The Jewish Atheist

“Civilization will not attain to its perfection, until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest.”

Emile Zola

On the summer solstice, there is more light than on any other day of the year. Light is a metaphor for knowledge, so let us set aside at least one day a year to intentionally do one thing to advance the light of reason. Read a book, join a secular group, write a letter to the editor, give a talk, have a thoughtful discussion, send some money where it will do some good…anything to advance the cause. When $27 MILLION can come together to build a Museum of Creationism, it’s a sign: that we Humanists have a lot of work to do.

Let us proclaim June 21 as Reason Day. Everything else has a dedicated day, week, month, even year…so why not the one thing that makes us human, the one thing that makes us just a little more than naked apes?

But let’s not take the metaphor too far. The solstice is one of a myriad of celestial events, which are a staple of religion and its fellow whore, astrology. What’s your sign? Read my chart? There are people who actually believe this stuff…who think, without a shred of evidence, that the arrangement and movement of celestial bodies influences human events and even individual human lives. Before we knew anything, the explanation of everything was in the stars. Now we know better.

Happy Reason Day. (I’m a Leo.)

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List of “Some Favorite Oxymorons,” George Carlin, Brain Droppings

Who would have thought that a figure of speech, a rhetorical device, would not only have its day in the sun…but become a cultural meme? That’s what’s happened with oxymoron. When will tmesis have its day? Or chiasmus? Probably never.

Why they’re funny

But oxymorons have very wide cultural acceptance in the literate, English-speaking world. The second two syllables probably help the word’s memorability. But the humor consists in the fact that ONE sense of the phrase could be considered absurd.

How can you have a dry lake? Ridiculous in one sense, but this phrase is intended seriously, as a name for something. Same for elevated subway. Sometimes the oxymoronic absurdity is actually a redundancy, as with live recording. Sometimes the absurdity comes from the inconceivabilty of the combined concept — what does true add to replica…and how does it distinguish it from any other kind? It sounds like someone’s pathetic attempt to add a sense authenticity, however inappropriate. In one item on Carlin’s list the absurdity seems to reflect the audacity of PR, as in “we’re going to create a new tradition,” presumably by doing something over and over. Sometimes the oxymoron reflects a judgment, as with military justice (justice is supposedly impossible in the military).

True oxymorons

A true oxymoron directly contradicts itself. And here I have three candidates. They’re deeply embedded in the language. People actually think they mean something. But what?

The first two are a pair: metaphysical and supernatural. These words support the hypothesis that language is way too powerful for our half-formed human intellects. It allows us not only to talk about what isn’t there (but can be experienced objectively)…but also to make up stories about what isn’t there (and can be experienced only subjectively). This is the case with words that purport to refer to something “beyond” or “above” the natural, physical world (and I will stretch the boundaries as far as possible — not only the sensible, but also the knowable, inferrable world, including the weird world of quantum mechanics). So…how can something be super-natural? What is there besides the knowable/inferrable world?

These concepts are not only widely accepted…they can appear in many forms, allowing the apparent legitimacy of any absurd assertion about God and gods, such as when Francis Collins, the physicist-geneticist who thinks science and religion can co-exist, says that “his study of genes has led him to conclude that God is both outside of nature and outside of time” (quoted in Kathleeen Parker’s column, Chicago Tribune, May 11, 2009). The good professor is trafficking in bullshit. Those words don’t mean anything. And precisely HOW does the study of genes lead you to conclude anything about God? The inquiry should be replicable, in order to be scientific, no? More linguistic cotton candy.

Imaginary worlds

Besides the world of nature and physics, there is another place: the world of the imagination. Here is where religious entities exist. I challenge believers of any sort to distinguish between “metaphysical/”supernatural” and “imaginary.”

You hear these words all the time. In Chicago, there’s a huge bookstore and many small ones devoted to the metaphysical. Humanists, here’s your chance. Any time you want to get politely engaged, ask a believer where the metaphysical/supernatural supposed to be, if not in the imagination of the person using the words. Tread lightly. It’s possible that people don’t like being questioned on this subject.

