Humanism and church-state separation

by Edd Doerr

Humanist Manifesto II (1973, excerpts): “The separation of church and state and the separation of ideology and state are imperatives. . . . The right to birth control, abortion, and divorce should be recognized.”

Unitarian Universalist General Assembly resolution (1982, excerpts): “Defend the democratic, pluralistic public school, opposing all forms of direct or indirect public aid to support sectarian private schools, such as tuition tax credits or vouchers. . . . Uphold religious neutrality in public education . . . oppose religious indoctrination in public schools [and] the introduction of sectarian religious doctrines, such as ‘scientific creationism’. . . . Uphold the constitutional privacy right of every woman, acknowledged by the Supreme Court in 1973 in Roe v Wade  and other rulings, to plan the number and spacing of her children and to terminate a problem pregnancy in collaboration with her physician, opposing all efforts through legislation or constitutional amendment to restrict that right or to impose by law a ‘theology of fetal personhood’.”

In 1982 prominent Humanist leaders/writers Edward Ericson and Sherwin Wine founded Americans for Religious Liberty (ARL) to defend precisely what the two above statements proclaim. To head the new organization they picked Edd Doerr, a columnist in The Humanist and editor of Americans United’s Church & State magazine since the early 1970s (and, incidentally, the author of the UUA resolution above and an original signer of Humanist Manifesto II) and currently a columnist in Free Inquiry magazine. Joining the ARL staff in 1990 was Al Menendez, an expert election analyst. Doerr and Menendez are the authors of over 60 books.

In its third of a century ARL has published 129 issues of its quarterly journal, Voice of Reason, the only church-state separation journal that reviews books in this important but neglected field, and over two dozen books and studies. All of ARL’s over 30 years of journals may be accessed on its web site – arlinc.org.

ARL has reached millions through print and electronic media and public speaking, has presented testimony at congressional hearings, has been a member of various relevant coalitions, and has been involved in over 60 major church-state lawsuits, some before the Supreme Court. In one successful suit in the late 1980s, a challenge to the diversion of US aid to sectarian schools abroad brought in cooperation with the ACLU, the plaintiffs included Isaac Asimov and Corliss Lamont.

Attached in pdf is ARL’s most recent journal.

ARL would like to invite you to join and support this unique organization. It’s only $25 per year (tax deductible) and brings you the Voice of Reason either in print or pdf format. ARL is solely dependent on individual donations. Further information on request.

Edd Doerr

Americans for Religious Liberty

Box 6656

Silver Spring, MD 20916

Climate and Secular Change

By Gary Berg-Cross

Some important topics like secular humanism and climate change are hard to get accepted by people for one reason of another. Secular humanism has its principles, goals and core ideas laid out in the various Humanist Manifestoes.  But to many it explanations and approach aren’t satisfactory.   Part of the reason is that is an inconvenient threat to biblical and older views of the world and a God who intervenes in natural phenomena and is indispensable for salivation.

Coming to grips with climate change is another one of those difficult topics where complex, scientific evidence and reasoning comes in conflict with simpler and perhaps emotionally satisfying non-scientific beliefs. People’s immediate experience is with weather and local weather at that.  This easy understanding gets confused with climate as it in entangled with common sense and verbal habits (always a factor in discussing atheism and concepts of God too).  So people say you “can’t change the weather” (or predict it well going past 10 days) and these seem to be powerful arguments against knowing about climate change with a needed degree of certainty.  If fact they are not good arguments at all. One may predict a green house will be warmer than its surroundings even on a cold day.

You can see and example of how particular issues, often statistical in nature, get resolved  such as how much warming is going on in Antartica  see- On Edge-Pushing Statistics and Climate Basics. Statisticians like Noel Cressie have directly investigated  "Uncertainty
Quantification for Regional Climate Projections in North America" by studying the various model projecting temperature change that is projected for North America 30 years in the future (2041-2070). Regional Climate Models (RCMs) projections are run up to 60 years into the future for "small", 50 km x 50 km regions in North America.

The results including degrees of uncertainty are analyzed statistically for all regions and all four Boreal seasons. The preponderance of results throughout all of North America, as shown in the pinkish figures below is one of warming, usually more than 2°C (3.6°F). As Cressie asked, "is this hot enough for you."
 

