BWS Politics

Why I'm Rooting Against the Religious Right
Save the Republic from shallow, demagogic sectarians.

BY CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Thursday, May 5, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

I hope and believe that, by identifying itself with "faith" in general and the Ten Commandments in particular, a runaway element in the Republican leadership has made a career-ending mistake.

I have never understood why conservative entrepreneurs are so all-fired pious and Bible-thumping, let alone why so many of them claim Jesus as their best friend and personal savior. The Old Testament is bad enough: The commandments forbid us even to envy or covet our neighbor's goods, and thus condemn the very spirit of emulation and ambition that makes enterprise possible. But the New Testament is worse: It tells us to forget thrift and saving, to take no thought for the morrow, and to throw away our hard-earned wealth on the shiftless and the losers.

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Then again, hundreds of thousands of young Americans are now patrolling and guarding hazardous frontiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. Is there a single thinking person who does not hope that secular forces arise in both countries, and who does not realize that the success of our cause depends on a wall of separation, in Islamic society, between church and state? How can we maintain this cause abroad and subvert it at home?

Mr. Hitchens, a columnist for Vanity Fair, is author of "Thomas Jefferson: Author of America," forthcoming from HarperCollins/Atlas Books.

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Bah, Humbug

The horrors of December in a one-party state.

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I was invited onto Scarborough Country on MSNBC to debate the proposition that reindeer were an ancient symbol of Christianity and thus deserving of First Amendment protection, if not indeed of mandatory display at every mall in the land. I am told that nobody watches that show anymore—certainly I heard from almost nobody who had seen it—so I must tell you that the view taken by the host was that coniferous trees were also a symbol of Christianity, and that the Founding Fathers had endorsed this proposition. From his cue cards, he even quoted a few vaguely deistic sentences from Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, neither of them remotely Christian in tone. When I pointed out the latter, and added that Christmas trees, yule logs, and all the rest were symbols of the winter solstice "holidays" before any birth had been registered in the greater Bethlehem area, I was greeted by a storm of abuse, as if I had broken into the studio instead of having been entreated to come by Scarborough's increasingly desperate staff.

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Our Christian enthusiasts are evidently too stupid, as well as too insecure, to appreciate this. A revealing mark of their insecurity is their rage when public places are not annually given over to religious symbolism, and now, their fresh rage when palaces of private consumption do not follow suit. The Fox News campaign against Wal-Mart and other outlets—whose observance of the official feast-day is otherwise fanatical and punctilious to a degree, but a degree that falls short of unswerving orthodoxy—is one of the most sinister as well as one of the most laughable campaigns on record. If these dolts knew anything about the real Protestant tradition, they would know that it was exactly this paganism and corruption that led Oliver Cromwell—my own favorite Protestant fundamentalist—to ban the celebration of Christmas altogether.

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But there are millions of well-appointed buildings all across the United States, most of them tax-exempt and some of them receiving state subventions, where anyone can go at any time and celebrate miraculous births and pregnant virgins all day and all night if they so desire. These places are known as "churches," and they can also force passersby to look at the displays and billboards they erect and to give ear to the bells that they ring. In addition, they can count on numberless radio and TV stations to beam their stuff all through the ether. If this is not sufficient, then god damn them. God damn them everyone.

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…Once upon a time, there was a Christian holy day upon which a Mass was held to honor the birth of Christ. It was a day of worship preceded by a four-week period of somber reflection known as Advent. For political reasons, this mass was grafted onto a Bacchanalian Roman holiday known as Saturnalia, as well as various pagan celebrations of the winter solstice as the faith spread through Europe. The public celebration of Christmas has been a theological mess for many centuries, but in Western Europe decorations were traditionally put up on Christmas Eve and the Christmas holiday was celebrated through "Twelfth Night" (January 5th) on the eve of Epiphany, the holiday which actually celebrates the adoration of the Magi and the gifts presented to the Christ child. The season of Advent, by contrast, was intended to be quiet and austere.

The current American protestant cultural regime, which knows nothing and cares little about history, theology or church traditions, has completely bastardized Christmas into a season of excessive shopping, insipid music, and tacky decorations celebrating the secular myth of Santa Claus that begins on the day after Thanksgiving and begins hinting at its arrival by November 1st. The only thing this holiday has in common with sacred tradition is the name... though God forbid anyone on the religious right hears you refer to December 25th by any other name.

Personally, I enjoy many of the American Christmas traditions, and I think Mr. Hitchens could probably stand to lighten up a bit and absorb the oft-quoted lines about peace on earth and goodwill toward one's fellow men and women. Nobody likes a Scrooge.