Conversely, believers: if you come upon this site, explain to me the difference. What is a religious service but a joint exercise in collective imagination?

One more

And the fourth oxymoron: afterlife. When you end, the world ends — for you. For the rest of us, it goes on. That’s the only sense in which there’s an afterlife. Do the best you can in this one.

I attended a Center For Inquiry/Chicago presentation on “The Evolution of Social Intelligence,” with Dr. Dario Maestripieri of the University of Chicago.

The following is from the Center’s announcement of the event.

“After Homo sapiens, the second most successful primate on our planet is a monkey called the rhesus macaque. Rhesus macaques share with us “Machiavellian” social tendencies such as high individualism and social opportunism, tendency to form despotic and nepotistic social systems in which individuals compete for high status and power and genuine altruism is exhibited only toward close kin, strong xenophobia, and high within-group cohesiveness under conditions of external threat. Rhesus macaque societies are organized and function like armies, and this may explain why these primates have been so successful in competing with other species and colonizing new environments.

“Like rhesus macaques, humans may have spent a significant part of their evolutionary history living under conditions of intense social competition and their social intelligence may have been shaped by this environment. Although our Machiavellian intelligence is not something we can be proud of, it may be one of the reasons for our success and it may have facilitated the evolution of many other human intellectual abilities including our ability to engage in abstract thought processes, language, and moral reasoning.”

I came away even more depressed about the future of humanity. One more reason to believe we’re way more like apes than we’d like to admit (98% DNA similarity, remember), one more thing to worry about. Like us, the macaques are an aggressive, opportunistic species. They’ve made a lot of progress in the last 100 years.

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I’m flying the flag today, as I do every day. My flag is about 3×4″ inches, attached to a short plastic flagpole. It rises proudly above a cupful of pencils on my desk.

I once had a big, beautiful flag that I bought at Restoration Hardware and attached to a tree, which was unfortunately at a roadside corner of the yard, where, one night, the flag and pole were easily and literally ripped off.

If it was one of my fellow Americans who stole that flag, then this fucking idiot does not understand the simple idea that the flag STANDS (partly) for property rights, which means that you don’t steal what is mine.

But I’m not surprised. Many Americans revere the flag, but few understand what it really represents.

Fall of the Republic

At about the time our original 13 states adopted their new Constitution, in the year 1787, Alexander Tyler (a Scottish history professor at The University of Edinburgh) had this to say about “The Fall of The Athenian Republic” some 2,000 years prior.

“A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy [and is] always followed by a dictatorship.”

The Big Four

That’s because for generations now, the creeping (recently Christian) fascist welfare state has been a fact of life. Its four pillars are: the drug war, the Social Security scam, the education monopoly, and the income tax. They are so much a fact of life that nobody notices them, much less questions them, the way a fish doesn’t notice the water.

Each of these perpetuates big government and perpetuates itself, wasting billions upon billions of dollars confiscated from American taxpayers; the government now takes fully 1/6 of the nation’s wealth.

The argument against every unconstitutional government policy and function (as well as free-market alternatives) is spelled out in the vast amount of libertarian material that is available on the web and in print. There is much that is wrong with government, but to me, these four are “first among equals.” They’re about the basics in life.

Taking the money you’ve earned

You are not free to keep the money you have earned. With the power of the income tax – specifically banned by the Constitution, which had to be amended to allow it — the government can sneak into your private affairs, penalize your entrepreneurship and wealth-building, and fund the promises it has made to the electorate.

Dumbing down your kids

Most Americans are not free to choose the best educational environment for their children. The government’s near-monopoly on the formative years of education guarantees that children will be educated, by and large, by government employees, whose primary loyalty is to the unions and the Democratic Party (that’s not to say there aren’t idealistic teachers who care about the kids, but the kids don’t pay their salary or guarantee their job security).

It’s almost impossible to fire a bad teacher, and while there are many good public schools, all too many American children are forced into the mediocre public school system, which warehouses them until they can drop out. Educational reform is slow, blocked at every turn by the unions or the Democratic Party. Meanwhile, the bureaucracy turns out hordes of thoughtless, obedient consumers, soldiers and voters.

