s house in the wee hours of the morning and arrested them in bed for violating the state’s prohibition against interracial marriage (the couple had been married in D.C.). As their case made its way through the state’s medieval judicial system, a trial judge named Leon M. Bazile offered this erudite reading of the law’s finer points: “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And, but for the interference with his arrangement, there would be no cause for such marriage. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”

And, now, half a century later, homophobes are employing the same anti-logic as their segregationist predecessors in arguing that gay marriage will offend God’s delicate sensibilities and bring about the collapse of civilization as we know it. Glenn Beck warns that a tsunami of “polyamorous,” multiple-partner marriages will be unleashed upon U.S. society if a man is allowed to legally marry a man or a woman is allowed to legally marry a woman. Pat Robertson has divined that gay marriage will lead us down the slippery slope to legalized pedophilia, child molestation, and bestiality. Bill O’Reilly seems particularly fascinated by the prospect of legal bestiality; offering up comical images of humans married to turtles, ducks, goats, and dolphins …give the fags a few rights and they’ll want more, and then they’ll come for your children—and your pets.

Of course, you expect this sort of attitude from the Bible-thumping Chicken Littles of The Far Right, for whom self-righteously intolerant absolutism is a central creed. Much more revealing, and profoundly hypocritical, is the bigotry emanating from some African American leaders whom one might hope would be a little more self-aware in this regard. For instance, when the D.C. Council voted on May 5 to recognize same-sex marriages performed elsewhere, the lone dissenter was none other than Marion Barry, an African American veteran of civil-rights struggles in decades past, who had to be taken to task for the obvious bigotry of his position by a gay, white member of the council, David Catania. Barry’s justification for his somewhat ironic stance was that he was siding with African American ministers “who stand on the moral compass of God.” Said moral ministers erupted with histrionic indignation when the vote was cast, invoking God and imperiled children with all the passion of the segregationists who came before them.

The moral of the story? Beware of anyone who claims to be in possession of God’s moral compass. He may do unto you as was done unto his forefathers.

{pic by Colin Purrington}

A front-page story in the March 11, 2009, Washington Post serves as an example of human stupidity both laughable and terrifying in its implications for the future of the United States and of Civilization as a whole. The laughable part of the story is the recounting of a recent field trip to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History by students in an “Advanced Creation Studies” class at Lynchburg, Virginia’s own Liberty University—the faux institution of higher learning founded by the late, great religious fanatic Jerry Falwell. Apparently, excursions to venues such as “natural history museums, aquariums, geologic sites, and even dinosaur parks” are a rite of passage undertaken by many Creationists as a means of inoculating themselves against the deleterious effects of science.

The terrifying part of the story is a reference to a 2006 survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life which found that “42 percent of Americans believe humans have always existed in their present form.” In other words, despite the abundant evidence of evolution—the well-documented genetic changes that have been observed in organisms over the course of many generations; the chronology apparent in the fossil record; the anatomical similarities and geographic distribution of related species—more than two out of every five people in an ostensibly “advanced” nation such as the United States view the creation stories of their favorite religions as literal renditions of world history.

This constitutes a grim indictment of the U.S. educational system. Not only is a sizable chunk of the populace unaware of what words like “evolution,” “science,” and “theory” actually mean; but they also lack any sense of perspective on the blindingly random diversity of the world’s religions and creation stories. There are as many creation stories as there are cultures. Which one is “right”?… Yoruba? Maori? Hopi? Norse? Mossi? Wakaranga? And which of the world’s religions possesses the greatest authority in matters of history?… Candomblé? Baha’i? Sikhism? Zoroastrianism? Jehovah’s Witnesses? Santeria? Of course, all a Fundamentalist of any kind needs is “faith”… you just know what you know… even when you know nothing at all.

It is ironic that many of today’s Creationists would probably be dead if the “theory” of evolution had not enabled scientists to develop new and better antibiotics in response to the evolution of antibiotic resistance among the bacteria that cause infectious diseases. Indeed, this suggests a means of reducing the incidence of Creationism in the U.S. population that might be far more cost-effective than a rejuvenated system of public education… we could stop giving antibiotics to Creationists when they get infections. It is only logical to assume that if Creationists don’t believe in the process of evolution through mutation and natural selection, then they don’t believe in the power of antibiotics either.

