Notes

Scientists say they have found genetic evidence of the Crusaders’ presence in the Middle East:

The researchers found that some Christian men in Lebanon carry a DNA signature hailing from Western Europe.

The scientists also found that Lebanese Muslim men were more likely than Christians to carry a particular genetic signature. But this one is linked to expansions from the Arabian Peninsula which brought Islam to the area in the 7th and 8th Centuries.

But they emphasise that the differences between the two communities are minor, and that Christians and Muslim Arabs in Lebanon overwhelmingly share a common heritage.

In my opinion, the most interesting thing about that finding is the implication that, even after thirteen or fourteen centuries of people from different religions living in close contact with each other, the tendency of people to adopt the religion of their parents remains strong enough that there is genetic evidence of their allegiance.

Doesn’t that correspondence speak pretty strongly against the idea that people practice a religion because it conforms to Ultimate Truth and for the idea that they practice a religion because it’s how they were indoctrinated as children?

More ridiculous censorship.

Web site name registrar Network Solutions is blocking access to a site owned by a controversial Dutch politician known for his confrontational views about Islam and Muslim immigrants.

. . .

The site in question is fitnathemovie.com, which is registered by Dutch Party for Freedom leader Geert Wilders. Wilders has said that he planned to post a short film on the site designed to rally support for banning the Koran in Holland. Wilders has said that Islam’s holy scripture urges followers to commit violent acts.

So Islamic militants threaten to destroy us all if we don’t convert to their religion and we’re just going to roll over and censor ourselves to appease them? These are the people who resort to murder over cartoons, but we still refer to their “scripture” as “holy”?

Banning the Koran or any other book would only be an act of foolish ignorance. Restricting the ability to call for banning a book, however, is destructive of basic rights, absolute idiocy, and far worse than actually banning the book. Destroy the freedom to engage in controversial speech, even of the foolish or ignorant flavor, and you destroy all the rest of our freedoms, too.

Wilders is a fool to call for banning a book (but at least he isn’t calling for a holy war). Network Solutions is a bigger fool for refusing to allow that call. Muslims who do the things that spur people like Wilders to urge the banning of a book are the biggest fools of all. Fools all around.

What happened to people like Thomas Jefferson?

Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear.

If it’s blind-folded fear you want, then plenty of militant Muslims and their handmaidens at Network Solutions look ready to provide.

The opinion page of the Fresno Bee includes a weekly feature called “Meet Our Letter Writers.” Each week they do a profile of a person who writes a lot of letters to the editor. This week the featured letter-writer is someone named Tim Spangler, whose letters often drive me nuts.

The profiles in this feature always include an “Excerpt from recent letter,” which usually typifies that letter-writer’s views. Here is Mr. Spangler’s excerpt:

Once again, the ultra-liberal viewpoint of the “separation of church and state” is supposed to mean you should never dare to even mention Christianity in any public or political venue. This is nonsense and isn’t supported . . . by an accurate reading of the Constitution.

Of course, the first of those two sentences is nonsense and not supported by the Constitution. It is also completely imaginary.

No one seriously suggests that “you should never dare to even mention Christianity in any public or political venue.” In reality, advocates of the separation of church and state object only to the endorsement of Christianity, either explicitly or implicitly, by individuals who are acting within their capacity as agents of the government. As the United States Supreme Court pointed out in Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe, 530 U.S. 290 (2000), at page 302, “there is a crucial difference between government speech endorsing religion, which the Establishment Clause forbids, and private speech endorsing religion, which the Free Speech and Free Exercise Clauses protect.”

Here is a common example to illustrate the problem: Should city council meetings begin with a prayer?

