Edd Doer on The Importance of This Year’s Elections for Secularists

Edd's column from the current (April/May) issue of Free Inquiry, “The Importance of This Year’s Elections,”  is featured on the British web site Churchandstate.org.uk.

Climate change, reproductive choice, and saving public education may be the most crucial issues in this election season

This year’s elections may be the most crucial since 1860. Foreign policy, the economy, social justice, tax policy, the appointment of Supreme Court justices, and the stagnation/retrogression of the middle and lower classes are just some of the many issues that our under-informed, distracted electorate will be asked to consider when choosing among the candidates. But in this column let me just highlight three of the most important ones.

Climate change

While the Paris agreements of late fall 2015 are a small step forward, it is fair to say that most American voters have yet to wrap their heads around the climate-change problem in all its depth and complexity. In addition to the global-warming effects of atmospheric carbon-dioxide buildup caused by burning fossil fuels and consequent sea-level rise, which poses threats to the 40 percent of the world’s population living in coastal areas, there are at least these other serious concomitants: environmental degradation; resource depletion; soil erosion and nutrient loss; deforestation; desertification; biodiversity shrinkage; toxic waste accumulation; growing freshwater shortages; decreasing access to rare minerals essential to modern manufacturing; rising consumer demand and consumption; and increasing sociopolitical instability and violence. Much of this was detailed in Michael Klare’s 2001 book, Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict, and many other books.

Though too rarely mentioned, all of this is fueled by human population growth, tripled since World War II to well over seven billion. Scientists have been warning that this would happen since the 1950s. In 1974, the U.S. government produced the National Security Study Memorandum 200 (NSSM 200) report, signed by President Gerald Ford and National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, which spelled out the problem and recommended universal access to contraception and abortion. Mysteriously, however, the NSSM 200 report was “classified”  and buried until shortly before the 1994 United Nations population conference in  Cairo. When the report was finally published in 1996 in The Life and Death of NSSM 200: How the Destruction of Political Will Doomed a U.S. Population Policy by Stephen Mumford, I was one of the very few writers who published reviews of it, in several forums. Meanwhile, reactionary Senator Jesse Helms and Representative Henry Hyde succeeded in getting Congress to pass legislation designed to interfere with broad domestic and foreign access to reproductive health aid. As I pointed out a year ago in the National Catholic Reporter, were it not for the 1.5 billion  abortions performed worldwide since 1974 (far too many of them illegal and dangerous), world population today would exceed a mind-boggling, unsustainable nine billion!

This brings us to the conservative religious and political leaders who have gone all-out to deny the dangers posed by overpopulation and to obstruct efforts to deal with the problem. Pope Francis may be commended for his good words on  climate change and social justice, but if he fails to reverse the Vatican’s absurd ban on contraception, ignored by most Catholics but all too influential with politicians, those good words will fall well short. Opponents of  universal access to contraception and safe, legal abortion must be seen as inimical to our species’ surviving, much less thriving.

Reproductive choice

Who by now is not aware of the massive Republican effort, in Congress and state legislatures, to defund Planned Parenthood on the phony charge of selling fetal tissue? Only about 3 percent of Planned Parenthood’s budget is devoted to abortions, while the rest is used for a variety of women’s health issues, particularly those of women of more limited means. Then there is in recent years the massive Republican flood of  state laws clamping down on clinics that perform abortions, thus denying an increasing number of women—mostly poor women—access to various forms of health care.

Religion is inserted into the issue by conservative religious leaders and politicians who insist that the Bible is on their side, a claim that is clearly phony. The Bible does not really deal with abortion. Anyone who bothers to look into it would see that the Bible actually supports the science side of the argument. Here is how: Genesis 1:27 and 2:7 state that “God created man in his own image” and humans became persons at their first breath. To cut to the chase, if “God” is not flesh and blood and DNA, then the Bible authors must be referring to some other qualities, such as consciousness and will, which modern science shows are not possible until sometime after the fetal brain is sufficiently wired to permit consciousness, after twenty-eight to thirty-two weeks of gestation. About 90 percent of abortions are performed by thirteen weeks and over 99 percent by twenty weeks. The small percentage that occur after “viability” at twenty-three to twenty-four weeks are due only to serious medical problems, such as threat to the woman’s life or severe fetal abnormality. This point was made in an amicus curiae brief to the Supreme Court in the 1988 case of Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, signed by 165 distinguished scientists including twelve Nobel laureates, one of whom was DNA codiscoverer Francis Crick. (Note: I engineered the brief, which grew out of an Americans for Religious Liberty conference of scientists, lawyers, and theologians on “Abortion Rights and Fetal ‘Personhood.’”) Judaism, we might note, has always generally regarded personhood as beginning at birth.

