We were in the church basement and the soundproofing curtains had been pulled to the sides so that it was one large room.  The guest speaker talked and started to list numbers: stars in the galaxy, galaxies in the universe, etc.  This was 1971, and the Big Bang theory was not well known, at least not in Holland.  The numbers he threw out were supposed to dazzle the audience, numb them with a graphic depiction of the smallness of human existence, and attach that smallness to any ideas Man might have.  But it had the opposite effect on me.

I started to do math with the numbers.  I have always been a person to do math in my head, particularly when I am bored.  I used to do geometry proofs in my head when the sermons got boring.  I was studying probability in class, and I started to work out scale of the numbers he was talking about.  It was such that for life to have spontaneously happened here on Earth, it would be a single event lost in many orders of magnitude.  I started comparing that to the size of the universe, and suddenly it didn’t seem so improbable.  The numbers were not of the same scale, but they were not unreasonable.  Suddenly, his conjecture, that it was not reasonable to conclude that random events could have produced mankind, seemed itself to be unreasonable.

I was scared.  The frame of reference for my existence was in question, and I had nothing to say to refute it.  Over the next couple of weeks, this was not far from my consciousness.  I tried to apply the arguments in which I had been trained, but they didn’t work.  I began to see my religious beliefs as an overlapping set of ideas, where they supported each other but for which there was not an independent basis.  There was a lot of circular logic going on and it was untethered.  I decided to resolve it in a rational fashion.

It seemed clear to me that the proposition that there was a God and its antithesis, that there wasn’t a God were mutually exclusive.  If I assumed the antithesis to be true, and followed it to its logical conclusion, and it proved itself to be false, I would have proved the initial proposition to be true by exclusion.

And it didn’t happen.  One by one, the precepts that I had previously held became undone and I found myself adrift in a new ocean of ideas, all of which needed to be tested.  The milieu for this investigation was my home, my school and my church.  My parents were born again believers.  My father was a man saved by grace.  I think that when he looked at his birth family, he credited being a Christian with changing his life.  I think my mother also saw being a born again Christian with giving her a life different from her family.  I think she probably got satisfaction from the fact that some of my father’s siblings and other relations turned to Christianity to help change their lives.

But an overly religious household is a hard place to hide one’s questioning of everything holy.  Church was not a place to question things either.  Holland, Michigan, is the birthplace of the Christian Reformed denomination.  There is a large enclave of Dutch people in Western Michigan.  But there were towns settled by other ethnic groups.  Reflecting on my time in Holland, I came to the conclusion that religion is a reflection of ethnic and racial underpinnings.  My grand thesis is that people adopt religion as an ethnic identifier, and that racism is extension of instinctive clan based associativity.  In my Sunday School class, the family names were Lorence, Barber, Pittman, Endean, Robinson and Dunlap.  Each of these boys had one Dutch parent and one non-Dutch parent.  When I try to remember the families in that church, I don’t remember many families where both parents were Dutch.  Immanuel Church, despite its liturgical doctrine, was a refuge for families that were ethnically separate from the community.  Most of the churches in town were Reformed or Christian Reformed.  There were a few Baptist, Methodist, Catholic, and Episcopalian. I have yet to test my thesis with regard to those populations.

School at Hamilton High was steeped in religion.  Most kids went to church and teachers were overtly religious.  I couldn’t talk to anyone about what I was thinking there.  And so I kept it to myself.  I told a few friends, but the result was that they wanted to convert me back.  That was unpleasant.  At some point, I decided not to try to convert other people to my way of thinking.  I had been active in church, proselytizing for fundamental Christianity.  My new way of thinking was so individual, so wrenching, that I could not induce other people to follow my path.  It was up to them to find it for themselves.  I have not tried to get other people to believe as I do.

When I could leave, I joined the Army, so I wouldn’t keep taking from my parents while being opposed to just about everything they believed.  I was alone, on my own, and it was hard to take.  Being alone in the world, cut off from family and friends is not anything I would suggest for anyone.  But that is the way I felt.

Over the years, I continued to read, consider and modify my ideas.  I discovered the field of Bible authenticity study and it resonates with me.  Reading Genesis with this in mind is such a clarifying activity.  I evaluated whether or not to call myself an ‘atheist’.  According to the definitions of atheist as someone who denies the possibility for the existence of a deity, and deities being defined as infinite beings, it seems impractical for a finite being such as myself to declare the existence or non-existence of any infinite being.  So I’m not comfortable with the label of atheist.

