Politics – Page 21 – Auxiliary Memory

How Would Life on Earth Be Different if Everyone Was an Atheist?

Belief in God and an afterlife affects how people see reality. What if one day we all woke up without any superstitious beliefs in the metaphysical? What if science caught on and everyone began thinking in the same way about how reality works – would that change the social fabric of Earth? Does religion help or hurt when it comes to doing good?

Think about what John Lennon suggested in his song “Imagine”

Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people living for today

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people living life in peace

You, you may say
I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one
I hope some day you’ll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people sharing all the world

If religion and metaphysical ideas disappeared would we come together as one? I doubt it, but I think we could start working on the real problems we face. I can’t help but believe that if people didn’t think a better life awaits them after death they would take this world more seriously.

I think religious divides us, but I think something else divides us more: politics. But politics are just the outward manifestation of our inner beliefs which are tangled up in religious beliefs. The litmus test for that division is how we treat the poor.

Some people hate giving to the poor. They feel the poor should work. They feel the poor are undeserving of charity. Welfare makes their heads explode with anger. Paying taxes for public schools galls them no end. Foreign aid and food stamps just annoy the hell out them. Their resentment knows no bounds when it comes to paying taxes.

Other people want to divvy up the wealth and make life on Earth decent for all.

What’s strange the first group tend to be Christians and the second tend to be secular or spiritual rather than religious. To the first group, socialism is a dirty word, even though their God was known for dividing the fishes and loaves so everyone could eat.

So, I’m not sure if religion disappeared life on Earth would be any different.

We are going through transformative times. Communism failed. But capitalism cannot provide enough jobs for all. There will always be a certain percentage of the population that are idle. We have incorporated many socialistic solutions into our economy, and many people hate that. If we revert to a complete free market, where it’s dog eat dog capitalism, we will have a world where the rich lived in armed enclaves and the rest struggle to survive in a cruel uncontrolled Darwinian conflict. The early Christians saw Jesus’ teachings as a solution to this problem, but modern Christians have moved away from those socialistic beliefs.

I tend to wonder if modern Christians haven’t jettison all the Christian philosophy and just hung onto the belief of heaven. They want to be rich on Earth, and rich in Heaven. If these people turned atheists one night I doubt anything about the world would change.

Religion is a distraction like watching TV. Believing in vampires or angels, it doesn’t matter, it’s all fiction. To get the world that John Lennon imagined doesn’t come from giving up religion. What we need is for everyone to stop thinking about themselves and resenting others.

The real solution is to think global but act locally. We have to solve the problem of creating a healthy Earth, and how to create an economy that provides the basics of a decent life for all seven billion people that live on Earth. Our problem is the 10% want everything for themselves and expect the 90% to go fuck themselves. As far as I can see religion is irrelevant to this problem.

Like I said, we’re going through a transformative age that people in the future will name and analyze. Will the Earth survive? The rich want to ignore that issue. They want to get as much as they can for themselves. They do not care what happens to the Earth. They do not care what happens to future generations. They do not care about the rest of the people living on the Earth now.

Humans are a cancer consuming this world. Unless we get our greed under control we will consume everything, including ourselves.

To answer my title question: Unless becoming atheist means becoming liberal and socialist, the disappearance of religion would mean nothing to life on Earth. The real issues to how we live on Earth lies elsewhere. I don’t think greed is a belief. It’s genetic, conditioned and animalistic. Religion neither helps nor hurts in solving greed.

I think people who want to help the world do so because they just want to help the world. But those people aren’t enough. Unless the greedy are brought under control, and we’re all greedy, we can’t save ourselves. Christians want to be saved, but the plight of the Earth is another kind of salvation. Unless we’re all saved, then we’re all lost. Whether a God is watching us or not, it does not matter, because we can only save ourselves.

JWH – 5/16/12

What Republicans Don’t Know About Obamacare

Conservatives are running like a pack of wolves to pull down and kill Obamacare, while they dream of killing Medicare afterwards. What they don’t recognize is killing Obamacare will promote socialized medicine, not kill it. Obamacare was designed with Republicans in mind. It’s the free market solution to universal healthcare. When Republicans get their way and Obamacare is destroyed, the only solution left will be socialized medicine, and Medicare will become the model.

