Random Walk

My Sarah Palin Prediction

2009-07-10T05:11:00.000-07:00

There is a fair amount of speculation as to what rationale Sarah Palin had for resigning her position as governor of Alaska 17 months before the end of her first term. After all, if she is trying to create a path to the White House, this does not seem to be the most reasonable way to do it. I certainly couldn't understand it, and I was perfectly happy to let her boneheaded decision destroy her political career. I would rather not have someone in the Oval Office who uses Revelation rather than the Constitution as her guiding document.

But then it occurred to me: She does have a plan. Or, more accurately, someone else has a plan for her, and she took the bait. So here it is, my prediction for Sarah Palin's intermediate professional future. I have to admit that it has me kind of worried.

I suspect that ever since her ill-fated run for the vice presidency, Mrs. Palin has been courted by Fox News, the only network she probably believes has given her a fair shake. I suspect that she has been offered her own show on that network, one with a much larger audience than she commands in Alaska, a much higher salary ... and a wardrobe allowance.

My guess is that she has decided to accept that offer. There may be a waiting period that will throw people off the scent, lest the good people of Alaska think that their governor bailed for a high-paying gig on television. But if Sarah Palin has a "higher calling," I believe that this is it. It is a great positioning plan.

With her small-town wisdom carefully scripted for her and an assortment of guests to make her points for her, Mrs. Palin will almost certainly have a massive hit on her hands. She'll be positioned as a champion of the common people, and she will have the opportunity to craft and hone a political philosophy that is focus-group tested to appeal to those people. It is the best plan possible for a 2012 run at the White House.

Guessing the Contents of the Economic Cauldron

2009-03-04T11:41:00.000-08:00

One cannot escape mention of the economy in the news today, so I thought I would write a little bit about it. Let me begin, however, by saying that those looking for expert advice here are bound to be disappointed. After all, I don't really know anything about economics. Then again, neither do economists, so I'll go ahead and dig right in.

The first thing that needs to be recognized about the economy is that it is a fantastically complex system. It is so complex, in fact, that it is often difficult for everyone to agree about what state it is in. When looking at temperature data, for instance, one can gain a reasonable idea about how hot or cold it is without first needing to go outside. That is because temperature is a single scalar measure, even though the process it describes is complex beyond belief. There is no such single measure for the state of the economy.

What if there were such a measure? What might it look like? Well, we would likely have a formula of the form E(t) = E(x(t)), where x(t) is some n-dimensional vector that is allowed to vary with time, whose components are operated on to produce a scalar result. (This function, then, would be a mapping from n-dimensional space to one-dimensional space.) If we were lucky, the function would tell us unambiguously how healthy the economy was at any time.

What might our vector x(t) be made up of? Well, one might reasonably expect it to include information about unemployment, gross domestic product, inflation, national debt, total market value across the stock exchanges, etc. (These variables are known as economic indicators, and they are often considered separately, in one form or another, as indirect measurements of economic health.) At his first prime-time press conference since taking office, President Obama was asked what Americans should look for as an indicator that the economic stimulus was working. It was a good question, and although I think the president did quite well at this press conference, I do think that the answer he gave—namely, that one should look primarily at job creation—could have been improved. More on this in a moment.

Let us return to the economic equation that we have imagined. We have no idea what it would actually look like. In other words, we don't know what is being done to the components of x(t) to produce the output. We know the ingredients, but we don't know how to combine and cook them. But we can suspect that the function would be highly nonlinear with lots of interdependencies between components. (For this reason, we might suspect that no such single equation can exist.)

One thing we can do, however, is use our intuition to guess what might happen to the value of E(t) if we were to nudge one of the components of x(t). Considering one variable at a time, while holding all others constant, is a process known as partial differentiation in mathematics. It is an interesting and valuable procedure, but it gives us, at best, only partial information. (After all, what we have chosen to remain constant may be more important than the variable we are manipulating.)

Intuitively, if unemployment goes up, that is bad for the economy, so the value of E(t) should go down. (The partial derivative of E with respect to the variable we have chosen to represent unemployment would therefore be negative.) The same should be the case for inflation, national debt, and a number of other things you can probably easily identify. Things like GDP, on the other hand, should show the opposite behavior.

I once again have to stress that no such measure exists. If it did, we could easily (well, more easily, at least) identify periods of recession or growth (which would more accurately be represented by dE/dt, the derivative of our indicator with respect to time) and perhaps more easily come up with ways to fix a sagging economy by identifying the components that are dragging it down by the greatest degree. But even without such a measure, we intuitively know what factors should positively influence the state of the economy and what factors should negatively influence it; it is these things that will provide our indicators. President Obama correctly mentioned one of them to look for. Let these things be our guide, and let us learn to rely less on the so-called experts on the financial networks, none of whom seem to be able to predict anything at a rate better than chance.

Let me return to our economic formula and motivate it with an example from the NFL. Anyone who has watched a televised professional football game has, at one time or another, seen a statistic called a passer rating (or quarterback rating). It is the output of a formula that relates a quarterback's completion percentage, the yards gained after a completion (for whatever that has to do with the quarterback), percentage of touchdown passes per attempt, and the percentage of interceptions per attempt.

In the NFL, this rating has a minimum value of zero and a maximum value of 158.3, which is often referred to as a “perfect” rating. Mathematically, however, this function is unbounded, which means that there really is no maximum or minimum value if one is allowed to plug in any number for the variables. There are restrictions on what one can plug in for football-related variables, however. It is also the case that if each component goes over a certain amount, it is, for some reason, automatically set to 2.375. I actually think it would be interesting to reset the quarterback rating to the maximum value possible given the rules of the game (no one could gain more than 100 yards after a catch, for instance). By my calculation, the maximum possible quarterback rating would then be about 842.9.

What is the point? Well, the passer rating is one example of a function that maps many-dimensional (that is, represented by many variables) space to one-dimensional space. It is also an indicator, of sorts, and one can get a reasonable feel for how a quarterback's game went just from looking at the value of this one umbrella statistic. Although no such friendly scale exists for measuring the state of the economy, I believe it would be worthwhile for the government's economic experts to explain the state of the economy to the public with some awareness of how such a scale might behave.

It is also worthwhile—but perhaps not comforting—to consider whether any function that would describe our economy is bounded from above. (Personally, I believe that a function that describes any real economy accurately would map the economic domain to a bounded set in the range. It is therefore possible for an economy to peak and never return to the summit, just as it is possible for an economy to never reach its peak, despite its being finite and theoretically reachable.) Real economies rely on limited resources, and although the economy is not, strictly speaking, a zero-sum game, it is generally true that an increase in wealth at one point will correspond to a decrease in wealth somewhere else. With only so much potential for wealth in the world, any measure of economic health that takes inflation into account should have a ceiling.

The economy is a chaotic system that often reacts to human psychology more significantly than it does to any built-in dynamic component of an economic system. (Consider, for instance, that economic crises are often referred to as panics.) Among the participants in the economy, a better understanding of the nature of such a system, including an appreciation for how chaotic its behavior can be, can help tailor the effect of the one component we have a healthy measure of control over—the human component.

Sadly, the human component with the greatest effect on the economy is not the same component that is most affected by the economy. What we need, then, is a sense of calm among those whose previous successes were often built on frenzy. We endured years of trickle-down economics. Does our economic future depend on trickle-up equanimity?

Thank You, America

2008-11-06T08:05:00.000-08:00

The long, twisted marathon that was the 2008 presidential campaign is now over, and Barack Obama has been elected our next president. I am writing this with a profound sense of relief at the outcome, and I am heartened by the reaction of people around the world.

In one day, the United States has earned a tremendous amount of worldwide goodwill ... and it didn't even take a tragedy for us to get it. I am confident that President Obama will be a better steward of that benevolence and that America will once again be seen as a beacon of hope around the world, not the font of disappointment it has recently been.

Mr. Obama's opponents frequently criticized the messiah-like treatment he was receiving, so one would be wise to use caution in lavishing praise on our new president before he has even taken office. Instead I will praise the tens of millions of Americans who used this election to vote their hopes instead of their fears. And for those whose votes went the other way, I urge you to stay tuned and give the new president a chance. You might be pleasantly surprised.

Colin Powell Endorses Barack Obama

2008-10-19T13:50:00.000-07:00

In just over seven minutes, Gen. Colin Powell makes the best case I have heard for why Barack Obama should be the next president.

The Supernaturally Qualified Sarah Palin

2008-09-25T21:50:00.000-07:00

You already know she is a young-Earth creationist. You already know that she is expecting the return of Jesus in her lifetime. But maybe you don't yet know why she is the best candidate to lead the country through the "end times." In the video below, you'll learn that Alaska will be a "refuge for the lower 48," and that Sarah's friends in Wasilla are prepared for the monumental task of ministering to those at risk of being on the wrong end of God's almighty smite stick.

There are several things worth noting in the video. First, a commercial for the religious group Palin is supporting (the video begins with her speaking at the group's "graduation" ceremony) is cut into the middle of the video to provide some context. This group, in Palin's hometown of Wasilla, is convinced that the end of the world is near. One of the crucial things to notice is the choice of graphics employed in the commercial. There is a very strong indication that this group believes nuclear war to be the thing to usher in the end of the world. Of course, a nuclear war would usher in the end of the world, at least as we know it. The difference is that this group believes that it will also herald the return of Jesus.

