Well to the Left Of Attila The Hun (W.LOATH):Jack Huberman’s Blog

AOL News's Funniest Headline Yet

It's about the Scooter Libby trial verdict. Ready?

"Reputations on the Line: White House Troubles Mount."

Yes, Bush's and Cheney's sterling reputations could suffer as a result of the trial, as more people begin to understand the utter moral depravity of a gang that would lie to the entire country and waste the lives of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis without a second thought in order to make themselves look and feel tough, establish a warlike, aggressionist, outlaw foreign policy, and get their Big Oil friends' hands on Iraq's oil, and who would then seek vengeance against someone who threw some light on their fraudulent claims without caring that in the process they could endanger U.S. intelligence agents and operations.

It really is a shame when something comes along to sully shining reputations like these.

"The White House faces a tough challenge to regain its political footing." Yes, they have slipped a bit--but it's just a rough patch (I mean, a slippery patch); but they'll get it back--if the media give them a chance, for god's sake, and don't just keep hammering away at them!

"Can Bush and Cheney get back on track? And how do you think history will ultimately judge them?" Oh, well, as US News & World Report noted last week (see my Feb. 21 post), it's much too soon to judge!

Sometimes Tom Friedman is well worth reading.

Like today, in this NYT op-ed, "The Silence That Kills." Highlights: Screw it--here's the whole thing:

"On Feb. 20, The A.P. reported from Afghanistan that a suicide attacker disguised as a health worker blew himself up near 'a crowd of about 150 people who had gathered for a ribbon-cutting ceremony to open an emergency ward at the main government hospital in the city of Khost.' A few days later, at a Baghdad college, a female Sunni suicide bomber blew herself up amid students who were ready to sit for exams, killing 40 people.

"Stop and think for a moment how sick this is. Then stop for another moment and listen to the silence. The Bush team is mute. It says nothing, because it has no moral authority. No one would listen. Mr. Bush is losing a P.R. war to people who blow up emergency wards. Europeans are mute, lost in their delusion that this is all George Bush’s and Tony Blair’s fault.

"But worst of all, Muslims, the very people whose future is being killed, are also mute. No surge can work in Iraq unless we have a 'moral surge,' a counternihilism strategy that delegitimizes suicide bombers. The most important restraints are cultural, societal and religious. It takes a village — but the Arab-Muslim village today is largely silent. The best are indifferent or intimidated; the worst quietly applaud the Sunnis who kill Shiites.

"Nobody in the Arab world 'has the guts to say that what is happening in Iraq is wrong — that killing schoolkids is wrong,' said Mamoun Fandy, director of the Middle East program at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. 'People somehow think that killing Iraqis is good because it will stick it to the Americans, so Arabs are undermining the American project in Iraq by killing themselves.'

"The world worries about highly enriched uranium, but 'the real danger is highly enriched Islam,' Mr. Fandy added. That is, 'highly enriched Sunnism' and 'highly enriched Shiism' that eats away at the Muslim state, the way Hezbollah is trying to do in Lebanon or the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt or Al Qaeda everywhere.

"One result: there’s no legitimate, decent, accepted source of Arab-Muslim authority today, no center of gravity 'for people to anchor their souls in,' Mr. Fandy said. In this welter of confusion, the suicide bombers go uncondemned or subtly extolled.

"Arab nationalist media like Al Jazeera 'practically tell bin Laden and his followers, "Bravo,"' Mr. Fandy said. 'The message sent to bin Laden is that "You are doing to the West what we want done, but we can’t do it." This is the hidden message that the West is not privy to. Unless extreme pressure is applied on Muslims all over the world to come up with counter-fatwas and pronounce these men as pariahs, very little will happen in fighting terrorism.'

"'The battleground in the Arab world today is not in Palestine or Lebanon, but in the classrooms and newsrooms,' Mr. Fandy concluded. That’s where 'the software programmers' reside who create symbolic images and language glorifying suicide bombers and make their depraved acts look legitimate. Only other Arab-Muslim programmers can defeat them.

"Occasionally an honest voice rises, giving you a glimmer of hope that others will stand up. The MEMRI translation Web site (memri.org) just posted a poem called 'When,' from a Saudi author, Wajeha al-Huwaider, that was posted on Arab reform sites like www.aafaq.org.

'When you cannot find a single garden in your city, but there is a mosque on every corner — you know that you are in an Arab country.

'When you see people living in the past with all the trappings of modernity — do not be surprised, you are in an Arab country.

'When religion has control over science — you can be sure that you are in an Arab country.

'When clerics are referred to as “scholars” — don’t be astonished, you are in an Arab country.

'When you see the ruler transformed into a demigod who never dies or relinquishes his power, and nobody is permitted to criticize — do not be too upset, you are in an Arab country.

'When you find that the large majority of people oppose freedom and find joy in slavery — do not be too distressed, you are in an Arab country.

'When you hear the clerics saying that democracy is heresy, but seizing every opportunity provided by democracy to grab high positions — do not be surprised, you are in an Arab country. ...

'When you discover that a woman is worth half of what a man is worth, or less — do not be surprised, you are in an Arab country. ...

