Rational Philosophy

Exploring faith’s role in everyday life.

On Saturday, NPR’s “Speaking of Faith” repeated an interview with poet and philosopher John O’Donohue, who passed away earlier this year. I was struck by O’Donohue’s very pragmatic views on faith and belief. He shared his view of god as beauty, which struck me as a very profound perspective on the concept of god. As an atheist, I am interested in the concept of god as one way that we make sense of existence. The idea of beauty conveys a sense of intrinsic wonder and appreciation that fits with the concept of god. And, as O’Donohue pointed out, beauty needn’t be confined to that which is not difficult or painful to confront.

If we start from this idea of god as beauty we can draw a conclusion about the concept of faith: Faith corresponds to a commitment to beauty. Having determined our points of reference for god or beauty, commiting to that conception becomes an act of faith.

With temperatures dipping sharply recently in many parts of the world, resulting in such phenomena as snow in Baghdad and ice reforming with a vengeance in the Antarctic, global warming skeptics have stepped up their cry against the science of human impact on climate change. Pointing to the recent cold snaps, the skeptics argue that the science of global warming is bunk. Even some who accept the underlying global warming trend say that the cold snap teaches us that we can’t base our deductions and predictions on a few years of data. The global warming trend only reveals itself after averaging out more dramatic and temporary climate swings.

To some degree perhaps this question is one of faith, too. I realize that rationally I believe and many believe that the data supporting global warming is strong enough to take on logic, but it’s not strong enough for everyone. I have cast my commitment behind the idea that burning fossil fuels in vast quantities must eventually have a negative effect on the planets eco-systems. Global warming and the evidence for it fits with that commitment. The skeptics, not stupid people, have committed to the idea that the planet’s eco-systems are unaffected or negligibly affected by burning fossil fuels. This is their faith and they interpret the evidence accordingly.

In another article we read about educators who have come to believe in the superior educational methodology of teaching in single-sex classrooms. Those who subscribe to the concept have committed to the idea and have faith in it. Those who don’t have faith in mixed-sex classrooms. Who is right? Reading the article, it’s not clear. I’m not even sure whether either side is necessarily right. If one accepts that boys and girls learn differently and respond differently to different environments and different stimuli, this still doesn’t tell you that single-sex classrooms will be superior to mixed-sex classrooms that acknowledge and respond to these differences.

Just one anecdote about an adherent to single-sex teaching styles was enough to make me very skeptical: “Sax credits Bender with helping focus a boy who was given a wrong diagnosis of attention-deficit disorder by telling him that his father, who had left the family, would be even less likely to return if all his mother had to report was the boy misbehaving in school.”

Yes, I imagine that would focus a child, but at what cost?

This brings us back to the core challenge of O’Donohue’s beautiful idea — that god is beauty. We can be deceived into thinking that we apprehend beauty when we simply apprehend our attraction to an idea. Without reflecting on the reason for our attraction, we can’t be sure that we’re committing to beauty or to folly.

It was Aristotle who said: “One swallow does not make a summer, neither does one fine day; similarly one day or brief time of happiness does not make a person entirely happy.”

Likewise, one appealing facet of an idea — be it single-sex classrooms, global warming or god — does not make it worthy of our full commitment.

For more rational, science-based explanations of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

On the reproductive strategies of Komodo Dragons — what they tell us, and what they don’t. And a parallel in the trends of religious affiliation.

Neil Shubin, associate dean at the University of Chicago and the provost of the Field Museum, tries to shrug off objections to cloning as “unnatural” by explaining that female Komodo Dragons, and other species, can reproduce without the need for male fertilization. Shubin reasons that this phenomenon, reported in Britain and Kansas, in which the offspring have identical DNA to the mother, shows that we’re on shaky ground if we turn to nature to determine that cloning is unnatural. Since nature can encompass all kinds of odd survival mechanisms, Shubin argues, when it comes to survival, “anything goes.” But in his rush to eliminate nature as an infallible moral compass (a sensible intent, since, as he says, only humans have a sense of morality) Shubin unfortunately shuffles out of the door the question of what’s “natural.”

Shubin’s argument goes like this: Cloning happens in nature (through the phenomenon of virgin births). Therefore cloning can’t be said to be unnatural.

