Itching for another shot at the Union

Neo-Confederates fantasize openly about insurgency against an impossible and bizarre scenario that ends in loss of sovereignty:

“He's going to try to hand over the sovereignty of the United States to the U.N., and what is going to happen when that happens?” Head asked. “I'm thinking the worst. Civil unrest, civil disobedience, civil war maybe. And we're not just talking a few riots here and demonstrations, we're talking Lexington, Concord, take up arms and get rid of the guy."

Judgement-free Judge Tom Head (R-lunatic fringe, Texas - sorry to be redundant) is canny enough to phrase his dark fantasy as a Lexington-Concord revolution, but you know he's really dreaming of Fort Sumter.

And these Americans have guns and want to budget more locally to train the local lunatics against the federal government.

This will not end well.

(h/t Philosoraptor)

Not when the facts have a liberal bias

House Republicans: "We'd rather live in a fantasy than deal with facts."

The Peters Amendment would not have altered H.R. 3582 in any functional manner, it simply would had added the following factual findings section:

(1) On January 8, 2003, White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer said that President Bush believed that the tax cut package enacted in 2001 and expanded in 2003 would “create additional revenues for the federal government and pay for itself.”
(2) Before the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 were enacted, the Congressional Budget Office projected gradually rising surpluses, from 2.7% of gross domestic product in 2001 to 5.3% of gross domestic product by 2011, with the federal government operating debt free by 2009.
(3) The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 have added over $2 trillion to budget deficits from 2002-2011.
(4) Despite signing the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 into law, President George W. Bush’s administration had, according to the Wall Street Journal, “the worst track record for job creation since the government began keeping records” in 1939.
(5) From 2001 to 2009, gross domestic product grew at the slowest pace for any eight-year span since 1953.
(6) Median household income declined during the Bush Administration for the first time since 1967, when this data began to be tracked.

Which is more embarrassing, denying brute incontrovertible facts or acknowledging them when your entire
platform depends on ignoring them?

Duh.

(h/t Philosoraptor)

Something I wish I'd said

Winston Smith of Philosoraptor fame (and deserving of more) limns right-wing responsibility for their own rhetoric:

Many people--including politicians and influential media figures--on the right now commonly say things which, in effect, constitute an argument for the conclusion that violence ought to be used against liberals and Democrats in general and the President in particular. You can deny that you are advocating violence all you want, but if you say that liberals are evil, that they are intentionally ruining the country, that they are trying to turn the U.S. into a totalitarian "socialist" state (and succeeding), then you are building a case for the use of violence against them, intentionally or not. (And this is not to even mention claims to the effect that the President is illegitimate and, perhaps, the Antichrist.) If you say such things, then you are trying to convince people of things such that, were a rational person to believe them, he would have to consider using violence in response. I can guarantee you, were an actual totalitarian movement actually on the brink of taking power in America, I would be contemplating violence against it. You would--and should--do the same. Add to the above some rhetoric about "Second Amendment remedies," and there is no rational way to deny that the right has sidled right on up to advocating violence.

Brilliant, clear, apt.  It's only three paragraphs.  Read it all.

Choosing our disbeliefs

Most people choose their beliefs. They don't reason to them. Many won't even reject their cherished beliefs just because they've learned something new.

In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.

Social norms matter immensely in the choice what to believe. The norms of society as a whole are important, though they may not be as strong for a person as the norms of a particular group that is central to that person's identity. My sixth grade teacher told me that evolution wasn't nice; she wasn't even willing to engage on the facts.

This doesn't mean that the truth is socially constructed. It means that social groups construct belief systems, often irrespective of observation and outside the truth. Just because these systems are popular (religious fundamentalism, for instance) doesn't make true-for-them a valid supporting heuristic. It merely makes them well-protected.

The Globe-reported studies found that conservatives, true to form, are often ignoramuses. Many don't care what you tell them. Offering a fact at variance with their beliefs immediately makes you biased. They rely on conservative media to package carefully constructed bullshit that protects their notions from contradiction. It's Fox's job to give its viewers shelter from the well-known liberal bias of reality.

The participants who self-identified as conservative believed the misinformation on WMD and taxes even more strongly after being given the correction. With those two issues, the more strongly the participant cared about the topic — a factor known as salience — the stronger the backfire.

Liberals as always are better, but we don't have that much to be proud of either.