'When land is more important than human beings — you are in an Arab country. ...

'When fear constantly lives in the eyes of the people — you can be certain you are in an Arab country.'”

Well worth reading

This, from the NY Times, about pioneer environmentalist philosopher Stewart Brand--now a self-proclaimed "environmental heretic" who supports nuclear energy, genetic engineering, population growth and megacities.

Contrasting "rational" and "romantic environmentalism," he says: “My trend has been toward more rational and less romantic as the decades go by,” he says. “I keep seeing the harm done by religious romanticism, the terrible conservatism of romanticism, the ingrained pessimism of romanticism. It builds in a certain immunity to the scientific frame of mind.”

The flight of villagers to burgeoning third-world megacities, he says, will allow farmland to revert to forests and nature preserves. That has occurred to me; but what about the godawful, slummy quality of life of those crowded billions? Or will they all soon have cars (earned at their tech-support and help line jobs), allowing them at least to visit those nature preserves on weekends and holidays--if the traffic congestion on their future expressways isn't too discouraging?

Brand says global population growth is slowing too quickly, which will lead to a shortage of young people. I think a (peaceful and healthy) global population reduction would be a good thing. And in vew of some of the qualities of Kids These Days, that shortage of young people just doesn't worry me all that much.

Wanted: Photoshop artist, rewrite man

Current US News cover on "America's Worst Presidents." (Cover shows Nixon, Hoover, Grant, Tyler. Replace any two, or shink all four--just so you make space for the two that are most glaringly absent...)

Get this subhead:

"It's too soon to judge the current one [??!!!], but for past leaders, the verdict is in"

OK, so they wimped out on their choices of "Our 10 Worst Presidents." Here's their list (which they explained as follows: ""U.S. Newsaveraged the results of five major and relatively recent presidential polls to make its own gallery of the 10 worst presidents"):

1. James Buchanan

2. Warren G. Harding

3. Andrew Johnson

4. Franklin Pierce

5. Millard Fillmore

6. John Tyler

7. Ulysses S. Grant

8. William Harrison

9. (tie) Herbert Hoover & Richard Nixon

The good news is that they did this cover story at all--and what it obviously betokens. Indeed, here's how the article leads off:

"Is George W. Bush's presidency shaping up to be one of the worst in U.S. history? [Only "one of" the worst?] You hear the question being asked more and more these days. And more and more, you hear the same answer. With Iraq a shambles and trust in the administration declining, it is probably not surprising that 54 percent of respondents in a recent USA Today/Gallup survey said that history would judge Bush a below-average or poor president, more than twice the number who gave such a rating to any of the five preceding occupants of the White House, including Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter."

Then it's right back to the BS....Some lowlights:

"Public opinion is a notoriously fickle beast..." I.e., Bush could be rehabilitated any day now. (Alas, this is probably true--given a lucky break or two, some Rovecraft, and media fatuouslness and obsequiousness as usual.)

"Whatever his reasons [I thought he made them quite clear!], Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz created a minor sensation last year when he published a resounding verdict in Rolling Stone magazine: 'Barring a cataclysmic event on the order of the terrorist attacks of September 11, after which the public might rally around the White House once again, there seems to be little the administration can do to avoid being ranked on the lowest tier of U.S. presidents.' ... But while Wilentz makes no secret of his liberalism, he referred to an informal survey of 415 historians in 2004 in which 81 percent of the respondents stated that the Bush administration would go down as a failure."

But then:

"If Iraq turns out to be a beacon of democracy in the Middle East 10 years from now, there will be a lot of scholars eating crow." Uh...what if Iraq only turns out to be a beacon of democracy 20 or 30 years from now? 100 years? Credit still goes to GW Bush? Why not give the Nazis credit for the comparative liberal democracy in Germany today? In other words: BushCheneyRumsfeldRove's invasion was four years ago. Even if Iraq turns out to be a beacon of democracy by next week--how do we know it wouldn't have by now on its own, without the invasion and war and the hundreds of thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of US taxpayer dollars it has cost? How do we know some of Saddam's generals wouldn't have deposed him (and his sons)? But even if it could be proven that "democracy" in Iraq came about only because of the BushCheneyRumsfeldRove policy, what gave them the right to decide on behalf of Iraq that a war with the aforementioned costs and the attendant chaos and destruction was the way to achieve that goal?

"Attempts to rate the Bush presidency are at best premature..."  Nice try, US News. Hey, I guess you're just doing your job.

Ahhh....How sweet it is...

From “Leftward Ho?” NY Times, 1/18/07:

A Gallup survey last month found that Democrats led Republicans by 34 percent to 31 percent in party affiliation — the largest Democratic advantage since the Clinton administration....By the same token, voters aged 18 to 25 are far more Democratic than previous generations, according to a 2006 survey by Pew Research. And the ratio of Democratic voters who describe themselves as “liberal Democrats” (32 percent) has risen steadily while the share of “conservative Democrats” has dropped (23 percent). Four years earlier, 27 percent of Democrats identified as conservatives, 26 percent as liberals.