Of course, readers of this column may well be indifferent to what the Bible says on this matter, but it is useful to know that one of the main arguments against women’s rights of conscience and religious freedom on this issue is essentially groundless. Opposition to abortion rights, if not based on what the Bible actually says, must be based on something else. That something else is the misogyny found throughout the Bible (and the Qur’an) and deeply rooted in most societies today. Official Catholic opposition to women priests and assorted evangelical forms of misogyny, not to mention Orthodox Jewish and Muslim forms of it, are among the many manifestations of that worldwide ailment.

Too little, too late, alas

by Gary Berg-Cross

More and more, on so many fronts it seems that the adage of "too little too late" applies to the contemporary scene.  The refuges crisis pouring out of Syria, parts of the Near to Middle

East and North Africa comes to mind driven there by the latest, ghastly TV images of a multitude of suffering .   The Greek debt crisis lingers as another situation that organizations were unable to deal with early on.   Over time it slid from bad to worse and it is possible that the scale beyond worse still looms.  And of course we have the difficult problem

of climate change.  Sure there is a growing international community consensus for action as we near the  Conference of Parties in Paris in December. A small step towards some leadership on the climate has been provided by the US and China. But it all seems like too little to stop temperature rise, acidification of the seas, glacial melt, droughts and the like. It has always been hard to fix things, but it is getting to seems that we need to fix things in every direction. As European Commissioner for Climate Action Connie Hedegaard put it. we need more action:

“for Paris to deliver what is needed to stay below a 2°C increase in global temperature, all countries, including the United States, must do even more than what this reduction trajectory indicates”..

And it is hard to do more in the face of determined opposition. California, usually a trendsetter for climate change actions, illustrated that recently. Recently under focused

pressure from the oil industry, CA state leaders folded and lessened an important piece of climate change legislation. They dropped a provision that would have required a 50% cut in petroleum use in cars and trucks by 2030.  We get too little and it will be too late.

What we are likely to get down the road are apologies. . Polite apologies such as “mistakes were made in the Iraq invasion/occupation. But of course, these don’t fix the problems that were made, as we know from things like the refugee crisis.  Awareness and apologies are better late than never.  They are fine and good as moments, but they can be tragic when they come too late and miss windows of opportunity.

Pope Francis, The Ban on Contraception and Climate Change

Edd Doerr continues to provide commentary on the Pope in this case linking climate change and over population.

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This letter was published in the July/August 2015 issue of The Atlantic in response to Ross Douthat’s essay “Will Pope Francis Break the Church?”  ---

Ross Douthat’s essay contained not one word  about Pope’s Francis’s position on climate change, a most important threat to our planet that Francis could help solve by the simple expedient of reversing the Vatican’s 1968 condemnation of contraception.

That mistaken ban has contributed enormously to the overpopulation that is driving climate change. Removing the ban would reduce the abortion rate, save the lives and health of countless women, and improve life for millions of children.

Critiques of Pure Arrogance Intellectual or Political?

by Gary Berg-Cross

Disciplined insincerity & confident ignorance are already evident in this spectacle we call the primary season.  Well it’s still the money primary I guess, but there is a steady effort to test market ideas for the later campaigns. It’s already evidenced an unhealthy dose of arrogance to go along with the insincerity & ignorance (not to mention those flashes & dashes of egoism, conceit, intolerance, sub-surface anger, quarter truths, & light, gossipy slanders.  

I’m thinking of, for example, of Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s sharp-tongued & perhaps dimmer-witted comments.  These started at the winter meeting of the free market Club for Growth winter economic conference in February.  It was a good time to be Palm Beach, but perhaps too comfy an environment for well-reasoned arguments. I’m already tired of people who want-to-be-in-charge of things saying “I’m not a scientist” followed by an awkward opinion that back hands real scientific understanding out of the conversation. In Jeb’s case it was his opinion about climate change, an important topic for Florida and the rest of the world.  Ok, so you are not a scientist or an economist but why not get informed?  There are advisors.

Perhaps we can be disappointed but not surprised with the opinion, since he is very much a politician fitting George Bernard Shaw comment in Major Barbara :

“He knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That points

 clearly to a political career.” 