And there are endless arguments over what to teach, which there would not be if schools were merely a private enterprise among parents, teachers, and administrators.

You’re too stupid to save your money.

You are not free to plan your future. Social Security takes 14% of your income – 7% from you, an equal amount from your employer (so you never see it or miss it) – and returns a miserable investment. The government treats us like children simply who simply don’t have the discipline and foresight to save for their own future.

Social Security’s unfunded liabilities are astronomical, covered only by the government’s IOUs. The bill will be paid by the GenXers happily plugged into their iPods, and their children, and their children’s children. Benefits will go down and taxes up. The system can be phased out, but nobody dares mention it.

You don’t own your body. The government’s drug regulation is politicized, irrational, and a denial of self-ownership. There are other, better ways to ensure drug safety and purity.

The government decides what you can put into your own body. The war on drugs, endlessly perpetuated, wrecks Constitutional freedoms (as well as the economies of entire foreign countries) while criminalizing Americans who claim nothing more than the right to do as they please with their own bodies.

If you don’t own your body, who does? The state?

Drug use is a personal, moral, social, medical, and ethical issue. If it becomes a sickness, it can be treated. But it has no place on the government’s agenda. And the drug war is yet another policy that enables the government to stay large and powerful…and remain deeply invested in violence and surveillance.

Pork and empire

These four pillars are reinforced by perpetual pork, which a libertarian like me loathes the way an Orthodox Jew loathes “the other white meat”…and an imperialistic foreign policy which has cost untold American lives and treasure over the past decades.

So you think you live in a free country, do you?

You are not free to educate your children, put substances into your own body, save for your own future, and keep the money you earn. All of the platform planks of the Socialist Party of the 1920s are now law in America. Otto von Bismarck would have loved it.

A new idea: liberty

Is America a free country?

Americans are free to criticize the government, travel where they like within the country, and shop till they drop. They are relatively safe — not likely to be victims of a civil war. Not bad compared to Nigeria or Burma. We have more religious freedom than Saudi Arabia.

But these are low hurdles indeed. The Founders of this country didn’t just want to avoid a police state. They didn’t just want to avoid a religious state. They wanted to found a country on a new principle entirely: liberty.

Apparently liberty is too advanced a concept for human beings. This is very sad, but it is the unavoidable conclusion from Tytler’s observation over 200 years ago… and from Americans’ reaction to libertarian ideas articulately stated by a credible candidate like Ron Paul or Bob Barr in legitimate and wide-reaching venues and public forums. Low single digits.

What happened?

For all of my adult life, I have contributed, financially and in services, to libertarian parties, politicians, and causes. I was naïve enough to think that the liberalism of the hippies, though muted, might translate into new freedoms in America.

Instead we got a resurgence of big government, wars without end, and, most recently, aggressive, fundamentalist religion sticking its ugly claw into the already gummed up machinery of politics.

When I graduated from college in 1964, with a secular, liberal education, I would not, in my wildest dreams, have imagined that the story of Genesis would someday seriously be advanced as an alternative to evolution. But it has happened, and not only that, somehow, $27 million has come together to build a Museum of Creationism in Kentucky.

For years, I followed and supported thoughtful, compassionate, knowledgeable candidates like David Nolan, Ron Paul, and the incomparable Harry Browne, who died with his dream of liberty unfulfilled, though he preached it patiently and tirelessly, until the very end.

I learned the libertarian persuasion techniques of Michael Cloud, who is still out there pitching libertarian persuasion techniques. I also learned that people’s political beliefs are mostly not amenable to persuasion, no matter how articulate.

I’m still behind the Libertarian candidates. I’m still a committed member of the libertarian movement. But I’ve grown much more pessimistic, by which I mean realistic.

Somebody else’s turn to be idealistic

Now it’s somebody else’s chance to be disillusioned (or to prevail – that would be nice, for a change).