The effect was slightly different on self-identified liberals: When they read corrected stories about stem cells, the corrections didn’t backfire, but the readers did still ignore the inconvenient fact that the Bush administration’s restrictions weren’t total.

The Boston Globe story chalks our irrationality up to the wiring of our brains. That's a pretty lame shrug of the shoulders. That wiring hasn't changed, but the degree to which we are polarized has. Yes, it's normal for all people to resist changing their beliefs, to be skeptical of new facts. But it hasn't until the past few decades been normal for conservatives especially to refuse to accept new information.

There has been an asymmetry in the past. Conservatives, by definition, resist change. It's not surprising to find more ignoramuses among them. Liberals are similarly more likely to support change for the sake of change, also not a positive trait.

But the asymmetry in teachability is larger now than at any previous time in my life. I think the crucial difference between now and the 1970s, for example, is that there is a diverse and well-organized propaganda operation dedicated to keeping conservatives away from difficult and dissonant facts.

The new social norm, created by talk radio, conservative think tanks, conservative foundations, Christian fundamentalists, and others, values adherence to the conservative creed over finding out what's actually true about the world.

To say that this is a danger to democracy, as the article does, is a vast understatement. But then, the current crop of radicals who call themselves conservative don't actually value democracy. Instead, they believe that any liberal-ish government is illegitimate and should be brought down as soon as possible. That's even more dangerous.

(h/t Philosoraptor)

First draught of history

Media coverage of politics is no longer driven by the New York Times or the Washington Post, not even by CBS, but rather by Fox News, talk radio, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, Drudge's rumor-mongering (still prospering on one semen stain after all these years!), and the rest of the concerted conservative corporate propaganda machine. The first draught of history is a heady blend of angry, paranoid, proudly ignorant Kool-Aid.

Any history of this period that's not a revisionist history will purvey the thoroughgoing bullshit of our age.

(h/t Philosoraptor)

Even Fox notices

Silence Do-Good may scoff, but there are qualitative and quantitative differences between lunatic loons on the left and frothing wingnuts on the right. To name one, gun ownership...

I'd guess that Shepard Smith is looking to make a career move.

(h/t Philosoraptor, linking to Andrew Sullivan, embedding Talking Points Memo)

Sickle claw to the throat of GOP special pleading

Like his blog's namesake, Winston Smith of Philosoraptor rips the flesh of his Republican prey in a particularly apt and succinct way:

The one thing it's absolutely clear that we absolutely cannot do is: demand scrupulous investigation and trial in Blowjobgate but not Torturegate.

We might forgive traffic tickets but not murders. We might forgive neither. If we're not too bright, we might forgive both. But it's simply not possible to rationally forgive murders but not traffic tickets.

Go and read it all. It's worth every word.

He even uses my favorite word.

Update (4/28): Digby comes through on the same theme:

I just pray no fellatio was involved in the torture regime or there is going to be hell to pay.

Asking the right questions

Some interrogators refused to torture. They learned what they needed. Here are the conclusions of one of them:

I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq. The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. It's no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me -- unless you don't count American soldiers as Americans.

This is the Bushist legacy.

(h/t Philosoraptor)

Shorter Brad Hirschfeld

When Saudi King Abdullah speaks about religious liberty, which he is manifestly opposed to, he's probably trying to ban blasphemy, which is an attack on religious liberty, but it's still a good thing because it's dialog.

My problem with this happy talk? I'm looking for more than lip service. Hiding legal mandates against certain thoughts in the dressy rhetoric of freedom doesn't seem like a positive under any circumstances.

Update: Philosoraptor provides a link to the Christian Science Monitor piece that started the conversation.

Tag, I'm it

The latest blog pyramid scheme, uh, six degrees of separation experiment has come my way via my friend Tom. Oh, bugger, no tag-backs! The rules of the game (much more straightforwardly presented at Tom's place):

