The trouble with Hanukkah?

by Gary Berg-Cross

A search of "war on Christmas" 2015 in the News yields 60,000+ hits so it quite a topic. Starbucks red cups along generates over 6,000 of this with articles asking, Is Starbucks brewing a 'War On Christmas'?

"This week, Starbucks unveiled new cups for the holiday season, which are solid red with the green Starbucks logo in the middle, with no candy canes, reindeer, or snowmen." 

Not hitting the iconic symbols for Christmas seems passive aggressive to some. It denies easy access to manufactured customs. Many of us know the story of how older customs were captured by Christmas and memed over to serve religious needs. With a good deal of humor, Tom Flynn's book The Trouble with Christmas puts Santa Claus, his reindeer, Christmas trees and cards, exchanging presents and the spectrum of diverse elements of the Christmas tradition in historical context . Given this context and and an increasingly secular society Flynn argues for the downsizing of Christmas as a national holiday given the diverse nature of America's population. You can see his video on this, 
The Trouble book came out in 1993, but he might have a chance for a sequel as fact checking has gotten around to challenging some of the myths around the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah (H-party) too.

The Washington Post and other papers ran a simple 5 myth list associated with the big H-holiday (Jennifer Bleyer: 5 myths about Hanukkah).

The WaPo fact list sometimes gets fact checked itself but at least this author consulted seemingly experts on the topic. The five myths discussed were:

1. Hanukkah is an important Jewish holiday.
Well many of us know that Israelis who visit at this time of year can be surprised at how but the H party is in the US.  In Israel it is a minor celebration.
Why the difference?  As with the C-party it is part of a culurally manufactured event. Bleyer's article explanation I see as illustration a general phenomena of how religion and group identity mix, to solve the problems of assimilation using a cathexing celebration:

"... hubbub around Hanukkah is (not) accidental. Its elevation to its current status in the United States goes back to the 19th century, when rabbis concerned about Jewish children feeling envious of their Christian neighbors realized that Hanukkah could let kids indulge in a joyous occasion around the same time of year. As Jewish historian Dianne Ashton recounts in her book "Hanukkah in America," the holiday's "timing in the midst of the Christmas season offered a way [for people] to perform their Jewish commitment through the holiday's rite and, for a moment, to resolve the ambiguity of being an American Jew."

2. Hanukkah celebrates a fight for religious freedom.

This one was new to me. The conventional understanding was that Jews celebrate traditional Jewish practices, which when threaten lead to an uprising of "a family of country priests called the Maccabees."  They are considered heroes (not zealots). They are associated with freedom and control of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem and "rededicated it according to their beliefs." 

But who were day and what were their values really?  The real history (ala Woodrow Wilson)  is more complicated, as history often is - think of the real Pilgrim-Indian story for example compared to the story that children used to hear in school.  These are often folk history stories hiding civil wars and such where words like "freedom" are hurled about as casually as in contemporary political campaigns.

"...The idea that theirs was a fight for religious freedom is a myth, as is the notion that their revolt was exclusively against their Gentile oppressors. At the time, many Jews readily welcomed aspects of the dominant Greek culture, with its emphasis on reason, wisdom and art. These Hellenistic Jews advocated for the reformation of their own primitive belief system according to Greek values - the modernization of a faith founded in the Bronze Age. The Maccabees opposed their Hellenized counterparts, and according to some scholars, their revolt really began as a bitter internal fight between religious fundamentalists and reformers.

"The Maccabees were fighting for the ability to observe their own laws and the ability to coerce other Jews to observe their laws," says Albert Baumgarten, an emeritus professor of Jewish history at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. "It meant a very strong fight against the Hellenistic Jews and the establishment of what we would today call a theocratic state." Some contemporary commentators have even deigned to call the Maccabees fanatics and zealots.

3. The Jews' victory in the Hanukkah story halted assimilation.

No, it turns out that the lesson is one of compromising and practical politics.  In this case with the accursed Greek ideas such as democracy that we now respect a bit more in the West.

"...as rulers who subsequently established the Hasmonean dynasty, these rebels quickly realized that their survival involved playing the game of regional politics -- and the way to do that was by none other than adopting Hellenism. "It was a kind of necessity," Baumgarten says. "The Seleucid dynasty to which Antiochus and his successors belonged was split between two rival families that were fighting each other over generations, and the Maccabees had to play one branch off each other.

If you backed the wrong horse in this ongoing civil war, you could end up losing your status and your head. . . . So although the Maccabees started as opponents of Hellenism, they soon become among its most enthusiastic admirers and adopters."

