God Bless Christopher Hitchens

I don't always agree with Christopher Hitchens, but his writing is always worth reading, and his opinions are worthy of respect. In this one, he's said nothing with which I disagree.

Here are some excerpts from Hitchens's response to the death of non-Doctor Jerry Falwell (his "doctorate" degrees are honorary and 2 of the alleged 3 are from non-accredited institutions - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Falwell for details). You can find the full article at http://www.slate.com/id/2166337/nav/tap2/.

...there is no vileness that cannot be freely uttered by a man whose name is prefaced with the word Reverend.

Or Imam, or Father, or probably Rabbi, although that seems to be much less prevalent. In the case of Islam, the silence of the "moderate" majority has dire and deadly consequences, allowing the worst forms of extremism to spread unchecked, but our Christian majority remains similarly silent most of the time, so long as the speaker of obscenities is "Christian." That this currently has no inspiring effect on violent Christian extremists is due to other factors (below).

Try this: Call a TV station and tell them that you know the Antichrist is already on earth and is an adult Jewish male. See how far you get. Then try the same thing and add that you are the Rev. Jim-Bob Vermin. "Why, Reverend, come right on the show!" What a fool Don Imus was. If he had paid the paltry few bucks to make himself a certified clergyman, he could be jeering and sneering to the present hour.

In the time immediately following the assault by religious fascism on American civil society in September 2001, he [Falwell] used his regular indulgence on the airwaves to commit treason. Entirely exculpating the suicide-murderers, he asserted that their acts were a divine punishment of the United States.

Falwell's fabricated indictment would certainly validate some of the Bush administration's policies and machinations subsequent to 9/11: since our sin is to blame (and not the terrorists'), clearly domestic changes are required to "restore" us to a Christian nation (despite the Founders' work to keep the Constitution secular).

A detail in this ghastly narrative, as adepts of the "Left Behind" series will know, is that the return of the risen Christ will require the mass slaughter or mass conversion of all Jews.

This depraved children's story certainly casts a new light on our relationship with Israel; perhaps our sponsorship is to enable a more efficient "mass conversion" when the time is right.

Men of this type, if they cannot persuade enough foolish people to part with their savings, usually end up raving on the street and waving placards about the coming day of judgment.

Most men of his type aren't quite as successful at financing lavish celebrity and lifestyle through the donations of the ignorant and desperate.

His place on the cable shows will be amply filled by Al Sharpton: another person who can get away with anything under the rubric of Reverend.

Opponents of Sharpton - a group of which any rational person should be proud to be counted a member - typically object on political or racial grounds, sidestepping this moron's religious title.

It's a shame that there is no hell for Falwell to go to, and it's extraordinary that not even such a scandalous career is enough to shake our dumb addiction to the "faith-based."

I'll follow this with a quite from Sam Harris, placing religious moderation in context:

While moderation in religion may seem a reasonable position to stake out, in light of all that we have (and have not) learned about the universe, it offers no bulwark against religious extremism and religious violence. The problem that religious moderation poses for all of us is that it does not permit anything very critical to be said about religious literalism. We cannot say that fundamentalists are crazy, because they are merely practicing their freedom of belief; we cannot even say that they are mistaken in religious terms, because their knowledge of scripture is generally unrivaled. All we can say, as religious moderates, is that we don't like the personal and social costs that a full embrace of scripture imposes on us. This is not a new form of faith, or even a new species of scriptural exegesis; it is simply a capitulation to a variety of all-too-human interests that have nothing, in principle, to do with God.

Christians are tolerant, nonviolent, and reasonable to the extent that we ignore most of the Bible, and embrace secularism. At least I can't remember the last time I helped execute a witch, homosexual, blasphemer or adulterer - you?

The most pithy and memorable quote from Hitchens's article is this:

All bigots and frauds are brothers under the skin.

Amen.

A time for heresy

From Bill Moyers, always a good read: A Time For Heresy. My attempt at a summary of the main points:

Bill Clinton is a Baptist. So is Pat Robertson. Jesse Jackson is a Baptist. So is Jesse Helms. Al Gore is a Baptist. So is Jerry Falwell. No wonder Baptists have been compared to jalapeno peppers: one or two make for a tasty dish, but a whole bunch together will bring tears to your eyes.

Many Baptists are fundamentalists; they believe in the absolute inerrancy of the Bible and the divine right of preachers to tell you what it means.

The Bible advocates violence like the Quran (burning witches, stoning adulteresses, endless massacres by Joshua and family, etc.), but with a higher illiteracy rate, Muslims hear Islam perverted by local preachers. For the literate, the only excuse for following preachers (and politicians), rather than the facts, is laziness.