1. Don't take yourself too seriously. No, that's not rule one. Rule one is to link to the person who tagged you, which I have now done twice, since any job worth doing is worth screwing up the first time.
2. Turn the rules into Calvinball, not the nasty kind played by Republicans, rather the kind where you actually post the rules and dare your victims to violate them and incur the secret penalty that changes on your whim.
3. Pretend that your biography hold some intrinsic interest to someone other than your mom. Mine is in fact less interesting than Tom's (unless I lie) - no hits of ... oxygen at high altitude, but I can nonetheless come up with six random things to write about myself. The challenge will be to stop at six.
4. Tag six people or blogs or at least Eliza programs that appear to pass the Turing test. I have actually never met any of the poor benighted bloggers I plan to tag, though there's always a chance.
5. The results of ESP being themselves pretty random, I have to let the person, uh, victim know that he or she has been tagged. I'm going to follow Tom's lead and use both a comment and an email. This is so important to me that I created a seventh email address for myself that does not reveal my secret identity to anyone who lacks the secret decoder ring found in packages of the thankfully defunct breakfast cereal Crispy Critters.
6. Dance with the girl who brung ya, in this case, let your tagger (well, this is sorta like graffiti) know that you've finally passed that difficult kidney ... meme.

Six themes in my life:

1. My seventh grade math teacher called me a "compulsive student" on my report card, and I couldn't believe that she would say anything back-handed, so I doubted my vocabulary and had to look it up, thereby proving her right. But look, it's undeniable (yes, and the vanity that goes with it). To my undying shame, I still remember my SAT scores and my PSAT scores from 30+ years ago. The shame makes me recall the events, and that makes them harder to erase. Still, there's no doubt I am open to and thrilled by learning even as it gets harder to plug the dike against the entropic leakage of the sea. Even so, I learned how to swim at age 37, I still think I will eventually learn something, anything about music theory and performance (not yet!), and I believe that I could still learn a foreign language to supplement the three years of high school Spanish that permits me to talk baseball with the custodian. I believe that I can learn anything, even calculus (again) so as not to disappoint Richard Feynman.
   
2. I've lost a step (not the first step, though), and my vertical leap is down around two feet now, but my hands are still deft and soft. If something volunteers to dive off a shelf in the fridge, I'll catch it. The dog takes tennis balls out on our night walks, not to timeshare fetch with sniffing the pee-mail but to help me amuse myself. I try to see how far away from a streetlight I can get and still catch a ball flung up toward the Milky Way, its dim crescent an echo of the moon. Other than hiking, all my favorite exercises (not the full category of physical activities!) involve chasing a ball. The reason I still play basketball against my better judgment at the advanced age of 50 is that I love the game, I still dream about the game, and I'm still getting better at the game. Tennis was supposed to wean me off hoops before a catastrophic injury, or so I thought. No dice.
3. I'm a night owl. There's never been a time I remember that I didn't want to stay up late. Only recently have I begun to regret this fact. Since I can't sleep till noon any more, I'm often sleep-deprived, as I will be when losing a few bucks at poker tonight.
   
4. Language is my favorite toy, spoken, written, imagined. It provides me endless joy with its sudden twists, its bizarre, often subversive hidden connections, with its transcendental opportunities for novelty in the familiar. Some of these come out as puns, and few appreciate those - but they laugh before they can help it. Poetry helps us understand the world or at least to go on after someone we love dies. For many, the poetry that consoles is scripture; for me, it is not, and often it is not even poems.
5. I pass everything through a skeptic's lens of reason, but my daughter knows that I'm an emotional being. Sometimes this reason is a poetry-killer. Sometimes it knows to step out of the way. Sometimes it is the source of poetry. The same goes for emotion.
6. The most important intellectual watershed in my life was my mother's introduction of me to Charles Darwin when I was eleven. Yeah, weird educated family. Well, the public schools in Tennessee weren't going to do it. From my current perspective, I should have become a biologist instead of a philosophy student turned techie, but my vanity got in the way, and physics, which appealed to my ego as hard, didn't appeal to my deep interest, so I wound up out of the sciences altogether. Unless you count computer science, which I don't.
   

My blogging ships-passing-in-the-night - drum roll, envelope please - are:

• Philosoraptor, where I've made myself both a nuisance and a valuable contributor to proprietor and philosophy professor Winston Smith for - it seems like forever - four years at least, maybe five.
• Newscoma in her new home, where it just jazzes me to have a connection back to the farm country soil of my birth, and a journalist to boot - Someday, I'll buy 'Coma and SQ a beer. Apiece.
• Main St. USA, where blogger truth writes with single-minded obsession, virtually every day, and always with something piquant to say. She (her sex actually a matter of conjecture based on sports fandom, but I'm a guy, and I share some of it, so go figure) , she plainly has the need to get her thoughts down, and I am so sympathetic to that need I just have to say so.
• Joy of Sox, where my minor, eentsy, embryonic, pathetic, gave up my share of season tickets Red Sox fandom is put to shame by Redsock, who rivals Ben Wrightman and who has the advantage of being, most likely, a real person and not just an AI program bent on the destruction of the now pitiful Yankees.
• LeftWingCracker, from the city in which I received my pseudonym like a gift that it took me more than thirty years to appreciate.
• From the Desk of Z, a new pleasure, of whose proprietor I've just made acquaintance in comments and then using the new Google follow feature.