My daughter, while in pre-school or kindergarten, complained to me about reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and the phrase ‘under God’.  I thought she was fishing for a definitive statement from me about it.  She was precocious, highly verbal and probing.  I asked her what she thought about it.  She said that she didn’t believe in the ‘angry old man in the sky’.  I said that it was okay for her not to believe in that because some of those ideas came from a time when there was a lot about the natural world that people didn’t understand and that it was easier to put a name and face on things like lightning.  Science hadn’t happened yet.  People credited to God those things that they couldn’t explain.  She nodded in agreement.  Then I asked her where love comes from.  She was stumped.  I asked her if she felt love, felt loved.  She did.  I said that there were some people who believed that God was where love comes from.  I transitioned the discussion into our need to allow people to find their own understanding for God.

I credit monotheism with setting the stage for the scientific method.  In monotheism, there is an unstated axiom that the world has order, and that the order is knowable.  I think that was crucial to the development of the scientific method.

There are many things that I do not know in this world.  It seems that the more I know, the more the things I don’t know grows.  It seems the latter grows at a rate that is exponential relative to the former.  During my years alone, I evolved the idea of a operational truth.  There are certain things that we define to be true, e.g., 1 + 1 = 2, but there are other things that we treat at true because they are the best understandings we have at the time.  There are two kinds of truth: things we define to be true, and things we determine to be true.  Operational truths are examples of the latter.  One of the smartest people I know, a guy who passed his qualification exams for a doctorate in high energy physics, but decided to write software instead, surprised me when I asked him if he believed in God.  “Of course!  You don’t think all of this just happened, do you?”  I don’t know.  There is insufficient evidence to close the case for happenstance.  My operational truth is that we may not know our origins, but that does not relieve of us of of the responsibility to live moral lives, treat each other with respect and work together to solve world problems.

Let’s talk, in particular, about what’s happening in Europe — not because all is well with America, but because the gravity of European political developments isn’t widely understood.  First of all, the crisis of the euro is killing the European dream. The shared currency, which was supposed to bind nations together, has instead created an atmosphere of bitter acrimony.  Specifically, demands for ever-harsher austerity, with no offsetting effort to foster growth, have done double damage. They have failed as economic policy, worsening unemployment without restoring confidence; a Europe-wide recession now looks likely even if the immediate threat of financial crisis is contained.

Krugman goes on in depth about Hungary, and you should read it.

Read it here.

I was an Army combat correspondent with the First Air Cavalry Division in 1965-66.  One day in December 1966 I accompanied a group of Army doctors and dentists to a remote hamlet in Binh Dinh Province. As we approached the village we took sniper fire, but nobody was hit. In this hamlet we held a sick call, passed out soap, toothpaste and toothbrushes, Band-Aids and antibiotic gel. We treated minor cuts, scrapes and infections and filled or pulled several teeth. In the process we found about 30y boys and men with cleft palates. These individuals were all related to each other; one doctor thought the condition might be genetic. A few weeks later we returned, set up a large tent and turned it into a sterile operating theater. I scrubbed in and used a waterproof camera that I immersed in an antibacterial solution. The doctors repaired every cleft palate, and returned twice for followups. They took sniper fire every time. The patient in this photo was the village headman.

America isn’t a perfect place, and we aren’t perfect.  But we should remember the legacy we bear.

In this quiet academic, John Bigelow found a resonating French voice for the American cause of Union and liberty. And in “la question amércaine,” Laboulaye and French liberals found a way of reawakening the debate over the future of democracy in France, America and the rest of the world.

Read it.

It’s 1944, and police escort a 14-year-old boy into the death chamber. He stands just 5’1 and weighs a mere 95 pounds. He is so small in stature that dictionaries need to be stacked on the seat of the electric chair so that when he sits in it his head reaches the height of the electrodes. His chains are loose around his narrow ankles.

This young boy is about to be the youngest person ever to be executed in the history of the United States. Before there was a Troy Davis there was George Junius Stinney, Jr. and the state of South Carolina electrocuted him.

