Listen up, and listen good!

May 30, 2006 By Leave a Comment
Source: My Way News – Pope: How Could God ‘Tolerate’ Holocaust?
Pope Benedict XVI toured Auschwitz, and was upset by his visit.
Joseph Ratzinger, 1940"In a place like this, words fail; in the end, there can be only a dread silence, a silence which itself is a heartfelt cry to God: Why, Lord, did you remain silent? How could you tolerate all this?"
What a cowardly, evasive, self-serving, pius pious piece of shit. And what he said, too. And today, while genocide is going on in Darfur and throughout Africa, while AIDS is on its way to kill one third of the population of that sad continent, while a thoroughly ruinous, unjust, and unjustified war is being prosecuted in Iraq, while the land of the free is contemplating a final solution to the brown-skinned people who clean our toilets and serve our tacos, while the earth itself is being raped by greedy, short-sighted SOBs and hurtling toward an environmental crisis that will make the holocaust look puny in terms of numbers killed and populations extinguished, while the Pope’s own Holy Land is torn apart by suicide bombers on one hand and self-serving nativist hawks on the other, what are the Pope’s hundreds of thousands of priests thundering about in their hundreds of thousands of pulpits? Gay marriage, the right of a state to force women to carry a foetus to term, the morality of fucking with condoms and the assorted immoralities propagated by all those brown people, or turbaned people, or atheists. It makes me sick.

And to answer Ratzo’s question, perhaps God’s silence is always and only apparent in retrospect. Or it may be that God was screaming His head off then, and is screaming His head off now, and nobody’s listening. Or maybe, just maybe, the persistent delusion of the faithful that God speaks to them and their mad longing to hear His voice is deafening them to the worldwide cries of human misery.

Filed Under: observe the passing scene, reject the one true God

Separating State from Absurdity

May 19, 2006 By Leave a Comment
Source: The Raving Atheist » Archives » May 2006 » Unbright
Madeleine AlbrightJoan and I watched The Colbert Report the other night, on which Stephen interviewed Madeleine Albright, and we were impressed by her composure and her intelligence. But something about the interview, in which Ms Albright was defending her new book, The Mighty and the Almighty, bothered me. I didn’t pay much attention to my discomfort at the time, but now the Raving Atheist does a number on Albright’s performance and nails the source of my discomfort.

Separation of church and state cannot be rationally defended except on one ground: that religious beliefs are fundamentally false and worthless drivel, no more useful than astrology or alchemy. The notion that religion is the ultimate and most beneficial truth, but for some reason must be nonetheless be walled off from politics, defies common sense. Nobody advocates separation of science and state, math and state, physics and state — or even separation of the state from softer sciences such as economics and sociology.

So it’s hilarious to watch purported believers, usually religious liberals or moderates, trying to justify separation on other grounds. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, promoting her book The Mighty and the Almighty, took a crack at it the other night on The Colbert Report. Here she addresses the problem of religious elected officials keeping their faith out of public policy:

Albright: I think that we have to keep the separation of church and state, but we cannot separate people from their faith.

Colbert: Right, how do you separate people from their job . . . if the faith is in them, and they’re in their job, the transitive property of religion says their faith has got to be in their job also, right?

Her statement was complete double-talk, and Colbert nails her hard. Unfortunately, the audience reaction suggested to me that they were as clueless as Albright. They laughed at his question as if it were nonsensical (perhaps in part because of his usual mock-serious delivery), but what’s nonsensical is claiming you simultaneously “bring your faith to your job” without letting it influence you in the least.