 

 OK so there is converging and ever increasing evidence and a scientific consensus on climate change exists.  What about regular citizen's beliefs?  It's a function in part of macro weather. Following a winter of record snowfall in 2010, the public’s acceptance of climate change fell to a low of 52 percent, according to the National Survey of American Public Opinion on Climate Change (as published by the Brookings Institution). After 2011's mild winter, support jumped to 65 percent.  Still fewer think it human caused. 2012 polling conducted by the Pew Research Center suggests that a greater number of people in the U.S. are accepting the reality of climate change. 67 percent of Americans said that there is now  "solid evidence" that average global temperatures have been rising in recent decades. That's a gain of 4points over 2010 and 10 points since 2009. Yet only 42 percent say this warming is "mostly caused by human activity," according to Pew.You know, the climate always changes.. Maybe we'll have an ice age...

Recently some scientific efforts have been directed at such phenomena and understanding why belief in climate change has decreased rather than risen as more evidence has been generated. It turns out there are a variety of complex psychological, and cultural reasons for this as well as scientific.

One obvious factor is complexity of space, time and factors. There are lots of facts to consider and models to integrate since almost every aspect of our planet influences the climate –

ocean circulation,

weather patterns,

plate tectonics (over long time) and ,

atmospheric dynamics are just a start.

A change in one of these affects climate and progress has being made in modeling each although the interaction of factors with each other and the climate is still a challenge.  But like the weather everyone has something to say on the matter even if the complexity is ignored in most opinions by laymen. Psychologically we like simple answers and simplifying problems down to familiar terms.  Still understanding is possible to the literate and astute who have the time to study it.

But there is a problem with space and time. The impacts are somewhat off in the future or impacting far away space like the artic now (Super Storm Sandy being an exception which did get our attention.) . But  these demand action and costly action now. So there is a mis-match and what is being asked (see recent blog on protests) for now is some sacrifice for some hypothetical gain. What is being asked for is deferred gratification. It’s not like cleaning up a park or a polluted river. There we can often easily track responsibility for a problem and results can be quickly seen and rewards such as return of fish in river a known reward. 

Handling climate change is new and the expected rewards far off and maybe beyond our lifetime.  No matter how much we slow the growth of emissions, we may not see the benefits in the short-term. Thus, climate change activists are asking fellow citizens to sacrifice something concrete (say my investment and retirement portfolio) now for potential benefits that may not be evident for many years to come.

 

In its own way this is a bit like what secularists are asking of religious people – sacrificing some comforting habits now to avoid down sides over time. We need to have the maturity to understand the dangers of climate change and the wisdom for that may translate as a useful skill for the advancement of humanist and secular thinking too.

 

 

 

 

Images
 

The Psychology of Climate Change: http://guide.cred.columbia.edu/

Noel Cressie ergional models of climate change: http://www.stat.osu.edu/~sses/collab_warming.html

Sacrificing investments:http://grist.org/article/2009-11-05-climate-psychology-in-cartoons-clues-for-solving-the-messaging/full/

 

Religious addiction: http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=library&page=flynn_27_4

 

Elite Problems

 

 

By Gary Berg-Cross

Immigration and defense “experts” are abroad in the land.  At least a look through the keyhole version of this seems to be what one see’s as part of media coverage of the early debates on immigration reform and the senate hearing to confirm a new secretary of defense.  To paraphrase one person’s summary of the latter hearing, the only thing more embarrassing than Hagel’s answers were the senator’s questions and posturing. We expect some meritorious discussion of topics, but instead we got what Chris Hayes (of MSNBC UP fame) described this way:

“Thursday’s Senate confirmation hearing for Secretary of Defense nominee Chuck Hagel was an omnidirectionally embarrassing debacle for everyone involved.

First there were the Senate Republicans who seethed with such theatrical contempt for Hagel and his ideas you would have thought the president had nominated Noam Chomsky for the post (who, incidentally wouldn’t be my first choice to head the Pentagon but who I’d take over Donald Rumsfeld in a heartbeat). Republican senator after Republican senator threw questions at Hagel that even by the debased standards of a nominating hearing were the cheapest kind of demagoguery and bullying….