Most of the world has moved to universal healthcare, Americans are just slow to see that. It’s an idea that it’s time has already come, we don’t see it because we cling to outdated notions about capitalism. Wake up and smell the roses, capitalism is constantly evolving and it’s incorporated aspects of socialism to be more efficient. Sooner or later as universal healthcare becomes a success in all but the poorest countries, Americans will realize they have been left behind.

Obama and the Democrats designed the healthcare system we call Obamacare based on private insurance to appease the conservatives. Obamacare is the experiment to prove free market capitalism can do the job when it comes to universal healthcare. Killing Obamacare means killing the belief that there is a non-socialized solution. That’s okay by me, I never liked that idea, I always thought Medicare was a better model.

What’s going to happen is conservatives are going to kill off Obamacare and we’ll be forced to expand the scope of Medicare to cover the poor and uninsured. Most people with jobs will stay with private insurance – for a couple decades. Over time more and more private businesses will stop providing health insurance as more and more of the population will shift into a Medicare type system.

Sooner and later Americans will wake up and realize the rest of the world has a better solution. Obamacare was the Republican solution, they just don’t remember it.

JWH – 3/29/12

Should We Preach Science to the Faithful?

Now there are two ways to interpret my question: Should we preach science to the faithful? First, the religious right in America already believe atheists are trying to convert them through liberal education, so the question becomes: Should we not teach science to protect people’s faith? The second way to look at that question is to assume the faithful have a war on science which turns the question into: Should we teach science so everyone will understand that faith is fantasy?

Evangelical America already knows secular American has declared war on them. Liberals say, “Oh no, not us,” but I think they are avoiding the issue. Most liberals are not atheists, or even agnostics, and cling to bits of religion, mysticism and theism. They want to be modern, educated and embrace science, but deep down they want God and heaven to exist. They want everything science can give them, like brain surgery, GPS, television, computers, cell phones, antibiotics, and so on, but they don’t want to let go of God. The conservative religious right have always known deep down that science invalidates religion. That’s why they want to do away with The Department of Education, change goals for higher education and rewrite K-12 textbooks.

For decades liberals have embraced the idea that all we need to do is embrace the separation of church and state and the religious will be protected and the liberals can keep science and education. They see this as fair, ethical, legal and most of all high minded. Sadly, this is completely clueless as to what the faithful want. They want America to be a Christian nation. Liberals have no idea what this means, or what it implies.

It would be fantastic if religion was a personal belief that was never political and always personal, but that’s not the case. For decades the religious have wanted to take over politics to get what they want. They are pushing their agenda so I’m asking should liberals push back? Of course, the faithful will claim we’ve been pushing them for decades and they are only defending themselves. It’s a complicated issue.

Nevertheless, we have to ask: How hard should we teach science, skeptical thinking, and evidence based reasoning? Essentially, the faithful are saying, “God says things are like this…” and we’re saying “There’s no God, but science tells us this….” As much as some people want to believe that God and Science can coexist that’s just not true. Early humans embraced metaphysical fantasies long ago and it’s taken millennia for some people to break out of those fantasies. Our choice is accept the fantasies or accept the truth about reality – there is no sitting on the fence.

I’ve never liked proselytizing. I’ve always thought the idea of missionaries traveling to other cultures to convert those people away from their own religion as offensive. I’ve always been a skeptic, an unbeliever, an atheist, and I’ve never wanted to go convert the faithful to my way of thinking – until now. What’s the harm in letting people believe in God, or believing they will go to heaven and meet all their old relatives and friends. It’s a wonderful dream to dream. What harm could there be in leaving people alone to believe in religion and all the things religion promises them?

But the Republicans are forcing me to make a choice. They have made their religious goals political. They have put education and science in their gun sights. They have essentially made the two political parties Democrats=Science and Republicans=Religion.

I use to believe it was important to let people believe whatever they wanted until I realized the faithful had begun an anti-Education campaign. Conservatives believe liberals are pushing education as a way of destroying their religious beliefs. Many liberals disagree with this, and even I don’t think it’s a conscious agenda, but I do think a good education tends to dispel religious beliefs. It’s natural for the faithful to fear higher education and to want to control the K-12 curriculum. I think liberals are being disingenuous not to recognize that a good education does erode religious belief.