They also believe in the separation of church and state only if they cannot control both. The only way to cooperate with fundamentalists, it has been said, is to obey them.

Baptists helped ... America’s great contribution to political science and practical politics – the independence of church and state... No religion was to become the official religion; you couldn’t be taxed to pay for my exercise of faith.

Said James Dunn: "The Supreme Court can’t ban prayer in school. Real prayer is always free." When the fundamentalists and their obliging politicians claimed that God had been expelled from the classroom, Dunn answered: "The god whom I worship and serve has a perfect attendance record and has never been tardy."

Unless your goal is to impress others with the amount of time you spend praying, talking about praying, and otherwise making your relationship with God as visible to your peers as possible. Not quite the goal, as I understand it.

Pain comes with freedom – it’s just the deal. The little gods don’t want you to grow, learn, think for yourself. But you have to test their truth claims against your own life’s experience – against your own faith and reason.

This is a time for heresy. American democracy is threatened by perversions of money, power, and religion. Money has bought our elections right out from under us. Power has turned government "of, by, and for the people" into the patron of privilege. And Christianity and Islam have been hijacked by fundamentalists who have made religion the language of power, the excuse for violence, and the alibi for empire.

In all countries, religious symbolism and rhetoric is power over those too lazy or igorant to try to understand the religion on their own, and to follow its implications. And as in Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, patriotism (or "nationalism" if you're referring to any country but your own) can be inflated to religious proportions and distortions.

We were not supposed to be a country where the winners take all. The great progressive struggles in our history were waged to make sure ordinary citizens, and not just the rich, share in the benefits of a free society. Today, however, the majority of Americans may support such broad social goals as affordable medical coverage for all, decent wages for working people, safe working conditions, a good education for every child, and clean air and water, but there’s no government "of, by, and for the people" to deliver on those aspirations.

How did this happen? By design. For a quarter of a century now a ferocious campaign has been conducted to dismantle the political institutions, the legal and statutory canons, and the intellectual, cultural, and religious frameworks that sustained America’s social contract.

For more details, use your favorite search engine on any of the organizations referenced in this article: Funding the Right.

Their economic strategy was to cut workforces and wages, scour the globe for even cheaper labor, and relieve investors of any responsibility for the cost of society.

And companies, of course: recent legislation on lawsuit "reform" restricts the options for American citizens, but not those of corporations, which file 75% of civil lawsuits.

Their political strategy was to neutralize the independent media, create their own propaganda machine with a partisan press, and flood their coffers with rivers of money from those who stand to benefit from the transfer of public resources to elite control. Along the way they would burden the nation with structural deficits that will last until our children’s children are ready to retire, systematically stripping government of its capacity, over time, to do little more than wage war and reward privilege.

This strategy is known as "starving the beast": cut taxes and raise national debt, all the while refusing to reduce spending. As debt increases, the only politically viable solution is to cut social programs (since money thrown at defense budgets is beyond criticism) - the goal all along.

Their religious strategy was to fuse ideology and theology into a worldview freed of the impurities of compromise, claim for America the status of God’s favored among nations (and therefore beyond political critique or challenge), and demonize their opponents as ungodly and immoral.

At the intersection of these three strategies was money: Big Money.

That money isn’t going to come from regular folks – less than one half of one percent of all Americans made a contribution of $200 or more to a federal candidate in 2004. No, the men and women who have mastered the money game have taken advantage of this fundamental weakness in our system – the high cost of campaigns – to sell democracy to the highest bidder.

The number of lobbyists registered to do business in Washington has more than doubled in the last five years. That’s 16,342 lobbyists in 2000 to 34,785 last year. Sixty-five lobbyists for every member of Congress.

The total spent per month by special interests wining, dining, and seducing federal officials is now nearly $200 million. Per month.

While the lobbyists are privately employed, it's a hard to take "small government" seriously when industry is spending such money sending more and more people to Washington. Given the span of their influence, this is evidently the situation Republicans want.

But it’s a small investment on the return. Just look at the most important legislation passed by Congress in the last decade.

There was the energy bill that gave oil companies huge tax breaks at the same time that Exxon Mobil just posted $36 billion in profits in 2005, while our gasoline and home heating bills are at an all-time high.

There was the bankruptcy “reform” bill written by credit card companies to make it harder for poor debtors to escape the burdens of divorce or medical catastrophe.

Note that the bill places no additional restrictions on corporate bankruptcies - only the much smaller bankruptcies of private citizens.

There was the deregulation of the banking, securities, and insurance sectors, which led to rampant corporate malfeasance and greed and the destruction of the retirement plans of millions of small investors.

There was the deregulation of the telecommunications sector which led to cable industry price-gouging and the abandonment of news coverage by the big media companies.

