INTP – the logical and analytical type, probably pretty true, though I think they give me too much credit when they say “great at finding subtle connections between things and imagining far-reaching implications.” However, I think (hope???) they’re wrong about “might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive.”
2008-11-25
2008-11-24
My submission to thereprobablyisnt.com
I don’t believe in gods because religion is just tradition, community and ancient mysterious rituals, using people’s natural sense of fear, wonder and curiosity, combined with someone’s view of “morality” and comforting answers to the “big questions” in a way that ensures the perpetual power and influence of the leaders and the obedience of the followers.
As an outsider, this is obvious with the “gods” of the Norse, Egyptians, Greeks or any of the native American civilizations. The challenge comes in accepting this for the religion you were indoctrinated with, which for me was Christianity.
To me, the Old Testament is nothing more than a bunch of campfire stories of a primitive, brutal tribe of Bronze Age desert nomads. The only reason it became the basis for so much of today’s religion is because they famously won all their battles. If any tribe had vanquished the Israelites in any of the battles, our view of religion would probably be completely different. But of course, no one did because the “God” of the Israelites encouraged them to be particularly ruthless and bloodthirsty. “Campfire stories” can be loosely based on truth, but after several generations, will be pretty much unrecognizable, and the whole God part is pure mythology anyway. People love stories of the supernatural, even today, but it doesn’t make any of it real.
Meanwhile, the New Testament is just the marketing materials of the followers of a charismatic leader (assuming he existed at all). They had to use all the standard symbolism of the day (being a god, born of a virgin, etc) to give his words the necessary credibility.
We now know that Earth is an insignificant speck in the universe and the only way human beings evolved to the point we did is essentially luck. This is the only life and the only planet we have, our highest aspiration should be to take care of of others and the planet, because there is no one else out there to do it for us.
( my story at thereprobablyisnt.com )
2008-11-23
America sometimes “spectacularly” more dysfunctional than more secular European countries
or in the words of TimesOnline, societies are worse off when they have God on their side
“In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies.
“The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so.”
Gregory Paul, the author of the study and a social scientist, used data from the International Social Survey Programme, Gallup and other research bodies to reach his conclusions.
He compared social indicators such as murder rates, abortion, suicide and teenage pregnancy.
The study concluded that the US was the world’s only prosperous democracy where murder rates were still high, and that the least devout nations were the least dysfunctional. Mr Paul said that rates of gonorrhoea in adolescents in the US were up to 300 times higher than in less devout democratic countries. The US also suffered from “ uniquely high” adolescent and adult syphilis infection rates, and adolescent abortion rates, the study suggested.
Mr Paul said: “The study shows that England, despite the social ills it has, is actually performing a good deal better than the USA in most indicators, even though it is now a much less religious nation than America.”
He said that the disparity was even greater when the US was compared with other countries, including France, Japan and the Scandinavian countries. These nations had been the most successful in reducing murder rates, early mortal
I find this an encouraging thought…
From LA Progressive,
Now, the Republicans are relegated to the South — an extremist backwater party of white heterosexual Christian fundamentalism, cultural intolerance, and political irrelevance. They embrace xenophobia, islamophobia, and homophobia as America becomes a browner, more diverse nation. They uphold the plutocratic interests of free market capitalism at a time when the public demands greater government intervention in the economy, as a check against corporate excess and upward wealth redistribution.
2008-11-08
I’m embarrassed for the “religious right”…
… or “values voters” or the “moral majority” or whatever they call themselves nowadays.
First, all the most outspoken gay-bashing Republicans and pastors turn out to be gay themselves. For an ongoing chronicle of pastors’ betrayals, see Mojoey’s blog. On family values, Republicans are no better than Democrats, but the hypocrisy makes them worse.
A while ago I learned that the whole global warming denial thing is a Republican strategy by people like Frederick Seitz, S. Fred Singer and organizations such as the George C. Marshall Institute, the Heritage Foundation and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, whose “About CEI” page says
The Competitive Enterprise Institute is a non-profit public policy organization dedicated to advancing the principles of free enterprise and limited government.