I was extremely naïve. I didn’t realize that in every age cohort, there are self-selected busybody control freaks who become politicians. They may cloak their will to power in nice sounding phrases like “public service,” but in the vast majority of cases, the only public they are serving is themselves and their cronies, with the voters as an afterthought.

Roughly a third of the Republican base consists of evangelicals, who enthusiastically commingle repressive church and oppressive state. All but lost in the maelstrom of toughness and Christianity is an authentic Republican ideal: small government.

The Founders of this country did want more than a police state, more than a monarchy, more than a theocracy, more even than a socialist paradise: they dreamed of a free country.

I have a dream.

I too have a dream, my brothers and sisters.

I have a dream that one day Americans will love and respect their government because it defends their liberties and does not tax and regulate them to death and lets them keep the money they earn, requiring only what it needs to carry out its basic Constitutional functions.

I have a dream…of an America in which people are judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. The noble ideal of civil rights has morphed into the ugly reality of affirmative action and “diversity.” Today’s identity politics, pandered to by shameless politicians, only divides the country and blurs what we have in common.

I have a dream…of an America where people take care of each other, generously, voluntarily, and compassionately, through charity and service. Government charity is not charity. Its monies are taken by force and used inefficiently. If the government did not take so much of its citizens’ money in taxes, they would have more to spend helping each other, which is what local private charity does do well.

I have a dream…of an America that truly walks humbly among nations, does not inject itself into the internal affairs of other nations, does not start wars with other nations that have not attacked it, does not manipulate the governments of other nations for the sake of its drug war, its oil gluttony, or its global empire…an America that combines strength, courage, diplomacy, and nonviolence…an America that is the proud leader of the world and a beacon of freedom, instead of the hated, feared global bully that it is today.

I have a dream…of an America in which the Constitution is clearly the guiding law of the land, and every question of public policy comes down to whether the proposal will promote liberty and is in harmony with the Constitution.

If any libertarian were President, America would change in this direction: if anything is not ACTUALLY in the Constitution (farm subsidies, education, corporate welfare…the list is endless) – no spin allowed, and non-appearance does NOT mean it’s Constitutional — then it is phased out, using its already generous budgets to give everyone generous severance packages. It’s not that difficult if even I can come up with a plausible action plan.

That America is far off at best…and may be an impossible dream.

Creeping Christian fascism

The dream of liberty will have to live on in the minds and hearts of the few, perhaps always as a dream, since the Christian fascist welfare state seems to be extending its vile, poisonous roots into the very soil of our country. And government programs, once established, are often almost impossible to terminate. Every agency, subsidy, handout, and benefit acquires its own constituency that ensures that it will endure unto perpetuity.

Could anything change the course of America’s decline? Well, I always answer with my Three C’s: Cash, Celebrity, and Circumstance (or maybe Catastrophe, like the government going broke). But either of the first two would do it – for example, if Clint Eastwood ran (and I know he’s a libertarian in sentiment), he would win and change the course of history. But Clint has more important things to do.

Keep hope alive!

So I guess we come back to keeping ideas alive until America is ready for them. I’m always reminded of the people in Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451” who had memorized the books that had been burned. They then taught the books they had memorized to other people, especially young children.

So too with liberty. I found out that liberty is not an obvious idea to everyone, that many people really like the government to do things for them with other people’s money, and that – most importantly — there is, in their age cohort too, emerging, like hordes of disgusting insects from their slimy pupa shells (as our cicadas did a couple of summers ago), an army of busybody control freaks who will become their generation’s politicians and keep the current corrupt system in place by rewarding everyone who supports it.

It took thousands of years to its develop institutions like the rule of law, equality before the law, rights of women and minorities, universal suffrage, peaceful elections, and many more pieces of an advanced, liberal, secular society. Most of the world still cannot. It was idiotic for Bush and cronies to think that Iraq could do so overnight.

Together, these factors can create the delicate web of consensus and consent that keep our society in place, but, as Tytler noted, the system contains the seeds of its own destruction, for as soon as people discover they can buy politicians, the game is over, and liberty is dead.

Right now, I would say it’s in the ICU and there isn’t too much hope. But what do I know? The nice thing about pessimism is that one may be pleasantly surprised – but is rarely disappointed.