Under no circumstances should a person who considers such a calamity both positive and inevitable (in her lifetime) be allowed to have control over a nuclear arsenal. Sarah Palin stands an extraordinarily good chance of assuming the presidency if John McCain is elected. She has also casually indicated that it might be worthwhile to go to war with Russia for the sake of Georgia, a place she certainly knows next to nothing about.

Zealots have been forecasting the "imminent" end of the world for centuries, and they have always gotten it wrong. But fundamentalist Christians finally have a chance to make half of their dream come true. They now have a candidate in position who could soon have the power to end all of human civilization in the span of a single afternoon.

Were such a disaster to happen, only a suffering few among the credulous who actively sought to bring about man's last days would spend the agonizing wait for a savior who would never come, while the dead would never know how wrong they were.

Some Good News About Sarah Palin

2008-09-25T06:36:00.000-07:00

Sarah Palin has been certified 100 percent witchcraft free!

Lies, Damned Lies, and Sexual Statistics

2008-09-21T20:52:00.000-07:00

You may have seen one of several news reports in the past few years that reported on surveys of the sexual behavior of Americans. In particular, you may have seen lines such as this one: “Overall, women report an average of six sex partners in their lifetimes, men, 20.”¹ Now, if you’re a woman, maybe you read this and thought to yourself, “Boy, men sure are dogs. No wonder they can’t seem to commit to a relationship. They’re always off trying to find something to rub up against!” And if you’re a man, perhaps you thought that you have really underperformed relative to your fellow men.

But did you stop to question the validity of the numbers? Maybe you leafed through the full survey results. There are colorful graphs and some statistical terminology. The conclusions must be legitimate, right? Not even close.

Perhaps it did occur to you that it seems strange for the average number of sexual partners for men to be so much larger than that for women. Shouldn’t they be closer together? (Yes.) Should they be the same? (Not necessarily.)

Why are the statistics so different? Well, people lie, especially about sex. To motivate our discussion a bit, let’s have a look at the chart below (click on it to see a larger version).

This is a matrix, of sorts, representing a hypothetical population of 20 men and 21 women. The sexual relationships among those in the group are indicated by whether there is a numeral one in the cell that lies at the intersection of a row representing a male and a column representing a woman. For instance, we see that male number 11 and female number 12 have gotten it on with each other, whereas male 14 and female 14 have not known each other in the biblical sense. Notice also that male number 12 is a virgin.

Male number 10 is the stud in the group. We can see a lot of ones in his row, and we can see from the sum in the far-right column that male number 10 has slept with more than half of the women in the population (over 57 percent, in fact).

You probably know how to compute an arithmetic average, which is just the sum of all the numbers on a list divided by the total number of items on that list. To find the average number of partners for the men, we add the numbers in the right-most column, which gives us the total number of sexual relationships for all of the men.² The average number of partners among the men is 3.0. We use the same idea to compute the average for the women, this time adding up the numbers in the bottom row and dividing by the total number of women. The average number of partners among women is about 2.86.

Notice that the sum of the relationships for the men is the same as the sum of the relationships for the women, namely 60. This is necessarily so. After all, we can count up all of the ones on our table either row by row or column by column. Either way, we should get the same answer. It also makes intuitive sense, since for a man to have a sexual relationship with a woman, it is required that a woman have a sexual relationship with a man!

This is going to be the case in any complete population under consideration: The total number of relationships will be the same for both the men and the women. The average can be a little different, however, because it is not necessarily the case that there are exactly as many men as there are women. I haven’t looked it up, but for the purposes of the rest of this document, let us say that there are 51 percent women and 49 percent men in the American population. I think that is actually pretty close to being true.

We can represent the proportion of men in the population by the letter p (where p = 0.49). Necessarily, then, the proportion of women in the population is given by 1 - p. If the total population is the sum of the men and women, given by , then and .

As we showed earlier, the sum of sexual relationships is the same for both the men and the women. Let us represent this number by S. The average number of partners for men is therefore given by , and the average number of partners for women is given by .

We will assume that the average is higher for men (which it should be if there are fewer men in the population). We can represent the difference of the averages by

But recall from above that , so we can write

We see, then, that the difference between the averages is a function of the average for the men and the proportion of the population made up by men. If the 49 percent figure I mentioned above is correct, then it should be the case that . At any rate, the difference between the averages cannot be greater than four percent of the average for the men, a pretty trivial amount. The difference shrinks further the closer the men and women get to a 50-50 split in the population. In our model, if the men are telling the truth, the average number of sexual partners for women should be 19.2, not six.

But the men are probably lying. Many probably overstated their sexual histories, bumping the average up. The women are probably also lying by understating their sexual histories to avoid coming off as tramps.³

We are left feeling disappointed in this survey, which was apparently never vetted by a competent statistician. It appears that, for now, the truth about Americans’ sex lives will stay between the sheets.

1. From the ABC News Primetime Live Poll: The American Sex Survey, October 21, 2004.

2. Here I refer to “sexual relationships” rather than “partners” in order to avoid confusion, since some women will be counted more than once if they slept with different men.

3. The other possibility is that these numbers are correct but that participants were drawn from wildly different populations: relatively normal women and bar-hopping studs. This is a possibility, but it is remarkably improbable.

[Note: A PDF version of this article can be found here.]

It Was the Best of Times, It Was the End of Times

2008-09-16T15:44:00.000-07:00

Below are excerpts from a September 3, 2008, entry on the blog Progressive Alaska. In it, blogger Philip Munger details the few informal meetings he had with the woman who would become the current Republican vice-presidential nominee, Sarah Palin. The key issue raised in the piece—and the thing that frightens me most about her—is that she is apparently among those who regard the end of the world as a good thing. Considering how easily that can be helped along by Republican hawks with a nuclear (let the spelling guide your pronunciation, Sarah) arsenal, these beliefs are anything but innocuous, and they certainly do not suggest to me any firmer moral foundation than what is possessed by a rationalist nonbeliever who does not require the threat of damnation to motivate his good works. More after the excerpt.

I first met Alaska Governor and GOP Vice Presidential aspirant Sarah Palin when she was on the City of Wasilla Planning Commission. ... Of the encounters I've since had with Sarah Palin, two that brought up her faith, have become important, in light of the possibility that she might someday soon be in charge of thousands of thermonuclear weapons.

In June 1997, both Palin and I had responsibilities at the graduation ceremony of a small group of Wasilla area home schoolers. ... Palin had recently become Wasilla mayor, beating her earliest mentor, John Stein, the then-incumbent mayor. A large part of her campaign had been to enlist fundamentalist Christian groups, and invoke evangelical buzzwords into her talks and literature.

As the ceremony concluded, I bumped into her in a hall away from other people. I congratulated her on her victory, and took her aside to ask about her faith. Among other things, she declared that she was a young earth creationist, accepting both that the world was about 6,000-plus years old, and that humans and dinosaurs walked the earth at the same time.

I asked how she felt about the second coming and the end times. She responded that she fully believed that the signs of Jesus returning soon "during MY lifetime," were obvious. "I can see that, maybe you can't - but it guides me every day."

Our next discussion about religion was after she had switched to the less strict Wasilla Bible Church. ... Once again, we found ourselves being able to talk privately. I reminded her of the earlier conversation, asking her if her views had changed. She was no longer "necessarily" a young earth creationist, she told me. But she strongly reiterated her belief that "The Lord is coming soon." I was trying to get her to tell me what she felt the signs were, when she had to move on.

—Philip Munger, Progressive Alaska, September 3, 2008

Let me take a moment to say something about young-Earth creationism, just in case anyone believes it to be a defensible alternative to the scientific view. If it were true that Earth is on the order of 6,000 years old, it would mean that our basic understanding of fundamental physics is mistaken. The casual reader may not see a problem with that. But one of the ways that science shows that it is working is by having its facts confirmed over and over again, often by different methods being applied in different fields by researchers looking into very different things. When it comes to the age of Earth, there isn't just one way of getting the answer. Numerous, fundamentally different ways of estimating Earth's age are possible, and all of those methods agree on the answer. The take-home lesson is that they agree on the answer—that Earth is roughly 4.5 billion years old—because the answer is probably pretty accurate.

These methods are based on a web of knowledge that forms our current scientific understanding. And, put simply, if we are wrong about the planet's age, then we are also wrong about most of physics. Your very ability to read this sentence on your computer depends on technology whose theoretical basis is the same system of physical principles responsible for the various methods of finding the age of Earth. The upshot is that our technology—and that includes your computer—would simply not work if our understanding of these fundamental ideas were so flawed. The ideas are so interwoven, in fact, that you cannot simply say that perhaps only our understanding of the physics behind the age of Earth is flawed. It doesn't work that way. The preponderance of the evidence, which includes your day-to-day experience with technology, shows that the young-Earth story is pure fiction.