Separation advocates would say no because prayers are religious exercises. They would argue that when prayers are made part of the official agenda of a governmental body such as a city council, that indicates the endorsement of religion by the council. Even when the prayers are offered by people who are not members of the city council, or when they are offered by alternating members of different religions, the practice of making prayer part of the official conduct of the council looks to many people like an endorsement of religion over non-religion. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor explained the principle clearly and succinctly in her concurring opinion in Lynch v. Donnelly, 465 U.S. 668 (1984), at page 688:

Endorsement sends a message to nonadherents that they are outsiders, not full members of the political community, and an accompanying message to adherents that they are insiders, favored members of the political community. Disapproval sends the opposite message.

In another case, Lee v. Weisman, 505 U.S. 577 (1992), about whether prayers are an appropriate part of a public school graduation ceremony, Justice David Souter, at pages 629-630, in his concurring opinion took a different approach and noted that since religious believers should not need government support for their religion, conduct that demonstrates such support is best understood as endorsement:

Religious students cannot complain that omitting prayers from their graduation ceremony would, in any realistic sense, “burden” their spiritual callings. To be sure, many of them invest this rite of passage with spiritual significance, but they may express their religious feelings about it before and after the ceremony. They may even organized a privately sponsored baccalaureate if they desire the company of like-minded students. Because they accordingly have no need for the machinery of the State to affirm their beliefs, the government’s sponsorship of prayer at the graduation ceremony is most reasonably understood as an official endorsement of religion and, in this instance, of theistic religion.

Although his reasoning is not entirely clear, I read Justice Souter to mean that if people’s religious beliefs need no affirmation by “the machinery of the State,” then such affirmation is gratuitous—that is, unnecessary to carrying out government functions—and consequently “is most reasonably understood as an official endorsement of religion.” In other words, since the affirmation of religious belief by the state is otherwise nonfunctional, it does not pass the infamous “Lemon test,” which requires that government action have a secular purose. (But I don’t have the time to do more thorough legal research, so I could be misinterpreting Souter’s opinion.)

But the United States Supreme Court in Marsh v. Chambers, 463 U.S. 783 (1983), at page 792, held that prayers to “invoke Divine guidance on a public body entrusted with making the laws” do not violate the Establishment Clause. In Marsh, the question was whether the Nebraska state legislature violated the Establishment Clause by opening each session with a prayer offered by a state-employed Christian chaplain. The Court based its decision largely on history, pointing out that “[t]he opening of sessions of legislative and other deliberative public bodies with prayer is deeply embedded in the history and tradition of this country.” (Marsh, at page 786.) Citing another case, the Court wrote:

It is obviously correct that no one acquires a vested or protected right in violation of the Constitution by long use, even when that span of time covers our entire national existence and indeed predates it. Yet an unbroken practice . . . is not something to be lightly cast aside.

(Marsh, at page 790.) The Court also pointed out that Congress, in 1789, during the same week, both approved the draft of the First Amendment that went to the states for ratification and authorized the appointment of chaplains to offer prayers at the openings of its sessions.

It can hardly be thought that . . . they intended the Establishment Clause of the Amendment to forbid what they had just declared acceptable

(Marsh, at page 790.)Relying on the Court’s opinion in Marsh, lower courts have held that “nonsectarian” prayers offered at city council meetings do not violate the Establishment Clause.

In my opinion, Marsh is not persuasive, or at least out of date. If you want to take a historical view, you can also find the approval of slavery and the limitation of civil rights to white men in the framing of the Constitution. But we have abandoned those ideas. Furthermore, if we were to follow Justice O’Connor’s reasoning in Lynch, decided a year after Marsh, and Justice Souter’s reasoning in Lee, decided nine years after Marsh, and applied those principles equally to legislative sessions and city council meetings, then even the historically traditional offering of “nonsectarian” prayers in those contexts should be a violation of the Establishment Clause.

Even “nonsectarian” prayers send a message that religious believers of all sects are favored more highly than nonbelievers. And since religious believers do not need the machinery of the state to affirm their beliefs and those prayers, offered in search of “Divine guidance,” appear to have no secular purpose, they are most reasonably understood as endorsing the distinctly religious possibility that there is such a thing as “Divine guidance.”