He has, of course, stooped to a very basic form of sophistry by taking two different ideas and equating them. Virgin birth in Komodo Dragons has evolved over millions of years as a survival mechanism when male fertilization is unlikely or difficult. When humans clone a species we deliberately achieve our means with mechanisms that haven’t evolved. That’s the whole point of applying science to cloning — to hoodwink nature.

In amongst this sophistry though, Shubin points out that male fertilization persists as by far the most likely form of reproduction in Komodos, despite the possibility of virgin birth, because it mixes up the gene pool of the offspring and in so doing allows for adaptation. (Passing on the same genes makes adaptation impossible.)

“Without variation,” as Shubin notes, “the world would be static and unchangeable, and species would gradually disappear as they failed to meet challenges…”

This put me in mind of a new survey on religion from the Pew Forum. In its survey of over 35,000 Americans (a relatively large sample), Pew found that “more than one-quarter of American adults (28%) have left the faith in which they were raised in favor of another religion - or no religion at all.” “The number of people who say they are unaffiliated with any particular faith today (16.1%) is more than double the number who say they were not affiliated with any particular religion as children. Among Americans ages 18-29, one-in-four say they are not currently affiliated with any particular religion.”

I should quickly state that non-affiliated does not necessarily mean non-religious; overall about 10% claimed to be non-religious (1.6% atheist, 2.4% agnostic, and 6.3% secular unaffiliated).

I’ve spoken at length in other posts that statistics mislead and get misused. But here I want to say something that would, I believe, hold true even if the statistics told another story; it would just lead to a different prediction.

The decision to change one’s religious affiliation requires as a prerequisite some openness to the idea of change. In making such a change one must be prepared to let go of the old affiliation in favor of the new one. In this way the process is analagous to evolution. Just as the body of an organism responds to physical impulses, so, too, our consciousness responds to mental impulses. And just as the natural world would be static and unchangeable without variation, so, too, the world of ideas would be static and unchangeable without variation.

If we take the Pew statistics at face value, they indicate that the world of ideas has begun to bring about a move away from particular religious affiliation, particularly in young people. Depending on our own religious beliefs, we may wish this to be otherwise. But we cannot argue that the capacity for change, the flexibility and adaptability of beliefs is a healthy sign — it is the evolution of consciousness.

Now for the subjective, but rational, commentary: I am not surprised by the trend that is apparently revealed in the Pew survey. It tracks with similar surveys in Europe (although charting a less dramatic move toward secularism than Europe has seen). And it makes rational sense. Relgions started out as mechanisms by which people tried to make sense of the world. Inspired by doubt, wonder, and fear, early humans invested inanimate objects with the power of deities. Once these inanimate objects were more fully understood, the sense of the divine moved ever further from the tangible world until in more recent times it became invested in an unseen, unseeable, omnipotent but ultimately elusive deity (after all, what was left?)

The more people become aware and convinced that existence can be understood without recourse to a god, the more they will be to change and even let drop their religious affiliations.

For more rational, science-based explanations of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

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On what people want to see and believe.
“Audiences don’t want to see realistic films about the war in Iraq. They want to escape all the bad news.” So says Howard Suber (UCLA Film and TV Producers Program founding chair and author of “The Power of Film,”) reacting to this year’s decidedly gloomy crop of Oscar nominees. I agree. And then, I disagree.

Since the nominated films haven’t done well, relatively speaking, at the box office, Suber’s claim holds water; people tend not to flock to downer movies. But those who enjoy provocative, thoughtful films made with great craft and artistic vision do go to see the kinds of movies on the Academy’s short-list. The Oscars aim to reward notable artistic achievements in film, not rampant popularity. They provide much-needed counterweight to the rather less lofty day-to-day goals of the film studios.

This confusion of box office success and artistic merit masks a positive phenomenon in the American film industry — artistry can make its furtive way into movies that have no purported artistic aim, and block busters can have great artistic merit without needing to be labeled “art” movies. The movies “Knocked Up” and “Superbad,” for instance, both big draws in 2007, both pitched and consumed as “raunchy comedies,” accomplished their low, uncouth objectives while revealing flashes of superior, if uneven, comic artistry.

In the American film industry, art will out, it seems, despite the drive for popular appeal and profit. Movies can’t be divided into “art” and “popular” movies, because some popular movies involve incredible artistry and some purportedly artistic movies are mediocre imitations or approximations of art. (Big names can make seriously flawed movies and pass them of as serious.)
The Academy then has a tough job, rewarding artistic achievements where they see them, without there being any kind of reliable delineation between the serious and the silly.