But if there's anything that gets my goat, it's the sanctimonious idiots who claim there's a "War Against Christmas" on the grounds that Our Lord's Most Holy Shopping Season has fallen victim to evil secularists who would have us believe that all those pine trees, inflatable snowmen, electric reindeer, big-screen-TV-sales and socks hung over the fireplace can be accurately described as a "holiday season" and not merely a faithful celebration of the birth of Christ.

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Bush's Secularist Triumph

The left apologizes for religious fanatics. The president fights them.

But all faiths are not always equally demented in the same way, or at the same time. Islam, which was once a civilizing and creative force in many societies, is now undergoing a civil war. One faction in this civil war is explicitly totalitarian and wedded to a cult of death.

So here is what I want to say on the absolutely crucial matter of secularism. Only one faction in American politics has found itself able to make excuses for the kind of religious fanaticism that immediately menaces us in the here and now. And that faction, I am sorry and furious to say, is the left. From the first day of the immolation of the World Trade Center, right down to the present moment, a gallery of pseudointellectuals has been willing to represent the worst face of Islam as the voice of the oppressed. How can these people bear to reread their own propaganda? Suicide murderers in Palestine—disowned and denounced by the new leader of the PLO—described as the victims of "despair." The forces of al-Qaida and the Taliban represented as misguided spokespeople for antiglobalization. The blood-maddened thugs in Iraq, who would rather bring down the roof on a suffering people than allow them to vote, pictured prettily as "insurgents" or even, by Michael Moore, as the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers. If this is liberal secularism, I'll take a modest, God-fearing, deer-hunting Baptist from Kentucky every time, as long as he didn't want to impose his principles on me (which our Constitution forbids him to do).

George Bush may subjectively be a Christian, but he—and the U.S. armed forces—have objectively done more for secularism than the whole of the American agnostic community combined and doubled. The demolition of the Taliban, the huge damage inflicted on the al-Qaida network, and the confrontation with theocratic saboteurs in Iraq represent huge advances for the non-fundamentalist forces in many countries.

Secularism is not just a smug attitude. It is a possible way of democratic and pluralistic life that only became thinkable after several wars and revolutions had ruthlessly smashed the hold of the clergy on the state. We are now in the middle of another such war and revolution, and the liberals have gone AWOL. I dare say that there will be a few domestic confrontations down the road, over everything from the Pledge of Allegiance to the display of Mosaic tablets in courtrooms and schools. I have spent all my life on the atheist side of this argument, and will brace for more of the same, but I somehow can't hear Robert Ingersoll or Clarence Darrow being soft and cowardly and evasive if it came to a vicious theocratic challenge that daily threatens us from within and without.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His latest collection of essays, Love, Poverty and War, is published this month.

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Stand up for Denmark!

Why are we not defending our ally?

Put the case that we knew of a highly paranoid religious cult organization with a secretive leader. Now put the case that this cult, if criticized in the press, would take immediate revenge by kidnapping a child. Put the case that, if the secretive leader were also to be lampooned, two further children would be killed at random. Would the press be guilty of "self-censorship" if it declined to publish anything that would inflame the said cult? Well, yes it would be guilty, but very few people would insist on the full exertion of the First Amendment right. However, the consequences for the cult and its leader would be severe as well. All civilized people would regard it as hateful and dangerous, and steps would be taken to circumscribe its influence, and to ensure that no precedent was set.

And nobody in authority can be found to state the obvious and the necessary—that we stand with the Danes against this defamation and blackmail and sabotage. Instead, all compassion and concern is apparently to be expended upon those who lit the powder trail, and who yell and scream for joy as the embassies of democracies are put to the torch in the capital cities of miserable, fly-blown dictatorships. Let's be sure we haven't hurt the vandals' feelings.

The preposterous person of Karen Hughes is quoted in the same New York Times article, under her risible title of "Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy." She tittered outside the store she was happily giving away: "The voices of Muslim Americans have more credibility in the Muslim world frankly than my voice as a government official, because they can speak the language of their faith and can share their experience of practicing their faith freely in the West, and they can help explain why the cartoons are so offensive." Well, let's concede that almost any voice in any world has more credibility on any subject than this braying Bush-crony ignoramus, but is the State Department now saying that we shall be represented in the Muslim world only by Muslims? I think we need a debate on that, and also a vote.