Returning to my original question, though, on the other side of the problem, what if a citizen bringing an issue before the city council speaks from his or her religious conviction and wants to express that while addressing the council? Should that be a problem?

Most separation advocates would see no problem there because the citizen is not acting in any capacity as an agent of government. Instead, the citizen has a right under the Free Exercise Clause to express his or her beliefs.

A trickier question is whether a member of the city council, while discussing a matter before the council, takes up an individual position based on his or her religious conviction and wants to express that during the discussion. Should the Free Exercise Clause also protect that expression? Some separation advocates might object, but in my opinion, there should be no problem.

Since the question there is whether the councilor speaks in an individual capacity or a governmental capacity, it is useful to note that if a city council operates by voting after discussing, the only expression in a government capacity should be the vote or decree itself. On the other hand, if the other councilors find the argument of religiously motivated councilor persuasive and it is clear that they vote together on the basis of shared religious belief, then there could be a violation of the Establishment Clause.

Although issues with the Establishment Clause are not exactly simple, it should be easy to see that Mr. Spangler is flat wrong to assert that religious expression “in any public or political venue” is “never” acceptable to advocates of the separation of church and state.

Like many people who are unfamiliar with the law, Mr. Spangler fails to understand the difference between speech made in an individual capacity and speech made in a governmental capacity. Separation advocates do not suggest that religious expression in an individual capacity should be limited according to its content in public or political venues. There may be constitutionally valid limitations of religious speech in those places that are based on “time, place, and manner”—such as rules that citizens only speak in city council meetings when recognized to do so—but no one really thinks that citizens should be barred from allowing their personal religious convictions from informing the opinions they bring to the public discourse.

The tricky issues arise when citizens are serving the public in a governmental role, like being a city council member. In those situations, it is easy to see how religious people who believe that most others believe as they do, or that their beliefs are favored by history, could have a hard time separating their roles as citizens from their roles as public servants. That does not make it acceptable for them to avoid the separation, though.

People who work as public servants need to recognize that members of the public should not feel that the government favors or disfavors anyone simply because they have or don’t have particular religious beliefs. Everyone must pay taxes. Everyone needs public services like police protection, sanitation, and transit. Everyone should have equal access to the instruments of government. In the judicial branch of our government, we expect judges to avoid even the appearance of bias. Why should we expect anything less from the legislative or executive branches?

Chris Hedges has written a book called I Don’t Believe in Atheists. AlterNet has posted an article adapted from the book. It’s painful to read, not because it is insightfully correct, but because it is staggeringly wrong.

Here is where Hedges started to lose me:

The New Atheists embrace a belief system as intolerant, chauvinistic and bigoted as that of religious fundamentalists. They propose a route to collective salvation and the moral advancement of the human species through science and reason.

Um, okay. I have never once met, heard of, or read books or articles by any “New Atheist” who fits that description. By the way, almost everyone, including Hedges, “defines” the “New Atheists” by listing Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris—and, apparently, by implication, anyone who has a favorable response to their books. If you are looking for an example of “gross oversimplification” or “misrepresentation,” that’s a good one. It gets worse.

Next, Hedges has a bit about one of Sam Harris’ books (he doesn’t say, but I think he’s talking about The End of Faith):

His facile attack on a form of religious belief I detest, his childish simplicity and ignorance of world affairs, as well as his demonization of Muslims, made the book tedious, at its best, and often idiotic and racist.

I cannot take seriously anyone who writes a sentence like that. The boldface I added to emphasize how thickly populated with epithets that single sentence is. “Facile” means without depth, but that could also describe Hedges’ article. “Childish,” “simplicity” (as used here), “tedious,” and “idiotic” are all subjective value judgments—also known as opinions, which cannot be supported with facts. “Demonization” and “racist” are politically charged accusations that depend not just on factual support for validity, but also on agreement as to what it means to “demonize” or to be “racist.” Good luck finding people who will make it over the hurdle of agreeing on the meaning of the terms before you ever get to the question of whether they are applicable to the given facts.

