www.JoeCobb.com

by Sam Harris
Los Angeles Times, Dec.24, 2006

Several polls indicate that the term “atheism��? has acquired such an extraordinary stigma in the United States that being an atheist is now a perfect impediment to a career in politics (in a way that being black, Muslim or homosexual is not). According to a recent Newsweek poll, only 37% of Americans would vote for an otherwise qualified atheist for president.

Atheists are often imagined to be intolerant, immoral, depressed, blind to the beauty of nature and dogmatically closed to evidence of the supernatural.

Even John Locke, one of the great patriarchs of the Enlightenment, believed that atheism was “not at all to be tolerated��? because, he said, “promises, covenants and oaths, which are the bonds of human societies, can have no hold upon an atheist.��?

That was more than 300 years ago. But in the United States today, little seems to have changed. A remarkable 87% of the population claims “never to doubt��? the existence of God; fewer than 10% identify themselves as atheists — and their reputation appears to be deteriorating.

Given that we know that atheists are often among the most intelligent and scientifically literate people in any society, it seems important to deflate the myths that prevent them from playing a larger role in our national discourse.

Myth 1: Atheists believe that life is meaningless.

On the contrary, religious people often worry that life is meaningless and imagine that it can only be redeemed by the promise of eternal happiness beyond the grave. Atheists tend to be quite sure that life is precious. Life is imbued with meaning by being really and fully lived. Our relationships with those we love are meaningful now; they need not last forever to be made so. Atheists tend to find this fear of meaninglessness … well … meaningless.

Myth 2: Atheism is responsible for the greatest crimes in human history.

People of faith often claim that the crimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot were the inevitable product of unbelief. The problem with fascism and communism, however, is not that they are too critical of religion; the problem is that they are too much like religions. Such regimes are dogmatic to the core and generally give rise to personality cults that are indistinguishable from cults of religious hero worship. Auschwitz, the gulag and the killing fields were not examples of what happens when human beings reject religious dogma; they are examples of political, racial and nationalistic dogma run amok. There is no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.

Myth 3: Atheism is dogmatic.

Jews, Christians and Muslims claim that their scriptures are so prescient of humanity’s needs that they could only have been written under the direction of an omniscient deity. An atheist is simply a person who has considered this claim, read the books and found the claim to be ridiculous. One doesn’t have to take anything on faith, or be otherwise dogmatic, to reject unjustified religious beliefs. As the historian Stephen Henry Roberts (1901-71) once said: “I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.��?

Myth 4: Atheists think everything in the universe arose by chance.

No one knows why the universe came into being. In fact, it is not entirely clear that we can coherently speak about the “beginning��? or “creation��? of the universe at all, as these ideas invoke the concept of time, and here we are talking about the origin of space-time itself.

The notion that atheists believe that everything was created by chance is also regularly thrown up as a criticism of Darwinian evolution. As Richard Dawkins explains in his marvelous book, “The God Delusion,��? this represents an utter misunderstanding of evolutionary theory. Although we don’t know precisely how the Earth’s early chemistry begat biology, we know that the diversity and complexity we see in the living world is not a product of mere chance. Evolution is a combination of chance mutation and natural selection. Darwin arrived at the phrase “natural selection��? by analogy to the “artificial selection��? performed by breeders of livestock. In both cases, selection exerts a highly non-random effect on the development of any species.

Myth 5: Atheism has no connection to science.

Although it is possible to be a scientist and still believe in God — as some scientists seem to manage it — there is no question that an engagement with scientific thinking tends to erode, rather than support, religious faith. Taking the U.S. population as an example: Most polls show that about 90% of the general public believes in a personal God; yet 93% of the members of the National Academy of Sciences do not. This suggests that there are few modes of thinking less congenial to religious faith than science is.

Myth 6: Atheists are arrogant.

When scientists don’t know something — like why the universe came into being or how the first self-replicating molecules formed — they admit it. Pretending to know things one doesn’t know is a profound liability in science. And yet it is the life-blood of faith-based religion. One of the monumental ironies of religious discourse can be found in the frequency with which people of faith praise themselves for their humility, while claiming to know facts about cosmology, chemistry and biology that no scientist knows. When considering questions about the nature of the cosmos and our place within it, atheists tend to draw their opinions from science. This isn’t arrogance; it is intellectual honesty.

Myth 7: Atheists are closed to spiritual experience.