This meant, for instance, aping Greek models of government and negotiation, and establishing an assembly to vote a ruler into power -- a practice with no precedent in Jewish tradition. Their realpolitik also helped them learn to "negotiate the different tensions between being part of the Jewish world and the larger world," Baumgarten says, which was critical to Jewish survival."

4. The oil burned for eight days and eight nights.

Here we have the miracle part from dim history.  But, oh wow, it isn't even in the old Jewish Bible stories!  A made up miracle story? This is a bit like attacking the virgin birth and Santa Claus. 

"..As scholars have long noted, there's no reference to the miracle in early sources based on firsthand accounts, including the first book of Maccabees, an insider history written to glorify the new dynasty and its achievements, nor the second book of Maccabees, also a historical account written close to the time of the revolt, although from the diaspora.

The miraculous-oil story seems to be a rabbinic invention transmitted hundreds of years after it allegedly occurred. After the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in 70 A.D., the Jews were expelled, and religious authority was transferred from Temple priests to diaspora rabbis, who came to codify the Babylonian Talmud as a central text of Jewish law, ethics and customs. In the middle of the Talmudic tractate discussing the proper way to light candles on the Sabbath, as a footnote that seems almost an afterthought, the rabbis included a discussion of Hanukkah candle-lighting along with a telling of the miracle of the oil. It's this written account that made the story last." 

5. Latkes are the traditional Hanukkah food.

"Latkes originated in Eastern Europe, not ancient Israel. And they were first made with curd cheese rather than potatoes, Gil Marks writes in the 'Encyclopedia of Jewish Food.' Although they are certainly a traditional holiday food, they are by no means the traditional holiday food."

Sort of like the bagel.  Things get acquired along the way and incorporated in to evolving tradition.  

It's not a problem unless you think some part of this is the eternal word of God working his dietary magic with a chosen group of people in a 13+ billion year old universe with quite a special locations in that cosmos.

All of this myth busting may be a little too politically incorrect for some H-celebrations, but it is also nice to know the history of how things came to be and the factors that influence group belief.

Perhaps that pleasant humbugging critic, Tom Flynn will have something to say here.  He is speaking at the next WASH MDC meeting Saturday, 

December 12, 20153:15 PM to 5:30 PM (Wheaton Library).

His topic, "A Radical View on Church and State"

E.O. Wilson and The New Enlightenment: A Call to Understanding

by Gary Berg-Cross

Biologist Edward O. Wilson’s new book is called ‘The Social Conquest of Earth.’  It’s largely provides a biological perspective on 3 grand philo-cultural questions (famous questions, inscribed by Paul Gauguin in his giant Tahitian painting of 1897):

    ·     “Where do we come from?

•      What are we?
•      Where are we going?” 

 Unlike traditional philosophy or religion Wilson wants to incrementally advance on these from scientific understanding and theory.  He speaks in terms of the relatively rare, eusocial nature of humans and how this might have develop as part of pre-adaption. (Eu-Social means the highest level of organization of animal sociality, and is defined by 3 characteristics: cooperative brood care (including brood care of offspring from other individuals), overlapping generations within a colony of adults, and a division of labor into reproductive and non-reproductive groups).
 While it takes a while to make a scientific case Wilson argues for this approach as better than what we are handed by religion approaches.  It’s of no real help at all  he argues aside from making us feel like we know:

          “mythmaking could never discover the origin and meaning of humanity”

Contemporary philosophy  also comes up with a backhand irrelevant, having as Wilson argues

 “long ago abandoned the foundational questions about human existence.”

Well maybe and maybe at Harvard, but there are relevant, contemporary folks in philosophy I think.

I largely agree that the most likely approach to answering the 2 above foundational questions is to follow the scientific method as applied by the proper and emerging disciplines.   So we have Biology, Psychology, Anthropology, Archaeology and Sociology along with newer disciplines like neuroscience, epigenetics and evolutionary biology.  It’s a wonderful matrix of expanding understanding and especially nice when a master of one or two of these spends the time to synthesize a view understandable to non-experts.  Others in this senior synthesis of ideas worth reading and listening to are Jared Diamond whose last 3 or 4 books are enlightened warning that touches on our eroding environment in an historical context. They are wake up calls such as we have heard too from Richard Dawkins, of course, whose latest book An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist  is autobiographical.

Wilson draws on all these sources to explore the development of human society and some objective self-awareness needed to understand our collective selves. The path has bounced from ancient art, primitive religion, the founding of philosophy, and finally an integrated science perspective. As a Biologist Wilson sees a tipping point in these various views of human nature and such with Charles Darwin's 19^th century theory of evolution by natural selection. Together with other sciences this theory can be applied to understand human behavior and deal with some age old controversies.