If you were a visitor from another country and just listened to Hagel’s Republican interlocutors you would have had to ask, where did this moral monster Chuck Hagel come from, where had this seditious dissident been hiding for the last decade? And the answer, of course is: mostly in the Republican Senate Caucus!

 

We expect and deserve more as part of our democratic republic by the elite folks we send to Congress, but of course we have grown used to being disappointed by them. 

 

In his new book, The Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy, the above mentioned Chris Hayes takes on a host of issues around our being mis-served by meritorious elites. He has plenty of evidence to work with just in the recently completed decade (2000–2010 -aka “a decade of failure”). He doesn’t seem far off in arguing that every major societal institution has failed in some way. Early on big businesses collapsed with Enron and Worldcom, and expert auditors and analysts failed to catch it.  The Supreme Court was more partisan than serenely supreme in deciding Bush v. Gore. Just a bit later in the decade the Bush administration and our intelligence apparatus failed to protect us from the 9/11 attack. Who can forgive our corporate media who let us down as the administration lied and mis-represented info to edge us into 2 wars.

Norman commented more broadly on the media and its weak reporting on who is accountable for what on MSNC:

ORNSTEIN (7/25/12): Figuring out who to hold accountable is fuzzy now and it’s the biggest one we have, given the way the parties are operating. They not only gridlock and do great damage, as you say, and it really is damage to the country, the fabric of the economy, but they leave voters with little opportunity to figure out who genuinely to blame. And frankly, the press corps is an unindicted co-conspirator to that.

In those unaccountable wars the military failed to get us a “win” and when we think of post-war nation rebuilding, well it was a catastrophe. We had years of the RC church engaged in and covering up of sex abuse. Same for the football program at Penn State.

The Bush administration had an inept management approach to the natural disaster called Katrina. We could add, as Chris does, a view of elite athletes on steroids.  We might cap it off with the failure of oversight for the housing bubble and then the financial collapse of unregulated bank practices that crashed our economy. Throw in a decline in government practice and the elite interdependence, such as Big media failing to effectively warn society of housing bubbles and leveraged default swaps.  It is a compelling picture of failure.

 

Hayes book elucidates his hypotheses of why it all went so wrong. Part of it concerns specialization and Sociologist Robert Michels’ idea of the iron law of oligarchy, published in his 1911Political Parties. Michels noted (as had Plato and Aristotle before him) that even political parties and groups ideologically committed to equality and democracy (yes even in the freethinking community), became more or less oligarchic in their operation like more unabashed elitist and aristocratic parties of the right. Michels’ grim conclusion was that it was impossible for any party, no matter its belief system, to actually bring about democracy in practice. Oligarchy with its rule by a few, true elites is inevitable because any institution has to “organize itself” for effective against the opposition. This self-directed organization in turn requires delegation of responsibility to someone in charge of specific things and thus with specific talents (or resources). Institutions and thus society finds itself in a dependent relation. Over time we are forced to trust and depend on a small cadre with delegated authority. Thus natural forces lead to an “us and them” – leaders and following, trusting masses of non-leaders. Of course immigrants are main targets of such thinking.  Michels speaks of it a great ‘gulf which divides the leaders from the masses.’ The type of thing we hear in both the immigration and defense confirmation debate and it abounds in fundamentalist religions where the Mosaic elite speak with God and the congregation sups on tableted words of wisdom from on high.

Of course there are institutions who recognize the need for democratic practices and open voices and I am happy to note that we in the humanist community are among those that do. One has to go no further that the Humanist Manifesto II, yes written by old fashion elite thinkers,  to see many declared democratic principles and warnings concerning elite power:

The beginnings of police states, even in democratic societies, widespread government espionage, and other abuses of power by military, political, and industrial elites, and the continuance of unyielding racism, all present a different and difficult social outlook.

