A flurry of Anniversaries

By Gary Berg-Cross

This year seems filled with memorable anniversaries.  Some like the first anniversary of SuperStorm Sandy (Oct. 23^rd) linger bitterly in recent memory as images of damaged neighborhoods and distraught lives.  A bit more distant is the 8th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina whose horrific damage now throttles the Philippines. Prohibition ended 80 years ago or so, something I guess we will see eventually on TV as part of Boardwalk Empire.

This month (Nov.), of course, marks the very big 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, who was shot and killed in Dallas, Texas on Nov. 22, 1963.

Forty years ago in the summer of 1973, the Senate Watergate Committee discovered that Trickster Nixon had a tape-recording system in his offices.  Many of the events come from the civil war era such as the anniversary of the Gettysburg address.

Earlier in the year we had a happier side of  Americana to celebrate like the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington and Martin Luther King's 'I have a dream' speech.

The setting for this was Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC and so it is perhaps fitting to thrown one anniversary onto the pile that involves the very progressive and first Republican President Lincoln and has a setting not far from his hulking memorial. It’s the 150th anniversary celebration the creation of the National Academy of Sciences. On March 3, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Act creating the National Academy of Sciences.  The act came from Congress with an impetus from American scientists including Coast Survey Alexander Dallas Bache (Ben Franklin’s great grandson!!), naturalist Louis Agassiz, Harvard professor of mathematics and astronomy Benjamin Peirce (father of that great philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce), astronomer Benjamin Gould, and Harvard professor of Greek and Latin Cornelius Felton.  Yes, Republicans once respected Science, reliable knowledge rather than ideology and its promotion in pre-Climate Change days. Indeed Congress was interested in good, scientific advice and saw the Academy as an independent and nonprofit institution charged with providing the government with the scientific advice that it needed. One of the new Academy's first tasks was to determine how magnetic compasses could be made to work properly on board the new "ironclad" battleships being developed for the Civil War.

There’s a year-long celebration, but a special event was held recently October 16-18 called Celebrating Service to the Nation. You can view the Sackler Colloquia's YouTube channel. According to the NAC site 9 videos are available, including the 2013 Sackler Lecture by historian Daniel J. Kevles (Yale University) on The National Academy in the American Democracy. The colloquium program, which lists the moderator and panelists for each of the eight sessions, is available online.

Remarks by President Obama on the NAC are also online.

“For 150 years, you’ve strived to answer big questions, solve tough problems, not for yourselves but for the benefit of the nation.  And that legacy has endured from the Academy’s founding days.  And when you look at our history, you’ve stepped up at times of enormous need and, in some cases, great peril. “

National Duh! of Prayer

by Edd Doerr

May 5, designated by Congress as this year's National Day of Prayer, has come and gone. Scarcely anyone paid attention. Humanists and freethinkers griped a bit, but that is hardly news. But there is something to be said on the subject again.

If most Americans claim a religious affiliation of some sort and believe in prayer, whatever diverse meanings that might have across the spectrum, why is it necesary for government to designate a special day for it? Aren't praying people capable of deciding for themselves when or if or how to pray? And since there are many activities that may have "religious" significance -- such in addition to prayer as alms giving, visiting the sick, helping widows and orphans, etc -- where does government come off designating a specific activity, prayer? Or does helping poor people fall under the heading of some sort of socialism?

Just as relevant as what "unbelievers" may say on the subject is what devout believers in prayer have to add to the discussion. My friend J. Brent Walker, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, representing a wide range of Baptist bodies (minus the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Baptist denomination, whose governing apparatus was taken over by ultraconservatives a generation ago), had this to say. "The problem with the National Day of Prayer is that it is an official act of government urging citizens to engage in a religious exercise." And, "The government should not be in the business of telling the Anerican people what, where and when to pray or even if they should pray."

BJC general counsel K. Hollyn Hollman, referring to the April 14 federal appeals court ruling that private citizens lack "standing" to challenge the practice, added that "most Americans are unaware of the occasion", but "it is certainly unwise".

The National Day was started in 1952 by Congress, and like a fishhook stuck in one's finger, it is easier to get in than get out.

The big problem, the real problem, is that far too many Americans have forgotten that the men (women being still shut out of the political process then) who designed our Constitution knew very well the evils associated with mixing religion and government, and so they incorporated the principle of separation of church and state into our founding charter. Politicians like John F. Kennedy understood this well, but far too many political hacks today are eager to force all taxpayers to contribute involuntarily to religious private schools (through vouchers or tuition tax credits), to impose theological notions about "personhood at conception" on all women (who sadly make up only 17% of Congress), to smuggle fundamantalist "creationism" into public schools.

What Ben Franklin wrote over two centuries ago is still applicable today: "When a religion is good, I conceive it will support itself; and when God does not care to support it, so that its professors [adherents] are obliged to call for the help of the civil power [government], it it a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one."