Pastor Casimiro Roca also has a tough job persuading his flock to give credit where credit is due. The poor priest presides over a small church in Chimayo, New Mexico, where people come seeking to be cured. Roca despairs that many of those who come believe that the dirt in a pit in the middle of the church has miraculous powers. Roca believes it’s the Lord. (The dirt he replenishes regularly, having it trucked in.)

It seems odd that Roca enables the perpetuation of the myth by importing the dirt and keeping the shrine, as he does, as something of a destination. But perhaps, like the Academy, Roca does what he does not in support of the masses but in support of miracles that reveal themselves despite the masses.
Postscript: As a rationalist one can’t dismiss out of hand things that defy our current comprehension. Reason must allow for doubt. Science has revealed its own share of completely unexpected findings. Einstein’s general relativity, quantum mechanics, and supersymmetry, for instance, all require us to move beyond everyday reason. The term miracle misleads, though, and perhaps when we come across evidence of events that defy reason, the term “unexplained phenomenon” is more appropriate.

On the logic or otherwise of war, protest, and reaction.

Today’s current events drew me to think about the philosophy of conflict in all its forms. Further reports of the violent and brutal repression of protests in Kenya, sparked by a reaction against the election results there, university protests against the Catholic church in Rome, Canadian condemnation (through its torture watch list) of inhumane detention and interrogation techniques being used by the US government, and the growing call for shoring up the economy with a stimulus package.

(Putting the economic stimulus package on this list may seem odd. But I deliberately want to stretch the idea of conflict to include “intervention” since it seems to me that the concept of conflict may be subordinate to the concept of intervention. (Another story I could have used as an example discusses Google’s philanthropic appendage — Google.org.))

The Kenyan troubles provide two philosophical questions: Can we logically and rationally examine whether violent protest is justified and under what conditions? And, secondly, can we logically and rationally examine whether harsh and violent suppression of protest is justified and, if so, under what conditions?

Emotionally, if we sense that a group has been wronged, we tend to sympathize with it in its protests. And if the protests meet with harsh suppression, we may even tend to sympathize with some level of violence on the part of the protesters. (This is why Ghandi’s philosophy of passive resistance caused such a stir and continues to stand out in people’s minds. It struck us as odd.) Conversely, if we feel that the group hasn’t been wronged in proportion to the protest, and that general order and safety is threatened by the protesters, we tend to sympathize with the use of some force (short of unwarranted violence) in maintaining order. I realize I’m not speaking for all of society in saying this, but just painting an emotional picture.

Rationally, though, can we justify violent protests or violent action against protests?

The student protests in Rome against the Catholic church raise a similar question without the violence. The Italian protests revolve around some of the incumbent Pope’s ill-chosen and perhaps ill-meant words.

And Canada’s arm’s-length but telling criticism of the US’s recent human rights record by putting the US on its torture watch list provides an example of confrontation that is charged because of the statement it makes rather than the mechanism it employs.

Which brings us to the sluggish economy and the growing support for some kind of stimulus package. Action, reaction. Situation, confrontation.

The concepts involved in confrontation seem to be 1. dissatisfaction with the status quo, and 2. judgment that it is right to act to effect some change to the status quo.

A conscious actors, human beings have gone beyond the simple response to stimuli that governs the actions of non-conscious creatures. Consciousness gives us the power to act against a stimulated response. In other words, we may be dissatisfied with a situation but decide to do nothing to change it. When an animal is moved to anger, it’s natural response may be to act aggressively. As human beings we can choose to act on this response or not.

As to the concept of dissatisfaction, we cannot control it. An adverse situation will either lead to dissatisfaction or it won’t.

Then there’s the question of whether it is right to confront the situation that has caused our disatissfaction, and how we judge this.

To put it simply, in the non-conscious world it is always right to respond according to the stimulus. Whereas, in the conscious world, it may not be right to respond to the stimulus.

The Fed and the politicians concerned about the slump must judge whether it is wiser in the long term to stimulate the economy than to leave it alone. The judgment on whether to confront the slowing economy should rightly take into account the long term economic impact. A confrontation based only on short term fears about a recession would be misguided.