Back on the topic of Sarah Palin, I could say more, but I think Matt Damon sums it up pretty well in this video clip:

Mourning a Fountain of Truth

2008-06-24T15:48:00.000-07:00

"In the Bullshit Department, a businessman can't hold a candle to a clergyman. 'Cause I gotta tell you the truth, folks: When it comes to bullshit—big-time, major-league bullshit—you have to stand in awe of the all-time champion of false promises and exaggerated claims: religion. No contest. No contest. Religion.

"Religion easily has the greatest bullshit story ever told. Think about it. Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man—living in the sky—who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever 'til the end of time! But he loves you.

"He loves you, and he needs money! He always needs money! He's all-powerful, all-perfect, all-knowing, and all-wise; somehow ... just can't handle money! Religion takes in billions of dollars, they pay no taxes, and they always need a little more. Now, you talk about a good bullshit story. Holy shit!"

—George Carlin, 1937-2008

Dwight Schrute Sums It Up Pretty Well

2008-05-20T15:38:00.000-07:00

Leave it to Dwight Schrute from NBC's The Office to pithily analyze those who have not discovered the wonder that is Battlestar Galactica.

Catch Up with the Best Show on Television

2008-04-07T16:10:00.001-07:00

Reason, Behold Your Enemy

2008-02-26T11:46:00.000-08:00

If ever, out of morbid curiosity, you have landed on TBN while channel surfing to see what the Evangelicals—that potent subset of the American electorate—might be watching, you may have seen the work of Jack Van Impe, the self-proclaimed “walking Bible” due to his shtick of spouting strings of dubiously relevant scriptural passages during his television program. Jack, like many of his ilk, has been predicting the end of the world for quite a while now. That it never seems to happen when he says it will has not stopped the tenacious Van Impe, whose show is a remarkable example of the televangelical formula perfectly executed: quote scripture, predict the Rapture, scare the shit out of your audience, quote scripture, and shill your latest product.

In the video below, Jack, his otherworldly wife, Rexella, and Chuck Ohman, his almost impossibly mellifluous announcer, inform us of the next grave danger to mankind. Watch the video to find out what it is, and we’ll catch up on the other side.

Did you catch that ordering information? After all, you don’t want to be caught with your pants down when the Satan-helmed alien hordes make their move.

It is very difficult to define a “ridiculousness scale” to quantitatively evaluate the content of this video. But I have to admit that there is little contained in this piece that seems much less plausible than anything presented in the Bible. (Is it silly to think that Satan controls a bunch of aliens out to get us but not silly to believe he rules over the damned for all eternity in a lake of fire?)

It would all be good for a laugh if these weren’t some of the same people who do this:

Richard Feynman on Uncertainty

2008-02-20T17:44:00.000-08:00

A Divine House of Cards

2008-02-14T20:06:00.000-08:00

Discussing the Bible reasonably is made exceptionally difficult by its stark paucity of testable claims. It is simply not a scientific book. Very frequently, we are given prophecies that are said to have come true, but we can never be absolutely sure that they did (there is always some uncertainty in history), nor can we be sure that the “prophecies” were actually written before the presaged events. For the most part, Biblical authors neither signed nor dated their work.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the Bible is what is not included in it. There are many facts that would be very impressive had they been put in the Bible years before readers could fully appreciate them. Consider pi, for instance, the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. How interesting it would be if God told us that this number’s decimal expansion went on forever, that no matter how we tried, we would never come to the end of calculating it, nor would we ever find it repeating itself. What a powerful idea that is! What better way to make us mere mortals understand the majesty and infinitude of God than by giving us a glimpse of infinity in every wheel that rolled beneath a cart?

Well, pi is in the Bible, but the Bible gets it wrong. In 1 Kings 7:23, we are told: “Then he made the sea of cast metal. It was round, ten cubits from brim to brim, and five cubits high, and a line of thirty cubits measured its circumference.” This says quite clearly that pi is a whole number: three. It is an error of less than five percent, but it is still an error. Let’s just say that one should use the version found in a modern table of fundamental constants if a calculation is a matter of life or death—in, say, planning a space mission.

Of course, there are many who so want to believe in the literal truth of the Bible that even this error can’t sway them. Some say that the figure quoted above is just an approximation (in which case 31 would have been a much better one than 30). Others say that it is a matter of the unit used, the cubit, but this explanation doesn’t actually explain anything, as it is merely another apology for a poor approximation. This explanation and another, somewhat more realistic one are given on a site called Answers in Genesis. I am not persuaded by these explanations, but they are at least genuine efforts. Check the link and see what you think.

While we are on the subject of mathematics, let me make a simple statement, which I will call a theorem. But before I do that, let me introduce a simple definition: A prime number is a natural number that is evenly divisible only by itself and one. (I should also define what a natural number is; it is a “counting” number: 1, 2, 3, etc.) Let us introduce the following:

THEOREM: All prime numbers are odd.

This is a statement that employs something called a universal quantifier. A universal quantifier makes a statement about all things having a particular property. Here I am making a statement about all prime numbers, namely that all of them are odd. I assume the reader knows the difference between an even and an odd number, so I won’t bother defining them here (whereas in a more rigorous setting, I might have to do just that).

What about this theorem? Is it true? Is there another way to write it that might make it easier to evaluate? As it turns out, there is. A universal statement like the one above can be written using an existential quantifier. In this case, if I say that all prime numbers are odd, I am equivalently saying that no prime number exists that is even (and among natural numbers, there is no option other than even or odd). In other words, if my theorem is true, there are no even prime numbers. If, however, even one prime number exists that is even, the theorem is false.

Well, there is an even prime number, the first prime: two. It is the only even prime, the lone exception to the “rule” above. But since it exists, the theorem is false. Now, it is easy to plug the hole in this theorem and make it true by restricting the primes we consider to those greater than two. But the point is that a universal statement is undone by a single exception. In mathematics, this is referred to as a counterexample.

Can we find a counterexample to an absolute statement in the Bible? If so, what would be the significance? Let us examine the first question first.

Consider the following statement from Genesis 6:3: “Then the LORD said, ‘My spirit shall not abide in man for ever, for he is flesh, but his days shall be a hundred and twenty years.’”*

We can easily present this as a theorem: “For all humans, the time between an individual’s birth and death shall not exceed 120 years.” We can also rewrite it as an equivalent statement and even tighten it up a bit, since someone in his or her 121st year is still called 120 years old: “There will not exist a human being such that 121 years or more passes between his or her birth and his or her death.”

Enter Jeanne Calment. Born in Arles, France, on February 21, 1875, she died in the same town on August 4, 1997, aged 122 years and 164 days. Although there are people who are claimed to have reached a more advanced age, Mrs. Calment is one for whom the most official documentation exists. She was awarded the title of “world’s oldest person” by the Guinness Book of World Records when she was a spry 113 years old. Her dates of birth and death are beyond dispute. She clearly lived more than 120 years … and 121 … and 122.

What becomes of our theorem? Well, since it states that we would not be able to find a person older than 120 years and we did find such a person, the theorem is disproved by counterexample.

Now we are left considering the consequences. I might have a mathematics book that contains a theorem with a faulty proof. Such a theorem cannot be said to be proved, but it is also not necessarily false. But let’s say a counterexample turns up that shows us for sure that the theorem is false, at least in its current form. Well, that would certainly be something to address in the next printing or edition of the book, but it would not necessarily render the rest of the book’s contents useless and condemn it to the garbage heap (unless every other theorem hinges on this false one).

With the Bible, however, another theorem winds up doing it in: “The law of the LORD is perfect” (Psalm 19:7). (This statement is actually contradicted by Hebrews 8:6-7, but I will leave that to the reader to verify.) The problem comes from realizing that disproving the earlier theorem provides a counterexample to this one, disproving it as well. How many other laws or observations in the Bible are incorrect is beyond the scope of this essay, but we know that at least two such statements are false. The worst part is that one of these statements provides the divine imprimatur, the authoritative endorsement of the book’s remaining contents.

In the Bible we are given implausible stories that resemble nothing from our common experience; tales of gross violations of fundamental laws of physics, chemistry, astronomy, and biology; natural histories that are contradicted by modern science; and statements and predictions that can be demonstrated to be false. But blind faith proves itself again and again to be immune to reason, so it takes no great skill or inspiration to prophesy how many believers this argument or any like it will convince.

Not a soul.

*From the Revised Standard Edition, 1982

A Measure of Man

2008-02-11T15:43:00.000-08:00

I expect that as cognitive science research advances, we will develop a quantifiable measure of consciousness, which will enable us to compare the consciousness of one animal with that of another. What form it will take is not certain, although it may be something that matches up fairly well with the ratio of synaptic connections to brain volume.* But an informal measure of how human consciousness compares with that of the lower animals can come from appreciating our need to externalize our memories. Using symbolism and formal languages, humans convert paper, computers, and even patches of dirt that can display our scribbles to external brains. Whether it is to temporarily enhance our working memories or to preserve our thoughts for posterity, this activity clearly demonstrates the human experience of the environment as something far transcending that of the other animals. While the simpler beasts are content to experience and remember life with only the equipment with which they were born, humanity, through a necessity borne out of the nature of its intelligence, had to invent an artificial memory.

*There is a measure called the encephalization quotient, which relates an animal's brain mass to its body mass and compares it to other animals of similar size. While interesting, I believe that it falls considerably short of a "metric of consciousness," which is admittedly difficult to define.

