Some explanation before I introduce Jim Wilson’ next blog entry:

 Jim gave me the following blog entry a few months back and I’ve been sitting on it. As you know, Jim writes profusely in this blog on a wide variety of topics. I’m dependent on Jim since he regularly provides three articles a week for this daily blog. Currently, I’m trying to get ahead and program in future blogs because next week I’ll be in Las Vegas attending TAM 2012 (The Amazing Meeting) and hanging out with Skeptics from around the world so I’m now going back to the submissions that I’ve been sitting on.

 Jim and I are different people. He’s not an alter ego. He’s a real person with his own ideas. He’s quite a bit younger than I am which gives him an edge on seeing things from a different perspective. I don’t always agree with his assessment but we are both freethinkers and understand that often reasonable people disagree due to differences in priorities and personal experience.

Jim’s original submission suggested that freethinking voters should not vote in the upcoming general election since we are a “Red” state and our vote would not make a difference. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t in clear conscience run that article. You should never tell someone not to vote because when you vote there are more items on the ballot than the presidential candidates. There are local races that actually affect us more than the national offices. Saying get knowledgeable about the candidates and the issues is better than saying “if you don’t know, don’t vote.” I was also uncomfortable about the Red State discussion since we don’t have all representatives from a single party and there is an outside chance that the independents could rise up and make Arizona a swing state.

 After some discussion, he took another stab at it. Here’s Jim Wilson’s rewrite:

Should, you vote against Obama & Romney?

I say yes, but that is just my opinion. I believe you should vote in such a way that it reflects the best interest of the country, your state, county, and city. Vote for whoever you think would do the best job and is most deserving of your support and if do not think any of the candidates deserve your support feel free to write someone in. Also, if do not feel that you have sufficient knowledge of the candidates or issue by all means take some time and do a little research there is a great deal of information available on the Internet and about all the major candidates and plenty of the minor ones.

While most if this piece is dedicated to the upcoming presidential election, I want to remind everyone that this should not be a voter’s first or only focus. Your vote has more influence when it comes to Congress, state, and local level offices. There is wide variety of choices regarding these positions.

I believe that our state is pretty strongly Republican but that is not true of other positions. Gabrielle Giffords and Raul Grijalva are recent examples of Democratic Arizona Representatives and Kyrsten Sinema is running in the Phoenix area and is a fellow Atheist with excellent secular credentials. The theocratic wing of the religious right currently has huge sway in our state government that I strongly urge everyone to research their Arizona House and Senate members and vote accordingly. It is time to show the Center for Arizona Policy that its outmoded religious authoritarianism and complete control the state’s Republican office holders will no longer be accepted. Become active in Arizona politics and do not limit your involvement to voting on election day. There are so many issues that need to be tackled and the status quo thrives on an indifferent citizenry.

I have a different opinion about the presidential election. I suggest all Arizonans keep in mind that this state is not expected to be a swing-state in the presidential election. It is reasonable to expect that the Republican candidate has this state in the bag. I see no reason to care about making the margin Obama looses by any bigger or smaller. I also hold no illusions of electing a third party candidate this year but that is not what is important to me. For me, the monopolization of our politics by what amounts to a two-party-one-party system is a major problem as is the lack of real choice this leaves us with. I sympathize with the notion that a functioning Democracy should actually give the people real choices rather than just the illusion of choice between to establishment insiders. In many ways, I see Republicans and Democrats as part of the problem and as I’m always happy when I get a chance to express this and I am always looking for opportunities to make their domination of the political system less secure.

I would say to anyone not living in a swing state to go ahead and vote for whoever you think the lesser of the two evils is but if you live in a solid red or blue state like this one you should go vote your conscience to the fullest and let the establishment know that we are looking for alternatives. A cumulative effect of more people doing this will be getting more coverage and more publicity to anti-establishment politicians and more importantly it will make their often important ideas better known and bring these ideas to the table. The attitude of not wanting to waste your vote on a candidate who is not going to win is absurd especially when ones lives in a state where the election is already decided and their vote as no-influence on it what so ever.

We have a wide range of choices this election cycle and many of them offer great appeal and many of them deserve far more attention than they are currently getting. There are many parties and many candidates with interesting and sometimes refreshing positions.

The Libertarian Party candidate is the former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson who is a favorite of many libertarians. Libertarian Party candidates tend to be more consistently free-market than the Republicans especially in social issues but also as importantly in areas of foreign policy such as opposition to the expansion of the country’s overseas empire the meddling in the policies of other countries. Libertarians want to get the government out of the bedroom and the boardroom. Libertarian candidates strike me as far more likely to consistent fiscal conservatives unlike their mainline Republican counterparts who have greatly (and often intentionally) contributed to our countries debt crisis. Libertarian Party candidates are consistently small government unlike their mainline Republican counterparts who have greatly (and often intentionally) acted to expand the role of the U.S. government domestically and internationally when in power.

Vote your conscience or not at all and whatever you do don’t be blinded by the Republicrat political machine. Vote Libertarian, Green, Constitution, Socialist, or whatever… you can even write in Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinich, or Peyton Manning for all I care. Just vote for who you think would do best.