Stinney was accused of murdering two young white girls. They were eleven year-old Betty June Binnicker and 8-year-old Mary Emma Thames. The two girls went missing one day after they were riding their bikes while looking for flowers on the wrong side of the tracks in a small working class town of Alcolu, South Carolina where whites and blacks were separated by railroad tracks. The girls went missing and were later found dead in a ditch, murdered with a railroad spike.

If a state wants to have a death penalty, let them pass a law such that the executioner is drawn, by lot, from the lists used to make jury pools.  Make it a citizenship duty.  Put that on the ballot and if that is what the People want, I will go along with it.

It was fairly easy to find the circular logic in claims of capital punishment being immoral, because they too often consisted of “Capital punishment is immoral!  So there!” kinds of arguments.  Not that it is easy to find an argument to state that capital punishment is moral, it is just easy to obviate the reverse.

Until now.

It is immoral to execute people for crimes when the criminal justice system rests on a failed system of equivalent advocacy.  The criminal justice system as it is currently composed does not exist to find the truth.  The premise is that the two parties are equal before the bar, that the rights of the accused are protected and that the prosecution works in the best interest of the People to redress wrongs.  And this is not true.

Aeschylus wrote in the Oresteia that the move from a system of clan based vengeance to a system of laws is one of the things that marked societal advancement.  But we have not given up capital punishment, this vestige of tribal revenge based justice.  Furthermore, it is clear that we seem incapable of administering it without mistake.

It has been clear for a long time that the criminal justice system tilts against the poor.  Perhaps the poor commit more crimes, I don’t know.  But it is clear that once a poor man has an encounter with the criminal justice system, the outcome is usually more convictions and stiffer sentences.  There are those that say that the criminal justice system is biased against people of color.  It is not clear that the data supports that position.  But it is a national tragedy that such a large percentage of certain ethnic groups has a much higher felony conviction rate than others and that should be addressed.

In discussing capital punishment, I would point out serious problems with the system as it currently exists.

• The criminal justice system doesn’t have a national standard for evidence.
• Capital cases before the bar are many times driven by the political aspirations of the prosecutor.
• Capital punishment is not pursued evenly.

The standard for evidence is scattered through case law, code law and textbooks.  Investigating officers sometimes take notes, sometimes video tape, sometimes reconstruct conversations.  Witnesses can be coerced and it never enters the body of evidence.  ”Tough on crime”.  There is a sitting congressman who claims to have been the man who brought the Green River Killer to justice.  This is not true, but he got a lot of media attention and used it as a springboard for his political aspirations.  The Green River Killer, Gary Ridgway, preyed on prostitues.  He is believed to have killed 71 women.  He may have killed more.  But he is still alive, having bartered knowledge of his crimes in exchange for a release from the death penalty.

It is patently clear that Texas executed an innocent man in Cameron Todd Willingham.  The  legal system did not protect the accused in this case, but bent the system to seek a conviction and execution.  The governor impeded the investigation into the case and his handling of it, and there were no repercussions.  In fact, in a focus group, one of his political supporters said, “It takes balls to execute an innocent man.”

In the past, I have not associated myself with capital punishment opponents in part because there were a lot of people in that camp who were against anything that the government did that was not in their particular world view.  They were vocal, impractical, too willing to try to win arguments by volume and repetition, not rational thought.  I try to keep distance between myself and people of that ilk.

Troy Davis was executed last night and he should not have been.

Enough.  I have had enough.  I am now firmly in the anti-capital punishment camp along with all the unlearned vituperative types who also rant against a broad spectrum of wrongs, as they imagine them.

Capital punishment is wrong, it is immoral as it is currently practiced.

We should stop it and try to recover the moral position that we imagine ourselves to hold.

And this is a public relations campaign.  But I don’t know what the goals are.  Remind people of religion?  Win new converts?  I don’t know.  Do you remember “WWJD”?  What would Jesus do?  That was a public relations campaign intended to establish the belief in Jesus as an aid to a moral life.  It gave wearers a touchstone facsimile for making moral decisions.  It identified wearers to each other as if they were part of a club.

There are those who say that organized religion is an unregulated tax-exempt business providing counseling and advice to an insular group.  I am not among them.  Most of those words could be easily defended, but I have known people for whom religion was the only thing that kept them from sliding into a life of bad choices, principally substance abuse.  I won’t disparage religion because if it helps one person stay on a good path and helps them be a responsible parent to their children, I’m okay with it.