There is nothing that prevents an atheist from experiencing love, ecstasy, rapture and awe; atheists can value these experiences and seek them regularly. What atheists don’t tend to do is make unjustified (and unjustifiable) claims about the nature of reality on the basis of such experiences. There is no question that some Christians have transformed their lives for the better by reading the Bible and praying to Jesus. What does this prove? It proves that certain disciplines of attention and codes of conduct can have a profound effect upon the human mind. Do the positive experiences of Christians suggest that Jesus is the sole savior of humanity? Not even remotely — because Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims and even atheists regularly have similar experiences.

There is, in fact, not a Christian on this Earth who can be certain that Jesus even wore a beard, much less that he was born of a virgin or rose from the dead. These are just not the sort of claims that spiritual experience can authenticate.

Myth 8: Atheists believe that there is nothing beyond human life and human understanding.

Atheists are free to admit the limits of human understanding in a way that religious people are not. It is obvious that we do not fully understand the universe; but it is even more obvious that neither the Bible nor the Koran reflects our best understanding of it. We do not know whether there is complex life elsewhere in the cosmos, but there might be. If there is, such beings could have developed an understanding of nature’s laws that vastly exceeds our own. Atheists can freely entertain such possibilities. They also can admit that if brilliant extraterrestrials exist, the contents of the Bible and the Koran will be even less impressive to them than they are to human atheists.

From the atheist point of view, the world’s religions utterly trivialize the real beauty and immensity of the universe. One doesn’t have to accept anything on insufficient evidence to make such an observation.

Myth 9: Atheists ignore the fact that religion is extremely beneficial to society.

Those who emphasize the good effects of religion never seem to realize that such effects fail to demonstrate the truth of any religious doctrine. This is why we have terms such as “wishful thinking��? and “self-deception.��? There is a profound distinction between a consoling delusion and the truth.

In any case, the good effects of religion can surely be disputed. In most cases, it seems that religion gives people bad reasons to behave well, when good reasons are actually available. Ask yourself, which is more moral, helping the poor out of concern for their suffering, or doing so because you think the creator of the universe wants you to do it, will reward you for doing it or will punish you for not doing it?

Myth 10: Atheism provides no basis for morality.

If a person doesn’t already understand that cruelty is wrong, he won’t discover this by reading the Bible or the Qur’an — as these books are bursting with celebrations of cruelty, both human and divine. We do not get our morality from religion. We decide what is good in our good books by recourse to moral intuitions that are (at some level) hard-wired in us and that have been refined by thousands of years of thinking about the causes and possibilities of human happiness.

We have made considerable moral progress over the years, and we didn’t make this progress by reading the Bible or the Qur’an more closely. Both books condone the practice of slavery — and yet every civilized human being now recognizes that slavery is an abomination. Whatever is good in scripture — like the golden rule — can be valued for its ethical wisdom without our believing that it was handed down to us by the creator of the universe.

Copyright 2006 Sam Harris

Here in Arizona, it is no surprise that many illegal immigrants are young workers, and some of those seek agricultural employment. Back in 1982-83, when NAFTA was first being talked about, I was working in the State Department. We talked about the comparative advantage of more open trade to each country, and one of Mexico’s advantages is agriculture - climate and low cost labor.

Yet, in the past 20 years, the U.S. Senate (in particular) and the House have continued to increase subsidies for agriculture. Look at the votes of the Senators from Southeastern and North Central agricultural states, which are losing population due to increased productivity in agriculture. Less labor is needed; fewer jobs; Americans are moving to cities and low cost labor is no longer plentiful on large farms when seasonal demands arise.

Subsidized changes in the United States have also affected Mexico’s economy.

Rural Mexican farmers have been particularly hurt by the removal of import duties and quotas. Mexican city dwellers are benefitting from lower food prices, but rural farmers are suffering a drop in their monetary income, although in their villages they are still self-sufficient but at a poverty level.

Part of the “transition costs” in any opening of trade is the adjustment that formerly protected domestic industries must face. In Mexico, the adjustment for rural Mexico has often been that U.S.-subsidized corn, beans, and rice are cheaper in the cash/city market than home grown staples. Transportation and storage costs are also a factor, since efficient systems from the U.S. displace more primitive delivery from rural Mexico.

Labor productivity in rural regions of Mexico is often low, as Nobel-laureate Theodore Schultz demonstrated by his research into “penny agriculture.” There is not sufficient marginal incentive for those workers at home. They look north for job opportunities, in American subsidized agriculture and more advanced work, like construction - subsidized by our residential housing angels, Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac?