But I think the faithful and conservatives need to realize that attacking the Department of Education, Higher Education, and the money we spend on K-12 schools is equal to the idea of liberals wanting to do away with Churches. The educational system is essentially the secular church of liberal beliefs. Now fundamentalists know this and that’s why they are attacking the educational system. Liberals have their heads in the sand if they don’t see this. Atheists believe in science and education, it’s not a religion, but it a belief system.

I know conservatives can’t understand this, but liberals and most atheists are very big believers in the freedom of religion, and they don’t want to challenge religious thinking directly, and especially not politically. But conservatives don’t see that, and they have decided to attack the educational system.

The faithful feel its their duty to spread the word of their faith and to attack evil where they see it. Of course, Muslims and Mormons believe this too, and they are growing faster than Christianity. All the aggressive faiths are in a battle for the hearts and minds of the people of Earth. My question is: Should atheists, skeptics, free thinkers, and other non-believers get in on the action by converting new recruits? Among the religious the war for souls is really a battle for who describes God best. Even though most Christians and Muslims hate each other, they do share the concept of God.

If atheists become missionaries for science, it will become a battle for God versus Science, and that could lead all religions to band together, and they’d have a big majority. Lucky for believers in science the faithful don’t get along. However, does that mean we need to make scientific converts to win the battle for scientific thinking?

When you think about it though, isn’t that what’s already happened around the world? Fundamentalism is pushing back against the secular all across the globe, in a disunited front? I think the recent rise of atheism is a retaliation to that movement. Maybe it’s time we all put our cards on the table and be honest. There are many Christians out there that want America to be a Christian theocracy. I think they are jealous of Islam innate relationship with politics. I want politics that’s based on reality and science.

On the surface Republican politics appears to be about reducing taxes, especially for the rich. And the rich members of the party see reducing the size of the Federal government as the best method to this goal. Below the surface are the religious members of the Republicans, and they’ve latched on to making a smaller Federal government as their method to undermine liberal education. The reason all candidates fall all over themselves claiming to be the one true conservative and the reason why they fear being called a moderate is because they are united in in their goals even though they want to achieve different outcomes.

For 2012, the question becomes: Are there enough pro small government voters to elect a small government president? Conservative politicians think they represent the majority of Americans but I can’t believe that. We’ll find out in November. Who are you going to vote for – the Party of God or the Party of Science?

JWH – 3/11/12

Rush Limbaugh v. Women

The focus of the recent Rush Limbaugh scandal has been his personal attack on Sandra Fluke, which showed Limbaugh to be a crude, repulsive individual. Even more offensive than calling an obviously intelligent, successful and well mannered young woman a slut, a young woman who would make any parent proud to have her as a daughter, was the fact that Limbaugh was making a major assault on women in general. Normally I think women should write about women’s issues, but I’m not seeing the massive feminist counter attack that Limbaugh deserves. Why?

Slut v. Stud

Slut is a word no one should use anymore. It should be categorized with the N-word. It’s extremely prejudiced against women. If a guy has sex with 100 women, he’s a stud, and society admires him, if a woman has sex with a 100 men, she’s a slut and society looks down on her. That’s condemning half the human race to a double standard that destroys their freedom. Limbaugh is a big windbag that often talks about freedom but he seems to know so little about it. The Pill has freed women from hundreds of thousands of years of sexual tyranny.

From the first day The Pill went on the market it should have been free to any woman who wanted it. The males of the human race owe the females that much. Before the advent of birth control it was common for men to literally fuck their wives to death by forcing them to go through constant pregnancies. Because of our double-standards towards sexuality, women have been condemned to millennia of indentured servitude at best, and constant rape at worse.

Once The Pill came on the market woman could pursue ambitions outside of the home, and become equal with men in the workplace. The Pill is literally a pill for liberation and freedom. People who are against women using the pill are actually advocating the enslavement of women. This puts any religion against contraception on the wrong side of morality. But then religion has always lagged far behind the forefront of justice, ethics and morality.