Wilson outlines the broad human story and fills in some details to illustrate our new understanding.  Wilson does this, for example, spinning a more complex story than a simple genetic basis for shared individual- and group-level selection factors.  Both selfish and group favoring factors exist. As a result there is intense inter-group competition along with unstable group composition that results in:

 "an unavoidable and perpetual war ... between honor, virtue, and duty ... and           selfishness, cowardice, and hypocrisy..." 

A payoff is the later section of the book called “A New Enlightenment.” In a sequence of chapters he covers the topics of language (pre-adapted cognition evolved into the ability to create abstractions, and later to use arbitrary symbols for communication, thus leading to the evolution of language)., culture, morality ("The naturalistic understanding of morality does not lead to absolute precepts and sure judgments, but instead warns against basing them blindly on religious and ideological dogmas," p. 252)., religion and art. These provide a much different and nuanced view to approach an answer to the earlier question - “What are we?”,

His warning about the tribal aspects of religion are a meme that one hopes is widely heard. Organized religion, Wilson argues, is a simple expression of an evolution favored tribalism. So the "illogic" of religious belief is not a weakness in traditional human cultures, since it serves a social role of binding a group's members together to the exclusion of outsiders.  You may get to be part of a group by abandoning your differences and converting to the group’s core beliefs. In pre-scientific days creation- genesis stories & myths employed by the early Big religions are all explainable as cultural relics. Wilson does a back hand refutation of "phantasmagoric elements" as the result of hallucinogenic drugs.  This natural explanation, he argues, is a much more plausible as the basis for things like John's “visions” recorded in the Book of Revelation than the idea that god intervention actually happened. The same goes for nomads wandering in the desert.

“.. you can see this especially in the difficulty of harmonizing different religions. We ought to recognize that religious strife is not the consequence of differences among people. It's about conflicts between creation stories. We have bizarre creation myths and each is characterized by assuring believers that theirs is the correct story, and that therefore they are superior in every sense to people who belong to other religions. This feeds into our tribalistic tendencies to form groups, occupy territories and react fiercely to any intrusion or threat to ourselves, our tribe and our special creation story. Such intense instincts could arise in evolution only by group selection—tribe competing against tribe. For me, the peculiar qualities of faith are a logical outcome of this level of biological organization.”

Yes, it is a good explanation and a warning too.

For a good interview with Wilson on this see the Slate article.

For a video interview see BookTV’s Social Conquest of the Earth.

5 Mythic Stories and Real American History

By Gary Berg-Cross

James Baldwin said famously:

“What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one's heroic ancestors.”

Baldwin is just of many quoted in James W. Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong which exposes a series of such myths. Secularists are often involved in exploring and exploding such concepts as the U.S. is being founded as a Christian nation. It’s often a heated debate as seen in the exchange between Blake Dunlop & Bruce Gourley. The secular Gorley side has to put things in context:

Yes, theocracies existed at the colonial state level prior to the American Revolution (and persecuted Baptists, Quakers, and non-Christians). However, at the insistence of Baptists, Deists, and many others, our founding fathers rejected theocracy and chose a secular government structure. Yes, some states continued to collect taxes for churches into the early 19th century, because some Christians yet yearned for some degree of theocracy. And yes, people of all manner (not just Christians) in the late 18th and 19th centuries spoke to the vague notion of “providence.” John Jay’s reference to “providence” is akin to the deism of most of our founding fathers, as is the formal offering of prayer to a distant universal force or supreme being.

Waldman’s relatively new book Founding Faith contributes some balance to this type of debate. At least according to Beliefnet :-) :

In Lies we see a larger myth challenging effort. Lowen surveyed 12 large books used to teach high school history and in circulation during 1994. What he found, and documented is that American History textbooks seem to portray the American experience in a very rosy optimistic way despite facts that make for a much more checkered story. The coverage is filled with a version of blind patriotism mixed with mindless optimism, sheer misinformation, and outright lies (see various blogs on American Exceptionalism). Hence the Lies title.

Lowen examines several important topics to demonstrate the divergence from historical facts. Why the discrepancy? There are several reasons including tradition and custom that creates a confirmatory story. Its confirmatory bias working again on a grand scale (as covered in previous blogs). And of course there is the challenge of covering so much material. Book feel compelled to cover every President and boil down conflict in American history losing much of the real story. Some conflicts such as the Civil war or intervention in Mexico and the treatment of the Indians are too hot to handle at times.

Lowen also points out that American history textbooks are approved by school boards and are consciously edited to guarantee that they contain acceptable, dare I say, politically correct perspectives on events. Textbooks authors and their editors avoid difficult topics and steer to what will sell textbooks Add to this the political agenda of rabid, right-wing boards such as in Texas and there is plenty or reasons for problems with the real American stories. Much safer to take an American Exceptionalism tope and say that, sure there were some problems like racism, but great (white and wealthy) Americans overcame it all and here we are now.