In Rome, the protesters seem to have forgotten about the value of freedom of speech by forcing the Pope to cancel his visit. Their confrontation seems to be based simply on short term anger at his visit rather than long term consideration of what’s best for the country. Perhaps they’d do more for separation of church and state by letting the sinister Ratzinger visit and countering his dubious social theories with elegant rebuttals.

But what of the philosophy of violent protest or suppression of violent protest? Again, it seems that, however abhorrent violence may be, the long term good or ill to society of violence must be weighed against the ill to society of the status quo. From the perspective of the good of humanity it was right and good for the nations of Europe and the US to fight the Nazis. The long term good to the world warranted the violence and loss of life incurred.

In Kenya, is more being gained through the protests than would be gained without them? If I understand the situation, the Kenyan protesters are confronting not just the election of a president they don’t like, but the suspicion of electoral fraud. In which case, for them, the very basis of civilized society is at stake. In which case, if they have good reason for their suspicions, it seems that their confrontation, meeting violence with violence if need be could be judged to be warranted.

Which is not to say that peaceful means of protest in Kenya or elsewhere should be disregarded or abandoned as either weak or ineffective. Far from it. As Ghandi showed, sometimes non-violence can be far more dramatic and dramatically effective than violence.

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The Golden Compass, Dark Chocolate, Marijuana, and The Future of The Human Race.

When Google’s search engine trawls a website, its bot uses the first couple of sentences at the top of the post as an abstract. I just found this out. So, as of today, I will add a brief topic summary to the top of my posts. As always, I want to add value for you, the reader, so in the topic summary I’ll try to be at least descriptive, and perhaps even amusing.

BBC’s world service this morning interviewed Phillip Pullman, author of the His Dark Materials trilogy, now a movie: The Golden Compass. Some have criticized Pullman for being atheistic and anti-religion. The American Catholic League has launched a national campaign encouraging people to boycott the film. Any “ism” can be criticized of course, and many can be problematic. But when asked about the controversy, Pullman gently steered the question toward one of rationality. Whether he is atheist or not, Pullman’s concern lies with the harm that organized religion can do when it meddles with politics and when politics uses religion as a rationale for war, murder and oppression. Pullman spoke with such sense and good intent that a national campaign in support of the film seems to be called for as an antidote to the actions of the American Catholic League.

Dark chocolate and marijuana, two guilty pleasures for many, both take a medical beating today. Beware of flavenolless impostors, we’re warned, when it comes to dark chocolate, and don’t eat too much. And for the pot-heads among us, it seems that marijuana, which constricts the blood vessels in the brain, may have long term ill effects on memory and the chances of a stroke. For anyone who knows a pot-head, of course, the news about long term effects comes as little surprise. It’s not that spacey, sieve-headed slackers (no offense intended) are drawn to the substance so much as it encourages these qualities in its partokers.

Where am I going? One more story will get us there.

The men’s satellite TV channel, Bravo, commissioned evolutionary theorist Dr. Oliver Curry of the London School of Economics to report on the future of the human race. Dr. Curry hypothesizes two mid and long-term shifts, the first a racial homogenization over the next 1,000 years, the second, in the 10,000 year time-frame, a split in the human race into two species, one talk, attractive, intelligent, graceful, and the other short, stupid, ugly and goblin-like. We can take heart in Dr. Oliver’s first prediction: Us men will be taller, more athletic looking, deeper-voiced, square-jawed and with bigger peckers. You gals will be wide-eyed, downy-skinned, pert-breasted… But watch out if you rely too much on technology, because 10,000 years on your heirs may be part of the underclass.

I warn my daughter about this when I’m helping her with her math homework. (Not the ultimate goblin-featured fate of her progeny, but the over-reliance on technology.) It’s a terrible thing. We don’t know how a sine function works. We don’t know how our cars work. We don’t know how our phones work, or the GPS devices that guide us from point A to point B. We don’t know how our HDTV works, or what HDTV is for that matter. Well, somebody knows, presumably, since it has been invented, trademarked, licensed and mass-produced, but most of us don’t.

But is Dr. Curry’s work conjecture or science? Is it prejudice wrapped as prescience?

We’ll never know. We’ll be long gone. But it strikes me (my own conjecture!) as sinister, mean-spirited, and downright pessimistic to predict that the long term effects of human consciousness will be to make one segment of the population more stupid. Being conscious and aware, we also have the capacity to self-monitor as a species, to detect our own over-reliance on technology and do something about it. If we can divert ourselves from the rocky shores of faux dark chocolate and pot smoke, we can surely counteract the dangers of technology.