The Corleone Doctrine

2008-01-16T19:19:00.000-08:00

It may be time for the United States to admit that everything it needs to know about foreign policy can be learned from an afternoon watching The Godfather, Part II. In a famous scene, Michael Corleone shares with Frankie Pentangeli some wisdom handed down from his father: “Keep your friends close but your enemies closer.” Essentially the same advice is given in slightly different words in Sun Tzu’s classic The Art of War, in which Sun says, “To know your enemy, you must become your enemy.”

American policy for the better part of a century has taken the opposite track. The government decides upon an enemy for the populace to rally against, and a war of rhetoric (at a minimum) ensues. Enemy nations are typically isolated and vilified (“Axis of Evil,” anyone?), and very little diplomatic intercourse results.

In the case of Cuba, for instance, the policy of the United States has been to demonstrate its support for the Cuban people by starving the island of American dollars. To further demonstrate America’s commitment to human freedom, Americans are forbidden from traveling to Cuba except under very rare circumstances, none of which have to do with sightseeing. The United States also imposes steep economic sanctions against Cuba in order to show the Cuban people what a bad guy their leader is. He is such a bad guy, in fact, that any American who lights up a Cuban cigar can go to jail for it. If that doesn’t make sense to you, then you must not understand what it takes to fight for freedom.

This policy must be working well, since no American president except Jimmy Carter has made any effort to challenge it. The cunning strategy is apparently to have Fidel Castro die of old age in office, thereby achieving the United States’ goal of having someone who is not Fidel Castro take over. Ten U.S. presidents so far have had to wait patiently for the chance to deliver what I’m sure will be a stirring, triumphant speech about how good an idea this policy was.

Somehow, though, the Cuban-American enmity seems like a quaint relic of the drive-in movie era in this new age of saber rattling against Muslim nations and nebulous ideologies. We have a new war now, having declared victory against communism, that godless beast bent on destroying us. Today we are fighting terrorism, a beast that, while not godless, associates itself with a god quite foreign to most of us. Needless to say, we are assured that it is bent on our destruction. It is difficult to say what it is in this case, actually, since terrorism is arguably a political technique and not a system of government. Communism is also not a system of government, in the strictest sense, but we have no need to discuss that, since it is something we are told was utterly defeated. Except in the case of Cuba. And China. And North Korea. But why bother with semantics, when only two of those three countries have nuclear weapons? Besides, terrorism has the great rhetorical benefit of being vague enough to conceivably be hiding under every rock. If only Joe McCarthy could have lived to see the day.

If you ask the Cubans—and policy sternly dictates that you not ask the Cubans anything—it is the United States that is committing acts of terrorism. Of course, this can’t be true for the following reasons: 1. It is a claim made by our enemy, which means that it has to be a lie. 2. The United States is only capable of doing things that advance the cause of freedom and democracy, and we are assured by our president that terrorism is the opposite of those two things. So that settles that.

The United States, if it is serious in its pursuit of the best PR, should consider the tremendous favor it does its enemies by attempting to isolate them. For when each side vituperates against the other, the public that is preached to is left to decide which side (if any) is right. As the other side’s complete argument is never presented in the opponent’s press, the choice that minimizes cognitive dissonance among the public is that the domestic version is the truth. How miserable it would be for the citizenry if it were the other way around. So even under the harshest regimes, a perverse version of the Stockholm syndrome manifests as ardent support for the domestic government and equally ardent hatred for its current opponent. This starts a cycle that weakens any chance for productive dialogue between the two sides, since the powerful specter of an enemy to unite against deflects attention from the nagging cancers that eat away at a society from within. “Conservation of tension” is not a law of physics, but it seems to be a law of politics. Ease it in one place, and it immediately pops up in another.

That the current American administration does not enjoy universal domestic support is evidence that something about our system still works. But we can’t build support for our own ideology by foisting it upon others. Rather, we can only get others to want the American version of democracy by making them believe that we’d rather keep it for ourselves. We do that by showing up around the world and talking warmly to everyone, all smiles, strutting around like someone wearing a brand-new outfit in the hopes of being asked about it, just for the opportunity to say, “Oh, this old thing?”

We accuse other countries of abusing their citizens, so why do we isolate them? If rumors swirl around a neighborhood that children are suffering at the hands of an abusive family, is the best choice for the other neighbors to turn their backs, allowing the horrors to continue behind drawn shades? Or is it better to invite the suspect neighbors to picnics every weekend and drop in on them unexpectedly? Can bruises be hidden when everyone is looking for them? Could all the attention change the parents’ behavior? Could we even find, to our surprise, that the rumors were in fact false?

When nations normalize relations and resume diplomacy, there is a concomitant cooling of rhetoric. Visiting ambassadors are given laudatory introductions by their hosts, and the ambassadors offer kind words in return. News reports of diplomatic visits run with video of smiling people shaking hands and saying nice things about each other. The best part of all is that none of it has to be done with even a drop of sincerity to advance the agenda and standing of each country

When diplomatic relations exist between countries, the rhetoric delivered to the public must at least approximate the attitude projected between the communicating governments. Otherwise, a government that publicly speaks ill of another nation to its citizens appears to them hypocritical when its conduct toward that nation’s diplomats is contradictory. Rather than reveal itself as less than honest, that nation is left to either give up the rhetoric altogether or alter its tone considerably.

The minor swallowing of pride required for us to break bread with our enemies is an essential gambit in the effort to win the hearts and minds of those who would otherwise oppose us. We might even be surprised when one day we forget to fake the smile we so carefully practiced, only to find that the one on our face is genuine.

Faith in Cults of Acquired Taste

2007-12-07T12:13:00.000-08:00

CNN is reporting a move to ban Scientology in Germany, which some may greet with a degree of discomfort. Could Germany again be moving toward religious intolerance as a matter of official policy

Hardly.

If you read the German Federal Ministry of the Interior's 2004 Annual Report on the Protection of the Constitution, for instance, specifically pages 266-275, you'll see a well-documented analysis of Scientology's insidiousness, which convincingly puts the lie to the cult's claim to be a group dedicated to the betterment of mankind. It is well worth a look, especially when you consider Germany's unique perspective on the dangers of embracing a cult of personality.

As the political season heats up, we are sure to hear more and more about religion in this country. The most recent—and to my ears, the most ridiculous—example is the bromide Mitt Romney shared with a group of evangelical Christians, which is as meaningless as it is offensive to free thinkers: "Freedom requires religion, just as religion requires freedom." (Beware, secularists: Religion is absolutely necessary for there to be freedom! Mitt Romney says so!) Interestingly, if you read the German report I refer to above, you'll see that L. Ron Hubbard's cult claims something remarkably similar.

There may be no official religious test for holding office on the federal level (the state level is another story), but there certainly is a religious test administered by the noisiest subset of the electorate. It is a troubling trend that continues largely due to the hands-off attitude many of us have toward questioning religion.

We are consumers of dirt, eager to learn every sordid detail in the lives of celebrities, but we are incongruously polite champions of privacy when it comes to the irrational religious beliefs of others. Further, Michael Richards and Duane "Dog" Chapman are pilloried (and rightly so) for their racist leanings, but Mitt Romney is respected for simply being a "man of faith," despite his faith being one that officially discriminated against blacks until 1978 and still maintains racially biased scriptural passages. (The Institute for Religious Research concluded in a 2003 report that in "Mormon scripture, dark skin is a sign of moral and spiritual inferiority and was given by God as a curse.")

The incuriousness that keeps us from questioning religious beliefs—our own or others'—must be defeated if modern, civilized culture is to survive and advance. What may look here to be an advocacy of intolerance is a move to forestall the evolution of an American theocracy, a fearful possibility that becomes more likely whenever we permit policy to be influenced by politicians' religious convictions.

The closer we get to becoming a society that elects its leaders based on their religious beliefs, the further we move from the intentions of this nation's Founding Fathers. Bear in mind that at least some of the very men who designed the democratic system we cherish would fail to meet the religious benchmark set by today's evangelical voter and would likely have no prayer of serving within it.

John McCain: Foot in Mouth, Head in Ass

2007-10-01T17:00:00.000-07:00

In the latest piece of news manufactured for our collective outrage and entertainment, CNN is reporting the flap surrounding some comments made by presidential hopeless John McCain, who was quoted as saying, “the Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation.” Not surprisingly, Jewish and Muslim groups are condemning McCain’s comments for their divisiveness. (The views of atheists and agnostics were not mentioned—nor, I assume, solicited—in the CNN report.)

Eager to mop up the spill of potential political support, McCain’s camp moved swiftly to clarify his statement. McCain himself said later that America was founded on “Judeo-Christian values ... which is [sic] basically ... human dignity and human rights.” Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, dismissed McCain’s explanation, saying, “Islam and other faiths have their basis in human dignity.” Seeking to clarify further, McCain’s communication director, Jill Hazelbaker, suggested that McCain merely meant to indicate that “values protected in the Constitution, such as respect for human life and dignity, are rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition.”

That sounds nice. Too bad it’s utterly false.