Now, I'm sure that this blog-posting social hack will bring tons of new and interesting traffic here to lovable liberal, but I have to agree with Tom's observation that a picture of a sexy woman would probably be more successful purely in terms of visits, however disappointedly brief. I even went looking for a Sarah Shahi portrait in an idle moment, and I found some eye-popping art, but nothing on Wikimedia Commons or similarly usable, so I'll have to be satisfied with the cold comfort of a keyword.

Now, only at the end, will you understand the power of the dark side. This meme, of course, is the mark of the beast meme - 6 rules, 6 taggees, 6 biographical blurbs. We're all doomed. But I never wanted to go to a heaven that denies admission to dogs, anyway.

Confession

Normally, I hate stories like this. They're trying to poll what reality is. They purport to tell us what we should be able to see and judge ourselves. The non-rational truth is that many people are influenced by social consensus to believe things they didn't actually conclude themselves. (See Cialdini, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.) In evolutionary terms, this is adaptive for social species (humans, ants, etc.), but I digress.

In politics, the usual rule is that perception is reality, but I obstinately resist the claim that anything besides reality is actually reality. Yeah, I'm old fashioned that way. My blog-friend Winston Smith at Philosoraptor (we've exchanged links, but it doesn't mean we're married) may be relieved to hear that I believe this, despite my occasional hedged defense of the phrase 'socially constructed'.

Still, the CNN polling story does show at least that people are seeing through the bullshit that we call our mass media. But, sure, I agree that Obama's more compassionate, better at the economy, smarter, a better leader, etc., so of course I like it.

Everybody rationalizes. Why shouldn't I?

Update: Ditto this story about the debate.

Why liberals think Republicans harbor racists

Because they do. Get them anti-macaca voters to the polls. Too bad McCain has a black baby, but Obama has two. Feh.

(h/t Philosoraptor)

First Amendment

The Bill of Rights gets free speech right. Unlike Canadians and Europeans, I fear government regulation of speech more than all the jerks who are offensive with it. It's only a matter of time before an administration or a bureaucracy chooses self-protection over liberty. Given a third term, the Bushists might well trim the edges of free speech further than free speech zones and Ari Fleischer warnings.

I'm not interested in restricting robust dialog because it might hurt the feelings of someone who needs a thicker skin. We've seen hypersensitivity from just about everyone at one time or another from fundie Christians to Muslims, from feminists to conservative men who are tired of having their penis-centrism mocked, from Confederate sympathizers to respect-hungry rappers.

Adapted from a comment on this Philosoraptor thread.

We all remember

The rhetoric of American political campaigns, both from the candidates and the media, pretends to be tough and incisive. But it only dekes toward issues before ducking into hysteria. It exaggerates every utterance in whatever way it might be most negatively construed. My blog-buddy Winston Smith at Philosoraptor aptly calls this practice radically uncharitable interpretation.

Obama says it's worth talking to Iran, and blood and guts McCain fakes outrage, pretending that Obama said he'd happily take one of Iran's future nukes up the butt if that would start negotiations. If Americans at large had their bullshit detectors turned on, they would see this for what it is and chalk up the bullshit against its purveyor. Instead, we appear to prefer being lied to. And McCain locks himself into policy that has no alternative to violence.

Yesterday, Hillary made her now-infamous remark about RFK's assassination. People with an ax to grind or conventional wisdom to sell leapt to insinuate that she meant in her heart of hearts that, hey, she could still get lucky the way Hubert Humphrey did in 1968 if only James Earl Lee Harvey Sirhan would just do her a favor.

I think she was trying only to paint as precedented her time frame for accepting loss of the nomination. "We all remember ...," she started. She was using Bobby Kennedy's death as a memory aid, as a teacher or any speaker might find a touchstone. Her error was to use such a large fact to make such a prosaic argument. The fact's horror overwhelmed the mnemonic.