Free and Freedom

Rush Limbaugh attacked Sandra Fluke because he doesn’t want The Pill to be free. He doesn’t want society to pay for it. That stance is far more offensive and repugnant than any words he used against Sandra Fluke personally. He is saying women do not deserve to be free. He is saying woman are not equal to men. He is saying women should be owned. He is saying sexual expression for women is wrong. Women deserve the same sexual freedoms as men. If a working prostitute had gotten up in front of congress and said she needed free access to the pill there should have not have been one moral judgment made against of her.

This issue of free birth control provided by healthcare should never have come up. The Pill should have always been free. Mr. Limbaugh, I think you owe all women a huge apology, and the only sincere one that I can think of is if you wrote an insanely large check to Planned Parenthood.

America is the land of the free, and Rush Limbaugh just became its biggest anti-freedom fighter.

Defies Logic

What’s amusing is how illogical Limbaugh’s selfish stance is. He wants to pay less taxes. He doesn’t want to pay to help other people. Giving The Pill away will reduce health costs. It will mean less unwanted children, especially ones that will use the entitlement programs he so dearly hates. It will mean less abortions.

If women were given proper sex education and birth control so they only had babies when they were ready, healthcare costs would go way down, and so would infant mortality statistics. You want to stop abortions – provide free birth control and sex education. All of this would lower your taxes Mr. Limbaugh, and that’s what you really want, isn’t it?

JWH – 3/7/12

How to Debate a Conservative?

My neighbor has a son I discuss politics with from time to time. He’s conservative and I’m liberal. He’s anxious for Obama to leave, I’m anxious for him to stay. My friend, who is my age, is good guy and he doesn’t push his agenda and I try not to push mine. Conservatives are mighty arguers, and debating them can be difficult because conservatives are often as passionate about their politics as they are about their faith. One problem with debating conservatives is they often feel the solution to the issue at hand is all too obvious and the facts are all on their side. And that’s the first quandary with debating conservatives – liberals have to argue against the status quo. We’re fighting an uphill assault against a well entrenched position.

Today my friend claimed Obama was making a huge political mistake by not siding with the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline. To ordinary folk, the pipeline sounds like a no-brainer. It promises jobs for Americans and more oil for America’s long term security, and during an election year where gasoline prices are climbing daily and politicians want to get every vote they can get, it would appear insane for Obama to reject the pipeline. Why wouldn’t liberals want more jobs? Why wouldn’t liberals want cheaper gasoline and securer oil supplies?

Obama recent decision to reject the current claim puts the decision off, probably until after the election. Obama claims he wants a better environmental impact report.

If you aren’t familiar with the Keystone pipeline controversy you’ll need to do some background reading because I don’t want to summarize what is already so well-written elsewhere.

I think it’s pretty easy to restate the conservative position. The pipeline means jobs during times of high unemployment. The pipeline will be another source of oil that doesn’t come from the Middle East, promising more security against future oil shortages. It offers hope for lower gasoline prices. It could be a great economic stimulus, especially for the state of Texas. Finally, it’s a way to help our friends the Canadians.

How can liberals argue against all of those benefits? We already have zillions of pipelines crisscrossing the country, why not another one?

If you read the articles you’ll see there are many people fighting the pipeline. Why? I don’t mean their specific reasons, but why are some people for something and other people against? Any project benefits some people and hurts others. It’s always that way. A hot issue like the Keystone XL Pipeline is political. The prime motivation for any big scheme is to make some people wealthy. There’s nothing wrong with that. The Canadian company and its American allies are trying to put over a big project and they are doing everything they can to convince America its in their best interests to let them go ahead. So why stop them?

Like every wish from an Aladdin’s Lamp, something unexpected comes with our wishes. To some, Obama’s delay is merely one for letting us think harder about what we’re wishing for – to try to foresee the possible unexpected consequences.

There’s been a boom in natural gas production in America and many landowners and towns rushed to embrace drilling and pipelines in their communities only to regret it later. That’s the first layer of protests against the proposed pipeline. There are individuals that don’t want it in their backyards. Eminent domain has always been controversial in our country – it’s always the little guys versus the big guys and the benefits of the many against the sacrifice of the few. But this is not the major consideration in the Keystone Pipeline now, but it’s growing.

