I have a little book hidden away somewhere - I forget where. It was given to me around 1982 or 83 by my parents or my girlfriend - I don't remember anymore. It has a kitten on the cover, so probably my parents. My girlfriend at the time was into bunnies.
Every time I clean out my files, I stumble across it and make another entry. I wrote the first several entries when I got the book during my sophomore year (more or less) at Cameron University. Then the entries are spaced out by several years at a stretch. They chronicle my thoughts about religion, family, love, wives, houses, careers, my soul (whatever the hell that is).
But they are short, few, and years in between. They are snapshots. Every time I make a new entry I find myself appalled at the inmaturity of the writings of my predicessor (previous version - whatever). What astounds me is how much I change every 4 or 5 years when I find the thing again and make another entry.
So I shouldn't be surprised at the changes I undergo in a year's time from looking at the aging entries in this blog. I need to blog more, but I'm really busy with other things and just don't get around to it much these days. Band. Solo work. Albums. Work. Family. Exercise. Life.
I have a series of essays I wrote this last winter but did not post while I was going through a transition from one job to another. I'm considering posting them. Maybe in a few months. Maybe I'll just revise them a few more dozen times before posting them.
rbs
Monday, July 7, 2008
Monday, June 25, 2007
God is not Great - Book Report
I just finished Christopher Hitchens’ blockbuster God is not Great - How Religion Poisons Everything. Hitchens comes off rather crusty, arrogant and slightly irritable in his interviews - but with a fine sense of humor that can go from raspy to scathing in nothing flat. He comes off pretty much the same way in print.
The book is a fun read, but many of the arguments lack punch - not because they are not well thought out, but because they are not well enough defended. I am accustomed to heavy hitters such as Mark Twain and Carl Sagan taking on religious literalism and mystic pseudo-science (respectively) and building impregnable edifices of thought and evidence to reduce these negative forces to so much warmed-over intellectual rubble. Hitchens trips far more lightly through his arguments - engaging, humorous, but not explored from every angle.
One glaring inconsistency is actually pointed out by Al Gore in the book I am reading now, The Assault on Reason. Several of our Deist founders - the very paragons of the Enlightenment that Hitchens celebrates - remained slaveholders even while writing about universal liberty in the most florid language.
Hitchens never even addresses how mores might have developed in a strictly materialist or secular society. There is no evidence that Occidental culture would have been better off without Christianity than with. I argue in my previous blog entry, “Why I am a Christian”, that Christianity is the fount of our best mores and Hitchens never effectively counters my contentions.
I share Hitchens’ deep mistrust of religious fervor and disgust for the destructive distortions preached in the various names of God. I agree with his contention that scientifically, no recourse to the mystical is needed to explain the universe. By these lights, religion appears to be at best an atavism from the childhood of our species. Hitchens sets forth in his final chapters to prove that religion should be left behind and calls for a new Enlightenment.
But the warning remains from the previous Enlightenment and further, I think Hitchens fails to investigate the nature of human reasoning itself in sufficient depth (or really at all) to prove that we can entrust our future to reason alone, uninformed by any of our long cultural religious traditions. The leaders of the American Enlightenment felt that reason should be the foundation of our culture and their accomplishment is stunning - unparalleled really.
But reason does not exist in a vacuum. Human reason is a product of our emotions, a product of our intellectual frame of reference, a product of preconceptions so ingrained that we most often don’t even see them at work. And we wonder why two intelligent persons with only slightly different backgrounds can look at a moral problem, work their way through it with the best of intentions and the best their intellect can produce and come up with answers so divergent as to be nearly unrecognizable.
It is precisely because reason is such a fragile, derivative, refined human product that it cannot be trusted alone. It is our most powerful tool, but not our only tool. I am far from an advocate of organized religion, but at the same time, some sense of the divine, of our common value, of the sanctity of life and of our environment, some sense of awe and some sense of proportion - a recognition of the twin miracles of our self-awareness and our empathetic compassion, and at the same time, of our relative insignificance are frames we discard at the peril of becoming monsters.
