Clarifying

This man has more cred (and, no doubt, more page views) than I, but he's saying exactly what I've been saying for a long time: that there are definable differences between conservative and liberal minds, that the Rovian model of exploiting religiosity is entirely unsurprising, that religious fundamentalism is a trait of rightwingism.

His homing in on the word "empathy" is important. In religious fora in which I've occasionally participated, it's regularly expressed that without god (specifically, the self-contradictory rule-book known as the Bible) there can be no morality. But, in fact, it all stems from empathy, the value of which as an evolutionary trait is self-evident.

The professor's analysis is clarifying. It explains (it's really just a statement of observable facts) the essential difference between liberals and conservatives, and how it breaks along recognizable biblical lines. Which, once more, is not to say that religion per se is useless. Not in all cases, anyway. After all, a majority of liberals consider themselves religious. The difference is in literalism, in the need to denigrate beliefs which differ from theirs, in openness to challenging ideas. These differing kinds of religious certainty equate very directly with the differing politics of liberalism and conservatism. Especially since, nowadays, conservatism has devolved into a sort of fundamentalism that wraps itself in the most doctrinaire sort of religionism.

It's pretty hard to see a way forward anymore. Particularly because there was a time when I agreed with much of what conservatives had to say. Before they went nuts.

A-Well-a, Bless-a My Soul

Here's some good sense from a Christian press organization. Lordy, it's even from Texas!

"...From the old Procter & Gamble Satanism libel to tales of more recent vintage about President Obama’s faith and citizenship, Internet-fueled rumors seem to run rampant. And, frighteningly, Christians seem at the very least to be as susceptible as the population at large to the habit of spreading false stories..."

Of course, I'd say the nature of religious faith is such that it fuels more gullibility, especially as it leads to building a wall between faith and facts which might threaten it. Still, it's nice to see some clarity on the matter, from a religious institution. I don't think it's mere coincidence that the party of conservative religionists is the one in which these sorts of falsehoods spread so easily; nor that the need for unquestioned belief is paired with the willingness -- need, that is -- to accept them.

Heart Like A Stone

A nearby woman is the first in Washington State to avail herself of the newly-passed "death with dignity" law. Here's a quote from the article:

One opponent of the law called Fleming's death a "sad day" and criticized her choice as "egotistical... It's saying: 'I want to go out of life on my own terms, even though the vast majority of us accept the natural conclusion of our lives,' " said Chris Carlson, of the Coalition Against Assisted Suicide...

Egotistical.

EGOTISTICAL! Of all the words to describe the act, that's not one that would have come to my mind. (Looking around a bit on the intertubes, I see it is, in fact, not unique to this person: in a particularly poorly written and grievously edited tract discussing psychology of suicide, the word is mis-equated with "egoistic" and other psychobabble that hardly applies to terminal illness.)

During the campaign against the initiative, the opposition mostly focused on "slippery slope" arguments: it'll be abused; it'll be forced on people to save health care dollars; families will talk their old ones into offing themselves to get the inheritance before it's used up. Self-indulgence wasn't brought up. At least not in reference to the dying.

With good reason: it's deeply offensive, heartless, and condescending. At the very least. And, of course, it's the imposition of a religious ethic on others by people who have no business doing so. Like opposition to same-sex marriage, except that in the latter case, no one dies. In each case, the act does no harm to the protesters, is exquisitely personal, and has only religious or sky-is-falling arguments to be made against it. (The Washington law, like the one in Oregon, has safeguards -- too many, if anything -- against treatable depression and premature invocation.) These are people suffering with terminal illness. Terminal. Suffering. Unable to be experienced (much less judged) by any but the sufferer, the woman's act was, in my view, one of bravery and, in a strange way, of ultimate optimism. Affirming of her humanity.

I don't discount the sincerity of those who oppose assisted suicide, some of my fellow physicians (none of whom can be made to participate) among them. But when I read the above sentences, I thought, is that what it's really been about? Taking a tiny bit of control over the otherwise uncontrollable and intolerable is egotistical? Not by my definition.

"...even though the vast majority of us accept the natural conclusion of our lives." Huh? Natural conclusion? Don't the majority see doctors, take meds, go to hospitals, have operations? What the hell is a "natural conclusion?"