But public relations campaigns by churches tend to get my attention.  A couple of years ago, it was the Catholics with “Catholics Come Home“.  Most people could see the Catholic Church as a welcoming place, it was just that uncle with the wandering hands who was a problem.  The Catholic Church did not do enough to dispel the spectre of centuries of sexual and other abuse at the hands of church officials.  Quite frankly, how could they?  They had painted themselves into a corner with the doctrine of church infallibility.  Since that campaign rolled out, there have been more reports of historical abuse in Ireland, which is practically a theocracy.  But I digress.

Jesus is what?  Fill in the blank.  I was riding with Bookzilla and pointed out the bumper sticker.  I told her that I wished I had a silver sharpie so I could write in “smokin’ hot”.  She cracked up, and laughed about as hard as I have ever seen her laugh.  A couple of days later, we were in back of a car bearing a “Jesus is” bumper sticker and the driver couldn’t seem to decide which direction to go.  After dodging right and left a few times, the driver pulled off the street.  ”Jesus is a bad driver” got a laugh from Bookzilla.

If Christians want to communicate something about Jesus, let it be by example, not by public relations.

9/11 Memorial app for iPad and iPhone is a free download today

Oh, stop already.  This digusts me.

The attacks could have been prevented if the Bush Administration had been focused on information readily available to them, rather than committed to a broad goal of revisiting the Cold War.  They never took responsibility for their actions and deployed the addage of “Admit nothing, deny everything and make counter accusations”.  If the attacks of 9/11 were such a seminal event, the victims deserved better than that.  If the attacks were not a seminal event, then why the big fuss about them?

Fetishizing the attacks of 9/11 make them into more than they were and elevates the people who attacked us.  We should treat the attackers for what they were: little narcissistic people bent on hurting people they don’t know or understand.  The correct response to the attacks of 9/11 was, “You call that an attack?  Never touched me.”  It was not a deep and grievous wound.  It did not harm us that much.  We are still here.  That should have been the message: You can’t hurt us because you don’t understand us and the principles we represent.

Ah, yes, principles.  Those were too easily discarded by Cheney et Co.  Torture became a modus operandi of first resort.  We should focus on the divisions in our society uncovered by these attacks.  It is troubling that a sizable portion of the society thinks that torture is acceptable.  It is despicable that some of them already hold high office and think they are suited for the highest office in the land.

We should also focus on the way that elections no longer work in their current formulation.  The central axiom of a representative democracy such as ours is that elected officials face an accounting on their actions via the ballot box.  In truth, Congressional districts are massaged to better ensure incumbents are re-elected, voter suppression is a primary electoral strategy by one party, and public relations wars are waged to keep people in office.  The central axiom is false, and should be addressed.

The attacks of 9/11 have significance, we are just not noticing it.

In response to a special education official who said there was “no such thing as an uneducatable person,” Shakir told a gym full of citizens: “I would dispute that fact. There are certainly individuals that are uneducateable. I am simply suggesting to you and everybody else that there should be a line drawn where the taxpayer is responsible to educate certain people.”

I watched the video and I think Shakir has a point.  We should be having a discussion about this.

1. Is the school system the place and method for dealing with those people who are so learning disabled that they may need care for the rest of their lives?
2. Who should pay for it?
3. What is the responsibility of society in this case?

I don’t know the answers for these questions, but we should be asking them and trying to answer them.  Shakir’s interlocutor/interrogator says the following in response.

You are physically making me sick. What you are saying, Mr. Shakir, is immoral, unethical, and illegal.

The guy was telling Shakir how he felt.  Why?  Why was that important.  You are sick?  Then puke.  Oh, you aren’t puking?  You are exaggerating?  Why?  Why exaggerate?  The guy then goes into statements that can not be true.  Immoral?  Why was it immoral?  Shakir was talking about public policy and it is a matter of discussion.  Unethical?  There was no talk of rights and responsibilities.  Only the statements meant to shame Shakir.  I don’t thing the guy in the vest really know anything about ethics.  I think he thinks he knows, but that does not convey knowledge.  Illegal?  I doubt it.

To be clear, Shakir has some weird ideas, but this clip is not the damning evidence that Amato thinks it is.