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By the end of this century, the typical European may attend a family reunion in which five generations are playing together. Great-great-great grandma, at 150 years old, will be as vital, with muscle tone as firm and supple, skin as elastic and glowing, as her 30-year-old great-great-granddaughter with whom she's playing tennis.

After the game, while enjoying a plate of vegetables filled with not only a solid day's worth of nutrients but medicines she needs to repair damage to her ageing cells, she'll be able to chat about some academic discipline she studied in the 1980s with as much acuity and memory as her 50-year-old great-grandson, who is studying it now.

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This idyll is more than realistic, given reasonably expected breakthroughs and extensions of our knowledge of human, plant and animal biology, as well as mastery of the manipulation of these biologies to meet our needs and desires.

Although you would think most people would devoutly wish for this vision, an extraordinary coalition of left-wing and right-wing bioconservatives is resisting the biotechnological progress that could make it real. Forget Osama bin Laden and the so-called clash of civilizations. The defining political conflict of the 21st century will literally be the battle over life and death.

On one side stand the partisans of mortality. From the Left, the bioethicist Daniel Callahan declares: "There is no known social good coming from the conquest of death." On the Right, stands Leon Kass, former head of George Bush's Council on Bioethics, who insists: "The finitude of human life is a blessing for every human individual, whether he knows it or not."

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This story originally appeared in the Times of London.

Ronald Bailey is Reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

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Fetus Cannot Feel Pain, Expert Says

By Amanda Gardner
HealthDay Reporter 59 minutes ago

FRIDAY, April 14 (HealthDay News) -- Fetuses cannot feel pain, therefore U.S. legislation requiring doctors to tell women that the fetus will feel pain, or to provide pain relief during abortions, has no scientific basis and may harm the women involved, a leading expert contends.

"I agree that pain is a complex sensory experience that requires activation of many regions of the cerebral cortex and that 'Without consciousness there can be nociception [response to noxious events] but there cannot be pain,'" Ralston said. "I do not know when that necessary neural circuitry is fully developed and functional, but it certainly is not established by 20 weeks gestational age, as encoded in legislation in several states in laws penalizing physicians for not informing mothers about pain in their fetuses."

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http://www.reason.com/cy/cy040406.shtml

Brief Quote:

April 4, 2006

What War On Christians?

Disagreement isn't oppression

Cathy Young

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Once, conservatives used to deplore the left's cult of victimhood and ridicule the obsession with real or imagined slights toward women, minorities, and other historically oppressed groups. Now, the right is embracing a victimhood cult obsessed with slights toward a group that makes up 85 percent of the American population. According to a Washington Post report, one conference speaker, Navy chaplain Lieutenant Gordon James Klingenschmitt, compared himself to Abdur Rahman, the Afghan convert. Showing slides of himself and Rahman, Klingenschmitt inquired, "What do these two Christians have in common?" and answered: "Perhaps we are persecuted." His persecution consisted of being disciplined by a commander for saying sectarian prayers at a sailor's memorial service. DeLay, ousted as House majority leader after being indicted for money laundering and conspiracy, was touted as another victim of religious bigotry, targeted for being outspoken about his faith, and his legal and political woes were compared to a crucifixion. (Isn't that offensive to Christians?) One is reminded of race-obsessed zealots who see a racist conspiracy in every prosecution of a prominent African-American, from O.J. Simpson to a corrupt politician. There is a nugget of truth in some complaints of anti-Christian bias. Many people in the academic and journalistic elites do turn up their noses at anything that smacks of faith. Some activists, courts, and public officials have misconstrued the prohibition on state establishment of religion as banning any mention of religion in the public square.

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But the complainers go much further. They cry persecution when religious conservatives are denied the ability to impose their beliefs on everyone—for instance, to ban abortion or gay unions. In fact, much of the hostility they encounter is directed at this political agenda, not at religion as such: People who bash the religious right seldom object when faith is invoked to protest war, poverty, or racism. This is a double standard, to be sure, but it's just as hypocritical for religious conservatives to suggest that Christians who don't subscribe to their brand of values aren't "real" Christians.

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Half of Americans agree that belief in God is necessary to having good moral values, and more than two-thirds say they would not even consider voting for a nonbeliever for political office. Georgia state legislator Ron Foster ruffled no feathers a few years ago when he noted, in defense of posting of the Ten Commandments in government buildings, that judges or public officials who don't believe in God are "more likely to be corrupt." This soft bigotry has consequences, and not just for godless politicians. In the May issue of the New York University Law Review, UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh documents discrimination against nonreligious parents in child custody disputes, based on the assumption that raising your children in a religious faith makes you a better parent.