Uh-oh, I seem to be with the conservatives on this one

I have to agree the statement made by Bruce Bawer, author of While Europe Slept, who has been accused of racism and Islamophobia by the very person who was at the same time announcing Bawer's National Book Critics Circle award nomination (one Eliot Weinberger, a previous finalist), by the president of the Critics Circle board, and by others. Sorry for the convoluted sentence. As the NY Times reported:

For Mr. Bawer, the condemnations are more evidence of liberals’ one-sided blindness. “One of the most disgraceful developments of our time is that many Western authors and intellectuals who pride themselves on being liberals have effectively aligned themselves with an outrageously illiberal movement that rejects equal rights for women, that believes gays and Jews should be executed, that supports the coldblooded murder of one’s own children in the name of honor, etc., etc.,” he wrote on his own blog, www.brucebawer.com/blog.htm. In an e-mail message yesterday he said he did not have anything to add to his posts.

Mr. Bawer’s book jacket is covered with admiring blurbs from well-known conservatives, but he does not fit the typical red-state mold. An openly gay cultural critic from New York who has lived in Europe since 1998, Mr. Bawer has published books like “Stealing Jesus,” a harsh critique of Christian fundamentalism. “Some people think it’s terrific for writers to expose the offenses and perils of religious fundamentalism — just as long as it’s Christian fundamentalism,” he wrote on his blog.

Admirable summary of art v. commerce in Hollywood...

...in this piece by Sheerly Avni on Truthdig.com:

‘Children of Men’: Universal’s Orphaned Masterpiece

Here’s how Hollywood’s “creative tension” between Commerce and Art really works: Commerce lures Art into his lair with roses and chocolate, swears his undying love, and then quickly leaves her for nights away at a nearby strip club called The Bottom Line. Then he throws the furniture and smacks her around the kitchen a bit, just to let her know who’s boss, and when she’s finally got her bags packed, to move back in with her sister The Theater perhaps—Commerce shows up with another batch of roses and convinces her to stay.

There’s not a lot of love there, but it’s how the babies get made.

Take “Children of Men,” for example, by Alfonso Cuarón, the Academy Award-nominated director of both “Y Tu Mamá También” and the only good Harry Potter installment. .... By all rights, “Children of Men” should be a blockbuster.... But as J. Hoberman wrote in the Village Voice last month, Universal has done everything it can to bury its treasure, treating the movie “like a communicable disease.” .... It has also been included on several critics’ top-10 lists, and is currently ranked number one on the New York Times’ viewing poll.

When I first heard it I thought it was a joke...

...like from The Onion or something. DIdn't you? From the NY Times, February 7, 2007:

Ousted Pastor 'Completely Heterosexual'

Forced by a gay sex scandal to resign as president of the National Association of Evangelicals, the Rev. Ted Haggard now feels that after three weeks of intensive counseling, he is “completely heterosexual,” says an overseer of the megachurch Mr. Haggard once led.

My recent talk at the Strand

This is the text of a talk I gave (in somewhat abridged form) last week at the Strand bookstore in Manhattan to promote my new book, The Quotable Atheist (see link in right-hand column--the large, mysterious red rectangle). The other speaker was Robin Morgan, whose new book is called Fighting Words: A Toolkit for Combating the Religious Right. (Please excuse the mishmash of fonts--I don't know why that happens when I paste my text in, or why I should have to know how to edit HTML, other than because the geeks run the world. Anyway, you can also read the text here on the Huffington Post.)

What luck that tonight’s topic is "How to Save Our Secular America," because I happen to have, here in my hand, a plan for saving our sacred secular America.

I also have, here in my hand, irrefutable evidence that there are 57 known atheists in the United States Congress! (I wish...)

Let me start by saying, I don’t just want to get religion out of our politics and government. I want to get it out of our churches and mosques and synagogues, out of our minds, and off our planet—for reasons that I’ll come to, but that you’ve probably heard from other writers, especially lately. And by the way, it is very heartening to suddenly see an Atheism section appearing in the Religion section of bookstores. Now we just need to get it into the children’s section…

I mean theistic religion, by the way, and I’ll come back to that.

But I’m saying, as long as 87 percent of Americans are unquestioning believers¹, something like 69 percent believe in Satan, and a majority, 53 percent, believe God created the world some 6,000 years ago while just 12 percent believe life has evolved through natural processes—and as long as there are politicians eager to exploit these faith-based folks²—then we’re going to see religion, meaning, for all practical purposes, Christianity, intruding on our politics and government and into every other area of life—with a view to ruling everything—as evangelical leaders have made quite clear:

Listen to Randall Terry, former head of Operation Rescue: “Our goal is a Christian nation. We have a Biblical duty, we are called by God, to conquer this country. We don’t want equal time. We don’t want pluralism.” And of course, his classic, “I want you to just let a wave of intolerance…a wave of hatred wash over you. Yes, hate is good….”

If Terry is too marginal to count, then hearken unto Jerry Falwell: “The idea that religion and politics don’t mix was invented by the devil to keep Christians from running their own country.” And “If you’re not a born-again Christian, you’re a failure as a human being.”