Images

 

Robert Michels iron law of oligarchy, Political Parties: http://liberation.typepad.com/liberation/2009/06/newlabour-party-history-23-the-alliance-oligarchy.html

Leave the thinking to us: http://gulfofmexicooilspillblog.com/2011/01/18/gulf-of-mexico-oil-spill-blog-iron-law-of-oligarchy-and-gratitude/

Financial elites: http://globaleduction.blogspot.com/

Twilight of the Elites: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2012/07/11/review-christopher-hayes-twilight-elites-america-after-meritocracy

The Challenge of Confronting Visionary Futures

By Gary Berg-Cross

When Paul Kurtz and Edwin H. Wilson penned the Humanist Manifesto II in the middle of the Viet Nam war (1973) they noted opportunities for the rapidly approaching 21^st century based on “dramatic scientific, technological, and ever-accelerating social and political changes crowd our awareness.”  They went on to talk about virtually human domination of the planet, moon exploration, and dramatic travel and communication advances. It all suggested  that  we stand at the dawn of a new age. It was one they characterized as “ready to move farther into space and perhaps inhabit other planets.” Well the movie 2001 certainly was in that spirit, but in 2012 we remain far short of that vision.

And it is not just space exploration.  The promise of technology suited to wise control of our environment hasn’t been promoted and we face a changed planet that could bring hurricane level flooded coasts on a permanent basis.

To be sure we have done a good job enhancing communication technology, but that gets used to let us shout alarms of problems rather than systematically solve really big systemic problems like putting poverty on the run or achieving what the Manifesto signaled as “an abundant and meaningful life.”  At times technological advances seem to go sideways towards profit as opposed to investing in the solution of large problems. “Shale boom derails U.S. investments in clean coal technology” reads a recent headline in the vein.

Why haven’t we done a better job of providing for the common good?  One problem is that large scale efforts (poverty, climate, renewable energy, space exploration) require long term commitments to visions. We simply lack policy frameworks (economic and otherwise), social organization and agreements needed to advance such large-scale projects to bring about visions.  On some issue, such as energy we are maintaining the status quo, rather than going with the new. This  makes narrow plutocratic sense based on old economic models.  Fractured policies and entrenched interests with political connections make change difficult and expensive. 

Take the issue and promise of residential,rooftop solar. According to the Department of Energy the US has more than 18,000 jurisdictions at state & local levels that have a say in how rooftop solar is rolled out. In Germany, at a latitude equal to Maine’s, they have addressed the problem as a whole society and reached a working consensus on solar's importance.  In Germany the price of installed rooftop solar has fallen to $2.24 per watt and on a sunny day in May, rooftop solar provided all of Germany's power needs for two hours. In the US it was $9 a watt in 2006 and is now closer to $5 and if commercial industrial installations are included the national installed price plummets to $3.45 a watt (Solar Energy Industries Association, a Washington trade group).

This point on the organizational rather than technical nature of problems is made in Solar energy is ready, the U.S. isn't which notes:

The trouble is, many of the big, investor-owned utilities that provide about 85 percent of America's electricity see solar as both a technical challenge and a long-term threat to their 100-year-old profit models. And the lack of a national energy policy means regulation of solar is up to states, public service commissions, and a wealth of local governments and bureaucracies - many of whom have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.

The rule of thumb had been that once rooftop installations made up 15 percent of the power on a given circuit, utilities could stay new connections until residents undertook an engineering study - costing as much as $50,000 - that showed their addition wouldn't destabilize the power grid. The hidden costs of obtaining permits and regulators' approval to install rooftop panels is a big reason the United States lags behind Germany, which leads the world in rooftop installations, with more than 1 million.

On big problems is that we need to formulate new plans of action and response and get some agreement. Such agreements may even cross national boundaries and so hint of some global governance based on common values. Follow ups to Humanist Manifesto II have taken modest steps in proposing things in that direction. It’s a long haul and vision starts with discussion and understanding of the issues. 

Some of each of this will be afforded at the discussion of an Agenda for a Democratized Economy So it is the People’s Economy Saturday, Nov 3rd, from (2-4 p.m.) when the MDC chapter of WASH hosts  Margaret Flowers & Kevin Zeese (co-directors of Its Our Economy).  This will be at the Wheaton regional library 11701 Georgia Avenue  Wheaton, MD 20902.

Images

1. Dawn of Man from 2001: http://publishingarchaeology.blogspot.com/
2. 2001 Logo: http://www.azadtimes.com/blog/2012/10/28/weekly-classics-2001-a-space-odyssey/
3. The promise of Solar panels: http://www.perspectivesonglobalissues.com/building-a-solar-india-the-promise-of-solar-power/
4. Plutocrats and Poverty: http://beforeitsnews.com/alternative/2012/10/wow-the-energy-is-intense-2483010.html