I try to keep this in mind as I read about poor Robert Schoff, who made it to seventy seven years of age before suffering the indignity of spending his Christmas Eve stuck upside-down in the opening of his septic tank, feet waggling in the air. It would be uncharitable to dwell, as Dr. Curry might, on Mr. Schoff generous girth and diminutive stature (5-foot-5 and 135-pounds). His septic mishap notwithstanding, Mr. Schoff sounds like an eminently sensible man. He knew, after all, that he had a septic tank, that it was blocked, and how to unblock it. His fault lay not in his cognition, but in the execution of his plan.

For a rational, science-based explanation of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

The AP reports on the success of a Japanese team in making genetically modified mice that show no fear of cats. This demonstrates that mice fear cats instinctively, upsetting the more commonly held view that the fear is learned.

The scientists from Tokyo University found that the modified mice quite happily cosied up to the unmodified cats and played with them.

I’ve been reading a fascinating biography of Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson is getting a lot of play at the moment because of his role in insisting on the separation of church and state as America was being constituted. Jefferson, a Virginian, saw and felt the unfairness of a system in which religion gets forced on people. Fortunately for the country he was a persistent and forceful person who carried forward this conviction even when others would have been OK allowing some degree of intermingling.

Roger Cohen invokes Jefferson’s ideas in an opinion piece that counters Mitt Romney’s vapid criticism of European Secularism, echoing to some degree my own response the other day. Jefferson was an enlightened man. His father read the classics out loud to his family. He had a classical education at home and then at university. Jefferson had great sympathy for the enlightened movements of Europe, and considered anything short of a rational grounding for society unacceptable. In his native state, he reformed the laws of inheritance, for instance, because he thought them inherently unfair.

Jefferson, one can imagine, must be turning in his grave. As Europe has marched on to become widely secularist and for the most part enlightened, America has slumped into a nation riddled with weird zealotry and faith-based fervor, where politicians either make it in part because they genuinely appeal to the religious community or are cowed into pandering to that community. As I sit here, I can think of several reasons why this gap has opened up — the sheer size of America, isolating far-flung communities from the influence and challenge of rigorous thought, the psychological composition of the people who populated America — people came here seeking peace and prosperity trusting largely in their faith that God would provide, the long, lingering influence of slavery and segregation, which was propped up by the idea that whites were somehow better than blacks, a very irrational proposition. I’m sure there are many other potential explanations.

But, as I see it, the point is less how did this happen, and more, how will this change.

The NY Times reports on a new study that indicates that human evolution accelerated rapidly in the last 40,000 years. There’s debate about whether that acceleration has continued over the past 10,000 years, but the study brings with it some hope that we’re not done yet.

Back to those mice…

If mice are genetically programmed to fear cats, this tells us two things: First, that while environment can affect our thoughts and behavior, we start from a predisposition toward a certain psychology and physiology. (My fear of spiders, for instance, may have been influenced by my mother’s fear of spiders, but it was probably also an inherent fear.) Second, that mice evolved their fear of cats.

And if mice can evolve a fear of cats (which seems self-evident to my mind), then human beings can evolve to become more enlightened.

Did I skip a step or two? I fear I did.

1. Is it evolutionary progress to become more enlightened? If you question the answer to this, you’re probably reading the wrong blog.

2. What evolutionary pressure will cause the human race to become more enlightened?

Again, I can come up with several theories in answer to the second question, and I’m sure you’ll find your own. All other things being equal, I think that women are more likely to find enlightened men attractive and vice versa. Who wants to be married to a cave-man? An enlightened man will also be more helpful around the house and with the kids, prompting the woman to be OK having more kids with him. And enlightened people are probably less likely to die stupid, meaningless deaths.

As I argue in my book we’ll one day look back on religious fundamentalism as an anomalous blip in the history of America. The Japanese modification of mice to fear no cats gives me fresh hope that American genes will adjust over time to fear no smiting from on high. At which point the Bushes and the Huckabees and the Romneys of the world will disappear from the political scene with a puff of enlightened smoke.

To satisfy the political machine in the name of their popularity, presidents are called upon to perform many functions, attend many events, make many speeches. President George Bush today recognized Hanukkah and evoked the memory of Daniel Pearl. Would Daniel Pearl have welcomed the honoring?