Someone who agrees with Hedges is most likely to respond to my objection by citing Dawkins’ famous sentence in a 1989 review of a book about evolution:

It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that).

The problem with that response is that Dawkins presented a general opinion that did not purport to be an indictment of any particular person, while Hedges not only appears to believe that Sam Harris, individually, is a childish, simplistic, racist, idiot, but he presents his opinion in a tone so blisteringly malicious (that even lacks the wit and elegance of Dawkins’ remark) that it reads more like an attack than an opinion or a position.

Worse, Hedges seems not to notice either, one, his logically impermissible leap from such a specific personal attack to the generalization that all “New Atheists” are the same childish, simplistic, racist, idiots he thinks Harris is, or two, that his response to Harris is not objectively factual research, but his own personal and anecdotal opinion.Hedges then says that:

Many of these atheists, like the Christian fundamentalists, support the imperialist projects and preemptive wars of the United States as a necessity in the battle against terrorism and irrational religion.

He doesn’t even bother to push his luck by saying “most,” but sticks with “many,” and even that is probably not accurate. Even among the four big names by whom the “New Atheists” are defined, I am pretty sure that Dennett and Dawkins (who are probably the far more influential of the group) oppose “imperialist projects and preemptive wars.”

Furthermore, Hedges is working from the assumption that “imperialist projects and preemptive wars” are inherently wrong. His position may be correct, but he fails to explain (at least in this article) why he holds it or what it is based on, so his complaint sounds particularly shrill, like we’re all supposed to just automatically agree with him, so it should be obvious that “many of these atheists” are childish, simplistic, racist, idiots. The problem with that kind of argument is that it fails to take seriously the fact that people do hold differing opinions. When your argument amounts to pointing at the people who disagree with you, complaining how stupid they are, and expecting it to be obvious why you are right, you have no argument. (Even if you are right, you still look foolish.)

Hedges continues:

They [the "New Atheists"] divide the world into superior and inferior races, those who are enlightened by reason and knowledge and those who are governed by irrational and dangerous religious beliefs.

That statement is just sheer projection and imagination by Hedges. Have you ever heard a modern atheist talk about reason and knowledge in terms of race? I haven’t. No one seriously contends that the irrational people in this world are irrational because of their race. Hedges is just making this stuff up. (If I had to guess why he is making this stuff up, I would speculate that he misunderstands and fears these “New Atheists,” but he is clever enough to know that alleging “racism” is an easy way inflame people quickly and completely enough that they will fail to see the factual defects in his arguments.)

I had a hard time getting through the rest of the article after those parts, but I made it. Here is another bizarre misrepresentation:

We live in an age of faith. We are assured we are advancing as a species towards a world that will be made perfect by reason, technology, science or the second coming of Jesus Christ.

Where, exactly, does he get the idea that atheists think reason, technology, and science will make our species—or anything else—perfect? Christians who believe in the second coming of Jesus Christ do believe in some future perfection, but I have never heard of any atheists who have a similar belief. Atheists tend to see the world from an evolutionary perspective, that there can be incremental adaptations over time, but not toward perfection. The advocates of reason and science recognize that these things are open to change via dissent, without terrible adverse consequences, while religion changes far more slowly and bloodily.

If some people advocate the quick destruction of those religious fundamentalists who openly threaten the violent overthrow of modern society (in which Hedges lives and seems to enjoy its tolerance), it is not because they want to stifle dissent—threatening to kill us all if we don’t convert to Islam is not “dissent.” It is because they believe, as did the U.S. government before it dropped the atomic bombs on Japan, that killing a few people to end a longer, bloodier conflict, is an acceptable tradeoff. Anyone is certainly free to disagree with that position, but it is hardly an irrational or insupportable position. It is simply a distasteful or offensive one for many people. But distasteful and offensive do not amount to “wrong.”