Or Pat Robertson: “The great builders of our nation almost to a man have been Christians, because Christians have the desire to build something. …The people who have come into (our) institutions (today) are primarily termites who are into destroying institutions that have been built by Christians…The termites are in charge now…and the time has arrived for a godly fumigation.”.… I can tell you that remark has a certain resonance to children of Holocaust survivors. It also reminds me that another Godly man, Tom DeLay, used to be an exterminator.

These same people meanwhile go around shrieking about a war on Christianity, on Christmas, on God, being waged by the secularist forces of evil that dominate our country and the world. (Worldwide, according to a 1995 survey, atheists are 3.8 percent of the population; the “non-religious” are 14.7 percent. But I guess those 3.8 percent are the ones who control everything, especially the media. Most people think that’s the Jews, but it’s actually the atheists. Of course, one can be both. Believe me.)

If anyone is vilified for their religious views in America today, it’s of course the nonbelieving minority. When was the last time a member of Congress, or a judge, declared publicly, I don’t believe in God or the tooth fairy? And we all know the reason I could never be elected president of the United States, even if I weren’t foreign-born and Jewish. And it’s obviously not because I’m unqualified to lead this great nation of ours in these challenging times.

● In a number of U.S. states, atheists are barred by the state constitution from holding even the lowliest state office. Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee, Pennsylvania. Texas, of course. (United States Constitution: “No religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” Anybody have the ACLU’s phone number handy?) The Arkansas Constitution says: “No person who denies the being of a God shall hold any office in the civil departments of this State, nor be competent to testify as a witness in any court.” (Well, it says “a God….I guess Odin or Moloch would satisfy them. I’m not kidding—wouldn’t everyone then feel obligated to say, “Well, we must respect his religious beliefs?” As Emma Goldman wrote: “It is characteristic of theistic ‘tolerance’ that no one really cares what the people believe in, just so they believe or pretend to believe.”)

● In 1988, then-presidential candidate George H.W. Bush said atheists cannot play a contributing role in American society and that it’s impossible for an atheist to be a patriot (because this nation was formed under God).

● In 1996, NBC’s Tom Brokaw introduced a jokey segment on Madalyn Murray O’Hair, who had been missing for a year, by saying: “She had the dubious distinction of being known as America’s most outspoken atheist.” As FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting) noted: “It’s impossible to imagine Brokaw making light of the disappearance of someone who has the ‘dubious distinction’ of being a leader of America’s Catholics or Jews….NBC quoted a ‘conservative Christian commentator’ as saying of O’Hair: ‘If she is indeed dead, then she’s burning in the fires of hell.’ Plenty of fundamentalist Christians believe that all Catholics burn in hell, but we doubt we’ll see NBC quoting any of them the next time a pope dies.’”

● At the 2002 opening of the United States Congress, a Rabbi Latham mentioned “the evil doctrine of atheism.” Not one member of Congress protested the bigoted remark.

As a blogger wrote recently in this context: “We do not hear anti-Jewish remarks any more in the public arena. Even anti-homosexual remarks are made behind closed doors.”

Here’s a comment left on my blog the other day: “Dear Jack, … Just picked up a copy of The Quotable Atheist at Borders in Louisville, Kentucky.  Excellent compilation!  Had an interesting exchange with the cashier.  He asked me if I needed a bag.  I said,  ‘Yes, I better.  In Louisville, being an atheist is worse than being homosexual.’  The cashier replied (exact words), ‘Yeah, tell me about it.  I’m both.’”

I want to see atheism—the word and the thing—brought back out of the paper bag and made respectable, and to see beliefs for which there are no reasons and no evidence, and which encourage intolerance and bigotry and violence, made unrespectable. Let Bibles be hidden in plain paper wrappers…

And let kids believe in Santa Claus, but I believe adult citizens have a social responsibility to be reasonably rational adults. The continuing belief in ancient mythology, in the 21^st century, is also an insult to the generations of scientists that have labored to add precious increments to the store of real human knowledge and to make our lives longer, healthier, safer…and all that stuff. I call it ingratitude and irresponsibility. Increasing people’s respect for science needs to be part of the propaganda campaign in our war on Christmas—I mean, on God—I mean, in defense of our secular Constitution and of the Enlightenment values that produced this great country we call the United States of America.

Thanks to people like Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and above all, us two sitting here, I think the message is getting out that adults who recognize the dominant religious beliefs for the claptrap they are should speak up. Conservatives have been right all along to attack the notion that all beliefs are somehow equal and have a right to be treated with equal respect. Too bad they won’t acknowledge that a great many religious beliefs deserve to be treated with equal disrespect: beliefs that encourage discrimination against homosexuals and subjugation of women; that obstruct life-saving medical research; that increase teen pregnancy and abortion by preventing honest and realistic sex education; that discourage condom use in regions that have already lost millions of people to AIDS, because the Vatican and other “pro-life” churches, and the U.S. government, still regard opposing birth control and discouraging sex as more important than saving lives; beliefs that have led to persecutions, wars and massacres throughout history, and to us secularists’ favorite recent example of religious madness, 9/11, 2001. The habit of faith itself leaves people vulnerable to the enticements of any political scoundrel who advertises himself as a man of God.