Last year Philip “Space Museum” Olson delivered a talk on the Bombardier beetle on the Desert AIR Podcast. Here is a transcript of that presentation:

One of my absolute favorite entomologists is the late Thomas Eisner. I want to talk for a few minutes about some of the research he did and how it has been misunderstood and misrepresented by creationists. I’m talking about the Bombardier beetle and its incredible defense mechanism – the ability to spray out a boiling mixture of oxygen and chemicals known as quinones. Many species of bombardier beetle emit the substance as a thin jet which they can aim with uncanny accuracy. The beetle is able to do this through an ingenious evolutionary adaptation. It stores two precursor chemicals – hydrogen peroxide and another type of chemical called hydroquinones – in separate reservoirs in the abdomen. When the beetle feels threatened, it contracts special muscles, forcing the two chemicals into a special mixing chamber. This is when things get really cool. Inside the mixing chamber are special enzymes – catalyses and peroxidase. Oxygen is freed from the hydrogen peroxide, and the hydroquinones are then oxidized into p-quinones. There is a lot of thermal energy released during this reaction, and as the substances heat up, the internal pressure builds and the boiling mixture is expelled out the rear end of the beetle at the would-be predator or over-eager bug collector. It gets even better. Not only is the mixture boiling hot, the substances that are expelled are very irritating to almost all arthropods and most vertebrates – including people, even when they are not hot. More incredible still – this cycle of muscle contraction, chemical reaction and expulsion occurs at a rate of up to about 500 times per second.

Now, many creationists look to the bombardier beetle as proof of intelligent design. Their “evidence” seems to be based primarily on the work of Duane Gish, a biochemist who is a former vice-president of the Institute for Creation Research. Like all good creation scientists, he gets all the facts wrong. He starts off by claiming that hydrogen peroxide and hydroquinones are spontaneously explosive when combined – they are not. He claims this was a mistake he made due to a poor translation of the original research by Dr. Hermann Schildknecht, mistaking “explosive” for “unstable”. However, if Gish were truly a scientist, and not merely a creationist masquerading as one, he would have performed the simple experiment himself before repeating it so vociferously, something which should have been exceptionally easy (if not unnecessary!) for him to do as a biochemist. He also continues making a thoroughly disproved claim that an explosive “inhibitor” is required to prevent the beetle from blowing itself up. He makes the argument that the entire reaction mechanism is “irreducibly complex” and that anything less than the present form would result only in a beetle capable of blowing itself up. It’s easy to show the errors in Gish’s reasoning; we don’t even have to look into the fossil record or hypothesize intermediate stages to show that the argument of irreducible complexity simply falls flat with the bombardier beetle. He apparently overlooks the fact that the quinones, by themselves, are present in the cuticles of many different arthropods. Also overlooked is the fact that hydrogen peroxide is a by-product of cellular metabolism. A small amount of excess quinone that is left on the external cuticle would make an insect unpalatable to predators (in fact, many beetles and millipedes make use of simple quinones as defensive chemicals to avoid being eaten). There are bombardier beetles that have been found, which, instead of producing a fine jet of hot quinones, emit more of a diffuse gas, and others which produce something more akin to bubbling foam. These could be examples of beetles with lower amounts of the catalyses or peroxidase, or perhaps weaker muscles, smaller storage or mixing chambers. However you want to slice it – they are intermediate forms, all of them capable of defending themselves well enough to continue reproducing, none of them simply blowing themselves up, and so the argument of irreducibly complexity is itself reduced to nothing.

Perhaps most important in all of this is the fact that the man responsible for much of the research on bombardiers, Thomas Eisner, was himself a non-believer. He died earlier this year, of complications due to Parkinson’s disease and was an outstanding scientist, incredibly gifted science writer, pioneer of the field of chemical ecology, and one of my all time favorite authors. If you want to know more about the bombardier beetle or Thomas Eisner, I wholeheartedly recommend you find his book “For Love of Insects”.

* Charles Darwin, an avid beetle collector, recorded an experience in which he once popped a beetle into his mouth when he spotted a third beetle and already had both hands full, only to get a mouthful of a hot, irritating chemicals from the beetle

Here’s the latest from Jim Wilson:

Recently, National Review writer Jonah Goldberg appeared on the Daily Caller and argued for increasing the voting age. Saying:

“Personally, I think the voting age should be much higher not lower. I think it was a mistake to lower it to 18 to be brutally honest. It is a simple fact of science that nothing correlates more with ignorance and stupidity than youth. We’re all born idiots and we only get over that condition as we get less young. And yet there’s this thing in this culture where ‘Oh young people are for it so it must be special.’ No, the reason young people are for it because they don’t know better. That’s why we call them young people… The fact that young people think socialism is better than capitalism. That’s proof of what social scientists call their stupidity and their ignorance and that’s something that conservatives have to beat out of them, either literally or figuratively as far as I’m concerned.”

This echoes a similar sentiment by conservative writer Ann Coulter. Who said:

“If we took away women’s right to vote, we’d never have to worry about another Democrat president. It’s kind of a pipe dream; it’s a personal fantasy of mine but I don’t think it’s going to happen and it is a good way of making the point that women are voting so stupidly, at least single women. It also makes the point; it is kind of embarrassing; the Democratic Party ought to be hanging its head in shame that it has so much difficulty getting men to vote for it. I mean, you do see it’s the party of women and ‘we’ll pay for health care, and tuition, and day care, and here what else can we give you soccer moms?’”