In the first chapter, Loewen talks about the process of hero- making which he calls heroification details (both important and trivial) are left out or changed to fit the archetypical mold of the flawless, inhuman "heroes." This Lowen notes is a "degenerative process" that turns "flesh-and-blood individuals into pious, perfect creatures without conflicts, pain, credibility, or human interest “

So we see American history textbooks filled to the brin with biographical vignettes of the very famous. Each of us could create a good list Heroification so distorts the lives of people like Helln Keller and Woodrow Wilson that “we cannot think straight about them.” There is a simple reason Loewen points out. History textbooks are actively edited to present the famous as heroes, minus most all of the negative attributes, so that impressionable kids will not think badly of them in any way and we can all be proud of our country. But in the process we may miss the larger issues which the nation has faced and learn from the failings as well as the success. Below are 5 people/issues that Lowen covers as examples of where the texts often go wrong.

.

1, Columbus – Columbus is one of only two people the US honors by name in a national holiday. We all remember 1492, and sure enough, all twelve textbooks Lowen surveyed include it. But he notes that they leave out virtually everything that is important to know about Columbus and the European exploration of the Americas. Meanwhile, they make up all kinds of details to tell a better story and to humanize Columbus so that readers will identify with him.”

The truth is that Chris was in it for the fame and fortune.

“The way American history textbooks treat Columbus reinforces the tendency not to think about the process of domination. The traditional picture of Columbus landing on the American shore shows him dominating immediately, and this is based on fact: Columbus claimed everything he saw right off the boat. On his first voyage, Columbus kidnapped some 10 to 25 Indians and took them back with him to Spain. “

As Lowen further notes:

“ Only seven or eight of the Indians arrived alive, but along with the parrots, gold trinkets, and other exotica, they caused quite a stir in Seville. Ferdinand and Isabella provided Columbus with seventeen ships, 1,200 to 1,500 men, cannons, crossbows, guns, cavalry, and attack dogs for a second voyage.,,,

On the whole Columbus introduced 2 phenomena that revolutionized race relations and transformed the modern world: the taking of land, wealth, and labor from indigenous peoples, leading to their near extermination, and the transatlantic slave trade, which created a racial underclass. All of these are important issues through American history and they start with Columbus and colonization. Understanding the current world is difficult with out this frame.

2. The Indians and those Pilgrims

Lowen notes that “There has been some improvement in textbooks’ treatment of Native peoples in recent years. In 1961 the best-selling Rise of the American Nation contained 10 illustrations featuring Native people, alone or with whites (of 268 illustrations). But and here is the catch most of these pictures focused on the themes of primitive life and savage warfare. This is note the way the early reports on Indians went and such things as primitive life and savage warfare is not supported by much of the modern research cited in Lies.

Loewen discusses America’s shameful treatment of the Indians and the problems with racism. For example, “The American Republic,” the authors of The American Pageant tell us on page one, “was from the outset uniquely favored. It started from scratch on a vast and virgin continent, which was so sparsely peopled by Indians that they were able to be eliminated or shouldered aside.”

Vast and virgin continent? Not according to modern research. The textbooks twist things with selective presentation. Take the Pilgrims, who textbooks say “started from scratch,” when they really started with a fully functional American Indian village previously emptied by European plagues (pg 90 of Lies). Loewen can quote primary sources to the effect of Pilgrims “settlment”, (they proceeded to rob Indian graves to find whatever else they needed!) And the early wars with Indian partners against other Indians.

The ugly truth is that many Pilgrims were thankful and grateful that the Native population was decreasing. Even worse, there was the Pequot Massacre in 1637, which started after the colonists found a murdered white man in his boat. Ninety armed settlers burned a Native village, along with their crops, and then demanded the Natives to turn in the murderers. When the Natives refused, a massacre followed.

Captain John Mason and his colonist army surrounded a fortified Pequot village and reportedly shouted: “We must burn them! Such a dreadful terror let the Almighty fall upon their spirits that they would flee from us and run into the very flames. Thus did the Lord Judge the heathen, filling the place with dead bodies.” The surviving Pequot were hunted and slain. (Quote from Lies)

3. Hellen Keller

Most of us carry a strong image of Helen Keller, the blind and deaf girl who overcame her physical handicaps. Made into a move with scenes in which Anne Sullivan spells water into young Helen's hand at the pump it has been an inspiration to generations of schoolchildren. A McGraw-Hill educational film version concludes with:

"The gift of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan to the world is to constantly remind us of the wonder of the world around us and how much we owe those who taught us what it means, for there is no person that is unworthy or incapable of being helped, and the greatest service any person can make us is to help another reach true potential."