Bush quoted some of Pearl’s last words, “‘My father is Jewish. My mother is Jewish, and I’m Jewish.”’ Then he said, ”These words have become a source of inspiration for Americans of all faiths. They show the courage of a man who refused to bow before terror — and the strength of a spirit that could not be broken.” Bush juxtaposes two ideas in order to connect them: The idea of faith and the idea of refusal to bow to terror. But given Pearl’s journalistic profession and his choice of pursuing it as he did in such dangerous places, would it perhaps not be more compelling to say that Pearl’s was less an inspiration of faith than of truth?

Mike Huckabee, an unexpected front-runner for the GOP candidacy, might be too easy a target, but his disarming lack of remorse in the face of his faults could win him supporters. Huckabee has refused to retract his idea, as it was voiced in 1992, that AIDS patients should be isolated. His justification for not retracting the statement? He believes it was an appropriate degree of caution at the time. He also continues to stand by his statements that homosexuality is aberrant, unnatural and sinful. Sinful because it “misses the mark.” (I doubt that a homosexual would agree!) And unnatural because it doesn’t meet the ideal of one man, one woman in a pro-life marriage under god. His justification for this being the ideal? The perpetuation of civilization.

Clearly not a man of science, Huckabee’s claim that homosexuality is aberrant or unnatural is easily refuted by well-documented studies showing that homosexuality appears in many species. And on the matter of his fear about the end of civilization, there’s ample evidence that civilization has done very nicely thank you over many millions of years, undeterred by Huckabees concept of a God insisting on one man, one woman, pro-life. But we’re still left with his position of authority as a former Baptist minister on the question of sin. As Huckabee says, we’ve all missed the mark, we’ve all sinned. In which case I expect we should wait for Huckabee’s future installments of what constitutes missing the mark so that nobody feels left out…

Back to Bush.

Also today, in the same NY Times piece, we read that, despite his record, Bush marked International Human Rights Day. I wonder whether he suspended torture of American detainees for the day, too, as a sign of his profound respect?

I didn’t post yesterday as I have pneumonia. I’ll try a quick post today because I’m feeling a little better, and because Mitt Romney’s speech on faith has me alarmed.

I highly recommend The NY Times editorial, Crisis of Faith, bravo. Of several pieces I’ve read it is the only one I’ve found that focuses on the distressing fact that Romney chose to make the speech in the first place. The rest seem to take it for granted that this kind of focus on religion is par for the course in a political race in America in 2007.

David Brooks, for instance, laments that Romney succeeded only in blurring the distinctions between faiths until one’s choice of religion may as well be a matter of picking “the one with the prettiest buildings?” I may be wrong, but Brooks seems almost offended that Romney didn’t rank religions by their degree of goodness.

As reported by CNN, Bill Bennett and Roland Martin debated the effectiveness of Romney’s speech; did it succeed in its political objectives. I can see how such inquiry can be of a certain amount of interest or even fascination, but if this is the primary level on which we judge such an event, surely there is a bigger problem.

As the Times editorial points out, Article VI of the Constitution states that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” And yet this is exactly what is happening in politics today. Romney succumbed to pressure to take such a test. Other candidates are doing the same thing. The general media implicitly or explictly supports or condones such tests in all manner of ways ranging from allowing an explicitly religious test to be posed as a question in a debate, to focusing political commentary on the content or success of a candidate’s religious posturing rather than questioning why the candidate is posturing.

If you have the stomach for it, you can listen to Romney’s speech or read a transcript via NPR.

Everything that’s wrong about Romney’s speech is contained within it. He equates freedom with religion, for instance, and states that freedom is given by God, the Creator. He refers sarcastically to ‘enlightenment’ in Europe as if it is intrinsically a bad thing. He tries to concretize a definition of America as a religious nation.

The phenomenon of religious sway in America and the stranglehold it has on so many matters of national importance can be tied, I think, to a culture of isolationism and fear. America has yet to accomplish freedom from religion because too many of those with influence, in society and in government, fear the ramifications of such freedom and believe that America is right in clinging to the notion that God somehow looks down with favor on it.

Then is this freedom? Hasn’t religion now become a constraint?

Religion is humankind’s way of trying to conceive of where we came from. Religious faith is humankind’s way of holding on to an idea of where we came from in the face of obstacles to that idea.