Heritage Foundation Moral Majority founder and conservative activist Paul Weyrich argued:

“Now many of our Christians have what I call the goo-goo syndrome — good government. They want everybody to vote. I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people; they never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

It is now known that the 2000 election of George W. Bush was influenced by voters purges carried out by his brother Florida governor Jeb Bush and his secretary of state Katherine Harris. The same thing is happening again this year as Florida governor Rick Scott is pushing for further voter purges. Both rounds of purging tended to focus on black Latino and independent voters who tended to go Democratic. Both disenfranchised legitimate voters for completely illegitimate reasons.

This seems to be a theme in conservative and libertarian politics especially the more corporatist, elitist, status-quo oriented wings of both camps. The political right simply wants to cut the voting rights on many parts of the population. I’m sure many would love to go back to the days when only property-owning white males could vote. There is a complete disregard for consent of the governed. Many of my libertarian friends would be happy to see a handful of like minded people take over the state by any means and destroy its workings. While many of my conservative friends were happy to cheer or make apologies for the increased growth in the power of the executive branch of government while presidents named Bush and Reagan were in charge. The double standard now seems to have set in since Obama has come to office. The liberals I know appreciate the idea of the governed having a say in the type of regime they live under. This reflects the fact that they see effective and efficient government as a possibility. Conservatives, on the other hand, driven by the sabotage instinct, seem to want to do everything they can to make the state as expensive and inefficient as their ideology says it is when they are in power.

But maybe the conservatives are right. At some level majority rule does come down two wolfs and a sheep voting on what to have for lunch if there are not some protections in place for the minorities involved. This has made me very sympathetic to the libertarian side over the years. With the Republican establishment, it is different though. They are happy to engage in heavily interventionist policies that often benefit their cadre of elite supporters over the rest of us. I speak, of course, about massive military expenditures, ugly foreign interventions, and adventurism. Republicans favor the erosion of civil liberties, promotion of Christian theocracy, and favor corporations.

In response to Goldberg (as well as the others), 18 year-olds should get the right to vote because they can fight and die for this country. They should have some say in its government. If they dislike capitalism, it is probably because the capitalism they grew up with is the type of crony capitalism where government, big business, and the military collude together to enrich themselves at the expense of the tax payer. It is unfortunate that the older parts of the voting population support or are indifferent to these things. Older voters are more supportive of religious theocracy, drug prohibitions, pointless expensive wars, and imperialism (which Goldberg is vocally in favor of). The youth vote may be more supportive of the welfare state but they are realistic on the warfare state. Also Goldberg strikes me as first and foremost a loyalist of the Republican establishment and his chief grievance has been that young voters do not vote Republican. I can’t blame them. Republican administrations have been highly fiscally irresponsible and have been dishonest about their expansion of government. I am not found of the established power players of either party but as far as I am concerned the youth vote is correct on many issues. You don’t get to deny people’s voting rights just because they do not go with your candidates of choice. We all pay taxes and have to live under this government’s rules. We should have some say in the nature of the regime we live under.

The next post from Jim Wilson:

Let’s assume that Jesus did exist, was he a capitalist?

Recently, there has been a great push among conservatives to paint Jesus as an advocate of their brand free market capitalism. For example, Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan states that his proposed budget was inspired by his Catholic beliefs. There are those on the other side who claim that Jesus as an advocate of welfare state measures. I reject the notion that Jesus, if he existed, was either a free-market capitalist or a prototypical social Democrat, and more importantly I reject the notion that we should base our economic policy on second hand accounts of a man who purportedly died roughly 1,982 years ago. The notion of Jesus as a hard-line capitalist is so prevalent, so ridiculous, and often so self-serving, that it deserves direct refutation. So here goes…

The Jesus story had him dying long before: John Locke, the American Revolution, the industrial revolution, the rise of modern corporations, the rise of wide-spread wage labor, the modern labor movement, the new deal, representative democracy, the abolition of slavery, the modern welfare state, globalization, and most of the central features of a modern economy. It’s no wonder he was unsurprisingly silent on these issues just as the Bible is silent on all things that were not known to first and second century middle easterners. It unsurprisingly, has nothing to say about nuclear energy, nuclear war, the germ theory of disease, electricity, internal combustion engines, global warming, Van Halen, or kangaroos. Christians try to stretch Jesus’ teachings to apply them to developments that took place long after his time, or to suit their political interests.

If we are to assume, that what is in the Bible is a consistent, complete and accurate depiction of what Jesus actually taught, we are forced to conclude that Jesus’ teachings were largely of a spiritual nature and that he was fairly politically and economically apathetic. He states, in the Synoptic Gospels, “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s,” when asked about paying taxes to the Roman Government, and in John chapter 18 he tells Pontius Pilate: “My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight, that I should not be delivered to the Jews: but now is my kingdom not from hence.” Both passages seem to dispel the notion that he was interested in challenging the Roman system of government or advocating an alternative political system.

Additionally, if we assume that the New Testament writings attributed to Paul accurately represent the teachings of Jesus, we find further advocacy of acceptance of one’s current political circumstances (from Romans 13:1-7):

Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves. For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and he will commend you. For he is God’s servant to do you good. but if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword for nothing. He is God’s servant, an agent of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer. Therefore, it is necessary to submit to the authorities, not only because of possible punishment but also because of conscience. This is also why you pay taxes, for the authorities are God’s servants, who give their full time to governing. Give everyone what you owe him: If you owe taxes, pay taxes; if revenue, then revenue; if respect, then respect; if honor, then honor.

The authority in question here was the Roman Empire, which was an aggressive, expansionist dictatorship. Additionally Paul’s acceptance of absolutist authority goes not only for citizens but for the slaves as well. In multiple places Paul says in Colossians 3:22:

Servants, obey in all things your masters according to the flesh; not with eye service, as men pleasers; but in singleness of heart, fearing God.