Hellen Keller’s truth is that she was a radical socialist. As Lowen notes:

She joined the Socialist party of Massachusetts in 1909. She had become a social radical even before she graduated from Radcliffe, and not, she emphasized, because of any teachings available there. After the Russian Revolution, she sang the praises of the new communist nation: "In the East a new star is risen! With pain and anguish the old order has given birth to the new, and behold in the East a man-child is born! Onward, comrades, all together! Onward to the campfires of Russia! Onward to the coming dawn!" ~ Keller hung a red flag over the desk in her study. Gradually she moved to the left of the Socialist party and became a Wobbly, a member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) the syndicalist union persecuted by Woodrow Wilson.

Wilson’s truth is also covered in Lies.

4. John Brown

I thought that I knew the core of the John Brown story. But since it is tangled with racism and the Civil War, the story I heard was a later construction. Lowen puts it like this - “Just as textbooks treat slavery without racism, they treat abolitionism without idealism. Consider the most radical white abolitionist of them all, John Brown.” I didn’t know of his family roots or the events in blood Kansas preceding his raids or what was revealed in the trial or how he was a hero to the North.

Despite the fact that Brown's lawyers may have used the insanity plea to get him off, Brown was hardly thought of as insane during his time. As Loewen puts it in Lies:

(Brown) favorably impressed people who spoke with him after his capture,

including his jailer and even reporters writing for Democratic newspapers, which supported slavery. Governor Wise of Virginia called him "a man of clear head" after Brown got the better of him in an informal interview. "They are themselves mistaken who take him to be a madman," Governor Wise said. In his message to the Virginia legislature he said Brown showed "quick and clear perception," "rational premises and consecutive reasoning," and "composure and selfpossession."

(Loewen, pg. 167).

Lown supports the view of a culturally convenient view of Brown this way:

“The treatment of Brown, like the treatment of slavery and Reconstruction, has changed in American history textbooks. From 1890 to about 1970, John Brown was insane. Before 1890 he was perfectly sane, and after 1970 he regained his sanity. Since Brown himself did not change after his death, his sanity provides an inadvertent index of the level of white racism in our society.”

5. The Government

Most the 12 textbooks describe the US system of government as being as close to flawless as humanly possible. Here are some snippets from Lies.

“What story do textbooks tell about our government? First, they imply that the state we live in today is the state created in 1789. Textbook authors overlook the possibility that the balance of powers set forth in the Constitution, granting some power to each branch of the federal government, some to the states, and reserving some for individuals, has been decisively altered over the last two hundred years. The federal government they picture is still the people’s servant, manageable and tractable.” pg 217 which continues with specific book treaments

“In Frances FitzGerald’s phrase, textbooks present United States as “a kind of Salvation Army to the rest of the world.” In so doing, they echo the nation our leaders like to present to its citizens: the supremely moral, disinterested peacekeeper, the supremely responsible world citizen.”


“Since at least the 1920’s, textbook authors have claimed that the United States is more generous than any other nation in the world in providing foreign aid. The myth was untrue then; it is likewise untrue now. Today at least a dozen European and Arab nations devote much larger proportions of their gross domestic product (GDP) or total government expenditures to foreign aid than does the United States.”

The truth Lowen argues is that there is almost no mention at all, in these textbooks, about the way things really worked including elements of alternative (inckuding conspiracy) theories, abuses of power, or anything else negative.

Lowen surveyed the 12 history textbooks to see how they treated 6 U.S. attempts to subvert foreign governments that occurred before 1973, More than enough time to be covered as history. The episodes were:

1. US assistance to the shah’s faction in Iran in deposing Prime Minister
Mussadegh and returning the shah to the throne in 1953;
2. our role in bringing down the elected government of Guatemala in 1954;
3. our help rigging of the 1957 election in Lebanon, which entrenched the Christians on top and led to the Muslim revolt and civil war the next year;
4. our involvement in the assassination of Patrice Lumumba of Zaire in 1961;
5. our repeated attempts to murder Premier Fidel Castro of Cuba and bring down his government by terror and sabotage; and
6. our role in bringing down the elected Alende government of Chile 1973.

Looked at objectively if these happened to us we would call actions such as these “state-sponsored terrorism.”

Blind patriotism, mindless optimism, sheer misinformation, and outright lies all of which helps to explain why we have lost touch with our history and why high school students hate history. When they list their favorite subjects, history is always at the bottom. They consider it the most irrelevant of twenty-one school subjects; bo-o-o-oring and confusing too. What could be interesting is the recent past, but it isn’t covered and disappears, unexplained down what Lowen calls the Memory Hole. And because important details are omitted the stories it tells are often incoherent.