Why are these Latino workers “illegal”? It is because for the next 20 years the racial/national visa quota from Mexico has been filled up by the elderly relatives of their green-carded children and grandchildren already here, under the “family unification” prime directive of U.S. immigration law. There are no available visas for young workers - the kind who might legally save Social Security’s solvency. There are no legal work visas.

So, thank you, agricultural (corporate?) welfare queens, and U.S. Senator Join Kyle. You have given us not only more expensive food, but also an illegal immigration problem. [see my further comment below, about Kyle]

Published in OpinionJournal’s Political Diary, Dec.8, 2006
by Russell Seitz

When it comes to climate change, not much is new under the sun. In 1751 Ben Franklin spied civilization altering the balance of solar energy “by clearing America of woods and so making this side of our globe reflect a brighter light.” When the first Earth Day dawned ten generations later, it led to America’s Clean Air Act, which has since cut sulfur dioxide emissions by ten million tons a year and — incidentally — contributed to global warming by letting more light penetrate the atmosphere.

One fact of natural history is that a relatively small mass can cast a great deal of shade. Combusting just a few tons of jet fuel can transiently cast a mile-wide sun-reflecting contrail from coast to coast. Now Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen and global warming whistleblower Tom Wigley have floated the notion of having aircraft generate stratospheric sulfur aerosols to stop global warming cold. “It was meant to startle the policymakers,” says Prof. Crutzen. “If they don’t take action much more strongly than they have in the past, then in the end we have to do experiments like this.”

Mr. Crutzen’s attempt to pry open the narrow orthodoxies of the global warming crowd comes not a moment too soon. Daring yet affordable ideas don’t figure in Jay Rockefeller and Olympia Snowe’s
dogma-enforcing attack on ExxonMobil [prior article]. Al Gore excluded them from “An Inconvenient Truth” too. But Prof. Crutzen is not alone. Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson soberly observes that it’s unwise to regard global warming as “a moral crusade when it’s really an engineering problem. The inconvenient truth is that if we don’t solve the engineering problem, we’re helpless.”

If the same atmospheric computer models the global warming worriers invoke are to be believed, a few pounds of sulfur per capita per year globally — in some decades, major volcanic eruptions naturally inject far more — might be enough to arrest the melting of the polar ice caps. Such an aerosol arctic sunbonnet might cost roughly as much as the power bill for running the Internet. Little wonder, then, that Mr. Gore and his communitarian cohort are aghast. Such modest post-modern proposals threaten to cut their fantasies of Deep Green societal control — and moral superiority — down to economic size.

I turned 62 in February 2006 and took early Social Security in June. Here are a few observations about doing this, and whether to wait until age 63 or 64. I definitely endorse taking it earlier than your “normal retirement age,” but you have to consider all the tax aspects of the Form 1040, Line 20 tax. [See my comment below; I just reversed the early decision and repaid the benefits I received for the first part of this year.]

Based on my experience, I definitely recommend having your early retirement benefits begin punctually on January 1, not in mid-year. [This suggestion is true regardless of the age you begin.] Go to your local SSA office about two months before you want your benefits to begin. I started mine in mid-year and it made my “earnings test” rules more complex. I am now doing things like figuring out how to postpone income about three more weeks, until next year. (We all hate the income tax!)

I recommend you should drain out - distribute - all of the funds from your traditional IRAs and 401(k) plans before beginning SS benefits. Your after-career life should begin as a vacation. Take a vacation and think about what you want to do as an “after career.” If you wait to start distributing IRA and 401(k) funds, you will end up paying a higher tax rate on your distributions.

You can finance your first few years after age 62 by drawing down tax-sheltered savings. Allow Social Security to phase out its discount penalty. When you take early retirement from Social Security, they impose a reduced pension for the rest of your life. The longer you wait, this penalty goes away. Even after your “normal retirement age,” your monthly pension will continue to increase based on the price index formula.

Your financial planning should emphasize distributing retirement savings from traditional IRAs and 401(k) plans before starting Social Security, because these are taxable. After you start to draw Social Security benefits, the marginal tax rate on these distributions will be higher.

I didn’t drain my traditional IRA, but I wish I had done. [I am now going to take IRA distributions instead of SS for a year or so.] But I am thoroughly enjoying doing absolutely nothing by way of earning money, except for my H&R Block hobby-job, which I love. Free advice and sharp tax analysis. I am also highly opinionated.

Come make an appointment to talk with me about your personal income tax situation, from a fully confidential libertarian point of view. Phone 623-872-9112.

My office is on 107th Avenue, northwest side of Indian School Road, in Phoenix, 85037.