Nowhere, is there a suggestion that Christians take over or try to change the governing forces they lived under. Despite what the Catholic church did or what the Christian right says there is little to no justification in the bible for taking over the government, or outlawing: same-sex marriage, abortion, or prostitution (not to mention slavery).

Additionally, much of what Jesus and Paul say in the New Testament is incompatible with capitalist enterprise or aspirations. For example in the Sermon of the Mount, Jesus blesses the poor and gives woe to the rich. He states in Luke 6:25, “Woe unto you that are full! For ye shall hunger. Woe unto you that laugh now! for ye shall mourn and weep.” Apparently placing a high value on poverty and rejecting the desire for material wealth. He goes further stating in Matthew 6:25 and Matthew 6:34:

25 Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment. 34 Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself.” In other words, don’t save for the future, don’t invest in capitalist enterprise and do not try to enrich yourself, as the lord will take care of you.

Not only is this decidedly at odds with the capitalist spirit, it is also horrible advice.

Jesus also hammers this notion home further when, in Matthew 19:21, he instructs a wealthy man: “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” He goes on to explain to his disciples in Matthew 19:23-24:

Truly I tell you, it is hard for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of heaven. 24 Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.

Here Jesus expresses the very disdain for success that today’s conservatives accuse liberals of. His instructions here do, however seem to echo, the instructions he purportedly lived by, as well as those he gave to his disciples. Specifically, to give up the quest for material wealth and focus entirely on spreading the Christian message.

This short sighted lack of concern for the near future may have been inspired by the belief among early Christians that the world as they knew it was ending soon. In Marks Gospel Jesus states in Mark 9:1:

There be some of them that stand here, which shall not taste of death, till they have seen the kingdom of God come with power.

This sentiment is also echoed by Paul, who says in 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17:

For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.

Similar statement in the New Testament may be a sign that early Christians expected a return of Jesus, during their lifetimes.

On a final note, in Acts of the Apostles, the Apostle Paul takes up the lifestyle of an itinerant Christian teacher and travels around the Mediterranean founding churches. Acts 4:32-35 states:

And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul: neither said any of them that aught of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common… Neither was there any among them that lacked: for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the prices of the things that were sold, and laid them down at the apostles’ feet: and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need.

In other words, the author of acts is proposing the early church lived under a system of voluntary socialism much in keeping with Marx’s, “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” The extent to which, this is an accurate depiction of early Christianity is hardly debatable, but is certainly not an endorsement of a business friendly world-view.

So there you have it, according to the Bible, Jesus advocated a acquiescence to earthly governments (regardless of their non-free-market nature) and his followers practiced a form of voluntary socialism (possibly under the mistaken belief their world would soon end). None of this answers the question as to what kind of economic or political system is best for us. For that we need to use our own brains, examine the evidence, and not base our decisions on the teachings of people who died centuries before the advent of the modern economy.

A few days ago I published Jim Wilson’s thoughts on a topic I also care deeply about: education.

Like Jim, I attended government (“public”) schools and I wouldn’t write off Jim’s ideas solely on the basis of where he went to school. To write off ideas because of where the person expressing them did or did not go to school is a ridiculously shallow caricature of independent thought – be the ideas of the left, right, or libertarian variety. Ideas should be judged on their merits, not their source.

Jim cites the endless disagreements over government schools: They’re too rigid/they’re too soft; They’re anti-sex/they’re too sexualized; They’re bigoted/they promote acceptance of deviancy; There’s too much testing/not enough testing; They don’t teach enough of the basics/they don’t teach enough beyond the basics. It’s true that the American people can’t seem to make up their collective mind about what they want in education. But this is merely a symptom of education’s character and tradition in modern America, not a set of problems owing to some unique feature of education itself. Most debates about education fail to address the important systemic question: the consequences of paying for and providing goods and services primarily as a community through government taxation, rather than as private individuals making private, piecemeal choices.

To understand what I’m saying, imagine if we decided as a society that food is really important, and everybody needs good food to eat. After all, it’s difficult to be a good citizen and participate in democracy if you’re starving, and you’re a drain on health care resources if you eat too much of the wrong kinds of food. So what we do in the name of democracy and fairness and efficiency is: tax all citizens, and fund the local county/city government building a public cafeteria system with a cafeteria in every neighborhood serving up good, wholesome food that everyone in the neighborhood is entitled to eat for free. In order to preserve local control, we’d have food districts with cafeteria boards elected by the people in the district to decide what food is best for their own community. We could rationalize such a move with all kinds of perceived benefits: It would relieve people of the need to build and stock elaborate kitchens at home, it would specialize (and probably unionize) the profession of cooking, create jobs, address the problem of people who don’t know how to prepare healthy meals, or can’t find the right ingredients, or can’t clean their kitchens properly, or can’t store their food safely, or just can’t afford to pay the prices at the grocery store. It would help reduce the disparities in the quality of food eaten by the rich and the poor, and government cafeterias could be used as a tool to increase overall public health and reduce problems like diabetes and obesity. Government run “public” cafeterias would reduce the duplication of having many small restaurants and could be much more efficient because of economies of scale in production and distribution. Government run cafeterias would bring people in each neighborhood together, enhancing the social fabric of the community as ample anthropological evidence demonstrates that shared meals tend to bring people together. Public cafeterias would also address the problem of some neighborhoods having tons and tons of restaurants while other neighborhoods suffer with few or no restaurants close by.