I've not heard of the speaker, but it seems he/she is a spokesperson for an activist group, so I assume it's representative. Of something. Is it a sensible argument in any way? "[M]y own terms." Yes! Of course!! And your point is what, exactly? When I saw the word "egotistical" my reaction was revulsion at the clueless insensitivity, the faux superiority, the EGOTISM. When I read the rest of the quote, I found it laughable.

In a "god help us here we go again" sort of way.
.

Right and Wrong

Who could have predicted this? Iowa Republican legislators are moving to amend their state constitution to outlaw same sex marriage. That's them, above. Loving-looking group of people. Rights-rescinding sort of folks: eaters of corn, family protectors destroyers. God bless 'em.

What's the word I'm looking for....? Oh yeah: evil. If what they're trying to do isn't evil, what is? They want to strip fellow human beings, loving people, of rights enjoyed by everyone else. Attack them, punish them, deprive them. People who are law-abiding citizens of their country, teachers, students, doctors, lawyers, insurance agents, clerks, harming no one, whose only offense is having been born with a sexual preference different from theirs (although if you put a handful of gay-bashing Republicans in a room, chances are there's some whose preferences aren't as white-bread as they profess. Could it be the one on the right?) People who want only to live in a loving home like heterosexual families, and to be left alone.

I simply can't fathom it: devoting all that effort to punishing people who've committed no crime, pose no danger, ask for nothing more than what everyone else has. What does it take to rationalize such a thing? Religion, of course. But to support that kind of discrimination, designed specifically to exclude a group of people from human rights, based on a false concept: it's so foreign to me that I can't imagine it. I can't put myself in their shoes any more than I can breathe under water. These people are hate-filled, frightened, self-important, indifferent, vengeful, uncharitable, sociopathic, ill-informed, oppressive, sanctimonious, tyrannical, malicious, smug, fact-denying, intolerant, thoughtless, hurtful, petty, parochial, narrow-minded, mendacious, vindictive, brainwashed bullies. More simply: evil.

At best it's but another example of how differently people think; how facts are processed or rejected in differing brains. There's nothing -- NOTHING -- about same-sex marriage to which that group of self-satisfied legislators can point that threatens them. Yet there they are, plotting, planning, and, likely, thinking they're doing God's work. In some things there is more than one respectable point of view, legitimate bones of contention. Opposing arguments can be rationally made when the facts are not clear, or conflicting. Billroth I vs Billroth II after antrectomy, for example; pancreatectomy vs Peustow for chronic obstructive pancreatitis. But sometimes, there is no argument. Sometimes people on one side are simply wrong, period.

Those guys at the top of this post? Wrong. They have no argument, no facts. They're just wrong. It's the kindest thing I can say about them, and they don't deserve it.
.

Truth-Tellers?

It's my opinion that among the clergy is a disproportionate number of people (men, it seems, nearly exclusively) who are sincerely screwed up, compensating in some weird way for their less-than-honorable proclivities. For them, taking up the cloth is a kind of reaction formation. How else to explain the regular revelations of the very behavior (sexual, generally) against which they rail? Youth pastors seem, often enough to be newsworthy, to see their flock (and flockettes) as personal playground. The bigger the church, the more prominent their proclamations, the more likely it is (unscientific assessment, but this is a blog) the preacher has something to hide. The more lavishly they spend on themselves. And, of course, all the more amusing when it all comes out.

But that's not my point. This is.

From there, I hardly know which direction to choose: the bizarre theology, the fact that people like these are given political -- or ANY -- credence, that politicians make pilgrimages to their doorsteps; or that people by the uncountable tens of thousands flock to hear what they have to say. Some guy, basically, who has a mammothly inflated view of his own rectitude, of his own righteousness (to the extent that he's managed to subvert his real desires), who has the good business sense to put together a megamillion dollar enterprise and use it as a platform to promote whatever the hell comes into his head. And people eat it up; give him time on their talk shows, consider his concurrence a blessing for their own inadequacies. (For is there a more inadequate personality than Sean Hannity?)

I've said it before, because I mean it: I have nothing but respect for a person's individual beliefs, insofar as they allow that person to manage in this strange world. And insofar as they don't try to force their beliefs into our schools, and onto me. I recognize and honor the personal need, and the personal purpose. But it's this wholly undeserved national stage...