Mere mention of assassination does provoke our fears, mine anyway. Obama could be the sort of transformational figure that JFK, MLK, and RFK threatened to be before each in turn was gunned down. What would the 1960s have achieved had all three survived the decade?

There are thousands of Confederate throwbacks in this country who might take up arms against a renewal of that transformation, arms that they already own. James Earl Ray, Byron De La Beckwith, and the Philadelphia, Miss., KKK of 1964 are gone, but their hate-filled racist inheritors are still here. They have not failed to notice that Obama is a black man with a real chance to be President.

There are also thousands more Mark Chapmans, Arthur Bremers, and John Hinckleys - crippled little narcissists who kill for attention, who might again snatch chaos and defeat from the jaws of victory.

We all remember. Don't we?

It's not the information age

The real problem is not that there's a blizzard of information. Instead, there's a deluge of bullshit in the guise of information. Trying to get food for thought out of that torrent is the hard task.

What is real is too boring; even reporters want to tell us what it means. Today's story is too late; they want to guess what tomorrow's will be. What happened? Who cares! We don't even want to try to read the shadows on the cave wall anymore.

Pundits pick out whatever suits their favored narratives and leap to conclusions about all the rest. All the better if the RNC's blast faxes reinforce the stupidity. Ecstasy if Hillary's public statements about Obama also reinforce the new conventional wisdom.

The pundits face no consequences when they're wrong, not even the requirement that they admit it. Not even the requirement to stop saying well-worn, thoroughly debunked bullshit.

Practically everyone in the normal world has turned their bullshit detectors off or else burned them out listening to the shouting of "Jane you ignorant slut" in a thousand voices. They've found that no matter what ugly prejudice they choose to believe, someone somewhere will defend their point of view as if it really makes sense and will flattering them while doing it.

Thinking for yourself

Originally a comment at Philosoraptor.

If you don't get children thinking as they learn from as early an age as possible, they'll never shake off the rote regurgitation of factoids or, at best, the ability to solve exactly the class of problem that you've taught them. They'll never grasp the meaning in the equation.

Teachers matter, but for the most part parents are decisive. If they permit their children to follow the truth, their children may try to understand how things work instead of how their parents and teachers want them to work. The academically free approach is perfectly encapsulated in Richard Feynman's title, What Do You Care What Other People Think?. I was blessed with a mom who introduced me to Darwin at age eleven (me, not her!). (She was a public school educator and also an exceptional mentor.)

None of my teachers were going to do this. They were too conservative (in the South a long time ago), too unable themselves to question their social conditioning.

I went to college with a botanist who told me that in no case could a blackberry be considered a berry because botany classified blackberries as drupes (actually, an aggregate of drupelets, but nevermind). No amount of lexicography could move her off that dogma to a more open-minded view that words have different and still legitimate senses. She teaches high school science now, hopefully with a little more perspective.

Since I knew this botanist at Harvard, for chrissake, my result matches jimbales's for elite institutions. Critical thinking appears to be as damn rare in them as everywhere else.

When it's ripe

Poll: Bullshit Is Most Important Issue For 2008 Voters

After all, bullshit is important to me.

(Hat tip Philosoraptor.)

Battle of hot air

The scientific consensus on human causes of global is not new, except to Andrew Sullivan and others like him. It has existed since the early 1980s. Political resistance to that consensus hasn't changed it; it has merely trumped up ignorant doubt among the voters using essentially the "research" paradigm pioneered by the Tobacco Institute and the Institute for Creation Science (sic).

The climate change consensus existed during the Clinton administration, as it still does during the Bushist reign. Clinton and Gore had no need to suppress the actual science.

Now, of course, global warming deniers' comparisons to Clinton and Gore suggest a rhetorical trap. Do they have something from Newsmax or NRO alleging a suppression of dissent on climate change by someone connected to Al Gore? Is the fact that the UN's reports don't include Singer's dissent evidence for them of symmetrical suppression of scientists? Or did a denier's peer reviewed grant application get rejected? Well, out with it, then.

I will say this: Democrats are much more tolerant of mixed messages from the scientists in their administrations. This is true, I believe, because Democrats are more comfortable with dissent in general. Republicans, on the other hand, hearken to the corporate model, where the one version of the truth is handed down from the executive suite. The Bushists explicitly believe this - see Yoo, John.

Of course, science is not certain. It's empirical, not subject to certainty. It's qualitatively different from logic and mathematics. Their epistemic justification still has to deal with the often faulty reasoning power of humans, but at least they don't have to deal with the whole host of other sources of error and misinterpretation that are inherent in any study of the world.