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Alan M. Perlman is a secular humanist speaker and author — most recently, of An Atheist Reads the Torah: Secular Humanistic Perspectives on the Five Books of Moses. For information, go to www.trafford.com/06-0056.

“All during the controversy about admitting questionably-qualified candidates to the U. of I., I’ve kept silent, smiling cynically to myself that people are shocked — shocked! — that the college admissions process is biased and based on many factors other than academic achievement. But now that it’s gotten to the “heads must roll” stage, it’s time to remember that college admissions have for decades been based on the hypocritical racism called affirmative action. The U. of Michigan drew controversy a few years ago for being both blatant and unapologetic about the policy, which — talk about unfairness — makes today’s applicants pay for the sins committed by other people, generations ago. But the reverse racism has had such enormous social approval for so long that it’s become an unquestionable given, no matter how many people are unfairly harmed by it. By giving the U. of I. story front-page status, you make it seem almost criminal, and you burnish your status as a crusading newspaper. But it’s trivial compared to monumental injustice of affirmative action. But you won’t dare to attack this most sacred of sacred cows.”

Letter to Chicago Tribune, June 11, 2009

Here in Illinois, the behind-the-scenes intervention of University of Illinois trustees in the admissions process is HUGE news. Applicants with questionable qualifications were admitted because of what we here in the Corruption Capital of the US (poissibly excepting Washington DC) call “clout.” In response I wrote the above letter, which was published today.

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“After the Holocaust, the best thing you could say about God is that he doesn’t exist.”

Rabbi Sherwin T. Wine

As long as we’re celebrating the successful invasion that began the liberation of Europe from the Nazi plague, let us also remember the parallel war that was being fought — a war of genocide and extermination, primarily against Jews.

I was first exposed to the ghastly details of the Holocaust in Leon Uris’ Exodus and later in Jack Eisner’s Survivor: the cattle cars, the snarling Nazi dogs, the gassing, the tortures, the soap, the tattoos, the rapes, the lampshades, The Beast of Belsen (and the Bitch), the hideous experiments, murder by slave labor, the countless acts of humiliation and sadism. In Stephen King’s Apt Pupil, a nice, clean-cut California teenager becomes obsessed with the Holocaust…and then discovers a concentration camp commandant hiding under an assumed identity in his neighborhood. In exchange for secrecy, he gets tales of “the gooshy parts.”

I try not to think about the gooshy parts. Somehow Uris’ portrayals of what it was like to be naked and gassed to death in darkness were and are very real for me.

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I like and respect the Prez so much that I offer him my speeechwriting services gratis for the upcoming memorial.

My fellow Americans, I have just visited the Middle East, where I spoke of the need for peace via political means and strategies that are obvious to everyone. What we need is the “will to peace…” — for everybody to get together and simply do what needs to be done…whereas what we have now is a standoff and the will to war.

On this day we mourn and thank those who gave their lives in one of the most massive invasions in history: the landing of over a hundred thousand Allied troops on the beaches of Normandy. One of the developers of the atom bomb said he did so partly to keep from having to fight another D-Day. On that horrible day, 1,400 Americans (as many as 2,500 according to another estimate) lost their lives, because another nation had been gripped by a mass psychosis — a racist, militaristic xenophobia driven by an insane ideology — which could be cured only through destruction.

D-Day teaches us many lessons, foremost among which is the pointlessnes of war. Fifty million people died in World War II, sometimes at the rate of 15,000 a day. And for what? Because not one but two nations had to be rescued from the mass madness of fascism (in Japan’s case it was more like feudalism plus emperor-god) and dragged into the Enlightenment and beyond. Milton Friedman has argued that the war could have been prevented by economic means — starting, I would guess, with not humiliating and bankrupting Germany after World War I.

But even though Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and the Soviet Union are gone…and China is getting more and more liberal…we are still waging a world war. This time the enemy is not the religion of the state but religion itself — religion based on fantasy, religion that claims final truth for itself and wants to clear the world of all unbelievers.

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