It's self-evident that the Bible (I'm talking Christianity here, as usual, but only because it's the driving religious force in our politics; I feel the same about all organized and proselytized religions) is a mirror of oneself. Vague, internally contradictory, translated, edited and revised to the point that there's literally no way to know the original meaning or intent of its various authors, the reading of and response to it is entirely individual. It means to you what it means to you, and you are quite free to find your own way into and out of it. Which is, I suppose, a significant part of its attraction. Once again: I bear no ill towards those who find solace in it. I envy their certitude.

Where I entirely part company is with the idea of imparting to some (possibly quite damaged) individual primacy of pronouncement. Why is Rick Warren's view, or Pat Robertson's, or Billy Graham's, any more noteworthy than yours? Why cede to these people the power of persuasion? What do they know that you don't? In what way are they closer to God than you are? And, for that matter, other than better clothes and more soap, what do they have that the guy on the street corner doesn't?

Of all the mysteries of religion, near the top for me is the willingess -- or whatever it is -- of those who flock to a given minister, to accept his interpretations and imprecations as gospel (as it were) when not very far down the street is another, with quite different views on those same fungible and willowy words. Why the one's, and not the other's? Why, in fact, the need to rely on another's at all over one's own?

And why, why, why, choose self-important power-mongerers like Warren, and Robertson, and Hagee? What's wrong with the humble little church down the road, with the pastor who drives a beater car and has a flock of a hundred or two? Why the need to be part of some sort of movement of millions? What's up with that?

.

Mindless

It's not that John McCain and Sarah Palin invented campaigning based on "us versus them." They aren't the first in the Republican party to try to win by denigrating education and expertise, calling those who have them "elitists." It's just that they -- and the apparatus behind them -- have taken it to much higher levels than ever, and they've done it at the very time when we are threatening our own suicide. A time, in other words, when cooperation and calling upon the best advice from the best experts are needed more than ever before.

What the country needs, as in country first, is an electorate willing to think deeply about tough issues; and it needs leaders willing to and capable of calling on our best: our best thinkers, our best politicians, our best scientists, our best selves. Because it ain't gonna be easy, these next few years. It'll be harder, in fact, than either side has been willing to admit, and the reason no one is talking is that no one wants to listen.

With great gusto, from the top of the ticket all the way down, Republicans deride the idea of education, laugh at it in others, tout their own lack of it. Wear it like a damn pendant. From Neiman Marcus. Greedily they bait fear and division, smear their opponents, whatever it takes to win. At all costs. They count on sloppy thinking, because they know they've cultivated it (or, in the case of Sarah Palin, maybe it's because it's all she's ever known.)

It's the direction in which we've been heading for a long time, accelerating exponentially these last eight years: mindlessness. Cheered on by McPalin, facilitated by the religious right, we (they) are actively turning away from education, from science, from thought and discourse, from reality. Because those things are too damn hard. And, of course, because they threaten our (their) deepest need to believe that everything's fine. We make our own facts; that's how Bush did it, that's how Jerry and Pat do it. If the politicians on that side know better, they don't care; because it keeps getting them elected.

The paranoid in me sees it as a grand and cynical plan: recognizing the credulity of many of those on the hard religious right, the Republican party came upon the path to power by using them against themselves, playing to their weaknesses. In addition, knowing that liberal education is necessary to a functioning free society -- and that it's inimical to their ends -- they undertook the two-pronged approach of dumbing down public education and touting private (ie, fact-free, religious-based) education. It's working.

And, of course, there's the demonization of a free and inquisitive press. Inquiry, ipso facto, denotes bias. Divergence from the party line is the same as hatred of country.

It's perfect: to aggrandize power in an open society, you need both to close minds and prevent the spread of knowledge. In a big, brawny and previously energetically innovative country like ours, you'd think that'd be hard, or that it'd take time. Instead, to the amazement of those looking on from the outside, it's been easy as a snakebite.

About our leaders' recent rejection of science, Nobel Laureates are worried, and are urging a change in direction. Of course, these are the epitome of the elitists at whom the right like to sneer: professors, experts, researchers. Scientists, by golly. Thinkers. It not only makes no difference to those whose minds need changing: the very fact that Obama is endorsed by these eggheads is proof that he's the wrong guy. It's the ultimate damnation: don't need no smart people 'round here. We got our ideas all fixed in our head, end of discussion. La la la, we can't hear you.