Hedges calls that tradeoff rationale “dehumanization.” That argument carries a lot less weight when one asks what exactly it means to “dehumanize” someone, and whether “dehumanization” is a cause of violence, a rationalization for violence, or a psychological construction imposed on the perpetrators of violence by those who disagree with their methods. The argument becomes even more problematic if one sees “dehumanization” as a continuum upon which nearly all human activity falls, rather than a binary state, where people are either “humanized” or “dehumanized.” For instance, couldn’t it be a mild form of “dehumanization” to call a thinking adult with whom one disagrees simplistic, ignorant, and childish?

Hedges says he rejects “simplistic and utopian visions.” So does every atheist I have ever met or read.

Another Fresno blogger, Scott Hatfield, has put up a post with a great embedded video that brings together both the music and the novel graphical score for Gyorgy Ligeti’s Artikulation. Check it out.  Nothing like some excellent mid-20th century experimental music to clear the aural palate. After you’ve listened to Artikulation, check out this video of one of Ligeti’s piano works, The Devil’s Staircase, for something a little more conventional, at least by way of instrumentation.

There are a couple interesting posts at Wired in the last couple days.

Today, David Brin writes to defend his idea of a “transparent society,” in which there is more surveillance, but everybody gets to see everybody else. Last week, another Wired columnist, Bruce Schneier, pointed out that the problem with Brin’s model is that “[y]ou cannot evaluate the value of privacy and disclosure unless you account for the relative power levels of the discloser and the disclosee.” He gives an example

You’re stopped by a police officer, who demands to see identification. Divulging your identity will give the officer enormous power over you: He or she can search police databases using the information on your ID; he or she can create a police record attached to your name; he or she can put you on this or that secret terrorist watch list. Asking to see the officer’s ID in return gives you no comparable power over him or her. The power imbalance is too great, and mutual disclosure does not make it OK.

Seems pretty persuasive to me. Brin disagrees. He writes in response:

Almost monthly, we hear of some angry cop arresting a citizen on trumped “privacy violations,” for using a cellphone camera or MP3 recorder to capture an interaction with authority. And each month, judges toss the arrests, forcing police to apologize. Every time. So much for those power exponents.

In other words, the judiciary provides a check. Since the cops’ arrests get “tossed,” no harm, no foul. In other words, the massively disruptive, intimidating power of the police to arrest people on trumped up charges apparently carries no value in Brin’s universe.

It is particularly interesting then to see that just yesterday there was a post on Wired describing how American police officers afraid of “unfair maligning” were able to convince the web hosting service GoDaddy to pull the plug on the website RateMyCop.com, which allowed people to “post comments about police they’ve interacted with, and rate them,” including names and badge numbers.

The owner of the website is looking for other hosting and will probably find it, but for how long? Jerry Dyer, president of the California Police Chiefs Association, and chief of police in my very own city of Fresno, wants legislation that would make such websites illegal. That seems unlikely, but the fact that Dyer and his cop cronies are so afraid of citizens shining a light on their activities sure sounds suspicious. If citizens were acting so suspiciously, the police would probably start looking for probable cause to search or arrest.

That enormous power imbalance makes Brin’s argument look, in my opinion, downright stupid. If it is acceptable for citizens to be arrested on “trumped” charges because we can rely on the judiciary to “toss” their arrests, why is it not acceptable for police officers to be “unfairly maligned”? It’s acceptable to unfairly take citizens and arrest them, disrupting their lives and tarnishing their reputations, but it’s not acceptable for people to “malign” police officers, unfairly or not? The police are immune from mere criticism while citizens are not immune to unfair arrests?

Furthermore, why should the mass of police officers in the United States have the clout to put pressure on a private company to censor a private website? Even worse, the information on RateMyCop.com is not private or secret information. It is information provided by citizens based on their interactions with the police, which the police record in reports that are public record. Except those reports are written by police, while information provided online is written by citizens. Why should the police be so worried that information not subject to their own slant is available to the public?