One more reason—they’re coming fast and furious these days—that moderate religion shares much of the blame, and perhaps most of the blame, for the current ascendency of the mullahs and theocrats. We have to be courageous enough to follow the logic of enlightenment ideology to its conclusions. And the conclusion regarding religion is that belief in an all-powerful, all-good, all-knowing deity is absolutely absurd, logically and empirically, and has no place in the rational management of civic affairs. Follow the link and read the whole post; RA does a nice job analyzing the rest of the Colbert/Albright dialogue, and, in the process, reveals Albright to be more muddled than she appears, and Colbert to be immensely sharper than his stage persona.
Filed Under: clip, reject the one true God

Progress

May 14, 2006 By Leave a Comment
Source: Clusterfuck Nation by Jim Kunstler : Progress
Jim Kunstler’s grim vision of where we’re going is founded in a surprisingly upbeat idealism. I say that with sincere admiration: I don’t think that idealism is fuzzy-minded or a sign of weakness; in fact, Kunstler’s fearless confrontation of a probably disastrous future proves that. But his admiration for, and profound understanding of, progressivism is bracing. He understands clearly what the ideal of progress was based on, and the question he asks is a keen one:

The notion of Progressivism per se really comes from that brief and amazing period in the early 20th century when technological advance was lifting so many out of misery that social justice actually began to seem a plausible political goal rather than an idealist fantasy, and social reformers raced to catch up with the advances of telephones, motorcars, and sanitary engineering.

Progressivism also may have been fatally tied to the accompanying reality of robust industrial economic growth, which itself was tied to abundant new energy resources, mainly oil. The belief that more of everything would become available raised the moral issue of allocating it fairly. Since we now face declining energy resources, and perhaps long-range economic contraction, we would appear to also now face the awful task of allocating less of everything — which may be as impossible in practice as it sounds.

So the question now might be: what kind of economic justice is possible?

When things fall apart, as Kunstler believes (and argues for most persuasively), people will be in difficult straits, and will be in no mood for what passes for liberalism these days – “a political movement that is preoccupied with pseudo-psychotherapeutic exercises in self-esteem building along racial and gender lines.” And the feds aren’t going to be able to provide material help; they’ve exhausted their credit, and when the housing bubble pops, there will be nothing left – no welfare, no safety net, no chance of a federal bailout. So, how can we, in a desperate nation, maintain the progressive ideal of justice? The answer that Kunstler gives is almost hopeful, given the prevailing tone of his posts.

The entire thrust of American life the past forty years has been toward the privatization of public goods. That is why suburbia will turn out to be such a fiasco — because the public realm, and everything in it, was impoverished, turned into a universal automobile slum, while the private realm of the house and the car was exalted. The private goods of suburbia will now have to be
liquidated and we will be left with little more than parking lots and freeways too expensive to use.

A true Progressivism of the years ahead has to begin by concerning itself with a redefinition of what our public goods really are — and in practical, not abstract terms. That’s why I harp on the project of restoring the railroad system. Not only will it benefit all classes of Americans in terms of sheer getting around, but it would put tens of thousands of people to work at something with real value. It would also begin the process of healing public space ravaged by cars for almost a hundred years.

A true Progressivism would concern itself with the comprehensive reform of all land use laws, policies, codes, and tax incentives that promote more new car-dependent suburban development. A new Progressivism would put dwindling public monies into the re-activation of our harbors and shipping infrastructure. We’re going to need it. It would direct remaining agricultural subsidies into explictly organic, local farming enterprises, not to the Archer Daniel Midland corporation. It would revive the legal practice of restricting monopolies in business. It has to lead us in the direction of making other arrangements for how we live.

I think all that’s true even if Kunstler is wrong, or mostly wrong, about the magnitude of the coming crash, as I hope he is. Whatever happens, what we are witnessing now is exposing, clearly and painfully, the failure of anti-progressive conservatism. And Kunstler’s recipe for the kind of progressive thought that we need to put in its place sounds tasty to me.

Filed Under: clip, dread the rising dark, observe the passing scene

I don’t like you. (Did you hear me?)

May 12, 2006 By Leave a Comment
Source: Boing Boing: William Gibson on NSA wiretapping
It brings me low to see polls showing that the majority of my fellow citizens approve of NSA’s gill-net attack on our liberties. Cory Doctorow quotes William Gibson about how that is, and I think Gibson’s right again:

I keep seeing that in the lower discourse of the Internet, people saying, "Oh, they’re doing it anyway." In some way our culture believes that, and it’s a real problem, because evidently they haven’t been doing it anyway, and now that they’ve started, we really need to pay attention and muster some kind of viable political response.

Unlike the rest of us, Gibson’s been there and written travel books about it.
Filed Under: dread the rising dark