God is not Great. Neither is Christopher Hitchens. But it is a tremendously fun read and if you’re in a bit of a snit about the horrible things Muslims and Christians are doing to each other and worse, the way they behave toward atheists, Hitchens scratches that itch quite nicely.
rbs
The book is a fun read, but many of the arguments lack punch - not because they are not well thought out, but because they are not well enough defended. I am accustomed to heavy hitters such as Mark Twain and Carl Sagan taking on religious literalism and mystic pseudo-science (respectively) and building impregnable edifices of thought and evidence to reduce these negative forces to so much warmed-over intellectual rubble. Hitchens trips far more lightly through his arguments - engaging, humorous, but not explored from every angle.
One glaring inconsistency is actually pointed out by Al Gore in the book I am reading now, The Assault on Reason. Several of our Deist founders - the very paragons of the Enlightenment that Hitchens celebrates - remained slaveholders even while writing about universal liberty in the most florid language.
Hitchens never even addresses how mores might have developed in a strictly materialist or secular society. There is no evidence that Occidental culture would have been better off without Christianity than with. I argue in my previous blog entry, “Why I am a Christian”, that Christianity is the fount of our best mores and Hitchens never effectively counters my contentions.
I share Hitchens’ deep mistrust of religious fervor and disgust for the destructive distortions preached in the various names of God. I agree with his contention that scientifically, no recourse to the mystical is needed to explain the universe. By these lights, religion appears to be at best an atavism from the childhood of our species. Hitchens sets forth in his final chapters to prove that religion should be left behind and calls for a new Enlightenment.
But the warning remains from the previous Enlightenment and further, I think Hitchens fails to investigate the nature of human reasoning itself in sufficient depth (or really at all) to prove that we can entrust our future to reason alone, uninformed by any of our long cultural religious traditions. The leaders of the American Enlightenment felt that reason should be the foundation of our culture and their accomplishment is stunning - unparalleled really.
But reason does not exist in a vacuum. Human reason is a product of our emotions, a product of our intellectual frame of reference, a product of preconceptions so ingrained that we most often don’t even see them at work. And we wonder why two intelligent persons with only slightly different backgrounds can look at a moral problem, work their way through it with the best of intentions and the best their intellect can produce and come up with answers so divergent as to be nearly unrecognizable.
It is precisely because reason is such a fragile, derivative, refined human product that it cannot be trusted alone. It is our most powerful tool, but not our only tool. I am far from an advocate of organized religion, but at the same time, some sense of the divine, of our common value, of the sanctity of life and of our environment, some sense of awe and some sense of proportion - a recognition of the twin miracles of our self-awareness and our empathetic compassion, and at the same time, of our relative insignificance are frames we discard at the peril of becoming monsters.
God is not Great. Neither is Christopher Hitchens. But it is a tremendously fun read and if you’re in a bit of a snit about the horrible things Muslims and Christians are doing to each other and worse, the way they behave toward atheists, Hitchens scratches that itch quite nicely.
rbs
Thursday, June 21, 2007
Bush to Close GTMO???
I am concerned about a report I heard tonight about Guantanamo Bay.
Several Democratic presidential candidates have indicated they would close Guantanamo Bay and the other secret torture camps the Bush administration has been using around the world. Richardson and Edwards both pledged to do this their first day in office.
Now I hear that President Bush wants to close Guantanamo - but of course not the other torture camps. The prisoners we are currently torturing at Guantanamo (using techniques developed in 2002 and later replicated at Abu Ghraib) will be separated and transferred to lower profile facilities worldwide.
I seriously doubt, given the history of this administration, that President Bush has had a revelation about the moral repugnance and ineffectiveness (for intelligence purposes) of torture.
But the administration has realized that Guantanamo Bay is an enormous thorn in their side from a public relations standpoint both with the voters at home and with the civilized world who now see the USA as a rogue state in open violation of international law and moral standards.
Scattering these prisoners from Guantanamo Bay to secret torture camps worldwide will make it much more difficult for the next administration to put a stop to the torture and to make sure that we, the American people, never tolerate such an outrage in our name again.
The broom is in place. The carpet has been lifted. A few thousand victims of institutionalized American torture are about to be swept under it.
rbs
Several Democratic presidential candidates have indicated they would close Guantanamo Bay and the other secret torture camps the Bush administration has been using around the world. Richardson and Edwards both pledged to do this their first day in office.
Now I hear that President Bush wants to close Guantanamo - but of course not the other torture camps. The prisoners we are currently torturing at Guantanamo (using techniques developed in 2002 and later replicated at Abu Ghraib) will be separated and transferred to lower profile facilities worldwide.