There was the blocking of even the mildest attempt to prevent American corporations from dodging an estimated $50 billion in annual taxes by opening a P.O. box in an off-shore tax haven like Bermuda or the Cayman Islands.

And in every case, the religious right was cheering for the winners.

There are no victimless crimes in politics. The cost of corruption is passed on to the people.

These charlatans and demagogues know that by controlling a society’s most emotionally-laden symbols, they can control America, too. Davidson Loehr reminds us that holding preachers and politicians to a higher standard than they want to serve has marked the entire history of both religion and politics. It is the conflict between the religion of the priests – ancient and modern – and the religion of the prophets.

It is the vast difference between the religion about Jesus and the religion of Jesus.

For the greatest heretic of all is Jesus of Nazareth, who drove the money changers from the temple in Jerusalem as we must now drive the money changers from the temples of democracy.

Faith-based security

From the "what the f***?" department, for your (in)digestion: Executive Order: Responsibilities of the Department of Homeland Security with Respect to Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. No, this is not a joke, at least not an intentional one. Some of the lowlights of this directive:

The Secretary of Homeland Security (Secretary) shall establish within the Department of Homeland Security (Department) a Center for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives (Center).

The purpose of the Center shall be to coordinate agency efforts to eliminate regulatory, contracting, and other programmatic obstacles to the participation of faith-based and other community organizations in the provision of social and community services.

... coordinate a comprehensive departmental effort to incorporate faith-based and other community organizations in Department programs and initiatives to the greatest extent possible...

That's right - faith-based homeland security! Good for the entire family! If I were more cynical I'd take this as the administration finally admitting that prayer is about the only option left, in lieu of smart policies and fiscal decisions which could fund reasonable security recommendations.

Messiahs and Imperialists

Some notes on why a state of "minimum and permanent level of international tension" is desirable to U.S. policymakers: Messiahs and Imperialists:

... the main differences among the different schools are tactical—liberal internationalists, for example, tend to value multilateralism and a sense of prudence, they believe in the magical healing powers of global capital, and they don't usually descend into the trance-like messianism of George W. Bush...

... a president with a divine sense of purpose is hardly the scariest religious impulse in American foreign policy. That honor belongs to the various forms of millennialism in the United States, which can hold that it's America's duty to bring about the millennium...

... the standard bearer of a "non-apocalyptic view of means and ends, capabilities and challenges" tends to be the "realists" within the foreign policy establishment—those, like Jeanne Kirkpatrick or Condoleeza Rice, who believe that America must remake the world in its own image, but should be cautious about how to do so. ... But even if these "realists" don't drink from the same millennial Kool-Aid as the neoconservatives, they very much serve their own master: namely, American militarism.

On the one hand, there's the widespread, quasi-religious idea that America is the chosen nation called on to transform the world, with all the genuinely noble and appallingly ugly impulses that brings. On the other hand, there's a security establishment that doesn't buy into these millennial fantasies, but still remains committed to the endless "maintenance and expansion of U.S. global military power." Zbigniew Brzezinski, who is held in high regard by the Democratic establishment, sees the world as a "Grand Chessboard," which gives a sense for what that's all about. If this is all correct, then any hopes for a sensible foreign policy in the near future are probably foolish.

The wages of fundamentalism

This is a good article on the Taliban in every country - evidently a byproduct of evolution: The Wages of Fundamentalism.

From the article:

There are warning signs, however, that American science is losing its edge, and may even have peaked. One reason is that as religious and political fundamentalism tighten their grip, they are beginning to sap America's intellectual vitality.

Yet history shows that fundamentalism leads only to stagnation and disaster.

Christianity in the Roman Empire led to half a millennium of dark ages, ending only with the rediscovery of Aristotle in the 12th century. ... And Islamic fundamentalism beginning in Baghdad around 1067 led to a millennium of backwardness, which still afflicts the Islamic world.

By contrast, the very history of modern Europe - the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, the modernist battles of the 19th century - may be characterized as the victory of rationalism and science over religious dogmatism.

Turkey has tried to rid itself of fundamentalist Islam twice - and failed twice.

Above everything else, Europe is not fundamentalist. This is why, in their hearts, many Europeans have misgivings about Turkey's entry into the EU. Europe has no shortage of problems of its own making, and has no need to import fundamentalism of any variety.

Just a reminder that any sort of ideological Christian fundamentalist entrenchment is likely to result in conditions as bad as those of the "barbarians at the gates," whether real threats like fundamentalist extremists abroad, or imaginary threats like evolution, obscenity, environmentalism, or liberalism (which was, after all, the offspring of the Enlightenment and the foundation of our nation - prior to the term's corruption by the 80s right-wing media machine).