David Brin thinks transparency that allows citizens to look in on the government is the perfect antidote to transparency that allows the government to look in on citizens. He ignores reality. The government has more power to make people’s lives miserable. The government has more guns. The government has the privilege of keeping secrets. The government has the benefit of massive propaganda that has caused many citizens to believe falsely that police officers and military personnel are automatically respectable people because they are in uniform.

The imbalance is too great. The government retains all the meaningful power. The solution is in the rights of free speech, free press, free assembly, petition for grievances, the right to keep and bear arms, and the right of privacy. Although the last does not appear in the Constitution, it has long, underlying precedent in the common law and has been affirmed by the United States Supreme Court.

Transparency is not the solution. It is a foolish illusion propped up by people who fail to notice that governments with unlimited power to look in on citizens provide the perfect tool for idealists, utopians, and fundamentalists who are looking to control the conduct of their neighbors. The power of our government has already been seized by people who believe that sex offenders can never finish being punished, that they must not only be registered, but that they should be listed on a website so all their neighbors can find them and drive them away, or perhaps even murder them. Give government the power to gaze into people’s lives and let the judgmental, moralistic right-wing get too much power and you have the perfect recipe for a truly nightmarish existence.

I recently discovered a website that contains a series of video interviews in which eight of the nine justices of the United States Supreme Court talk about legal writing. If you are a law student or a lawyer, then I highly recommend watching them. You can pick up some tips on what judges are looking for in briefs and how to get through the process of writing a brief.

The interviews are also interesting considering the infrequency of the justices’ appearances on video. It’s a nice chance to catch some of the personality of the justices and of the Supreme Court as a whole.

Every now and then, when I have a few moments, I like to go to Google News and put in the search terms “atheism OR atheist,” just to see what kinds of things are happening. It’s usually pretty interesting stuff, from the front lines of the “culture wars.” This morning I did that search and found this letter to the editor in the Sioux City Journal:

I have a suggestion for all City Council members. The next time you feel a need to pray to a mythical cosmic being, do so in the privacy of your home or place of worship. When you come to a council meeting, be prepared to think in a logical and rational manner in addressing the problems facing this city.

Is it any wonder why people in eastern Iowa, Omaha, Sioux Falls and elsewhere see Sioux City as a laughable backwater when you have a council member worrying about satanic prayer at council meetings? In my opinion, what he said was not only nonsensical, but embarrassing.

When are conservative Bible thumpers going to understand that we all do not walk in lockstep behind their beliefs, their religion or their God. It’s called thinking independently. It is called living in a democracy.

How many cities across the United States have had this debate? Has anyone been left out?

From what I can tell, that letter is a response to a previous story in the same paper where one of the city council members worried that a proposal for each of the council members to take turns saying a “nonsectarian” prayer at the start of each meeting would allow non-Christians to speak, too:

He said he was not concerned that the current council members would say satanic prayers but said he was worried about what might happen in the future.

“If I saw someone with a satanic belief, I would have trouble living with myself. … I don’t like the opportunity this is presenting to nonbelievers. I will not give someone a stage to bash him (God).”

In other words, he would only allow a spoken prayer at the start of each city council meeting if he could guarantee it was a Christian one. He made the right decision for the wrong reason. As the letter-writer quoted above pointed out, a city council is a practical group that should spend its time solving basic local problems, not an institution of religious devotion. At least this council member recognizes that he cannot force Christianity on others.

It is fascinating how many communities have argued over this kind of thing. Maybe people think their local city council is their last foothold to keep Christianity established as the official or quasi-official religion of the land. Maybe they just don’t have any other important or pressing problems to handle in their area, so they can spend their resources trying to make political institutions seem like religious ones.

At any rate, one of the best things about the internet and about Google News is that it allows us to read about these low-stakes disputes in relatively small towns. I think it’s good to see how people tend to play out the same dramas everywhere, with their own local flavor. For instance, if you read the news item linked above, you can see that Rob Zombie, of all things, was a major part of that council member’s decision. Go figure.