So, my secret plan. It’s a simple, two-step plan. (1) Continue to work at ridiculing theism into extinction; and (2) at the same time, create a new, non-theistic religion that will fill people’s apparent—no, real—“spiritual” needs.

As a wit, I have naturally been assigned by secular-conspiracy headquarters to the ridicule team; but I’ve also quietly taken it upon myself to come up with the new religion, which I hope to deliver in time for the 2007 holiday season. I can tell you this one will be equally—no, far more satisfying than the theisms, because its adherents (there will no longer be “believers”) won’t be troubled by the knowledge that even the most devout believer must have deep down that his or her beliefs are full of shit. (I’ve been advised to add, “Just kidding…I’m not really trying to found a new religion.” Then again, the money is very good…)

This little red book of mine, The Quotable Atheist, contains much in the way of both reason and ridicule. I am however mindful of what Jonathan Swift said on page 292 of his great book—I mean, my great book—The Quotable Atheist: “It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of what he was never reasoned into.” People’s religious beliefs are of course rarely arrived at through reason, but are inherited by birth or imposed and sustained through social and peer pressure.

So my book’s claim to redeeming social value is that it might add a little counter-pressure by showing how many of the great and/or famous are or have been nonbelievers or at least strong skeptics—and in the case of some of our Framers, even violently anti-religious.

People like John Adams, Thomas Paine, Franklin, Jefferson, Lincoln, Susan B. Anthony, Frederick Douglass, Frederick the Great, Napoleon, Simon Bolivar, Benjamin Disraeli, Winston Churchill; Locke, Hume, Bentham, Byron, Coleridge, Carlyle, George Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Emerson, Twain, James Joyce, E.M. Forster, Hemingway, Beckett, Borges, James Baldwin, William S. Burroughs, Margaret Atwood, Martin Amis, Umberto Eco…Aristotle, Hippocrates, Galileo, St. Giordano Bruno…Charles Darwin, Huxley, Huxley & Huxley, Freud, William James, John Dewey....Einstein, Born, Feynman, Hawking, Francis Crick, Carl Sagan…

And the really great minds: Lenny Bruce, Phyllis Diller, George Carlin, Al Franken, Lewis Black....Bono, Björk, Bowie, Buffet, Billy (Joel)....Hugh Hefner, Noam Chomsky, Larry Flynt….Lance Armstrong…(Athletes are harder to find because their coaches are always leading them in prayer for victory before a game. This does work, but only if you pray longer and harder than the other team. But as Bill Maher said: "I’ve never heard a team blame Jesus when they lose.”)

My book also shows how surprisingly Christian someone like Adolf Hitler actually was, or at least said he was. (I’m not quite sure what I mean by “someone like Adolf Hitler.”) And how frightful and immoral some religious leaders, popes included, turn out to be on closer examination—like the 11^th century pope Gregory VI, who purchased the papacy from his 20-year-old godson, and who said “the worst plague of all” was liberty of opinions and free speech.

Thenceforth, religion for me represented everything that was backward and stupid about America; now it could be blamed for giving rise to the worst presidency in modern times. It was blind, stupid faith in George Bush as a man of God and a champion of all that is good, wholesome and righteous that nearly got him elected in 2000, and that sustained his and his party’s popularity even as they systematically violated Jesus’ teachings by robbing the have-nots to further enrich the rich and by doing unto others what others didn’t even have the WMDs to do unto us.

And yet…I identify with this remark by the socialist leader Michael Harrington:  “I consider myself to be—in Max Weber’s phrase—‘religiously musical’ even though I do not believe in God….I am, then, what [sociologist] Georg Simmel called a ‘religious nature without religion,’ a pious man of deep faith, but not in the supernatural.”

What I mean when I say I’m an atheist is that I don’t believe in the existence of anything similar enough to any traditional conception of God or gods to warrant it calling it God. No Big Guy in the Sky. No supernatural, purposive, intentional, and therefore necessarily conscious or superconscious being, generally held to have other humanlike attributes and emotions, such as love, compassion, jealousy, anger…the ability to speak and understand Hebrew, Aramaic, Latin and English (but probably not Yakutsk, Zapotec or American Sign Language)….

I don’t mean that I think everything can ultimately be reduced to particles of matter and energy and their interactions according to the laws of physics… Nor will any narrowly materialistic atheism ever answer the mother of all questions—why anything exists at all. (Not that anything else necessarily will; and not that there necessarily has to be any “why.”) Nonetheless, we atheists need to beware of narrow, dogmatic materialism or scientism. It won’t attract many converts, for one thing.

I have no trouble saying that something is behind the existence of the universe. On the other hand, there may be nothing behind it. Or—like the word “why”—the words “something” and “nothing” may mean, well, nothing when it comes to whatever lies behind or outside of the existence of this universe—as would, of course, the words “behind” and “outside.”