I seriously doubt, given the history of this administration, that President Bush has had a revelation about the moral repugnance and ineffectiveness (for intelligence purposes) of torture.
But the administration has realized that Guantanamo Bay is an enormous thorn in their side from a public relations standpoint both with the voters at home and with the civilized world who now see the USA as a rogue state in open violation of international law and moral standards.
Scattering these prisoners from Guantanamo Bay to secret torture camps worldwide will make it much more difficult for the next administration to put a stop to the torture and to make sure that we, the American people, never tolerate such an outrage in our name again.
The broom is in place. The carpet has been lifted. A few thousand victims of institutionalized American torture are about to be swept under it.
rbs
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Edwards made the Pledge
On Chris Matthews show on MSNBC, John Edwards has now added his voice to that of Bill Richardson (and to a lesser extent, Obama and Dodd). Edwards pledged that on his first day in office he would close Guantanamo. Unlike Richardson, he did not go on to mention the various secret prisons around the world, but I believe he would close those as well.
I'm waiting for the other Democrats to make the pledge. I don't expect any of the Republicans to do so. Not even McCain.
rbs
I'm waiting for the other Democrats to make the pledge. I don't expect any of the Republicans to do so. Not even McCain.
rbs
Saturday, June 16, 2007
Blue Grit - Book Report
Laura Flanders is one of the founding commentators on Air America Radio - the new voice of the American left. Her book, Blue Grit, is an examination of what is happening at the grass roots level of the Democratic party and how this is at odds with the D.C. based national Democratic party establishments.
Flanders holds that the true strength of the Democratic party is at the grassroots and is divided among local single issue groups who are variously patronized and denigrated by the far more conservative national party. In recent years, the Republican party has been a three-way coalition among right-wing Evangelicals, anti-tax Libertarians, and powerful big business interests. The Democratic coalition is far more diverse - including environmentalists, civil libertarians and their vast multitude of client demographics, labor leadership, and consumer advocates.
In Blue Grit, Flanders tells several stories about local Democratic electoral successes despite deliberate neglect from the national party. Among her stories is the newly elected Sheriff of Dallas County, Texas. Their first Democratic Sheriff in decades. Their first Hispanic Sheriff probably ever. Their first woman Sheriff ever. Their first openly lesbian Sheriff. Simply because the citizens of the county were sick of business as usual and wanted someone who would talk straight and get the work done.
Americans will vote for liberal values - if the Democratic party will bother to offer them. But the national party has been chasing the Republicans farther and farther to the right under the illusion that they can out-center the Republicans and the left has nowhere else to go. Blue Grit is a rallying cry to local single-issue liberal groups to take over the Democratic party. It’s really not an astounding work or a great read, but it is good practical advice to us local activists. The American public is better than we think they are. They will vote for liberal values - but only if given the opportunity. The old saw is - run a conservative Democrat against a Republican and the American people will vote for the real thing every time.
I don’t know if Flanders will influence the national party, but she certainly influenced me. I am active in the local Democratic party. Now I will do some research to find those local single-issue groups and try to knit them together under our banner. We can work together and make this a better country.
rbs
Flanders holds that the true strength of the Democratic party is at the grassroots and is divided among local single issue groups who are variously patronized and denigrated by the far more conservative national party. In recent years, the Republican party has been a three-way coalition among right-wing Evangelicals, anti-tax Libertarians, and powerful big business interests. The Democratic coalition is far more diverse - including environmentalists, civil libertarians and their vast multitude of client demographics, labor leadership, and consumer advocates.
In Blue Grit, Flanders tells several stories about local Democratic electoral successes despite deliberate neglect from the national party. Among her stories is the newly elected Sheriff of Dallas County, Texas. Their first Democratic Sheriff in decades. Their first Hispanic Sheriff probably ever. Their first woman Sheriff ever. Their first openly lesbian Sheriff. Simply because the citizens of the county were sick of business as usual and wanted someone who would talk straight and get the work done.
Americans will vote for liberal values - if the Democratic party will bother to offer them. But the national party has been chasing the Republicans farther and farther to the right under the illusion that they can out-center the Republicans and the left has nowhere else to go. Blue Grit is a rallying cry to local single-issue liberal groups to take over the Democratic party. It’s really not an astounding work or a great read, but it is good practical advice to us local activists. The American public is better than we think they are. They will vote for liberal values - but only if given the opportunity. The old saw is - run a conservative Democrat against a Republican and the American people will vote for the real thing every time.