The next level up is the local environmental impact of the project. President Obama and the EPA and other agencies want to take a longer look at the problem. What’s the worst thing that could happen? Could Keystone shell out the billions like BP if there was a major spill? What if there was an accident that impacted millions of citizens? I tend to think the current delay by Obama is really about this level of opposition, and sooner or later the pipeline will be built.

But there’s two more layers, that I think are the real issues. These two issues are at the heart of liberal opposition to the Keystone Project. The first is oil addiction and the second is global warming. They are related, and even interconnected, but they are still two separate issues.

Oil is a finite resource that the human race is using up at an exponential rate of consumption. Americans are oil junkies and the Canadian tar sands offer billions of barrels we greedily want to consume. We don’t want to give up our SUV and wasteful lifestyles, and the Keystone Pipeline is another drug dealer to rely on for our addiction. Among our citizens are people that are saying, “Hey, this is enough, we’ve got to get off this drug.” These people know that through conservation and energy efficiency we could easily live with much less oil. They know oil is vital to our whole economy and wasting it is huge danger to our long-term survival. Instead of using all the oil up in the next 50 years, maybe we should make it last 300 years or longer.

To these people, some of who are environmentalists, and others just economists, they know we don’t need more sources of oil, but a lifestyle to live with less. And they believe we need to change now. This would be true even if global warming didn’t exist.

Of course global warming does exist, and the Canadian tar sands are a particularly nasty way to get oil. Conservatives refuse to believe that global warming is happening, or they refuse to believe it’s man-made. Throughout the history of mankind people have refuse to accept anything that threatened their personal wealth and wellbeing. Accepting that the pipeline is a bad idea means accepting that our way of life is wrong, and most people can’t go there. But what if it’s true?

Now this brings me to the title of the essay, “How to Debate a Conservative?” How do you convince people their way of thinking is wrong? I’m not sure we can. That’s why conservatives don’t like liberals. We’re asking them to make radical changes in their lives. What gives us the right to ask so many to give up so much? Of course we know we can substitute an energy efficient lifestyle that would give them everything they have now and more, but it would be disruptive and costly in the transformation.

We can also tell them their children and grandchildren will suffer the consequences of their wastefulness, but that’s never worked in the past. How effective is that Bible verse about the sins of the father visiting the later generations? If God couldn’t change the Israelites, why think the liberals can change the conservatives?

We could try and convince them to read hundreds of history and science books, but we spend billions on education and get few to read.

How long has it taken to convince white people that people of color are equal? How long has it taken to convince men that women are also equal? Right, the liberals are still hard at work on those issues. Change comes slowly. We can take some satisfaction that even the most conservative people today are flaming liberals compared to people of the past. But is that any consolation?

And how many liberals are driving SUVs and living in 6,000 square foot houses? I’m afraid all too many. As long as liberals consume as much oil and live equally energy inefficient lives, we can’t argue well.

Does it come down to which side has the most lawyers, super-PACs and Congressmen in their pockets? It certainly would help if Obama had the balls to take an environmental stand and marshal the Democrats into action. I like Obama, and I think he’s a very eloquent guy, but he’s not a visionary leader. We live in times that needs another Lincoln but all we got was another Kennedy, a charming man with style, beautiful wife and kids, but who is only better than average politically.

Liberals need to organize and become more successful politically. They need to fight as hard as the conservatives do, but hopefully without the dirty tricks. Lucky for us, the best the conservatives can find to lead them are greedy buffoons that only think about one thing: eliminating taxes. If liberals were as aggressive as conservatives at seeking tax breaks we’d have one healthy environment, but sadly Democrats seem to be just as corrupted by money and power, but they feel just enough guilt to help the poor.

I’m not sure how to debate a conservative.

I tend to think our addiction to oil will not be broken and the Keystone XL Pipeline will be built.

I tend to think the concerns of the little landowners, farmers and ranchers will be pushed aside when the pipeline is built.

I tend to think there will be small and large oil spills and we’ll live with the consequences.

I tend to think we will consume all the oil before we learn to live without it.

And I’m quite confident global warming will destroy our current way of life, and our generation will be cursed for centuries.

JWH – 2/26/12