So if there is a God, nothing can really be said about him/her/it, and all you’ve really done is attach a three-letter name to something—or nothing—about which nothing meaningful can be said.  At the same time, however, you’ve implied the existence of a being that cares especially about us humans, and especially about our sexual behavior; that wants us to worship it; and that apparently created the world for our sake—all 100 billion plus galaxies and thousand trillion trillion trillion cubic miles of it. Just to impress us with his grandeur, presumably. (God may be a conservative, but He’s evidently no conserver of natural resources.)

I feel at my most religious (I actually prefer that word to “spiritual”)—and at the same time my atheist sentiments are most inflamed—whenever I read any science. It’s there that I see real piety and humility, and respect for, if you will, God’s creation—in the determination to learn how things really are. I think that’s the meaning of a quote on my opening page—from Thoreau: “There is more religion in man’s science than there is science in his religion.” 

There is obviously some incomprehensibly vast …incomprehensibility out there…. But we atheists are the ones who are really open and alive to it, or should be. We’re not the ones who try to impose on this vast…whatever a whole schema of creation, purpose, good and evil, salvation, redemption, and so on, or who claim that one book tells us everything we need to know. As Tennyson wrote: “There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds.”

I think the current worldwide religious resurgence is a generational thing, and that it has already peaked. But we secularists still need to understand the current sources of religion’s power and appeal, which are not the same as they used to be. Religion may be a more formidable, durable, reason-resistant, stain-resistant affair than we realize because it doesn’t rest only or even mainly on irrational beliefs, which might be relatively easy to dispel.

Ever since Sept. 11, 2001, it has often been remarked that the world can no longer afford the irrationalism and the divisive tribalism associated with most religions. Actually, tribalism, divisiveness, exclusiveness in the most literal sense—rejection and exclusion of the foreign—meaning, usually, the Western and the modern—are not merely corollaries of religion—they have become more than ever its very point and driving force. I think religion today is about identity more than about actual belief.

In fact, I just can’t believe that deep down, fundamentalist Christians, Muslims or Orthodox Jews really don’t believe that the world is billions of years old, that animals and plants are the products of evolution, and that we’re descended from apelike creatures. In fact, I find it hard to believe that many people today can really believe in God. There’s a big difference in believing in God and believing in religion—between believing and wanting to believe. As Daniel Dennett says, “Most people in the West who say they believe in God actually believe in belief in God.” A century or so ago, the Spanish writer and philosopher Miguel de UnaMUno wrote, “Faith is in its essence simply a matter of will, not of reason…and to believe in God is, before all and above all, to wish that there may be a God.” Even earlier, an American Roman Catholic bishop, John Lancaster Spalding, said: “Few really believe. The most only believe that they believe or even make believe [that they believe].”

Religious life today is perhaps above all a declaration that “we will not assimilate, we will not submit to secular, materialistic, globalized, homogenized, consumer-commercial culture.” (As regards many Muslims, the word “American” or “Western” should probably be somewhere in there as well.)

All this ironically owes a lot to the 1960s counterculture, which in its various spiritual aspects was a reaction to the deadening mechanization of modern Western life. The “Jesus freaks” may be seen as the forerunners of today’s Christian Right.  The playboy hedonist Osama bin Laden got religion in, I think, 1979. It was the same year in which someone I’m close to, and who’s the same age as bin Laden, had a similar and lasting Augustinian conversion—albeit to a different religion, but also involving growing a beard. I’ve been struck by that coincidence.

I actually have a lot of sympathy with such conservative feelings—with the refusal to have one’s own culture and traditions steamrolled—paved over to make way for a Wal-Mart, as it were. The global disappearance of cultural diversity that began five hundred years ago but has become all but complete only in the past few decades may even come to be viewed as the greatest disaster in human history.

But—but—none of this makes the religious beliefs that tens of millions of people have embraced during the past two or three decades true/ As George B. Shaw said: “The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.”  Or as the naturalist  Edwin Way Teale put it: “It is morally as bad not to care whether a thing is true or not, so long as it makes you feel good, as it is not to care how you got your money as long as you have got it.”

Dubious, false and absurd beliefs also make for a dangerously shaky foundation on which to build a culture or movement, no matter how much social cohesiveness and moral fiber and other binding agents it may appear to provide. I don’t see religion continuing indefinitely to be a strong social and political force, even in the Middle East. Religion has after all been on the decline, at least in the West, for 500 years. I really think what we’ve been seeing is one of the last throes. I know, I know—that’s what Dick Cheney said about a certain “insurgence” two or three years ago….But as the a radical theologist Mary Jean Irion wrote in the 1960s: “Christianity…has been over for a hundred years now….When something even so small as a lightbulb goes out, the eyes for a moment still see it.” In fact, she might have added, it may flare up brightly just before the end. “So,” she continued, “it is not at all strange that when something so huge as a world religion goes out, there remains for a century or more in certain places some notion that it is still there.”

A formidable obstacle that still confronts atheism is that, in contrast with it, theism continues to be viewed as positive, open, joyful, hopeful: “We do believe, we have faith, you don’t….We are pro-life. You are obviously, conversely, pro-death….We say yes, you say no, you say stop, we say go go go.”