That we are becoming -- already are -- a nation of idiots is clear. The rest of the world is leaving us in their dust, while on the right the response is either not to care, to rail against immigrants, or simply to deny the truth of it. What's not clear to me is how it came to this. The cause is clear: put simply, it's the rise of religiosity, bringing with it a rejection of reality. But why is it happening here? In other developed countries the trend is the opposite way: separation of religion from public policy or rejection of it entirely. Yet here we are, the once and past leaders of the world in scholarship, innovation, production, invention, electing people based on their religious views -- the more dogmatic the better -- willfully turning away from intellectual rigor. The "what" is obvious. It's the "why" that I don't get.

Tough times require tough thinking. Everywhere but in the US, it seems people understand that. Here, we've turned to magic. Or, rather, we've been led to it; and, for some reason, we've followed with only the occasional look back. Sarah Palin, many say with delight, is the new face of the Republican party. Indeed, I believe that's the case: a hyper-religious fanatical member of a sect-like subset of Christianity who confuses certainty with knowledge. A person for whom discrimination is a sacrament, and whose style of politics is distortion, fear-mongering, and division. One who denies the role of mankind in global warming, who believes God is controlling our politics, our wars, who ignores facts that get in her way. Who wants to ban books, believes "The Flintstones" was a documentary. USA! USA! USA!

This is what we are becoming, relentlessly. And it's why I see this election as such a bellwether of our future. It's why I hope -- deeply, with everything I have left -- for a resounding rejection of the tactics of McCain and the philosophy (if that's what it is) of Palin. For if we continue to laugh off the educated and thoughtful as silly elitists, and if we fall further into substituting her brand of magical and self-reinforcing faith for addressing worldly reality, our downward trajectory will only pick up speed.

I'm not a religious person, but I have valued friends who are. As one form of moral guidepost, as a way to ground oneself in this unsteady world, as a source of reliable strength to help on the journey, I respect it in my friends, because for them that's what it is. But as an alternate reality, as a substitute for grappling with the problems we all face on this planet, I reject it. The idea of my friends praying for the courage and strength they need, looking clear-eyed into the world, is, if anything, something I envy: I'm sure such faith is comforting. But the scenes of thousands of people in a megachurch, fed doomsday theology, speaking in tongues, being rid of witches -- that frightens me. Because those are people -- uncountable in numbers -- who've thrown in the towel and joined up; they've looked around and said, I can't handle it, I'm checking out. And to do it, I need the reinforcement of the likemindless, by the thousands, by the tens of thousands, singing in unison with me. More than that, I need to decry and deny the reality of those who disagree, to cast them out, resoundingly to reject their very openness to uncertainty; because the least amount of disagreement threatens me. When facts run counter to my needed beliefs, I will ignore them. I will reject all cognitive dissonance, before it hurts. The Earth is a few thousand years old. Open-mindedness is next to godlessness. You can't tell me otherwise.

Whatever happened to the pioneer spirit, that can-do attitude?

I wouldn't care, except that it affects us all. The credulity demanded by these forms of faith (nor is charismatic Christianity the only threat) oozes outward. Those people, needy in their faith, are the same in their politics. They don't want to hear -- they simply can't deal with -- complexity. Nuance, gray zones? Not even. They must rail at those who don't agree with their simplistic view, and their chosen leaders are happy to feed the need. It is, heretofore and of late, a winning strategy.

Indeed, we appear to be in the end times after all. We are living during the culmination of a near-perfect plan (imperfect only in that, like endotoxin, it's killing its host), foisted by the devilish commingling of religionism and right-wing politics. Filling school boards with fanatics, home-schooling when possible, vouching for religious-based education when they can, in order to close minds to education; turning the populace against the idea of an inquisitive, free, and skeptical press; devaluing expertise and intellectual accomplishment as godless at worst, laughable at best; harnessing believers into the political fold, using their faith against their real-world interests; electing the narrowest of minds. It's a self-reinforcing power machine, and it's taking over. I guess if all that matters to our leaders is personal power, it's all good.

Maybe the religionists don't care: they're on their way to the rapture. But I wonder if at some point the Machiavellio-Rovian politicians who put it all together will have a moment of clarity. Just before we fail as a nation, as the lights go out on America as it once was, will they say "My God, what have we done?"