Picture/Image credits:

Columbis: http://pagsapush.blogspot.com/2011/07/columbus-lies-my-teacher-told-me.html

Lies book cover: http://america-lives.blogspot.com/2010/12/james-w-loewen-lies-my-teacher-told-me.html

Lowen: http://leaksfree.com/2012/05/conversations-with-great-minds-dr-james-loewen-lies-my-teacher-told-me-p1/

Lowen with the Texts: http://www.stthomas.edu/bulletin/2010/03/02/faculty-invited-to-a-conversation-with-james-loewen-author-of-lies-my-teacher-told-me/

Skywoman: http://lifeafterhate.org/2010/11/the-reeducation-of-thanksgiving/

Myth Supplants Reality & Fantasy Displaces Common Sense

By Gary Berg-Cross

Allan Sloan wrote recently about the 5 Myths of the Great Financial Meltdown. His list covered:

1: The government should have done nothing

2: The government bailed out shareholders

3: The Volcker Rule will save us

4: Taxpayers are off the hook for future failures. And

5: It's the government's fault.

The details in the article are worth reading, but I was particularly struck a compelling framing line that I could identify with in his analysis:

I find myself getting increasingly angry and frustrated watching myth supplant reality about what happened, and seeing fantasy displace common sense when it comes to fixing the problems that got us in this mess .

Some manifestations are because of ideological and political stances. We see fantasy and unsound thinking in the climate change debate and warming as conspiracy of scientists, who are the most reality grounded of us. We will hear more myth, like “death panels” in likely discussion the Affordable Health Care act. As Chris Mooney notes it seems at times the political right lives in a different reality that pushed serious, critical thinking to the back of the bus. You can see this for yourself by going to the Main page of Conservapedia. When I was writing this blog the following were the very mythic, anti-freethinking news stories featured:

Liberals have destroyed the perceived value of a college degree with their worst college majors: "Undervalued and overpriced, the beleaguered bachelor's degree is losing its edge as the hallmark of an educated, readily employable American." [9]

---

The myth of neutrality.[10] Which side are you on?

Remind Wikipedia that their neutral point of view policy (NPOV) is a farce and they might as well confess they are liberals! See: Bias in Wikipedia

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Pastor Carl Gallups declares his anti-atheism and anti-evolution book is doing well around the world.VIDEO

Is there more bad news on its way for global atheism and global evolutionism? You know where to go to find the latest news detailing the decline of atheism and evolutionism![11][12][13] It is such a glorious time to be a Christian creationist.[14][15]

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Also, food related stocks with large international footprints are largely doing well in the Great Recession.[18][19] No matter how incompetent Barack Obama and secular European leaders are, people still need to eat!

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Much to the dismay of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Michelle Obama and "The Lord of the Fries" (Barack Obama), there are fast food restaurants serving big sugary drinks whose stocks are doing well in the Great Recession.[20]

Obese atheists and obese evolutionists of the world, stop driving up the price of fast food stocks! Also, a leading creationist organization declares, "Blaming gluttony on evolution seems very self-serving."[21] You thought you could blame your obesity and gluttony on "evolution". Think again! Start hitting the gym for 60 minutes a day evolutionist slackers![22][23][24] And give your body one day of rest a week.[25][26]

**********************************************************************************

Want to read part of the Conservapedia entry on Climate Change? Here is a snippet:

Ideologues insist that the world's top scientists have reached a "consensus" that most of the warming which land-based weather stations have recorded in the last century is due to human activity. The basis for this claim is a set of reports published by the IPCC, an agency of the United Nations. The assumption is that the government-appointed representatives who run the IPCC would be completely objective and neutral, and would place finding and revealing the truth ahead of any nationalistic interests.

A lot of money is spent publicizing each side's position in the debate:

"Newsweek purports to take readers inside the world of “Global-Warming Deniers: A Well-Funded Machine” without mentioning that the global-warming alarmists are even better funded, in some cases with government support

Myths replacing reality is a perennial worrisome topic to Freethinkers and the above is a large dose. Some of the WASH speaker’s have addressed the myth-reality battle directly. Rob Boston’s Talk on “The Christian Nation Myth” covered many aspects of this arguing that we have to

strongly oppose the Christian establishment myth and its associated principles, which exclude many people who now it can claim, are not true Americans. We are still struggling with our pluralism and the claim that non-believers that don't have America’s best interest at heart.

Another historical myth family has bothered my is the oversimplified stories about Western and American Exceptionalism such as Niall Ferguson’s book Civilization: The West and the Rest or the Reagan-like belief that “God has granted America a special role in human history.”.