Doesn’t sound very scientific, does it? Sounds more like the Republican mantra that John McCain has been parroting since his involvement in the Savings & Loan crisis of the late 1980s, until this year’s subprime meltdown, “deregulate, deregulate, deregulate”. The whole goal of global warming denial was to sow doubt about the science and delay regulation. They were such fierce believers in “free enterprise” that they created false, misleading “evidence” and succeeded in delaying meaningful action by 30 years, causing our current environmental situation to be much worse than it would have been if Reagan had acted.
I read that people in 34 countries were polled about their belief in evolution and only Turkey had a higher percentage of people who reject evolution. Maybe you’re even one of them, and you think you have all this brilliant “evidence”, but trust me, you’re wrong. 100% wrong. You’ve been deliberately kept ignorant by your church and the Republican Party. It’s part of their war on science and “elitism”. Or call it the assault on reason.
Why do you think Bill O’Reilly hates Daily Kos so much? He doesn’t want you to read it, because you might begin to comprehend the magnitude of the lie that’s been perpetrated on you.
Then, I find out that the Republicons were just using racist white voters, and that the Republican Party
promotes not the general welfare but the commercial interests of corporate enterprise.
How many times did you hear John McCain talk about the middle class? He just talks about tax cuts for business, it’s Reaganomics, you take care of big business and hopefully wealth will “trickle down”. We all know how well that’s worked – the gap between rich and poor has never been as big as it is now.
Then I learned that the whole idea of repealing Roe v. Wade is just red meat (a much more powerful analogy than a carrot) dangled in front of evangelicals to keep them on issue. For over 35 years since Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court has been dominated by Republicans – they could have overturned it at any time, but they never have and never will because then they’d lose their precious carrot.
Lee Atwater, Karl Rove and their type turned negative campaigning into an art form, hitting new lows this year. They knowingly use your racism, intolerance and ignorance to instill fear in you. They’ve succeeded so well this time that I’m afraid it will be hard to get the hatred back under control. Seriously, so what if his middle name is “Hussein”? It’s a name, he was named well before Saddam became a household name. And do you not remember the stuff about his pastor, how can he be a Muslim at the same time? They hit a new low with their smear against Rashid Khalidi. But you don’t care – he has a Muslim name, he must be a terrorist. People, your ignorance is appalling. Here’s even an article by Bill Ayers, who’s not an enemy of America as he was portrayed.
After McCain picked Palin, most reasonable Republicans were severely disappointed. But not “the base”, you guys love her, and already want her to run in 2012. In fact, many of you were secretly hoping that McCain would die so she would become President. McCain chose her in a cynical move calculated to appease “the base”, hoping it might attract some Hillary supporters, but Palin’s whacked-out ideas just drove them away.
I learned about American eliminationism, which helped me decode the veiled racism in statements such as
“You know, people are poor in America, Steve, not because they lack money; they’re poor because they lack values, morals, and ethics.” (Same guy also said they’re “fat and flatulent.”)
or
Except that the Declaration of Independence starts with the words “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…” And Abraham Lincoln made it clear in the Gettysburg Address that the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness doesn’t apply just to whites.
And of course there’s the obsession with being “tough on crime”, which is code for “put the blacks in jail where they belong” because you’d rather just lock ‘em all up than create programs to help them help themselves. “If you work hard in America, you can succeed” just means that you think blacks are lazy and don’t deserve any help.
When McCain said that famous day, “The fundamentals of the economy are strong”, the deregulation theme he’d been repeating for so long was shown to only benefit the rich.
And of course he couldn’t separate himself from his good friend, George W. Bush, the most-disliked president in history. But many of you still support him because your pastors have been telling you to for eight years.
So between Bush, Palin, the economy and negative campaigning without any viable ideas of his own, he lost the election, and the Republican Party became a “white, rural, regional party”, who mostly voted for Palin not for McCain.
Now, the party has been taken over by the base, and Palin is your first choice for 2012. Problem is, the guys in charge know Palin will never attract the independents and democrats needed to win an election so now they’re throwing her under the bus.
Too bad, so sad.
2008-11-06
A (Short) History of Human Rights Reform
(Yes, from an Anglo-North American point of view…)
Centuries ago, it was perfectly acceptable to “own” slaves, women had no right to vote and marriage was permanent (“What God has put together, let no man put asunder”). There was no divorce in the Catholic church; widows and widowers could remarry, but otherwise, marriage was permanent. To this day, the Catholic church does not recognize divorce, but they accommodate by granting an annulment, i.e. pretending the marriage never existed.