Religion began as a natural and imaginative way for people to explain certain things that seemed inexplicable. The earliest religions focused on things such as the heavenly bodies (one could say that worshipping the sun comes closer to revering the source of life than any other religion!) or the spirits of the earth. As our scientific understanding of the world improved the basis for religious understanding receded ever further from the realm of everyday life, into something quite nebulous and remote.

This is the philosophical aspect to the piece: Religion cannot be supported logically or rationally. There are those who would rebutt that neither can atheism or agnosticism. I would beg that there is a difference. If we take as a ground for our awareness of our existence the input of our senses, we can build up a picture of the world as we perceive it from entirely logical and rational principles without ever calling upon the need for a god or creator. I cannot prove that there is no god, but I can demonstrate, logically and rationally, to my own satisfaction that my place in the world and the way the world works (even the way religions function) can be understood without calling upon some divine creator.

I’m alarmed by Romney’s speech because this culture of religion and its clamor will hold America back, and will continue to cause harm in the world in the name of good. As long as America defines itself as a religious nation, it will continue to spawn and support crusades, both here at home and abroad. It will further isolate America from the rest of the world. And it will perpetuate the religious moralizing that prevents politicians from making perfectly sound decisions because they’re afraid to stand up to the zealots in the community.

News of Hugo Chavez’s narrow referendum defeat brought a decidedly unexpected relief. His proposals, in line with his former policies and stated goals, would have moved the Chavez administration toward a Castro-style dictatorship. But whereas Castro possesses an enduring charm, even if warped and spoiled by time and power, Chavez has all of the charm of a pit bull. At the conclusion of CNN’s story on the referendum result, the reporter offers a fascinating financial footnote: Venezuela’s oil-fueled prosperity, which has helped enrich Chavez’s popularity and solidify his power (the country’s wealth allows him to fund his social programs) accounts for as much as 90% of the country’s export economy. Two guesses as to who buys most of venezuela’s oil… Us. Apparently, the United States is one of the few countries that can refine Venezuela’s low-grade crude and we pick up about a million barrels per day. So, America then, Chavez’s nemesis, has been funding his regime.

A so-called National Intelligence Estimate issued today — a consensus view of “all 16 American spy agencies” (but who’s counting?) — concludes that Iran quite probably stopped its weapons program (if it had one) back in 2003, and that as of the middle of this year had probably not resumed that program (if it ever existed). Although couched in all kinds of provisos and qualifications, perhaps the most striking conclusion of the NIE is the estimate that sanctions and international pressure probably caused Iran to halt its program (if it did and if it had one). Of course, the White House has been quick to point out that this makes the President right again in seeking to maintain and increase pressure on Iran, rather than being wrong to pressage military action, since military action would have been not his error but someone else’s error for issuing a National Intelligence Estimate like the one that got us into the Iraq war. (Not that that was a mistake, but if it had been a mistake it would have been someone else’s mistake, too.) In any case, money seems to have been a key factor in making bringing to a halt the Iranian weapons grade fuel enrichment centrifuges (if they weren’t just nuclear energy centrifuges).

In Malawi two seasons of good crops have helped prevent famine. After the country’s most recent miserable crop failure in 2005, the president of Malawi, Bingu wa Mutharika, decided to ignore the financial strings attached to foreign subsidies and to subsidize himself the use of fertilizer and good seed. The U.S., Britain, and the World Bank have disfavored fertilizer and seed subsidies in countries such as Malawi because… wait for it… “foreign-aid fashions in Washington [and elsewhere] featured a faith in private markets and an antipathy to government intervention.” Let me get this straight, while the U.S. government subsidizes fertilizer purchases for our own farmers it’s been preaching and practising free-market ‘no subsidy’ religious policies overseas that have effectively been starving millions of people in Africa and elsewhere. The shamefulness of such self-righteous arrogance seems reprehenisble.

(There’s also a good op-ed piece about Goldman Sachs along similar lines, but I don’t have space to write about that.)

Money, money, money… But what about principles, what about good sense, what about logic and reason, why does money seem to lurk behind everything like a pesky accountant with an irrevocable pen poised to fall?

Allow me a quick detour into energy and matter. When Einstein equated mass with energy he unlocked a mysterious secret about the universe. The question: What is this stuff that things are made of? Einstein’s answer: Call it what you will, but you may as well call it energy.