I posted Dec.4 a comment on the Yahoo email discussion list of the Libertarian Party of Orange County about the 2008 LP candidates for president and vice president. I learned Greg Raymer, the 2004 World Champion of Poker, is intested in running for VP. Steve Kubby is running for the top job, and so is Christine Smith of Colorado. I don’t know her, but I like her platform, which openly supports the political and social equality of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered individuals.

Christine Smith writes me and says she is heterosexual. Glad to hear it. I hope nobody would be offended to be called gay; it should not be a focus for any kind of discrimination, just as nobody should be offended to be called Asian, African, European, or “hill billy” (my own ethnic ancestry).

If Christine was actually offended that I implied something, I would ask why? If she wants an apology, I am happy to offer it right here, right now. But I would ask why it is offensive in the first place? If anyone is proud to be a social progressive (as I am), it bothers me not at all if anyone thinks I am gay, transgendered, or whatever.

After all, we are talking about a category of vilified people. I remember the story about the King of Denmark saying if Nazi occupiers of his country in 1942 made Danish Jews wear yellow Mogan David star badges, all Danes should wear one. That example is what I am advocating, rather than affirming my non-membership in the persecuted group.

Intolerance is intolerable!

In this season of holiday joy and gifts, the image of Santa Claus is everywhere. The jolly old elf and his reindeer-drawn sleigh, his oversized bag of toys, and his “ho ho ho� are passed on by parents to children as part of our cultural tradition.

Since the 1930s, the U.S. government has gotten into the Santa Claus game by increasing the generosity of welfare and subsidy programs. The Congress in recent years has increased government spending to $2,654 billion, doubling the size of government during the Clinton and Bush administrations. Politicians run for re-election on the record of how much of other people’s tax money they have captured for spending back home, just like 535 little Santa Claus elves cheerily making gifts to the happy voters. The Santa Claus spirit is shown by infamous spending earmarks such as the “bridge to nowhere� in Alaska and thousands of other special pork projects, and expensive new entitlements like the Medicare prescription drug benefit.

In the Santa Claus story, however, the toys and gifts he brings are made by magic, so they are free. In the real world, parents have to crowd into stores during the busy retail season and pay real money for those things. Yet, magical thinking still dominates our nation’s political philosophy, at least in regard to government spending.

But the Santa Claus story should be taken seriously as an example of political reality in the United States today for other reasons, too. There are increasing examples of how our government is more closely resembling the mythical figure, and not in a good way. Santa Claus is becoming “Santa Claws.�

Remember the lyrics of the famous song,

He knows when you are sleeping;
He knows when you’re awake.
He knows when you’ve been bad or good,
So be good for goodness sake!

In the past six years, if not for as long as memory will serve, this is now the story of our government. The idea that Americans have some constitutional rights to private property and personal freedom are becoming mere historical footnotes. “Santa Claws� has come to town, and he is gathering information about every aspect of our lives. “He knows when you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake.�

The new Military Commissions law, passed earlier this year, has given the president the power to order the indefinite detention of any person, anywhere in the world—including U.S. citizens in the United States—without the right to a trial and without the historic right of habeas corpus. The president, or his officers, need only certify that one is an “enemy combatant,� which is a term not defined in the law.

Of course, this power will never be used by our president for bad purposes; no, of course not. Only terrorists will be imprisoned and tortured, but environmental activists should be careful, too. Right-to-life activists who protest outside abortion clinics need to watch their step. If the military draft is established again, as Congressman Charles Rangel (D-NY) wants, be careful not to protest or resist the draft, as millions of Americans did in the 1970s.

The USA PATRIOT Act adopted a few years ago provides for warrantless searches of our homes and businesses, along with spying on our library records, our Internet activity, and our bank accounts. The Real ID act provides for a nationwide system of photo identification, and Congress is seriously looking at a national data bank of DNA and other biological identification measures. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2004 that Larry Hilbel did not have the right to refuse to show identification to a police officer, even though he was not suspected of any crime.

A national computerized data bank is being set up to identify everyone who can be legally authorized to work in this country, as part of the new focus on illegal immigration. Medical records are being computerized and centralized, for greater efficiency in emergency treatment of accidents and illness. Pets are being implanted with radio frequency identification chips, and some serious proposals have been made to use these devices on children, who are at risk of abduction and abuse.

How did we manage to transform this “land of the free� into a modern totalitarian state? Perhaps we just invited Santa Claws to come to town and he “knows when we’ve been bad,� or at least when we are thinking about the freedom we have lost.