But it gets worse, because Jeb was just starting on the not-being-humble path. More recently in New Hanpshire he upped the attack as one sees from the headlines:

‘Jeb Bush Says People Who Accept Climate Science Are ‘Really Arrogant’

It is one thing to be “not a scientist” (Re climate change.) and another to attack scientists for their inconvenient evidence, if not a good approximation of reality.  Why are they not to be believed?  Well their explanations are too complicated – he used the more manipulative work “convoluted” in comments reported by CNN.  Then we have the pithy punch:

“For the people to say the science is decided on this is really arrogant, to be honest with you,” ... “It’s this intellectual arrogance that now you can’t have a conversation about it, even.”

Well I think that was a swing at President Obama as much as at Science. He’s speaking up.  But it is easy to believe that the arrogance (perhaps anti-intellectual arrogance in this case) really dwells in those politically conservative people.  Sure, one can perceive strength as arrogance in fact-based people, who are right but the not believed. They have a lot to go on. Evidence-based belief comes from the various climate scientists who actively publish research, 97 percent agree that humans cause climate change. Further the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

leveraging research  from ~ 800 climate experts across the globe,  concludes that  it is at least 95 percent likely that human activities are the main cause of atmospheric and ocean warming since the 1950s. Scientists speak in probabilities, how’s that for arrogance?  Well pulling math on you seems arrogant to some, I guess.

I think that the more dangerous arrogance is this.  It is the acted upon and emotion-centered belief of people who are wrong on the evidence (see above), don’t like testing evidence (what is the trend for the next decade?) and for one reason or another can't face this reality and projected reality.  This type of arrogance is manifested in Jeb's attack on the evidence based community and is especially true of political leaders who need to comfort the flock.

Unfortunately, this is just an early, primary season example of the attack on intellect, facts and critical thinking. We are likely to have more as part of 2015-16 silly season. I know that I will still be upset when I see  how many hands get raised this year when the candidates are asked about their belief/non-belief in evolution. Sort of a reverse American Exceptionalism demonstration.

‘Religious Right’ are politically stronger than ever

by Edd Doerr, president, Americans for Religious Liberty

 ‘Religious Right’ are politically stronger than ever

James Haught’s March 22 article, “Cultural change is slow but deep,” accurately reported demographic shifts in religion in America, but that’s not the whole story. The “nones” or religiously unaffiliated may be 20 percent of our population now, but in the November 2014 elections — in which only 36 percent of eligibles bothered to vote — exit surveys showed that only 12 percent of voters were “nones.”

Further, while very conservative churchgoers, usually labeled the “Religious Right,” are diminishing somewhat in numbers, they are politically stronger than ever. They and their political allies nationwide have:

1. Advanced their agenda of diverting public funds to faith-based private schools through vouchers and tax credits, even though American voters between 1966 and 2014 have rejected such measures by an average 2-to-1 margin in 28 state referendum elections from coast to coast; and this is damaging the public schools serving 90 percent of our kids.

2. Increased restrictions on women exercising their rights of conscience and religious freedom when deciding to terminate problem pregnancies for medical or other serious reasons.

3. Denied climate change – involving carbon dioxide buildup in the atmosphere, resource depletion, toxic waste accumulation, deforestation, desertification, soil erosion and nutrient loss, rising sea levels (40 percent of world population lives in coastal areas), shrinking biodiversity, and increasing sociopolitical instability and violence, all of which is fueled by human overpopulation – thus endangering our whole planet.

4. Increased federal and state court rulings that undermine the constitutional church-state separation that protects the religious freedom of each and every one of us.

There is indeed a culture shift, but our country is not out of the woods by a long shot. Americans of all persuasions — Protestants, Catholics, Jews, the “nones” and others — need to work together to stop the erosion of our basic values before it is too late.

(Note: Jim Haught is editor of the Gazette, and he and I are both columnists in Free Inquiry.)

Who me? I’m not responsible. Why do those things happen?

by Gary Berg-Cross

Flight from responsibility with its resulting dilemmas is nothing new, but it confronts us in a variety of ways across the country, globe and culture.  It is difficult not to think of the reign of unintended consequences of irresponsibility as we are showered with 21^st century news.  This ranges from the responsibility of deaths from police such as in Ferguson, Missouri; to epidemic deaths in Africa; to thousands and millions in conflicts around the globe.  No one thing seems responsible, although you can find attempts to simplify it down to a target cause.  Policemen are only doing their duty and protecting themselves.  They are not responsible if someone gets shot.  Riots break out as unintended consequence of that action.  Are the police, the community of the media responsible for that?  It’s just an unanticipated consequence of a diffuse system where it is difficult to locate one single, intended, responsible cause.  But a multi-causal/many hands explanation might mean that I, as a citizen, share some of the responsibility.  No, not me.  Society says that a crime and such must be intentional.  It's not my intent.  It must be them, or whatever, but not me.