Atheism and secularism ignore spiritual needs at their peril. We need to reposition atheism as something positive, not just as a rejection of God and faith and so on. I see my atheism as the doorway to my religious life, such as it is or as I hope it will be. 

As the literary scholar and critic Carl Van Doren wrote in his 1926 essay “Why I Am an Unbeliever”: "Belief, being first in the field, naturally took a positive term for itself and gave a negative term to unbelief….But what they call unbelief, I call belief.”

According to philosopher Quentin Smith: “God does not exist if Big Bang cosmology, or some relevantly similar theory, is true….Now the theistically alleged human need for a reason for existence [is] unsatisfied.” But, he suggests, instead of “such anthropocentric despairs,” “[w]e can forget about ourselves for a moment and open ourselves up to the startling impingement of reality itself. We can let ourselves become profoundly astonished by the fact that this universe exists at all.” (A fact which Smith doesn’t take for granted, by the way.) Anyway, that’s not a bad starting point for a new religion.

Anyway, the religious tide may already be turning—God willing—so to speak—much as it seems to be turning politically. This development, if real, may even, ironically, be getting help from George W. Bush. Every faith-proclaiming, God-invoking scoundrel of a public figure—politician, preacher or priest—who gets caught with his pants down (sometimes quite literally) helps! At any rate, I really hope that in the not too distant future, the title of my book will seem quaint, and strange: as though it was a collection of quotes from people who don’t believe in alchemy.

Meanwhile—lest anyone complain that I’m not offering enough in the way of practical ideas for activism: I’m petitioning the City of New York to permit an annual Atheist Pride parade. See you there!

Notes:

¹In European countries, the percentage of believers ranges from 62% in Italy, home of the Vatican, down to 27% in Godless, hell-bound France.

²According to a study by Paul Bell, published in the Mensa Magazine in 2002, there is an inverse correlation between religiosity and intelligence. Analyzing 43 studies carried out since 1927, Bell finds that all but four reported such a connection, and concludes that "the higher one's intelligence or education level, the less one is likely to be religious or hold 'beliefs' of any kind.” A survey published in Nature confirms that belief in a personal god or afterlife is at an all time low among the members of the National Academy of Science, only 7% of which believed in a personal god as compared to more than 85% of the US general population.

The ruins of Iraq

This NY Times op-ed is worth reading.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/weekinreview/28tave.html?pagewanted=1

Dickhead Cheney, George Bushhole, Donald Bumsfelt, Karl Rogue & co. destroyed a country.

Deport them to Iraq and let them fend for themselves.

Molly Ivins (1944-2007), RIP

Texas has just become a much darker place still.

One conservative's penance

Rod Dreher, a former editor at National Review, in a commentary on National Public Radio:

As President Bush marched the country to war with Iraq, even some voices on the Right warned that this was a fool’s errand. I dismissed them angrily. I thought them unpatriotic. But almost four years later, I see that I was the fool.

In Iraq, this Republican President for whom I voted twice has shamed our country with weakness and incompetence, and the consequences of his failure will be far, far worse than anything Jimmy Carter did.

The fraud, the mendacity, the utter haplessness of our government’s conduct of the Iraq war have been shattering to me. It wasn’t supposed to turn out like this. Not under a Republican President.

I turn 40 next month – middle aged at last – a time of discovering limits, finitude. I expected that. But what I did not expect was to see the limits of finitude of American power revealed so painfully. I did not expect Vietnam.

As I sat in my office last night watching President Bush deliver his big speech, I seethed over the waste, the folly, the stupidity of this war. I had a heretical thought for a conservative – that I have got to teach my kids that they must never, ever take Presidents and Generals at their word – that their government will send them to kill and die for noble-sounding rot – that they have to question authority.

On the walk to the parking garage, it hit me. Hadn’t the hippies tried to tell my generation that? Why had we scorned them so blithely? Will my children, too small now to understand Iraq, take me seriously when I tell them one day what powerful men, whom their father once believed in, did to this country? Heavy thoughts for someone who is still a conservative despite it all. It was a long drive home.

Must read!

Frank Rich's column this week, "Hillary Clinton’s Mission Unaccomplished." Highlights/the gist:

[Clinton] was blindsided Tuesday night, just as Mr. Bush was, by an unexpected gate crasher, the rookie senator from Virginia, Jim Webb. Though he’s not a candidate for national office, Mr. Webb’s nine-minute Democratic response not only upstaged the president but also, in an unintended political drive-by shooting, gave Mrs. Clinton a more pointed State of the Union “contrast” than she had bargained for. ...