Such Myths are potent in part because they cobble together reassuring ideas that we want to believe in. We just need enough support to get above a very low threshold of our version of “proof” that serves a confirmatory bias.

WallBuilders is an organization, for example, that shows a healthy dose of confirmatory bias towards the proposition of:

"presenting America's forgotten history and heroes, with an emphasis on the moral, religious, and constitutional foundation on which America was built – a foundation which, in recent years, has been seriously attacked and undermined. In accord with what was so accurately stated by George Washington, we believe that "the propitious [favorable] smiles of heaven can never be expected on a nation which disregards the eternal rules of order and right which heaven itself has ordained."

Myths persist in part because considering the alternative, skeptical view is threatening. Then again, critical thinking, as opposed to the intuitive, feel-good version is hard work. Real historic understanding takes time and energy for evidentiary analysis and most of us routinely rely on short cuts that seem like common sense but are often don’t stand up to rational analysis..

Rational analysis for the masses, alas, remains an unfulfilled Enlightenment goal..

Top Ten List of Thanksgiving Day Thoughts for Humanists and Nonbelievers

by Gary Berg-Cross



Dave Letterman has a general list. So do various religious groups & regular folks. They have their top 10 lists (e.g. the police wife list) of things to be thankful for. Why not a humanist/nonbeliever list for Thanksgiving? Here’s a start on a list of things I’d wish would happen, that I’m thankful for or that people might say or think about on Thanksgiving.




10. It’s a day after President Obama pardoned 45-pound Liberty and understudy Peace from the butcher's knife ( fifth and sixth turkeys to skip the Thanksgiving feast during his administration. a (20-kilogram). I’d celebrate if he would realized that liberty and peace might be advanced by pardoning Climate Activist Tim DeChristopher Given Two-Year Sentence For Derailing Bush Oil Auction.
9. Historical skeptics may celebrate, educate and entertain their dinner guests with some myth busting facts. There are many to choose from including the apparent fact that the first Thanksgiving, a harvest festival, actually took place in little San Elizario, a community near El Paso, in 1598 -- twenty-three years before the Pilgrims' festival. Nice to know and sharing knowledge is something I’m always thankful for.
8. I celebrate Thanksgiving as a multicultural, humanist event rather than a religious one. Even the Pilgrim festival was more than a family holiday. It was more a multicultural community event. Remember the Pilgrims invited the Indians to join in. The Indian perspective on this is a bit sobering. In 1997 Linda Coombs, Aquinnah Wampanoag, put it this way:
"Thanksgiving is celebrated at the expense of Native Peoples who had to give up their lands and culture for America to become what it is today."
7. I’m glad that America is an exceptional nation. True. At least our founders were an exceptional and enlightened group and we would do well to be more like them or maybe an updated version of them. Now when I look over the crop of current Republican candidates which ones are exceptional like that?
6. I glad that I won’t be bombarded by silly gaffes of politicians this day. Sarah Palin isn’t pardoning turkeys any more right?
5. Some of us can celebrate the failure of the not-so-democratically-super, Super Committee. We can look forward to solving our problems the old fashion way – with people’s and representative involvement.
4. Managing and pulling off a great Thanksgiving feast requires quality planning and critical thinking. Let’s celebrate that type of productive thinking in the wider scope of society. If we can balance and compromise Aunt Marcie’s aversion to strong spices and Henry’s desires for something hot why not try accommodation more

consistently in a civil society?
3. Got space at the table and need to spark some conversation? Maybe there is still time to invite Paul Kurtz and PZ Myers to dine and share some insights on accommodation versus confrontation. It should be interesting to any Millennials attending. I’d sure be thankful for such a visit and free exchange of ideas.
2. Remember who/what to thank. Ken Guthrie a board member of Salt Lake City Pagan Pride made a good start on this - "I'm thanking, first, the universe for allowing me to be alive. I'm thanking my family for being with me, and I give thanks to the turkey that gave its life, the plants on our table, to the Earth itself for being abundant." That’s thinking and speaking clearly.




1. Not sure what is the # one thing to be glad of? One thought is that it’s only 31 days till Tom Flynn (he of "The Trouble with Christmas") goes to work on Dec. 25th. Whose turn is it to give him a call while he's in the office?
You tell me your candidates for being humanistically thankful…..I’m sure that you can improve on the list and I’d celebrate that.

Magic of Reality Part 2 –Why are You so Insensitive About my Real Myths?