Some left wingers are undoubtedly salivating at this idea - which is part of my point. If you think that government solutions work better than private ones, then government solutions sound like pretty good ideas whether the product is food, or education, or health care, or transportation, or retirement. The arguments for such systems are, at base, pretty similar.

I’m not advocating the system of government cafeterias I’ve just described; it’s just a thought experiment for the kinds of problems we’d have if we adopted such a system: Some people would want higher taxes to pay for better quality food. Other people would want lower taxes and be willing to live with lower quality food as a result. The high tax/low tax people would fight constantly about the cafeterias, how much and what kind of people eat in them, etc. A few, the really rich 1%ers, could afford to pay their food taxes and still buy their own very high quality private food in elite restaurants – which would then be viewed as just another of the unfair privileges of the 1% and a reason behind their selfish lobby to reduce food taxes. Some people would want higher food taxes on the rich to pay for higher quality food for the poor – they’d want to use the public cafeteria system as a means of wealth redistribution. Some people would say the food in public cafeterias has way too much sugar and salt and fat for good health and so these ingredients should be reduced. Others would say the food tastes bland and icky – because it lacks enough sugar and salt and fat. Fad diets would go from a curiosity to a matter of public policy. Some people would object that the food of their ethnic heritage – Mexican, Chinese, Italian – isn’t fairly represented on the menu or authentically prepared, and accuse people who advocate for steak and potatoes in the cafeterias of being racists. Some would advocate that everyone must eat their vegetables before they’re allowed to have dessert; others would claim that people have an inalienable right to eat their meals in any order they choose. Still others would say desserts are unnecessary and unhealthy and should be eliminated altogether.

And here’s something for this blog to consider: The religious right would of course want a community prayer to be recited before every meal, or at least a moment for people to pray, claiming that eating without praying out loud infringes on their religious beliefs. Meanwhile those of us who aren’t religious would be accused of infringing on religious freedom when we insist, rightly, that the first amendment prohibits any kind of official prayer in a government cafeteria. Voila – something that was not a contentious social issue (whether people pray before meals) now becomes another tool for divisive politicians to exploit.

We’d have hotly contested elections for the local cafeteria board to decide some of these issues, and others would be matters that would be fought all the way to the US Supreme Court. People would lament that the cafeterias in poor neighborhoods always end up serving lower quality food than the cafeterias in rich neighborhoods, and demand that the state equalize funding across food districts. Others would say, let’s bus some of the poor people to cafeterias in rich areas to better integrate the population through shared meals. And then whenever there’s a local budget crisis, Washington would be called on to intervene to keep hard working chefs from losing their jobs and Americans from starving. And on and on – food would become a political football just like education is today.

If my little thought experiment came to be, after a hundred years or so anyone who remembered today’s system dominated by private food would be dead. Anyone who said the government should get out of the food business would be accused of being “radical” and “unrealistic” and “utopian”. They might be called selfish, for not caring about all the poor people who would surely starve to death without government cafeterias every few blocks. In such a scenario some people might insist on ”home cooking” – maybe because they want to pray before every meal and the supreme court rightly ruled it unconstitutional in government cafeterias. But maybe, just because they want food that isn’t served in the local public cafeteria. Whatever the reason, these home cookers would be looked upon as weird and anti-social because they don’t share meals with their neighbors – by then well established as an absolutely essential part of proper socialization. People would also question whether most of these home cookers are really competent to cook food for themselves and their families – they didn’t get degrees in cooking; most haven’t had any formal training in cooking at all! Microwaves, ovens, refrigerators, and blenders would all be very expensive devices, and only available in industrial sizes leading people to regard the very idea of cooking for one or two people at a time as hopelessly inefficient.

To be fair, there are indeed problems with today’s mostly private food system – obesity and over consumption mostly, real hunger and malnutrition in a small minority. These are just not the kind of problems most people raised with a government dominated food system would think of. A primarily private system is better than a government system, but I’m not pretending it’s utopia.

Point being: the “problems of public schools” mostly aren’t problems about education, they’re problems of centralized funding and communal decision making. It matters little whether centralization occurs on a local, state, or national level, and it matters little what good or service we’re talking about paying for via government. People have different preferences; it’s part of being human. No government system can ever fully accommodate individual preferences and so you end up with inevitable political fights to control various aspects of the system. There’s hardly a problem of education dominated by government’s “public” schools as ours is today, that wouldn’t have an analogous problem in a food system dominated by government’s “public” cafeterias, or a housing system dominated by government’s “public” housing, or a transportation system dominated by government’s “public” transportation, or health care dominated by government’s “single payer” health care. We don’t need to have this argument over and over about every good and service people need or want. It’s the same argument, and the same answer, for all of them.

When you look at education through this lens, some issues are perhaps a little clearer. In our hypothetical America of widespread government cafeterias, a few “private cafeterias” would constitute little improvement if they were basically like public cafeterias except that they tended to be sponsored by a church, have mandatory prayers before every meal, or adhere to Kosher preparation standards. Just as, today, non-elite church sponsored “private schools” aren’t really an improvement over public schools.  We don’t need local church schools to replace local government schools. A multi-source, individualized approach to education will work better than either.