I don’t know if Flanders will influence the national party, but she certainly influenced me. I am active in the local Democratic party. Now I will do some research to find those local single-issue groups and try to knit them together under our banner. We can work together and make this a better country.
rbs
Sunday, June 3, 2007
A Moment of Hope
A Moment of Hope
Moments ago I just heard Governor Richardson, Senator Obama, and Senator Dodd each separately publicly commit to closing Guantanamo Bay and the secret prisons on their first day as President. I believe that just became a standard plank in the Democratic Party Platform.
(Note - watching it again, I noted that only Richardson made that pledge specifically. Dodd pledged to "restore American civil liberties" and Obama made no pledge, but noted the damage Guantanamo Bay and the secret prisons have done to America's international moral authority. rbs 6-4-07)
Promises aren’t always kept, but I could tell from the way these people spoke that they considered such a move critical to restoring America’s moral leadership in the world. There are a lot of things I really like about these candidates - but there is such a clear difference on this particular issue. The Republican candidates lined up last week in support of the secret prisons and specifically (with the significant exception of Senator McCain) in favor of torture.
There is no brighter line between the presidential wings of these parties than this. I don’t think it could possibly be more clear. This is a moment of hope for those we have oppressed - though they don’t yet know it.
As a sideline - while I have been a fan of Governor Richardson for many years and looking forward to him running for President, I saw tonight what I’ve really liked about Senator Biden for many years. I remember in the midst of the Abu Ghraib scandal that Biden just about came across the table at Secretary Rumsfeld. “My son is serving over there!!! You just made it more likely that he might not come home!!” (paraphrased).
That Joe Biden showed up again tonight vibrating with rage about our failure to stop the genocide in Darfur. It is refreshing to see someone with a true passion for saving lives and for meeting our moral obligation to save life when we can and to treat all people fairly and humanely. I’ve observed that about Biden over the years. When people are in danger, and particularly when that happens because of our actions, he addresses it with powerful moral authority.
I haven’t seen the entire debate yet, so I’m not ready to have overall reactions. When I get a chance, I will see the whole thing and give my reactions here.
rbs
Moments ago I just heard Governor Richardson, Senator Obama, and Senator Dodd each separately publicly commit to closing Guantanamo Bay and the secret prisons on their first day as President. I believe that just became a standard plank in the Democratic Party Platform.
(Note - watching it again, I noted that only Richardson made that pledge specifically. Dodd pledged to "restore American civil liberties" and Obama made no pledge, but noted the damage Guantanamo Bay and the secret prisons have done to America's international moral authority. rbs 6-4-07)
Promises aren’t always kept, but I could tell from the way these people spoke that they considered such a move critical to restoring America’s moral leadership in the world. There are a lot of things I really like about these candidates - but there is such a clear difference on this particular issue. The Republican candidates lined up last week in support of the secret prisons and specifically (with the significant exception of Senator McCain) in favor of torture.
There is no brighter line between the presidential wings of these parties than this. I don’t think it could possibly be more clear. This is a moment of hope for those we have oppressed - though they don’t yet know it.
As a sideline - while I have been a fan of Governor Richardson for many years and looking forward to him running for President, I saw tonight what I’ve really liked about Senator Biden for many years. I remember in the midst of the Abu Ghraib scandal that Biden just about came across the table at Secretary Rumsfeld. “My son is serving over there!!! You just made it more likely that he might not come home!!” (paraphrased).
That Joe Biden showed up again tonight vibrating with rage about our failure to stop the genocide in Darfur. It is refreshing to see someone with a true passion for saving lives and for meeting our moral obligation to save life when we can and to treat all people fairly and humanely. I’ve observed that about Biden over the years. When people are in danger, and particularly when that happens because of our actions, he addresses it with powerful moral authority.
I haven’t seen the entire debate yet, so I’m not ready to have overall reactions. When I get a chance, I will see the whole thing and give my reactions here.
rbs
Monday, May 21, 2007
A Sense of Helplessness
I am thinking again about the victims of our government, many of them innocent, imprisoned in our torture camps around the world, most notably in Guantanamo Bay. It depresses me to realize that even the election of a Democratic president will not guarantee justice for these people. I was horrified by the parade of Republican candidates in the debate on Fox TV, stumbling all over each other to advocate more torture - to thunderous applause by an audience of devoutly Christian American patriots.