By Gary Berg-Cross

As I mentioned in my earlier blog not everyone is happy with Dawkin’s Magic of Reality book and its gentle debunking of myths. When Sally Quinn published a favorable review and profile on Richard Dawkins in the Post’s Oct. 4 Style (“Outspoken atheist explains magic of science to the young”) it was met by an angry Letter to the Editor by Jim Fowler, Ashburn. Jim largely ignores the science-centric nature of the book and started down the religious path arguing that Dawkins is no expert on religion:

“Mr. Dawkins himself is quite a contradiction. His understanding of science is truly profound, and his ability to communicate its truths is quite enthralling. Yet when it comes to the topic of religion, he exhibits a far less sophisticated comprehension, and his rants can come across mean-spirited. If he would only stick to science instead of veering into a domain where he is apparently not well-trained, his considerable gifts could be far more broadly appreciated.”

What rants he may be alluding to are unclear and how he veered into religion, at least in this book, is also unclear. Perhaps it is that not all myths are created equal. It may be OK to critique other people’s myths and knock Scandinavian Thorists but the story of Genesis, elevated by Hebrew tribes in the Middle East and enshrined in a claim of one true God is not to be treated this way.

Or it could be that the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins is not being criticized, but Richard Dawkins, the outspoken atheist and bestselling author of “The God Delusion” is. With this book he may have made permanent, vocal enemies who want to shout down anything he says. It’s analogous to what happened to Michael Moore and Al Gore when they exposed certain inconvenient mass beliefs as erroneous. that It doesn’t matter that he’s written what Sally Quinn called:

“a book for 12-year-olds, although with its entertaining clarity and beautiful illustrations, it’s also appropriate for adults who lack a strong science background.”

Perhaps it is that Richard can be wonderfully direct in interviews that accompany the book. For example creationists, as Dawkins acknowledged in a recent interview, “might have trouble with it.” Talking about believers in the Adam and Eve myth, Dawkins was expressed himself clearly:

“What baffles me about people like that,” he says, “is how they can get in a car, fill out tax forms, go to the grocery store or run a life, harbor these delusions and still be so ignorant and stupid? How do they navigate their way home without driving over a cliff?”

All of this directness can be seen and read in an exchange with Bill O’REILLY on his Fox show. A portion is reproduced below and you can decide who is playing “semantic games” and who is being clear thinking:

O’REILLY – You may remember about two years ago we had an atheist, Richard Dawkins, on The Factor. He was on a crusade to convince believers they’re idiots. Well now, Mr. Dawkins’ new book, partially aimed at children, called The Magic of Reality – I talked to him earlier this week.

Now, you wrote this book, and this book, you know, is marketed somewhat toward children, adolescents, correct?

DAWKINS – It is, yes.

O’REILLY – And you want them to not only believe in science – which I think is a good thing – but reject God and religion.

DAWKINS – No, this is a book about science. It doesn’t talk about God.

O’REILLY – It mocks God. I looked at it.

DAWKINS – No it doesn’t.

O’REILLY – Come on!

DAWKINS – Which page have you looked at?

O’REILLY – I mean I went through that book and basically you’re saying that everything can be explained by science. Correct?

DAWKINS – Well, everything about the natural world can be explained by science. But where does it mock God?

O’REILLY – It basically says that these things are myths. They’re not really true…

DAWKINS – Every chapter has myths at the beginning of it.

O’REILLY—Ah-ha!!!

DAWKINS – Some of them are Aztec myths, there are ancient Egyptian myths, the … {inaudible}.

O’REILLY – You're playing semantic games. You know what you’re doing. You’re trying to get to the kids and say you’re an idiot if you believe in God.

DAWKINS – It has nothing to do with God. I am talking about myths from all over the world. The Judeo-Christian myth is thrown in occasionally, as one of many myths that come from around the world.

O’REILLY – The Judeo-Christian philosophy isn’t a myth. It’s reality. This country is based on it.

DAWKINS – Whew! That’s not true.

O’REILLY – Yes it is. Throughout history, some of the worst regimes ever have been atheistic. You know that. Communists, under Stalin, Mao Tse Tung …

DAWKINS – That’s nothing to do with atheism……

****************************************************

And the story doesn’t end there. After the interview and later on his book tour Dawkins was scheduled to speak at a $95-a-plate dinner event at Wyndgate Country Club organized by the Center for Inquiry Michigan, along with the Richard Dawkins Foundation.

But the country club of cancelling his appearance after the interview on Fox News’ “The O’Reilly Factor,” where he discussed his new book, The Magic of Reality: How We Know What’s Really True.

Why? In a phone interview Assistant Director Jennifer Beahan of the Club said simply that the club owner did not wish to associate with individuals such as Dawkins or his philosophies.

Dawkins told the Detroit Free Press.

"This is sheer bigotry. If the country club had said, 'I'm not having Dawkins speak because he's a Jew, or because he's black, or because he's gay,' they would never get away with it,"

CFI is pursuing legal remedies against Wyndgate Country Club.