And vouchers - vouchers are an absolutely terrible idea. Don’t the right wingers know that vouchers are the education equivalent of food stamps? With education vouchers, the government is doling out money for people to go buy their “private” education with, just like food stamps are government money for people to buy food with. Yet in Arizona, the hypocrits on the right use dirty legislative trickery to enact education vouchers while decrying Obama as the food stamp president. The sad truth is, food stamps work *better* than education vouchers would. Sticking with our cafeteria example, how well would food stamps work in a system dominated by public cafeterias, private church-run cafeterias, and a few high-end restaurants that serve only the very wealthy - with no private grocery stores, few cookbooks and kitchen tools designed for home use, and no moderately priced restaurants run for profit rather than for the promotion of religious dogma? They wouldn’t work well at all. They’d just be a means of funneling public money into private churches without substantially improving food quality.

My wife and I “home school” our children. That really means they learn from us, or extended family members, or friends, or others in our home school group, or private classes in specific subjects, or from activities with private organizations like Freethought Arizona. As a matter of fact, we are also “home cookers”, meaning that we feed our children meals either at home or in other private homes or private restaurants and not government food outlets. The only difference between these two parental decisions, about education and food, are some pretty arbitrary social traditions – neither is more radical than the other when considered objectively. In both cases we have the self-confidence to think and act on the conviction that we can do better as individuals than as part of a collection of communally-minded bureaucrats.

Despite the lack of government involvement in either my kids’ schooling or their eating, neither practice results in them, or us, being developmentally disadvantaged or socially isolated. Humans evolved as social animals and a government program is not required to learn how to make friends. Yes, cooking is somewhat easier than schooling. However, that’s at least partially because there are vast and well established resources available to make providing private food easier; there’s an entrenched tradition of private food in America, whereas the traditions of private education are far more limited in scope. But the difficulty involved in home education is changing: the internet makes home schooling orders of magnitude easier than it used to be, which is one reason why it is the fastest growing model of education.

I say get the government out of mainstream education, and not because I want only the elite to get a good education any more than I want only the elite to get a good meal. I advocate for the separation of school and state because it would make education better than it is today for the majority of American children. I’d like to see most Americans get educated the same general way most Americans get fed: a piecemeal and variable combination of home cooking, meals with friends, and private for-profit restaurants of nearly infinite variety. While allowing that there will be exceptions (like church pot-lucks and Chick-fil-a are in the case of food), I’d like to see education dominated by families and friends and secular enterprises, not by either the state -or- churches. This is not a utopian system, but it’s better than any system dominated by government payment and provision of service can be. Note I’m speaking here about the dominant model. Whether it is right to have government intervene at the fringes of a mostly private system, such as providing for the very poor and instituting basic quality regulations like we have with food and housing today, is another topic.

And with that, I’m handing over management of the blog to Don Lacey. It’s been fun, and I appreciate everyone’s comments and discussion over the last few months whether I agreed with you or not. It’s just time to let someone else have a crack at this for a while.

Sunday, February 19, 2012

All events are at Duval Auditorium, 1501 North Campbell Avenue.

Parking is free in the visitor parking structure.

8 am Cafe Inquiry– Open Forum. The hot topics of the day will be discussed. Moderator, Gil Shapiro

9 am – Annual FreeThought Membership Meeting. All FreeThought Arizona members are invited to attend. Come and meet the new board members.

10-Noon– Lecture:

Conservative Evangelicals in American Politics: Reflections from the Field

Speaker: Karen Seat

As political activists have been gearing up for the 2012 presidential election, Professor Karen Seat has been traveling the country interviewing social conservatives at the forefront of the movement that is often dubbed the “Christian Right.” Professor Seat will discuss conservative Christians’ engagement with American politics today and in American history.

About the Speaker – Karen Seat is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Arizona. She specializes in the history of American evangelicalism. Her current field research is supported by a grant from the University of Arizona’s Confluence Center for Creative Inquiry. She teaches courses on American religious history and gender studies in religion.

Upcoming FreeThought AZ events:

March 18 – Recovering from religion by Jerry DeWitt.

April 15 – Activities of the ACLU by Sam Daugherty.

Here’s another interesting insight from Jim Wilson:

I have had members of my own family repeat the nonsense that this country was founded upon Christian principles. Often these are referred to as “Judeo-Christian principles”. Many politicians (more often than not Republicans) speak of bringing us back to these principles. This nonsense needs to be put to rest. There is nothing in the bible that comes anywhere close to prescribing anything like our system of government.

In fact, the American revolution was largely inspired by enlightenment ideas that came about after rejecting the religious dogmatism that governed Europe for the preceding centuries. Many of the founding fathers were actually Deists. All of the tyrannies our founding fathers were fighting against were justified through appeals to Christianity. Furthermore, the founding fathers took multiple opportunities to dismiss the notion of this being a country founded on Christianity. The first Amendment of the Constitution specifically protects against a government imposition of religion and Article six explicitly states “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” Furthermore, Thomas Jefferson made it clear he wanted a “wall of separation” between church and state. To quote Christopher Hitchens “Build up that wall Mr. Jefferson.” Furthermore, the Treaty of Tripoli (signed by John Adams) shortly after the country’s founding explicitly states: “ the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”

Still, the Christian nation mythology is a stubborn one and its crown jewel is the Ten Commandments. The mythology is often embodied by politicians erecting Ten Commandments monuments. Let’s walk through the commandments and see how many parallels to the American legal system are actually there.