... Mr. Webb is standoffish. He doesn’t care whom he offends, including in his own base. He gives the impression — as he did Tuesday night — that he just might punch out his opponent. When he had his famously testy exchange with Mr. Bush over the war at a White House reception after his victory, Beltway pooh-bahs labeled him a boor....But this country is at a grave crossroads. It craves leadership. When Mr. Webb spoke on Tuesday, he stepped into that vacuum and, for a few minutes anyway, filled it. It’s not merely his military credentials as a Vietnam veteran and a former Navy secretary for Ronald Reagan that gave him authority, or the fact that his son, also a marine, is serving in Iraq. It was the simplicity and honesty of Mr. Webb’s message. Like Senator Obama, he was a talented professional writer before entering politics, so he could discard whatever risk-averse speech his party handed him and write his own. His exquisitely calibrated threat of Democratic pushback should Mr. Bush fail to change course on the war — “If he does not, we will be showing him the way” — continued to charge the air even as Mrs. Clinton made the post-speech rounds on the networks....

... Compounding this problem for Mrs. Clinton is that the theatrics of her fledgling campaign are already echoing the content: they are so overscripted and focus-group bland that they underline rather than combat the perennial criticism that she is a cautious triangulator too willing to trim convictions for political gain. Last week she conducted three online Web chats that she billed as opportunities for voters to see her “in an unfiltered way.” Surely she was kidding. Everything was filtered, from the phony living-room set to the appearance of a “campaign blogger” who wasn’t blogging to the softball questions and canned responses....

... After six years of “Ask President Bush,” “Mission Accomplished” and stage sets plastered with “Plan for Victory,” Americans hunger for a presidency with some authenticity. Patently synthetic play-acting and carefully manicured sound bites like Mrs. Clinton’s look out of touch. (Mr. Obama’s bare-bones Webcast and Web site shrewdly play Google to Mrs. Clinton’s AOL.) Besides, the belief that an image can be tightly controlled in the viral media era is pure fantasy. Just ask the former Virginia senator, Mr. Allen, whose past prowess as a disciplined, image-conscious politician proved worthless once the Webb campaign posted on YouTube a grainy but authentic video capturing him in an embarrassing off-script public moment.

And don't miss this part:

As we’ve been much reminded, the most recent presidents to face Congress in such low estate were Harry Truman in 1952 and Richard Nixon in 1974, both in the last ebbs of their administrations, both mired in unpopular wars that their successors would soon end, and both eager to change the subject just as Mr. Bush did. In his ’52 State of the Union address, Truman vowed “to bring the cost of modern medical care within the reach of all the people” while Nixon, 22 years later, promised “a new system that makes high-quality health care available to every American.” Not to be outdone, Mr. Bush offered a dead-on-arrival proposal that “all our citizens have affordable and available health care.” The empty promise of a free intravenous lunch, it seems, is the last refuge of desperate war presidents.

Amen

Just want to quote Frank Rich's current column:

Mr. Cheney was honest, at least, when he said that the White House’s Iraq policy would remain “full speed ahead!” no matter what happened on Nov. 7. Now it is our patriotic duty — politicians, the press and the public alike — to apply the brakes. Our failure to check the administration when it rushed into Iraq in 2003 will look even more shameful to history if we roll over again for a reboot in 2007. For all the belated Washington scrutiny of the war since the election, and for all the heralded (if so far symbolic) Congressional efforts to challenge it, too much lip service is still being paid to the deceptive P.R. strategies used by the administration to sell its reckless policies. This time we must do what too few did the first time: call the White House on its lies. Lies should not be confused with euphemisms like “incompetence” and “denial.”

....

The president’s pretense that Mr. Maliki and his inept, ill-equipped, militia-infiltrated security forces can advance American interests in this war is Neville Chamberlain-like in its naiveté and disingenuousness. An American military official in Baghdad read the writing on the wall to The Times last week: “We are implementing a strategy to embolden a government that is actually part of the problem. We are being played like a pawn.”

Bob Ney, Victim

Yes--maybe even hero.

Former Representative Ney (R-OH) was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison today for taking bribes from Jack Abramoff and from Syrian-born Cypriot businessman businessman Fouad al-Zayat, and for lying about it all.

Ney expressed his remorse, shame and personal responsibility--or rather, tried to sound remorseful, ashamed, and responsible... But consider the subterfuge in his statement, in which he referred to his drinking habit:

"I will continue to take full responsibility, accept the consequences and battle the demons of addiction that are within me."

He could have just said "continue to battle addiction." By sneaking those "demons" in there, however, he created outside beings--agents of Satan, no doubt--who are really repsonsible for the whole affair. Ney is battling demons. Maybe even the Big D Himself. He's battling bad guys. Ergo...he's a good guy, really. Just another innocent victim.

Today's AP story reminds us of White House spokesman Tony Snow's statement at the time of Ney's guilty plea: Ney's criminal activity "is not a reflection of the Republican Party." Tsk tsk....So defensive. Who said it was a reflection of the Republican Party? Besides me and everyone else across the land who knows anything at all about anything whatsoever?

*     *     *

My newest book, The Quotable Atheist is now widely available, thus reducing considerably your stock of excuses for not buying it (in large quantities). (Click on large red rectangle in right-hand column, which is a fragment of the cover image, which I was unable to reduce in size due to technological idiocy. [Mine, obviously.]) You must also promise to tell everyone you know. About the most entertaining and edifying anti-religious book ever written.

So you'll do that, right?