The Torah and Bible are fairly thick books, so one can perhaps be forgiven if a light reading of only their “greatest hits” gives the impression that human dignity is held in high esteem. (Let’s briefly address Islam as well. Many people are led to believe that the name of the religion itself means peace. It doesn’t. It actually means surrender. God is everything, and you are nothing. Surrender to that idea, and you’re well on your way.)

Please help me find the evidence of human dignity and the value of human rights in the following selections from the so-called Good Book:

The Bible condones and sanctions slavery. There are numerous references to slavery in the Bible, and I hope you’ll put in the effort to look them up on your own. But I’ll share this one with you: “When a man strikes his male or female slave with a rod so hard that the slave dies under his hand, he shall be punished. If, however, the slave survives for a day or two, he is not to be punished, since the slave is his own property” (Exodus 21:20-21). Lest one think that the pro-slavery talk ended with the Old Testament, check out Ephesians 6:5, which says: “Slaves, obey your earthly masters with deep respect and fear. Serve them sincerely as you would serve Christ.” There are more slavery chestnuts in the New Testament, too, including a message that slaves of Christian masters should work even harder to please them (see 1 Timothy 6:1-2). Oh, and even Jesus tacitly approved of the beating of slaves (see Luke 12:47-48).
The Bible orders wholesale murder. If you’re unlucky enough to live in a town in which even one person is a nonbeliever (woe unto you, my neighbor) or a worshiper of “foreign gods,” you’re asking for it: “If you find it is true and can prove that such a detestable act has occurred among you, you must attack that town and completely destroy all its inhabitants, as well as all the livestock” (Deuteronomy 13). Beyond that, if you get married and find your wife is not a virgin, kill her on her father’s doorstep (Deuteronomy 22). If you have sex with a priest’s daughter, set her on fire when you’re finished (Leviticus 21:9). Of course, kill all the homosexuals you come across (Leviticus 20:13), as well as everyone not of your faith (Exodus 22:20, Deuteronomy 13, Deuteronomy 17), anyone you catch working on the Sabbath (Exodus 31), anyone who commits adultery (Leviticus 20), or just about anyone else you feel like killing, since the Bible will probably give you a reason for it. If you don’t believe me, have a look through some of the reasons given here.
The Bible hates women. It's a fairly remarkable thing when women are treated as anything but property in the Bible. Furthermore, rape is rampant in the scriptures, but not in a way that is condemned by God. The penalty for rape is prescribed in Deuteronomy 22:28-29, which says: “If a man is caught in the act of raping a young woman who is not engaged, he must pay fifty pieces of silver to her father. Then he must marry the young woman because he violated her, and he will never be allowed to divorce her.” Yes, that sounds like justice for the victim. Oh, if the victim is married or engaged, Deuteronomy says that she has to die, since she didn’t cry out and thereby allowed her husband’s or fiancé’s property to be violated. The financial penalty for falsely accusing a wife of not having been a virgin is twice that prescribed for rape (again, paid to the woman’s father), but the burden of proving that the woman was a virgin on her wedding night falls upon her family. If they are somehow unable to prove that she was a virgin, the woman must be stoned to death (Deuteronomy 22:20-21). For those with a taste for pillage, if you conquer a land, feel free to rape all its women after massacring all the men and children, assuming you don’t feel like raping the children, too (Judges 5:30, Zechariah 14:1-2, Deuteronomy 21:10-14, etc.).

These are but a few examples—chosen from scores more—of the true values celebrated by the vile, murderous godhead described in the horrendous fiction we’re supposed to regard as a paragon of human rights and divine wisdom. I highly recommend the site Evil Bible, which exposes the hypocrisy, inconsistency, and outright ludicrousness of this book.

I also recommend that those who find it fashionable to cite the Bible as a model of virtue actually take the time to read it first.

Blessed Are the Censors

2007-09-11T12:07:00.000-07:00

I happened upon this article while browsing around CNN.com. Kathy Griffin, while accepting a creative arts Emmy for My Life on the D-List, said, "a lot of people come up here and thank Jesus for this award. I want you to know that no one had less to do with this award than Jesus." According to the story, Griffin "went on to hold up her Emmy, make an off-color remark about Christ and proclaim, 'This award is my god now!'"

Not surprisingly, the always eager-to-be-offended Catholic League has labeled her joke a "vulgar, in-your-face brand of hate speech" and called on the television academy to "denounce Griffin's obscene and blasphemous comment." Here is the part that I found interesting: The academy complied. Griffin's comments will be edited from the show. According to the article: "'Kathy Griffin's offensive remarks will not be part of the E! telecast on Saturday night,' the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences said in a statement Monday."

Okay, you may not find Griffin's joke funny (even if I did, at least a little). Still, does it deserve to be expurgated from the broadcast? If it does, can we just make it so that all religious comments are banned from the airwaves?

Think of how many football games have closed with a hapless reporter asking for a victorious player's take on the game and receiving an answer like this: "First, I want to say that all the glory goes to God. I want to thank my lord and savior Jesus Christ for this victory." If you have ever watched football, you have probably heard a variation on this theme. It is important to note that this statement is logically equivalent to the following: "I want to thank Jesus Christ for interceding on my team's behalf, forsaking the prayers of all those suffering right now so he could influence the outcome of a professional sporting event. More specifically, I'd like to thank Jesus for cursing our opponent with defeat."

Exactly how much less offensive is that comment than Griffin's?

My Question for the Candidates—and Everyone Else

2007-07-24T15:41:00.000-07:00

Hello, future leaders of America. A question has been eating at me for some time, and I hope you’ll help resolve it. Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney has said that we here in America “need to have a person of faith lead the country.” I guess I am wondering why that is. I am also wondering why not a single candidate has come forward to publicly declare a difference with that opinion.

One possible answer could be in the words of former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, who said, “the organic law of our country establishes God as the basis for our justice system.” He also argues, as do others, that the Ten Commandments are the foundation of American laws. If that is indeed the case, then a “person of faith” is probably the best choice for a chief executive.

But let’s think about that contention for a second. Is God really the basis of our justice system, a system supposedly built upon the democratic ideal? For in the Bible we have an unelected leader who rules by edict and fiat with absolute authority. His laws are not subject to debate, referendum, or repeal, and the mere questioning of his authority—or, for that matter, his very existence—is equivalent to high treason, requiring, according to those laws, the death penalty. It seems to be that the political model the Bible prescribes is one most typically used by governments we refer to as our enemies.

What, then, becomes the benefit of a person of faith helming this country? Is there a leadership advantage to believing centuries-old supernatural tales of our universe and its origins on no rational grounds, ignoring or rejecting the abundance of evidence in stark disagreement? Seneca the Younger suggests that there is: “Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.”

When a leader reports that he consulted a “higher father” before invading a sovereign nation and enmeshing his country in an intractable war, are we to consider his move virtuous or insane? Martin Luther, the father of the Protestant Revolution, had this to say: “Whoever wishes to be a Christian, let him pluck out the eyes of his reason.” Mr. Bush has passed this test, but those of us choosing not to hobble our intellects demand better. Reasonable people will perhaps forgive the faith of their leaders, but they should not be expected to celebrate it.

Remember, whatever your beliefs, the majority of the world thinks them blasphemy. This sober democratic fact contains an important lesson yet to be learned.

A Discomforting Investment of Time

2007-07-16T19:59:00.000-07:00

It is often tempting to dismiss tales of conspiracy—especially those that seek to provide occult explanations of pivotal events in human history—as made from whole cloth, spun by nervous and leery minds. But if we follow through on that temptation and allow bias to cloud our judgment, it is almost certain that we will eventually reject a story that is true.

The test of any claim, no matter how fantastic, is the evidence that supports it. The video attached to this post, Zeitgeist, makes some stunning claims that, if true, reveal nothing less than the attempted enslavement of the entire world. In the filmmaker's wide-ranging thesis, Christianity, September 11, and the Federal Reserve System are all part of a broad conspiracy to create a population of ignorant sheep, beholden to a select few and stultified into submission by mass media.

On the surface, it seems like such a hopelessly far-fetched idea—and one so far beyond the capabilities of the ignoramuses we've grown used to in government—that it almost begs for summary rejection. It is also arguable that the filmmaker's effort to weave these disparate elements together into a single cogent thesis does not meet with complete success. Why, then, would I post the video on this blog? Simply put, each claim it makes is either true or false, a fact or a lie. Some of the historical claims I know to be true from my own reading (of course, to the degree that I can be certain of the veracity and authority of what I read; the false report of an attack in the Gulf of Tonkin, which served to escalate the American involvement in Vietnam, is one example); others I can't confirm without some additional research. Still other claims seem plausible on the surface and warrant further investigation. If even a fraction of the video's claims turn out to be true, this is an earth-shaking bit of work.

Among the tougher ideas to swallow is the suggestion that the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were not actually terrorist attacks but instead carefully orchestrated bits of theater designed to support a move toward the guaranteed cash cow of war, specifically a war against an ideology, with victory so undefined as to be unachievable, an unwinnable war by design. Much of the evidence—indications of controlled demolition of three of the World Trade Center buildings, suppressed video footage of the Pentagon attack, wreckage inconsistent with aircraft crashes—may not be new to you. After all, any tragedy seems to give birth to a conspiracy story to explain it, and the Internet has been rife with "evidence" since soon after the attacks. But there has always been something less than satisfying about the official explanation of the World Trade Center buildings' collapse and the pattern of damage at the Pentagon, and some of the ideas presented here are not easy to dismiss without a leap of faith. Is it possible that we have been believing a lie when the truth is far more horrible? I can't say that I am convinced, but I am at least interested.