Of the Republican candidates, only John McCain spoke against torture of the prisoners and he did not address it from a moral standpoint but rather because torture is ineffective as an interrogation method. But we are not torturing prisoners to beat information out of them. We’re doing it to demonstrate our power over them. We’re doing out of a collective sense of helplessness.
There are so many issues that have spun out of control in modern America. I’m deeply concerned about global climate change, runaway budget deficits, the erosion of our civil rights, the deliberate policies to take wealth from the middle class and deny vital services to the poor to enrich the already wealthy. But none of these issues strike me as deeply as our government’s systematic torture of people of middle-eastern descent - some born British citizens, others abducted from around the world.
In my gut I sense that this depravity goes deeper than the Bush administration - admittedly the most depraved Presidency in living memory and arguably in American history. But I think this evil runs deeper. It is a sickness at the core of American culture. The same sickness that created Nazi Germany. The same sickness that perverted the French Revolution and turned it into an endless bloodbath. The same sickness that led Mayan priests to unbelievable orgies of human sacrifice.
Could a President Clinton keep the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay? Would a President Obama close the secret American torture camps around the world? Even with a landslide victory, an incoming Democratic president would be hard pressed to end this madness. The American people have not just tolerated it. Those prisoners are not just victims of our indifference. I believe they are victims of our vengeance, and more deeply, victims of our sense of insecurity.
America cannot control the entire world and each of us feels the world slipping from our grasp - never stopping to think that we never had any right to it in the first place. For a brief moment, America held the world together. We could do it and we had to do it because we were the only industrial power to survive WWII. We got used to it - even though it was a situation that could never last. The rest of the world eventually re-built - and we were wise enough to help rebuild much of it.
But that wisdom has left us and in its place is an ebbing sense of superiority that we have now propped up with clumsy exhibitions of power and cruelty. I have no faith that the victims of Guantanamo Bay will ever be freed or that any of them will ever have justice. They are the most helpless. Some of them were our enemies. Others were innocent. At this point it doesn’t matter that much. They’re all torture victims now. Our treatment of them is not justice. It is sickness.
I have to fight for them. I feel it in my gut. I just don’t know how to. Yet.
rbs
Of the Republican candidates, only John McCain spoke against torture of the prisoners and he did not address it from a moral standpoint but rather because torture is ineffective as an interrogation method. But we are not torturing prisoners to beat information out of them. We’re doing it to demonstrate our power over them. We’re doing out of a collective sense of helplessness.
There are so many issues that have spun out of control in modern America. I’m deeply concerned about global climate change, runaway budget deficits, the erosion of our civil rights, the deliberate policies to take wealth from the middle class and deny vital services to the poor to enrich the already wealthy. But none of these issues strike me as deeply as our government’s systematic torture of people of middle-eastern descent - some born British citizens, others abducted from around the world.
In my gut I sense that this depravity goes deeper than the Bush administration - admittedly the most depraved Presidency in living memory and arguably in American history. But I think this evil runs deeper. It is a sickness at the core of American culture. The same sickness that created Nazi Germany. The same sickness that perverted the French Revolution and turned it into an endless bloodbath. The same sickness that led Mayan priests to unbelievable orgies of human sacrifice.
Could a President Clinton keep the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay? Would a President Obama close the secret American torture camps around the world? Even with a landslide victory, an incoming Democratic president would be hard pressed to end this madness. The American people have not just tolerated it. Those prisoners are not just victims of our indifference. I believe they are victims of our vengeance, and more deeply, victims of our sense of insecurity.
America cannot control the entire world and each of us feels the world slipping from our grasp - never stopping to think that we never had any right to it in the first place. For a brief moment, America held the world together. We could do it and we had to do it because we were the only industrial power to survive WWII. We got used to it - even though it was a situation that could never last. The rest of the world eventually re-built - and we were wise enough to help rebuild much of it.
But that wisdom has left us and in its place is an ebbing sense of superiority that we have now propped up with clumsy exhibitions of power and cruelty. I have no faith that the victims of Guantanamo Bay will ever be freed or that any of them will ever have justice. They are the most helpless. Some of them were our enemies. Others were innocent. At this point it doesn’t matter that much. They’re all torture victims now. Our treatment of them is not justice. It is sickness.
I have to fight for them. I feel it in my gut. I just don’t know how to. Yet.
rbs
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