A similar, humbler equation exists of course between money and power. Money and power are two ways of thinking about the same thing. You can convert one into the other and vice versa.

(My wife and I, for another instance, were discussing the presidential race and my wife pointed out to me the reason Mike Bloomberg could still run for president having skipped the abrasion of the primaries: He doesn’t need the money.)

Rather than just throw up my hands at this point, I’m struck by the question of what we as observers of the machinations of money and power can we do to make a difference? It seems to me that armed with the awareness that money churns away like a sump pump in the basement of every important political edifice, we’ll always be better able to judge things for what they are if we pop our head down the stairs and take a sniff. “Follow the money,” as Deep Throat apparently said, and we’ll be richer for it.

And if we doubt that paying attention to this will be enough to make a difference, we can be heartened by another discovery of science, famously encapsulated by the thought experiment of Schrodinger’s cat, that observation by itself is enough to change the outcome of a process.

The unfolding hostage (just freed) and bomb threat at Hillary Clinton’s New Hampshire campaign office provides a sobering example of the difference between rhetoric and reality. As an armed man stands off with a bomb strapped to his chest the sparring between campaign candidates doesn’t seem the slightest bit important. Reality trumps rhetoric every time.

Critics of former mayor Rudy Giuliani have stepped up their attacks on his rhetorical device of bandying about mistated, inflated or exaggerated statistics to present his mayoral accomplishments in a brighter light. Here, it seems, rhetoric and reality combine to demonstrate that Giuliani, if elected, would prove to be a deceitful and egotistical leader. Something that by now we’ve surely had enough of.

Then there’s the “outcry” in the Sudan over the thankfully relatively lenient sentence (15 days in jail versus six months and 40 lashes) meted out to Gillian Gibbons for allowing the children in her elementary class to name a teddy bear Muhammad. Sudanese demonstrators have called for Gibbons to be executed. But witnesses indicate that the protesters were supplemented  (or perhaps seeded) by government workers. And the outcry seems to provide convenient rhetoric for the Sudanese government as it tries to block Scandinavian peacekeepers from being sent to Darfur — this in response to last year’s publication in Scandinavia of cartoons that depicted Muhammad and offended muslims.

And for all of the endless rhetoric about Iraq, when one reads some of the details of the violence there (as I’ve been doing in the New Yorker (Inside The Surge)) one realizes just how bloody and brutal and real the war is, and how divorced from those facts is the rhetoric.

The aim of rhetoric, when it has an aim, is to sway the listener or audience. The speaker uses rhetorical devices (such as emphasis, repetition, sarcasm, humor, logic or sophistry, the inducement of fear, omission, bullying, and charisma) to highlight his or her points, and to persuade the listener that his or her perspective has greater merit than any other. Unfortunately, the better the speaker the harder it becomes to differentiate a valid, worthy perspective from an invalid or fatuous perspective. And, given the established methods we employ to select the leaders of our regions, cities, states, and countries, rhetoric must remain for now an indispensible part of the process.

Rhetoric is employed so pervasively around the world that it’s almost impossible to imagine processes of government and leadership without it. But perhaps that’s because we’re not trained to recognize and counter rhetoric. Plato’s Socratic dialogs or their teachings should be required readings in schools. If we could learn to decode rhetoric and diminish its influence the world would be a better place.

Reality on the other hand often gets too little attention. It takes a lot of reality to impinge upon our consciousness. And all too often it’s the sensational stuff that we focus on. In the past few days I’ve been struck by the number of high profile news stories that have focused on tragic disappearances and deaths for no other reason than there was something odd or grizzly or heartbreaking about them (the hoaxed teenager who killed herself, the missing teenager who’d been involved in porn, the couple who allegedly killed their two year old child, the ex-cop who may have killed his wives). I’m not saying that these tragedies aren’t worth our attention, but should they occupy, relatively speaking, so much of our news-space? News serves two purposes — it delivers information of note and it keeps society apprised of things that we should care about and perhaps act upon. Of course, news media don’t make the news, it’s the consumers (us) who dictate our appetite for sensation to the savvy editors and pundits. What would it take to bring about a more enlightened media? A more enlightened public…

One can only hope that the armed hostage taker in New Hampshire is defused. I’d rather have more rhetoric than that kind of reality.