{pic by Godverbs}

To hear some conservatives describe it, the Obama Administration’s announcement that it will rescind the so-called “conscience rule” implemented by Ex-President Bush means that God-fearin’ doctors and nurses around the country will soon be forced at gunpoint to bite the heads off of babies. In truth, Obama will be overturning a rule so sweepingly vague and Taliban-esque in its extremism that it has no place in a civilized society. Under the Bush doctrine, a pharmacist refusing to fill a prescription for, say, birth-control pills would be entitled to a “right of conscience” for not doing his or her job. As for the possibility that some Good Christian might be forced to perform or assist in providing an abortion in the absence of Bush’s edict, federal law already “protects” those medical professionals who might find it morally objectionable to do so.

One can only imagine the Dark Ages into which medicine might fall were the conscience-stricken anti-logic of fundamentalist doctors and nurses to hold sway throughout the land. You are taken to the emergency room with a compound fracture of your leg, hoping that a surgeon might pin your broken bones back together and enable you to one day walk normally again, only to learn that your doctor—good Christian Scientist that he is—prefers to use the healing power of prayer rather than surgery to mend horrifically broken bones. Should you really be forced to spend your life as a cripple in order to accommodate your doctor’s superstitions? Doctors, nurses, and pharmacists who can’t handle the demands of modern medicine because of perceived conflicts with their favorite religious story books should consider finding a new line of work. Perhaps as faith healers.

Then again, there might be an upside to a Bush-style “right of conscience.” Progressive medical professionals who have moral qualms about fundamentalism could refuse medical care to conservative patients….

{pic by cactusbones}

As the largely civilian death toll among Palestinians from the Israeli invasion of Gaza surpasses 1,000—including more than 300 children—some Israelis are engaged in a bit of soul-searching. In the opinion pages of Haaretz, for instance, Gideon Levy describes the invasion as “war deluxe,” with “pilots bombing unimpeded as if on practice runs, tank and artillery soldiers shelling houses and civilians from their armored vehicles.” He describes a conflict in which “a large, broad army is fighting against a helpless population and a weak, ragged organization that has fled the conflict zones and is barely putting up a fight.” And he reminds us that “the children of Gaza who survive this war will remember it” and that “a child who has seen his house destroyed, his brother killed and his father humiliated will not forgive,” thus breeding a new generation of resistance fighters and suicide bombers.

With a similar sense of existential anguish, Avraham Burg opines that Israelis refuse to negotiate with Hamas because “we are incapable of speaking with ourselves.” According to Burg, Israelis are not yet “ready to talk about the evacuation of settlers out of fear of the domestic price entailed in pulling out the agents of the occupation. We are incapable of acknowledging the fact that we have become a state of the settlers and that the Israel Defense Forces is the settler defense forces.” He laments on behalf of both Israelis and Palestinians the “faith-based murderousness that is killing our two nations and religions.”

It is this last point that gets at what is perhaps the most psychologically intractable element of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—quite apart from the historical injustices experienced by Palestinians who were expelled from their lands when Israel was created in 1948, and who lived under the decades-long Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza that commenced in 1967. As Haaretz columnist Tom Segev writes in the Washington Post, “in recent years, with the rise of Hamas and the increasing militance of some Jewish settlers, this precariously irrational conflict has also assumed a more religious character—and thereby become even more difficult to solve. Islamic fundamentalists, as well as Jewish ones, have made control of the land part of their faith, and that faith is dearer to them than human life.” In other words, legions of well-armed lunatics on both sides believe quite firmly—fanatically, in fact—that their god has given them the divine right to wipe out their ethno-religious enemies by any and all means necessary.

Ideally, the Hebrew god (Yahweh) and the Islamic god (Allah) might be persuaded to get in the ring and fight it out to decide who is right. But, unfortunately, neither is real, so this is unlikely to occur anytime soon. Both faiths believe there is only one true god, and he has apparently promised all of the “holy land” to different groups of people at the same time. Under such circumstances, rational discussion becomes difficult at best. It is for this reason that Segev counts himself “among the new majority of Israelis who no longer believe in peace with the Palestinians. The positions are simply too far apart at this time.”

However, it’s important to keep in mind that the lunatics on the Israeli side are being propped up by enormous amounts of U.S. money and weapons, and the lunatics on the Hamas side by large, though not quite so enormous, amounts of Iranian money and weapons. Were those two sources of external support removed, perhaps more people would quickly come to favor reason over religious fantasy.