There is one claim made of which I am totally convinced—namely, that religion and the mass media are responsible for the gradual decline in our ability to reason as a society and as individuals. Whether this effect is intentional or accidental is ultimately less important than our ability to recognize it, arrest it, and reverse it before it is too late. Invest two hours in watching this video. Think about it. Check its facts. Accept it, reject it, or hold your judgment in abeyance, but do so on the strength of the evidence it presents. We should be grateful for the exercise.

NOTE: The filmmaker has posted clarifications to some minor misstatements made in the video here. The film's primary Web site is http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com.

Freedom of—but not from—Religion

2007-07-09T17:52:00.000-07:00

When I was a child, I used to dream about being the president. I imagined living in the White House, leading the country to a better future through whatever troubles it might be facing, building relationships around the world and turning old enemies into new friends. So attractive was the idea to me that when it came time for my family to move to a new home, I always seemed to prefer the houses we saw with white, fluted columns. It would be some time before I’d have the chance to live in the real White House, but I figured I could prepare for the experience in the meantime.

The charm of that idea wore off, and I gave up on any thought of being called President Weber, at least as far as it referred to any government leadership. But in recent years, it has become apparent that my childhood fantasy was always a fantasy, never a possibility. I am, after all, an atheist, and I am part of the most mistrusted, unelectable, and unfortunately disjointed community in the United States.

George H.W. Bush, our current president’s father, had this to say in response to a question about the patriotism of American atheists: “I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God.” I am fairly confident that this is an accurate report of what Bush had to say, but his interlocutor, Robert Sherman of the magazine American Atheist, never got it on tape.

Lest one believe that this example of egregious bigotry is but an isolated example of one politician’s impromptu pandering to the denizens of God’s country, I present here a list of quotes from state constitutions—currently on the books—that formally restrict the rights of any person not professing a belief in a supreme being. For your convenience, I provide links to the documents’ texts housed on the respective states’ official Web sites. It should be pointed out that the U.S. Constitution does not contain the proscriptions you'll find here. But I believe that the endurance of the following lines is indicative of the lingering prejudice against those whose only “crime” is not sharing a popular mythology.

Arkansas

“No person who denies the being of a God shall hold any office in the civil departments of this State, nor be competent to testify as a witness in any court.” — Constitution of the State of Arkansas of 1874, Art. 19, Sec. 1.

Maryland

“That as it is the duty of every man to worship God in such manner as he thinks most acceptable to Him, all persons are equally entitled to protection in their religious liberty … nor shall any person, otherwise competent, be deemed incompetent as a witness, or juror, on account of his religious belief; provided, he believes in the existence of God, and that under His dispensation such person will be held morally accountable for his acts, and be rewarded or punished therefore either in this world or in the world to come.” — Maryland Constitution: Declaration of Rights, Art. 36.

“That no religious test ought ever to be required as a qualification for any office of profit or trust in this State, other than a declaration of belief in the existence of God; nor shall the Legislature prescribe any other oath of office than the oath prescribed by this Constitution.” — Maryland Constitution: Declaration of Rights, Art. 37.¹

Massachusetts

“As the happiness of a people, and the good order and preservation of civil government, essentially depend upon piety, religion and morality; and as these cannot be generally diffused through a community, but by the institution of the public worship of God, and of public instructions in piety, religion and morality. … Therefore, to promote their happiness and to secure the good order and preservation of their government, the people of this commonwealth have a right to invest their legislature with power to authorize and require, and the legislature shall, from time to time, authorize and require, the several towns, parishes, precincts, and other bodies politic, or religious societies, to make suitable provision, at their own expense, for the institution of the public worship of God, and for the support and maintenance of public Protestant teachers of piety, religion and morality, in all cases where such provision shall not be made voluntarily.” — Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Part the First, Art. III.²

Mississippi

“No person who denies the existence of a Supreme Being shall hold any office in this state.” — Constitution of the State of Mississippi, Art. 14, Sec. 265.³

North Carolina

“The following persons shall be disqualified for office: First, any person who shall deny the being of Almighty God.” — The Constitution of North Carolina, Art. VI, Sec. 8.

Pennsylvania

“No person who acknowledges the being of God and a future state of rewards and punishments shall, on account of his religious sentiments, be disqualified to hold any office or place of trust or profit under this Commonwealth.” — Constitution of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Declaration of Rights, Art. 1, Sec. 4.

South Carolina

“No person shall be eligible to the office of Governor who denies the existence of the Supreme Being.” — South Carolina Constitution, Art. IV, Sec. 2.

“No person who denies the existence of a Supreme Being shall hold any office under this Constitution.”— South Carolina Constitution, Art. XVII, Sec. 4.⁴

Tennessee

“No person who denies the being of God, or a future state of rewards and punishments, shall hold any office in the civil department of this state.” — Constitution of the State of Tennessee, Art. IX, Sec. 2.

Texas

“No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office, or public trust, in this State; nor shall any one be excluded from holding office on account of his religious sentiments, provided he acknowledge the existence of a Supreme Being.” — The Texas Constitution, Art. 1, Sec. 4.

If only these legislatures, in their hurry to make piety a metric of citizenship, had considered the words of Thomas Jefferson: “Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because if there be one he must approve of the homage of reason more than that of blindfolded fear.”⁵ He tells us further, “Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong.”⁶

1. This clause, although it remains in place, is most likely unenforceable under the terms of Torcaso v. Watkins, 367 U.S. 488, 81 S.Ct. 1680, 6 L.Ed.2d 982 (1961), which ruled it unconstitutional.

2. To its credit, Massachusetts altered this to the less-stringent but still ridiculous Article XI of the amendments.

3. A House resolution was proposed in 2006, not to strike this clause, but to add a provision that makes it easier for state officials to profess belief in God.

4. This clause has been challenged, and the petitioner's case was partially affirmed. Still, the clause remains.

5. Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to Peter Carr, August 10, 1787.

6. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia.

Escaping the Abattoir

2007-03-24T13:36:00.000-07:00

“Any action whereby we may torment animals, or let them suffer distress, or otherwise treat them without love, is demeaning to ourselves.” — Immanuel Kant

I had what I suppose you could call a conversion last night. Sitting in my apartment, slowly digesting the chicken burrito that had been my dinner, I was suddenly struck by a powerful urge to see the means by which that food came to me.

I had long been aware of the various indignities suffered by animals used for food. But I, like most meat eaters, put enough intellectual distance between my appetite and the experience of the animals feeding it to be able to continue eating with an attenuated conscience. But last night I became acutely aware of that willful self-deception, and I did a quick online search, coming across a video, Meet Your Meat, narrated by actor Alec Baldwin.

To call the scenes depicted in the roughly 13-minute video appalling would be a gross understatement. Animals are shown being raised in cramped pens, unable to even turn around or lie down comfortably; chased down and beaten over the head with blunt objects; killed—eventually—by being grabbed by the hind legs and slammed to the ground; burned alive in hair-removal tanks; exsanguinated while inadequately stunned and therefore fully conscious, many of them screaming and writhing in obvious agony; and mutilated and branded without any effort to deaden pain. As hard as it was to watch these scenes, it was even harder to believe that at least some of the people shown committing these acts were doing so without taking some degree of pleasure in them.

Baldwin’s narration suggested that the situations depicted are typical in the industry of animal husbandry, but it is difficult to evaluate the accuracy of that claim. What is clear, however, is that the video represents some portion of the reality within the industry, even if it is not typical. Much like the idea that one cockroach seen suggests many others unseen, it seems obvious that far more industrial animal cruelty is not caught on video than is.

Let us be generous to the meat industry and say that the scenes depicted in the video represent only one percent of the reality. In other words, let’s assume for the moment that 99 percent of the time, animals are treated humanely and do not suffer on their journey from birth to your dinner plate. Let’s also say that you are like I was until last night, namely someone who would typically eat meat twice a day on average. That means that there is a 45 percent chance that at least one meal you’ll eat in the next month will come from an animal’s suffering. The odds go up to almost 70 percent over two months and 83 percent over three. Clearly, even while giving the meat industry a tremendous benefit of the doubt, it becomes obvious that many of our meals are the result of animal agony. Even if we revise our assumption and say that animal cruelty is half as common as we considered at the top of this paragraph, there is a better than 97 percent chance that at least one of our meals will have come from a suffering animal within a year.*

Needless to say, the claims of animal-rights activists suggest that our assumptions in the preceding paragraph are far too conservative. (And if the rate of cruelty is, say, ten percent, there is an 87 percent chance of our consuming at least one animal that has suffered in just one month of meals.) PETA would of course claim the cruelty rate to be far higher, approaching 100 percent, especially considering that the pre-slaughter living conditions for food-bound animals would be considered insufferable by most rational people. There are several reasons why a far higher estimate is likely to be accurate.