The first four commandments:

1. “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before Me.”
2. “You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them nor serve them. For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate Me, but showing mercy to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My Commandments. ”
3. “You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes His name in vain. ”
4. “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord your God. In it you shall do no work: you, nor your son, nor your daughter, nor your male servant, nor your female servant, nor your cattle, nor your stranger who is within your gates. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it.”

These have nothing to do with our constitution and it would be wholly unconstitutional to force Americans to obey them. They are entirely about what a petty, jealous tyrant this God is.

Commandment 5:

“Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long upon the land which the Lord your God is giving you.”

Is also not anywhere to be found in the constitution and cannot be enforced. Furthermore it is a horrible commandment. Honor should not be unconditional. One should not honor parents, for example that physically abuse them.

Commandments 6:

“You shall not murder.”

Applied strictly to the other Jews in the bible, and God often commanded the killing of non-jews. But, at last we do have a commandment that is enforced by our laws in this country. The only problem is that all civilized societies have some sort of prohibition against murder, including ones that pre-date the old testament. Frankly there is no reason to claim this commandment is the source of the prohibitions against murder in this country.

Commandment 7:

“You shall not commit adultery.”

This is not against the law in the country either, though it may be admitted as grounds for divorce.

Commandment 8:

“You shall not steal.”

My comments on 6 also apply here.

Commandment 9:

“You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.”

We have laws against this, but only in a highly limited context, and dishonesty in general is completely legal except in cases like libel, slander and fraud, where there is actual tangible damage.

Commandment 10:

“You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, nor his male servant, nor his female servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor’s.”

This a fundamentally dumb commandment, you really cannot control what you covet, and there is nothing wrong with coveting as long as this does not lead you to steal their possessions. Furthermore, coveting the wealth of those around you is part of what inspires us to work hard to get it ourselves. This is what many argue American capitalism is all about.

Also, keep in mind that in the bible the punishment for disobeying these and the rest of Old testament law was death by stoning. That is one area of Judeo-Christian tradition I am glad we abandoned. Also note that there is a whole different set of ten commandments given in Exodus 34:12-27, which includes instructions for sacrifices, and a commandment not to boil a kid in it’s mother’s milk. So, the question, “which ten commandments” needs to be asked? Anyway, very little of this and the rest of The Law have anything to do with our current system of law and as brutal as much of what is in the Torah, I think we should all be happy about this.

Several days ago, I received an email with the following:

Vote for Obama, and here’s the reason you should …

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/02/opinion/krugman-nobody-understands-debt.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=general

This debt discussion is a symptom of what I like to call an ideological proxy war. Krugman himself has done an about face on the debt issue as described here:
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/01/krugman-v-krugman.html

My point isn’t to say that Krugman was wrong in 2003 or that he’s wrong today. My point is that both sides discuss things like the national debt primarily in service to larger agendas that are uncomfortable for them to talk about directly.

In 2003, Krugman wanted the government to do less of what it was doing at the time – invading the middle east and lowering tax rates - so he criticized the debt. Obama criticized the debt too, and voted against raising the debt ceiling as a Senator. Today, Krugman wants the government to do more of what it is doing – spending on social programs and infrastructure projects - so now he defends the debt, and Obama and the Democrats are the ones creating it.

Prominent Republicans did the exact same thing only in reverse: According to the Republican establishment during the Bush years the debt was no problem, a temporary necessity caused by the war on terror, and Democrats who warned about the deficit were portrayed as chicken littles. But now that there’s a Democrat in the white house you’d think all the Republicans went to college and got a PhD in sustainable financial practices. What a crock of bull. You’ll see how quickly all this fiscal discipline goes right out the window if the Republicans get back control of both the legislative and executive branches.

This is not a Republican or Democrat issue. This is a failure to face reality issue. The national debt is just a symptom of political choices made about how much to tax and how much to spend. Those are the things people should be thinking about.

The size of our national debt reflects that as a society we are habitually addicted to having government do more than we are willing to tax ourselves to pay for. This isn’t a temporary situation caused by a war or a recession. It doesn’t reflect “special needs” or compassionate priorities or sound management of the economy. Instead, this is a chronic condition that has applied every year for decades upon decades, regardless of which party nominally controlled Washington. The only exception was a couple of years in the late ’90s when new technology caused the economy to grow so much faster than anticipated that it took the politicians a little while to figure out how to screw up the budget again.

This is exacerbated by the fact that people are deliberately led to think they won’t have to pay a dollar (either now -or- later) for every dollar of services the government provides. Taxes are usually sold to the public as falling pimarily on someone else: Tax the rich! Tax the 1%! Tax the corporations! These are appealing to most people simply because most people are not rich, not in the top 1% of income, and are not large shareholders in corporations. Whereas government services are pitched as being primarily for our own benefit or the benefit of “the needy”: Fix our health care! Fix our schools! Fix our roads! Fix our retirements! Fix the environment!

Such broad-based appeals run smack into the political reality few talk about: politicians on both sides of the aisle get the vast majority of their campaign contributions and lobbyist input from the people they purport to tax, and very little from the people that they purport to benefit. Expecting your mark on a ballot to send someone to Washington who actually represents your interests rather than his or her own interests is the same kind of wishful thinking that we criticize religious fanatics for.  He who pays the piper calls the tune, which is how it’s always been. And no, marking a ballot does not constitute paying the piper. So who gets the best return on their money from government? Those who contribute the most to the political campaigns and lobbyists for those who run the show – the “1%ers”. Everyone else is just a pawn in the giant political chess game, and is lucky to get ten cents on the dollar.