During the 1500s, King Henry VIII wanted a divorce, but the Pope wouldn’t give him one, so he established, and became the head of, the Church of England. Being king has its benefits, you get to write the rules.
It was still frowned upon even for a Catholic to marry a Protestant – a Christian marrying a Jew would have been almost unthinkable. Gradually, it became more acceptable for Catholics and Protestants to marry, and today, even marrying completely outside your religion doesn’t have the stigma it once did.
In 1776, the preamble to the Declaration of Independence began,
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
And of course, there was the struggle to end slavery. The American Civil War was literally fought over slavery. Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address stressed that the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness did not apply exclusively to the white race. But black people still did not have the right to vote, and “Jim Crow” laws would enforce segregation until 1965.
Similarly, women did not win the right to vote easily – it took until 1918 for women in Canada to achieve the right to vote in federal elections. In the US, the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920, while women in Switzerland had to wait until 1973. Even today, some countries do not allow women to vote, including Saudi Arabia and Vatican City. Saudi Arabia also doesn’t allow women to drive.
In 1948, the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The civil rights movement in America gave finally black people full rights, but didn’t end the racism. It took over 40 years for Martin Luther King’s dream to be fulfilled by Barack Obama being elected President of the United States of America.
“Miscegenation laws” banning interracial marriage existed in America from colonial times until 1967. Similar laws were also enforced in Nazi Germany and Apartheid South Africa.
Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, by the way, here’s an interesting quote I just found,
A 1973 Supreme Court decision, Roe v. Wade, legalized abortion by a 7-2 vote. Six of the seven justices in the majority were Republican appointees. The only Democratic appointee, Byron White, voted against Roe v. Wade.
In fact, in every year since 1969, the U.S. Supreme Court has been controlled by a majority of Republican-appointed judges. There has not been a Democrat-appointed chief justice since 1953.
Currently, there are seven Republican appointees and two nominated by Democrats.
Obviously, if the Republican majority had wanted to overturn Roe v. Wade at any time since 1973, they had the votes to do so. Why haven’t they?
Or another, wondering if Roe v. Wade is the Republican Party’s carrot on a stick.
In 1978, Californians rejected Proposition 6, better known as the “Briggs Initiative”, which would have banned homosexuals form working as teachers.
Canada adopted its Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982.
“Civil union”, essentially gay marriage, was recognized in Denmark in 1989.
Apartheid ended in 1990.
In 2003, Ontario became the first jurisdiction in North America to recognize same-sex marriage. Today same-sex marriage is recognized in many countries.
In May 2008, the Supreme Court of California ruled that same-sex marriage was legal.
On November 5 2008, Proposition 8 passed in California (along with similar initiatives in other states), modifying the California Constitution to eliminate the right of same-sex couples to marry. Let me repeat, an existing right, that people want to remove. It is hateful, bigoted fearmongering to claim that gay marriage will destroy civilization and to use “that’s how it’s always been” as justification.
The struggle for human rights has been going on for centuries. This is just the next step we have to get over. Soon, places that don’t allow same sex marriage will be considered just as backwards as Saudi Arabia is today. And always remember who was the most vocal in supporting Proposition 8 – the “religious right”, the same people who resisted every advancement in human rights in history.
As a straight male, I think people even wonder why I’m so passionate about this. I’ve had all the same objections myself: “That’s how it’s always been”, to “Ok, but let’s not call it marriage”, to “Ok, fine, I guess”, to “Anything less is discrimination and is unacceptable”. I actually found it liberating to be free of that last vestige of bigotry, I now look at everyone as equal and I want all the same rights and privileges for everyone.
I know exactly one guy who’s in a gay relationship, and he’s such a great person that I can’t imagine denying him the same rights at everyone else. If he’s crazy enough to actually want to get married 
he should be allowed to (I live in Ontario, so technically, he is).
2008-11-05
Obama 2008 – Yes We Can!!!
Good news (in my opinion):
- Obama won in a landslide (349 electoral votes to 163)
- Senate: 56 Democrats, 40 Republicans
- Congress: 254 Democrats, 173 Republicans
- Kay Hagan beat Elizabeth Dole
- one new Democratic governor (MIssouri)
Bad news:
- Proposition 8 passed in California
- Al Franken lost
- Michele Bachmann won
- James Inhofe won