First, the scale of meat production in America alone is staggering. (According to a USDA report just released, 10,951,300 head of livestock were slaughtered in the United States in February of 2007 alone. This figure does not include poultry. According to another report, over 9.2 billion fowl were slaughtered in the United States in 2006.) In order to satisfy demand, animals have to be raised quickly and efficiently. The cramped living environments for farmed animals maximize profit potential, and there is no economic rationale for ensuring humane living conditions for animals at the volume encountered in the industry. Second, there is also no economic rationale for using painkillers when animals are branded, castrated, or otherwise mutilated. Painkillers are far too expensive and time-consuming to be applied when dealing with over nine billion animals.

With this figure in mind, let’s revisit our fantastically deflated estimate of animal suffering from a few paragraphs ago. If even one percent of the animals typically slaughtered by industry experience suffering, we’re talking about over 93 million of them living and dying in agony every year. But it is far more likely that the true number of suffering animals is in the billions.

Consider now the factory floor, populated by human workers whose business it is to raise and ultimately kill billions of animals a year. It is quite impossible for every animal to be treated humanely when there are so many to deal with. In order to do the job, it seems necessary that a certain detachment be developed and that these animals stop being seen as sentient beings and start being viewed merely as animated commodities. While that detachment might permit a slaughterhouse worker to keep showing up to work every day, it does nothing for the animals that hone his skill.

Even before the animals reach the slaughterhouse, many are abused by the farm workers who supervise them. It may seem a careless and casual claim, but video evidence supports it. Regrettably, it is also not outside the capabilities of many ordinary human beings to lash out violently at animals whose fate is already decided, especially in the course of a long, demanding day of work. After all, many of us have perhaps felt the temptation to throw an uncooperative computer against the wall during eight hours of office drudgery. Imagine now that the computer is a stubborn, moving, grunting beast that is resisting your efforts to do your job. Though not all of us would give in to the temptation toward brutal discipline, some would. In some way, when herding the condemned, something in the human psyche forces the thought that they deserve their fate.

Considering how little we know about human consciousness, it is hopelessly naïve to pretend to know the experience of the so-called lower animals. But whatever the occult thoughts and dreams of the animals we make our food, their pain and displeasure is manifest to all who would look their way. While we tend to our own pursuit of happiness, we have the choice of whether to participate in the suffering of others. That choice seemed to foist itself on me last night, and I could no longer stomach the alternative.

*These figures come from calculating the Poisson and binomial sampling distributions for the given probabilities and sample sizes (number of meals).

The Case Against Heaven

2007-03-12T19:02:00.000-07:00

If you are like most Americans—indeed, like most people in the world—you are familiar with the concept of Heaven. After all, you’re supposed to be living in a manner that would ensure your admission once you die. (How’s that going, by the way?) But just so we’re certain that we’re thinking of the same thing, let’s agree on a definition. This one comes from The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition, which considers Heaven the “abode of God, the angels, and the souls of those who are granted salvation.” Yes, that looks about right. Elsewhere we’re told that it’s a paradise, a place whose sheer beauty is enough to stave off boredom and keep eternity from feeling like, well, an eternity.

In the book of Revelation, we’re let in on a few details about Heaven. In particular, we’re told that it’s the “city of peace,” New Jerusalem, a square parcel of heavenly land that measures 12,000 stadia per side (about 1,400 miles, or 2,250 kilometers). Assuming the world comes to an end relatively soon, that should be more than enough room. The country with the highest current population density on Earth is Monaco, which packs them in at 41,971 people per square mile. I’ve heard nice things about Monaco, so that seems livable. New Jerusalem could accommodate some 82 billion people with a Monaco-like population density, and that is, I believe, far more people than have lived on Earth so far.

Revelation also tells us that the city is made of gold and jewels, so the laws of chemistry and physics apparently aren’t total strangers there. Nonetheless, 1 Corinthians 15:50 throws us off a bit, since we’re told that “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God,” despite our also being told that Jesus went to Heaven as flesh and blood.

New Jerusalem’s inhabitants apparently maintain their physical appearance, more or less, even though they are no longer physical beings. In Matthew 17:3, for instance, Jesus and his disciples have no trouble recognizing Elijah and Moses when they show up to chat on a mountaintop (though how they knew what the prophets looked like in the first place is anyone’s guess).

One has to assume that there are things in Heaven other than its population and gaudy, bejeweled buildings. What games, for instance, might be played in Heaven? Do people play catch there? On Earth, we get used to the parabolic path described by any object in a gravitational field. Once we get to New Jerusalem, if we find ourselves in the mood, it seems reasonable to assume that the familiar arc of a tossed ball would be maintained for our convenience and sense of continuity.

That brings us to the issue of gravity in Heaven. Is there any? Well, a city of roughly two million square miles that is made out of gold would have a nontrivial gravitational field of its own. In Revelation, we’re told that New Jerusalem is as high as it is wide, thus defining a cube that is truly stunning in size. Let’s say that just a quarter of New Jerusalem’s volume is made up of gold. That’s still about 2.85 quintillion cubic meters of the stuff (a quintillion is a one with 18 zeroes following it). As the density of gold is 19,300 kilograms per cubic meter, New Jerusalem might have a mass of about 55 sextillion kilograms (if you thought a quintillion was big—and it is—a sextillion is a thousand times as large). That’s a heavy city. Even so, it’s roughly one hundredth the mass of Earth and therefore has one hundredth Earth’s gravitational field.

Ignoring for the moment the fact that tall buildings made of soft, pure gold would collapse under their own weight, we’re faced with the need for something for New Jerusalem to sit on—a sturdy base roughly the mass of Earth—in order to supply the additional gravity needed to make our heavenly games of catch even the least bit sporting. I suppose one could say that God could just magically supply the rest of the gravity without the need for anything else. But this seems unlikely, since that isn’t the way he chooses to do it in the material universe, and we’re told about how much he likes everything to be “on Earth as it is in Heaven.” Heaven seems to require a physical location. Is there, then, a planet out there harboring Heaven?

But that raises an interesting point. The God we’ve come to know created a huge universe. There are a lot of planets, and we keep finding more and more outside of our solar system. We know that on at least one small stone hurtling through the heavens, life exists—life so special that God, the one who created everything else that makes Earth look so small and insignificant, sent his only son there to die in order to save the souls of those who call it home. That this idea makes little sense is not of concern to us here.

One of religious faith is almost forced to conclude that humankind has to be the only intelligent life in the universe, all that ever was and all that ever will be. For if it is any other way, Heaven would cease to be just ours. We would have to share it. And if there are even just a few other planets out there teeming with life like ours, the initially adequate dimensions of New Jerusalem start seeming less like Monaco and more like hell.

Any life that evolved (or, I suppose, was created) on other planets would be used to the conditions on those planets—the color of the sky, the local acceleration due to gravity, the style of architecture, etc.—and would expect to find something similar in Heaven, at least in an idealized sense. Those foreign planets’ qualities would have to be remarkably Earthlike for everyone to feel at home. We’d also have to assume that God created these other folks in his own image, too, or at least close enough to it for us not to be put off by the appearances they maintain. For if evolution is a biological fact, it is fairly certain that extraterrestrial intelligent life would bear little resemblance to us. Is it heavenly to share eternity with others we may have viewed as monstrous when alive?

To the truly faithful, the answer may come in denying evolution—already a popular pastime—and insisting that the inhabitants of Earth make up the only life in the universe. But if that is the answer, it raises yet another question: In such a conservative universe (featuring, for example, an abundance of spheres—the most efficient three-dimensional objects, containing the most volume with the least surface area), why make Heaven so far away from its only future inhabitants? If it’s more than 2,000 light years away, Jesus might even still be on his way there (assuming he can get arbitrarily close to the speed of light). If it’s farther away than that, light coming to Heaven from Earth would be what was reflected at a time when the portion of Heaven’s population responsible for authoring the Bible was still alive on Earth!

What light shines on Heaven? What star is lucky enough to be the one to illuminate the eternal city of New Jerusalem? It’s a lucky star indeed, since it is apparently immune to the inevitable death that all stars face. Maybe you’ll argue that it is, say, God’s love that bathes Heaven in golden light. But if that is the case, then God’s love is something measurable and finite, something that fits squarely in the visible range of the electromagnetic spectrum. (In the book of Matthew, it becomes apparent that the resurrected Jesus is capable of generating light, but being a mere lamp for Heaven's streets seems a tedious job beneath the putative savior of mankind.)

I suppose the last question we have to ask regards the dimensions of Heaven. Yes, it’s an exclusive club. But why, when designing his house, did God settle for a place so small, relatively speaking? Content to waste so much space and material surrounding our little planet, why did God all of a sudden become parsimonious when constructing Heaven? And while you might say that God is everywhere, there’s supposedly enough of him there for Jesus to be sitting at his right hand. One is left to wonder how cramped God feels in a Heaven that amounts to a mote of dust in the vast universe he created.

There is, I believe, a proper treatment to all these questions. Rather than fighting to try to reconcile the baroque old stories of Heaven told by men, we should accept that they are but mere stories. For I can't believe that a heaven home to a majestic god would be found bedecked with glittering kitsch, nor that a god worthy of our devotion would make his existence so uncertain and his wishes so contradictory as to foment centuries of wars fought in his name. Heaven’s halls of gold are the figments of man, an avaricious beast who, through religion, let his lust swell until one lifetime could no longer hold it.