The right question is: Based on our current knowledge, what should we do? We have three options - something, continued study, and nothing. Expense and confidence in our knowledge both do figure in a rational choice, but the expense is a balance of expenses since there is a large expected expense of doing nothing, too.

One source of my confidence in the scientific consensus is past cases. When scientists ascribed the ozone hole to freon, industry and its Republican handmaidens shrieked that the science wasn't certain, just as they do now (and as big tobacco has done for more than 40 years). Scientists not employed by the industry turned out to be right.

At this point, when deniers ("skeptics") suggest that maybe it's cheaper to address symptoms rather than causes, it sounds as though they're saying: "Hey, we ran the clock out on our opportunity to address the problem before dire consequences, and now it's too late to stop them." Hidden of course is the fact that mitigation is still possible even now that they have succeeded in causing us to miss out on prevention.

(Adapted from this comment on Philosoraptor.)

Defending the loons and dim-bulbs of academe

(From Philosoraptor)

If I admit that academia is liberal and that sometimes that's bad, will you admit that taking at face value anything George Will or David Horowitz has anything to do with is naive?

I know that George Will wants his readers to assume the definition of social justice that supports his thesis - because advocates for minorities use it in a specific way. Does the textbook he refers to use it that way, too? And what words intervene between the tiny little quotes? I never assume that a right-wing propagandist is leveling with me on the facts.

Really, if you take the word social and the word justice literally, who could oppose them? I mean, other than Michele Malkin. Could that have been the intended meaning?

Some of the anecdotes in the Will column would be disturbing - if they are fairly rendered. I don't assume that they are; too many times I've seen Horowitless allegations turn out to be fart when he alleged diarrhea.

Last, who would want an Ayn Rand social worker!

"Suck it up and will yourself to victory."

"But I came here looking for marriage counseling!"

"Tough, and oh by the way, I charge psychiatrist's fees."

It's a caring profession. Sure, there are conservatives who could do it, but not any of the ones who have a nationally syndicated column.

I mean, Charles Krauthammer! He must have gone into psychiatry because he enjoys screwing people up. Have you every known anyone as bitter and unpleasant?

Questioning God

A contrarian is suspicious of all rushes to judgement. In any society that channels both its good and its evil through every handy institution, religious, scientific, whatever, real contrarians are very valuable even if they are often despised or even hated. Any society? Really, every society.

When I think of contrarians, I think about the common characters from folklore of hermits and wizards and other weirdos. They don't get carried away by mob psychology, though sometimes they do get carried away by the mob to be killed. Still, enough must survive that the ability to stand apart can be passed down through genes or culture.

The value of a contrarian is that a monolithic culture always fails. It lacks the flexibility to overcome inevitable change. A contrarian or two can provide a margin of "odd" thinking that saves the day, though no contrarian should expect to get credit.

Jesus was a contrarian, too. It's not solely that he ministered to the poor - Mother Teresa did that without stepping outside her indoctrination (at least not willingly). Jesus also subverted the savage laws of the Hebrew Bible, not to mention the authority of its keepers. That's what made him dangerous and brought the whipped-up mob to kill him.

Paul was no free thinker, more an institutional revolutionary. Even Protestantism is marked by the dogmatic ossification of Paul.

Both Jews and Catholics have mostly escaped Old Testament savagery through gradualism, as have mainstream Protestants. (Well, Catholics did have several centuries of corrupt sectarian murder to learn repentance, and Protestants joined the battle, too.)

Fundamentalists, far from learning, have retreated to the vicious "morality" of tribal survival that fills the Old Testament in particular. They just don't put people to death for eating lobster. Islamic extremists may have mistaken Islamic society's present mean state as damning modernity and justifying their own retreat to savagery.

Where does that leave me? I'm an atheist. I don't believe God exists. I'm not quite fully to the disbelieving end of The Mystic's taxonomy of unbelief, however. I'm still willing to weigh evidence for the existence of God. But I've concluded that the likelihood of any God remotely resembling a person is nil, and that, based on every piece of evidence I've seen so far, the fundamentalists and even more liberal Christians are dead wrong about a personal God known from this one very local myth, a myth whose each day in the modern world more strenuously alienates it from its rigid ties to the culture of its origin.

(Adapted from a posting on Philosoraptor.)