Lest you think this is just promoting another ideology, it’s not. Whether you or I think that real wealth should be redistributed from the rich to the needy in our society is irrelevant to the fact that in the current political system the government is pretty much incapable of doing so. Whether financing of spending is done by debt or by taxation, the primary beneficiaries are always at the top: the rich, powerful, and well connected. The only thing a major party shift in Washington changes about that is which elites benefit and which lose out.

Need a final example of willful ignorance surrounding this? Krugman says of the debt, “U.S. debt is, to a large extent, money we owe to ourselves.” That’s true only if by ”ourselves” he refers mostly to the same rich 1% who primarily benefit from everything else the government does. Who collects the lion’s share of the interest on the debt? Not the poor and needy. Think about it.

Sunday, January 22, 2012

All events are at Duval Auditorium, 1501 North Campbell Avenue.

Parking is free in the visitor parking structure.

8-9:15 am – Cafe Inquiry. Open Forum. The hot topics of the day will be discussed.

Moderator, Gil Shapiro

10-Noon:– Lecture: Beyond Kumbaya: Culturally Relevant Humanism

by Sikivu Hutchinson

Despite media fantasies of post-racialism and post-feminism, the U.S. remains a deeply segregated, separate and unequal nation. The election of President Barack Obama brought heady claims of equality, yet anti-secularist, xenophobic Tea Party-style white nationalism is on the rise. So while the mainstream New Atheist movement battles over science and the separation of church and state, atheists, freethinkers, and humanists of color bring an entirely different set of priorities to the table. Author Sikivu Hutchinson discusses these challenges, providing a social justice lens for Humanism that goes beyond Kumbaya.

About the Speaker – Sikivu Hutchinson is a senior intergroup specialist for the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission. She received a Ph.D. from New York University and has taught women’s studies, cultural studies, urban studies, and education at UCLA, the California Institute of the Arts, and Western Washington University. She is the author of Imagining Transit: Race, Gender, and Transportation Politics in Los Angeles and Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics, and the Values Wars. She has published articles in Free Inquiry, American Atheist Magazine and Secular Nation. She is also the editor of blackfemlens.org, founder of the Black Skeptics and a senior fellow for the Institute for Humanist Studies.

Upcoming FreeThought AZ events:

February 19 – 9am Annual FreeThought Membership Meeting

10am “Conservative Evangelicals in American Politics: Reflections from the Field” by Karen Seat. She is Associate Professor of Religious Studies Program U of A

As an election year, 2012 is going to challenge our critical thinking skills in politics as well as everyday life. Let’s rise to the challenge. Resolved:

1. Do not forget our nation’s heritage of a strong separation between church and state. If you need a reminder of our history, here’s a good resource: http://freethought.mbdojo.com/foundingfathers.html. Politicians who promise or suggest that their religious beliefs will determine their decisions in office are not only spitting on the graves of our founding fathers, they’re extremely dangerous.
2. Do not be taken in by any hoaxes, scams, pseudo-science, or mysticism. Question everything. Criticize ruthlessly. Follow your own conclusions regardless of what “everyone else” seems to think. Also: the world isn’t likely to end, literally or figuratively, in 2012.
3. Create something unique, original, and valuable. Distribute it as widely as you can. You don’t have to make money from it, but if you do that’s even better.
4. Discuss controversial subjects like politics, religion, and economics with the smartest people you can find who disagree with you. Don’t waste your time with idiots, and if you agree with someone about everything or nearly everything then one of you is redundant to the discussion. Try to get information from as many diverse sources as you can.
5. Do not be fooled by public professions of piety and insinuations that a candidate’s political opponents are infidels. President Obama is a Christian, not a Muslim nor much as I might wish, an Atheist. All of Obama’s major Republican challengers are…Christians. All of the third party candidates you are likely to hear about are…Christians. Regardless of the wisdom of doing so, in the 2012 presidential election there will be little opportunity to vote based on a candidate’s major religious beliefs because they’re all Christians. This is true for most of the other races as well. Some semblance of Christian belief is practially and unfortunately a requirement to win election to high office in this country.
6. Learn and practice something that is both useful and new. Age is no excuse to stop growing your knowledge base.
7. Establish a set of core values and principles that you can live your own life by and also judge candidates by. As a start I suggest:
   * Critical thinking informed by logic and evidence rather than mystical and wishful thinking.
   * Integrity, responsibility, and accountability rather than endlessly kicking the can down the road.
   * Respect for all human rights, including: freedom of and from religion, privacy, due process, equal treatment,  speech, property, and self-defense.
8. Do not cast your vote based on a candidate’s promises or statements - such statements are usually composed of far more lies than truth. Instead, vote based on the candidate’s actual track record, the effect of their party affiliation on wider political outcomes, and who their campaign funding comes from — since that’s who they are most likely to listen to once in office. This requires a little more research than listening to whatever sound bites happen to be playing on Fox News or CNN. Either do the research, or stop calling yourself an informed voter.
9. It is possible that no candidate in a particular election race will measure up to earning your vote. If none do, then there is no shame in withholding your vote in that race. Voting is neither a legal nor a moral imperative and non-voters have just as much right to criticize government policy as voters do.
10. Treat your body and your mind with the respect they deserve. Accept neither the hedonism of short-term thinkers nor the asceticism of mystics. Lean on your own understanding, and run…don’t walk…from anyone who counsels you to have faith.

Happy New Year!