Faith Under Oath: Reconsidering Our Creeds

2007-02-06T20:35:00.000-08:00

Among the religious faithful (a term that describes the overwhelming majority of Americansⁱ), there are many degrees of fervency and zeal. At the far end of the spectrum are the biblical literalists, those who believe that every word in the current edition of whatever scripture they follow is divinely inspired and immune to interpretation or alteration. At some ideological distance are what I consider the culturally religious, those whose religious identity is determined more by their parents and community than by any frank consideration of the details of the particular faith to which they subscribe.

Many people close to me are in that latter camp, and while they perhaps don’t consider themselves necessarily religious, they attend religious services on holidays and accept their religion’s label without argument. They give little more thought to their being Jewish or Christian than I do to being American, effectively adopting religious identity as a subspecies in their cultural taxonomy.

This happens easily enough. For much of my childhood and adolescence, I was a “Christian,” but not because I had faith in Christianity; rather, I didn’t believe I was anything else. I wasn’t Jewish. I wasn’t Muslim. I wasn’t Hindu. I was a regular old American, so I guess I had to be Christian.

I continued that identification for some time, despite my feeling even in early childhood that the stories I was told about the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus seemed awfully far-fetched. So I did my best to squelch my doubts, which nagged at me like an itch in the back of the throat, demanding but never receiving satisfaction.

When I was in college, I even flirted with the idea of converting to Catholicism from the less regimented Methodism I was brought up in. Something about the pageantry of it, the choreographed moves, and the question-and-answer script between parishioners and priest appealed to my obsessive-compulsive nature at a time when I was suffering an unholy depression that had to that point proven frustratingly recalcitrant.

Many of my friends were Catholic, and I’d attend mass with them on Sunday evenings, the first part of a brief tradition that culminated each week in a drunken dinner at a local restaurant, a meal peppered with brash and overloud talk, often about the member of the church’s choir we’d most like to have sex with.

Much of my attraction to the religion came from the feeling of belonging I had those evenings, bolstered by my Catholic impersonations during Communion, after which I’d carefully cross my body, trying not to betray my interloping. It was like learning the secret handshake of a rival fraternity, crashing their party, and getting away with it. So much of Catholicism is choreographed that it is relatively easy to sniff out those who don’t belong. And I very much wanted to belong. Somewhere.

Fortunately for me, converting to Catholicism is a bit of an involved process. Some preparation, including education in the catechism, and a Catholic sponsor are among the things required for new recruits. But my interest died on the vine before my heart could become ripe for the Catholic harvest, and I soon made coherent the susurrus of doubt that had whispered static underneath every sermon and Sunday school lesson I’d ever heard. The fall from meager faith to apostasy, it turned out, had a pretty soft landing.

After all, the consideration of changing faiths had brought the issue of belief itself to the forefront. And the Catholic script provided the benefit of a creed—the Apostles’ Creedⁱⁱ—for me to gauge my beliefs. Having found that I agreed with almost none of it, my direction was clear. I certainly wasn’t a Catholic, and I wasn’t much of a Christian, either. If belonging was something I needed, I’d have to find it under someone else’s banner.

There are differences in some details between the Catholic picture of Christianity and the views held by the faith’s other sects. But those details, while a historical source of contention, are minor when considered relative to Christianity’s differences with other religions. The Apostles’ Creed serves as a fairly reliable algorithm for evaluating Christian faith for all sects, a flowchart whose affirmation is required for one to be truly in step with the Christian party line. Let me reproduce it here:

I believe in God, the Father Almighty,

the Creator of heaven and earth,

and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord:

Who was conceived of the Holy Spirit,

born of the Virgin Mary,

suffered under Pontius Pilate,

was crucified, died, and was buried.

He descended into hell.

The third day He arose again from the dead.

He ascended into heaven

and sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty,

whence He shall come to judge the living and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic church,

the communion of saints,

the forgiveness of sins,

the resurrection of the body,

and life everlasting.

Amen.

Depending on how you interpret it, there are 19 or 20 distinct statements of faith in this creed, serving as a sort of checklist of Christian belief.ⁱⁱⁱ

Like many prayers and recitations in Catholicism—and religion in general—the Apostles’ Creed is learned largely by rote, typically during childhood. More attention is paid to whether it is recited correctly than to its actual significance and meaning. Certainly, how many Christian children spend an appreciable amount of time going through this creed item by item, genuinely weighing each claim’s plausibility against what they think and feel?

Now, there are some things in the Apostles’ Creed that even I can agree with or allow for. For instance, I believe there is some historical evidence to support the existence of Jesus. I am not completely sold on that idea, but it is possible. I also think that if he did exist, he very well may have been executed by crucifixion on Pilate’s orders. And although I don’t believe it, there is the possibility, remote as it is, that he was born of a virgin. Intercourse is not required for conception to occur. Sperm can make the arduous trip from outside the body to the egg, but this is exceedingly improbable. Everything else is, I believe, totally outside the realm of possibility.

Let’s ignore for the moment the issue of the existence of God. I can’t prove his nonexistence any more than the faithful can prove the opposite, so we’ll leave that issue alone. Let’s consider an easier concept: the resurrection of the body.

Christian zeal hinges on the idea of the return of Jesus on a final day of judgment. That is when the dead will rise from the grave and stand to be judged. This point is so important that it is extraordinarily difficult to find a Catholic priest who will participate in the funeral of someone who has been cremated. But despite the clergy’s familiarity with the concept of “ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” they seem to lack an understanding of the chemistry of death. Whether a body is burned or left to decay, it breaks down into components from which an intact body can never be retrieved. A practical example can be found every time you fill your car up with gasoline, a product refined from petroleum produced by the natural decay of organic material over many millennia.

While the resurrection of prehistoric animals is never mentioned in the Bible—in fact, prehistoric animals themselves are not mentioned in the Bible, almost as if God knew only what humans knew at the time—the material from which they were made was virtually identical to the stuff we’re made of. Under similar circumstances, it is reasonable to believe that our bodies, too, would deliquesce into a precious goop that Earth’s inheritors could kill one another for many years down the road.

But just as I’d defy you to find a true tiger in your tank, I’d challenge the Almighty to conjure anything but dust on the day of the great homecoming. The idea is preposterous, and it deserves rejection.

I assume it would be far easier for God to wake his dead son after only three days down, so let’s say he knew how to do it. What then? We’re told that Jesus “ascended into heaven” to sit at God’s right hand. In other words, Christians believe that you can never find the body of Jesus because there’s no body to find. He ascended bodily into heaven. Timing must have been crucial, then. After all, over a century of aviation has failed to reveal a heaven in the clouds of Earth. No 747’s wing has ever clipped a harp and sent it crashing toward the mob below. So heaven must be somewhere else, somewhere not of this world.

But if that’s the case, then Jesus had to ascend to heaven at a specific time—and only that time. Since Earth rotates, Jesus would fly off in the wrong direction if he were delayed, for instance, by the skeptical questions and prodding fingers of the apostle Thomas. And his inconvenience wouldn’t end there, since he would need to achieve a velocity sufficient to escape Earth’s gravitational pull (almost seven miles per second) and endure untold hours of flight in the airless cold of space.

Some may claim that heaven is such a special place that physical laws don’t apply there. Why, then, was it important for Jesus to go there physically? And if he is there physically, how does he interact with the disembodied spirits blessed with heavenly admission prior to their resurrection on Judgment Day?

These almost silly reductions of Christian claims should not be seen as mere food for the disputatious. Rather, the ridiculousness of even some ideas credulously accepted by so many should impel the faithful to take the time to consider the rest of the story they’ve swallowed without chewing.

Whatever works of charity and goodwill can be credited to religion, there are at least as many (and I believe far more) acts of almost inhuman cruelty perpetrated in its name. The faithful need to recognize that their faith is not an ideological buffet from which they can pick only the palatable scraps. It is a complete package, a complete system of thought and law. Yes, “love thy neighbor” is a wonderful thought. Ordering the execution of human beings for their sexual preference is not. But each idea is given equal weight in the scriptures that many millions consider to be the infallible word of God.

My message to the faithful is this: Know your faith. Read your scriptures. Learn every detail of what it is you’ve up to now casually said you believe. Do not perpetuate the cultural crutch that has kept religion churning on for centuries. It is no more logical to continue identifying with and unquestioningly accepting an outmoded religious ideology than it is to expect to sail off the edge of the earth.

The sense of uncertainty in the absence of religion may be discomfiting for some. But they will soon realize that it is far better to have the liberty to ask questions when no longer stuck with the unsatisfactory answers of centuries past.

i. According to a 2005 Associated Press-Ipsos poll of 1,000 people from each of ten countries, only two percent of Americans said they do not believe in God.
ii. Islam has a similar creed of belief, known as the shahada. It is far shorter than the Apostles’ Creed, but its purpose is the same.
iii. It is important to point out two quick things here. First, there are some differences of opinion about the line referring to the descent of Jesus into hell; some translations simply refer to his descent among the dead. Second, the use of the word catholic in lowercase makes use of its adjectival form meaning “universal.”