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Cathy Young is a Reason contributing editor. This column originally appeared in the Boston Globe.

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Noting the ongoing evolution wars around the United States, Zimmer decided to expand the Clergy Letter Project beyond the borders of Wisconsin. Now the Open Letter on Religion and Science has received endorsements from 10,000 clergy around the country. Most endorsers are from relatively liberal mainline Protestant denominations. For example, a quick check of endorsers found just seven endorsements from Southern Baptists, almost all of whom were associated with hospitals or academic institutions.

The Open Letter declares: "We believe that the theory of evolution is a foundational scientific truth, one that has stood up to rigorous scrutiny and upon which much of human knowledge and achievement rests. To reject this truth or to treat it as 'one theory among others' is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children." So far, so good.

The Letter goes on to draw a distinction between "two very different, but complementary, forms of truth." Religious truth, according to the Letter, is "of a different order from scientific truth. Its purpose is not to convey scientific information but to transform hearts." The divines seem to be reaching for the proposed accommodation between science and religion devised by evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould. Gould argued that science and religion are two non-overlapping magisteria.

However, in a certain sense "values" are "facts" about human beings and as such can be studied by scientists. Today researchers into evolutionary psychology, neuroeconomics, genetics and other fields are elucidating the sources of human morality and how it functions. Dean Hamer, a biologist at the National Cancer Institute claims to have found "The God Gene," which affects how certain mood regulating chemicals are transported in people's brains. This variant of the VMAT2 gene seems to make people who have it more susceptible to spiritual beliefs.

Of course, theology is still a long way from being reduced to biochemistry. Scientific research into the sources of religious belief is just beginning, so any of the current findings could be rejected or revised as further evidence becomes available. Nevertheless, the magisteria of science is surrounding and shrinking the domain of the magisteria of religion. The Open Letter asserts, "We believe that among God's good gifts are human minds capable of critical thought and that the failure to fully employ this gift is a rejection of the will of our Creator." It may well be that that same capacity for critical thought eventually leads us to stop believing in Him.

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ATLANTA (AP) -- Georgia became what is believed to be the first state to offer government-sanctioned elective classes on the Bible, with Gov. Sonny Perdue signing a bill into law Thursday.

The governor also signed a bill permitting the display of the Ten Commandments at courthouses, an issue that has raised thorny constitutional questions.

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Bioethicist Daniel Callahan defines the "research imperative" as the drive to seek knowledge through research, either for its own sake or as a means to some worthy practical end. This coming Monday at the Biotechnology Industry Organization's annual conference in Chicago, he and I will be on a panel discussing whether the research imperative is "a curse or a cure." Callahan gets to damn research as a curse, while I get to celebrate cures.

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First, Callahan argues against the notion that biomedical research is a moral imperative. He properly points out that no person has a duty to become a researcher nor to pay for any particular research. If a person chooses to become a painter, a soccer player, an investment banker, a physicist or a journalist, she does not deprive another person of what he or she is in justice due. And if she chooses to spend her money on a house, feeding the poor, or traveling, again, she has deprived no one of what they may reasonably demand of her. Interestingly, while Callahan is correct that no one has a moral duty to do research or pay for it, he implies that people do have a positive moral duty to supply others with goods like education, access to health care, and better housing. The difference? He doesn't really explain.

In any case, it is very clear that Callahan thinks that too much money is being spent on biomedical research in the United States. Why too much? Because most Americans now get to live their three score and ten in relatively good health. That is, unlike their ancestors a century ago, they live long enough to have families, productive careers, pay their taxes and die content. That should be enough.

On the other hand, Callahan does argue that biomedical research to prevent and cure infectious diseases may be close to a moral imperative. Why? Because those diseases cut down young people who have not had a chance for full lives. "To my mind, premature death is something to be worked against," says Callahan. But research on cures for the diseases of old age is less important. "It would be a good thing to cure cancer, heart disease and the like, but it seems to me in terms of social priority, I would want to argue that they have a comparatively low priority," says Callahan. He declares, "I guess to me the fundamental question is, what are the appropriate goals for medicine at this stage in history given the fact that we have already made great progress, given the fact that most people now die in old age, rather than as young people?"

He's right. In modern societies, infectious disease plays a relatively small role in killing off younger people: If all the things that kill people in the United States before age fifty were eliminated, average life expectancy—now 77.6 years—would increase by only three and a half years.

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Ronald Bailey is Reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Moral and Scientific Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

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