So an easy, religio-cultural defense is that “I didn't intend for this to happen” any more that an anthropomorphic God intended bad things to happen.  Of course, social science suggests that "actions" are generally performed by some human or animal for some purpose.  Certainly we have things discussed in business, law, government, economics that depends on goals or purpose. It’s just that these or a person's model of what will happen based on some intended action may not be what will really happen. Our models are imperfect.  So we have the famous" unintended consequences" and a search for someone/something responsible to blame.  It is a difficult causal analysis and one can understand why we tend to avoid the complex explanation for the simple. Indeed it is a general phenomena that we may recognize which problems are significant, but they are often difficult and so we drift sideways on easier problems and topics that provide more immediate pleasure and conversation.

Fox News is blaming President Obama for being indifferent to the threat of terrorism.  He's an easy target of the focus of who is responsible for all that goes wrong in the Near East.  Who’s responsible for these deaths?  We want a simple answer.  Of course there is a history here and other players with various intentions.  But there is one model to analyze all of this, so as beings with limited analytic ability, we simplify with rules of thumb and biases.  It’s hard for most of us to believe that the President intends things to go wrong, but in politicized times we look for a simple agent explanation.  It’s a very natural way of thinking. But is can be dangerous.  Things happen for a “reason”, but if it is something I don’t like it makes sense to find a cause external to one’s self and group to blame.  And blaming can make enemies of lead to the gridlock of two 6 year olds fighting.

Why are there high divorce rates, the spread of venereal disease, troubles in our schools, and increases in teen suicide, along with alcohol and drug abuse among the poor?  A simple answer is that it’s their culture (see The Poverty of Reason by Glenn C. Loury) .  They are responsible, not the larger society in which poverty is created.  So if "they" rather than "I" are responsible I don't have to do anything about this problem and its unintended (by me at least) consequences.

I can ignore social sciences understanding of dysfunctional behavior patterns adopted by people in poor communities. It’s just too complicated for me to understand and this support broad solutions. 

A worrisome, perhaps central, example of this fight from responsibility is the creeping impact of climate change. Why aren't we taking action? Sure there are scientific warnings about what is happening and why. We  don’t want the anticipated climate changes let along unanticipated ones.  But since they are part of a very complex natural system, coupled with human institutions and power centers beyond my control, it seems to say that “things just happen”. Someone responsible will have to deal with that. 

As passengers on planet earth we can say “I don’t intend that the seas warm and polar bears die off.  My conscience is clear and my moral principles say that I am not to blame.  And thus we drift to unintended consequences unless we see some shared responsibility. As noted in the lead up discussion for the recent UN climate summit:

“...stating that nobody is responsible for climate change leads to paralysis. Second, empirical evidence of public and private initiatives in distant corners of the world ... suggests that both individuals and groups are actively taking responsibility for climate change mitigation.

Climate change can also be approached as a problem of collective moral responsibility. “

Who Has Moral Responsibility for Climate Change?

VANESA CASTAN BROTO, MAR 6 2013

Inconvenient Models of our Likely Future

by Gary Berg-Cross

 At a recent WASH MDC meeting on Peace Issues main panelist Edd Doerr

noted how the hope of advancing the world peace agenda will be challenged by a number of destabilizing forces as detailed in Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. As Edd noted Diamond discussed collapses of once-powerful societies including the Mayans with the most advanced culture in the Americas, the Anasazi who built six-story skyscrapers at Chaco, the Norse who occupied Greenland for 500 years. He also features the iconic Easter Island collapse as inhabitants destroyed their environment 

“where a society that could build 80-ton statues 33 feet high and drag them 12 miles, and who could navigate the Pacific Ocean to and from the most remote islands in the world, could also cut down their rich rain forest and doom themselves utterly. With no trees left for fishing canoes, the Easter Islanders turned to devouring each other. The appropriate insult to madden a member of a rival clan was, “The flesh of your mother sticks between my teeth!” The population fell by 90% in a few years, and neither the society nor the island ecology have recovered in the 300 years since.”  From the Long Now Foundation

All of current society might face similar collapse.

Along with climate change and environmental degradation there is the pressure of population growth.

These were time observations and Edd and Jared are not alone in their concern. Recently the Guardian newspaper had an article by researchers Graham Turner and Cathy Alexander which looked back at earlier predictions about what the earth of 2100 might be like.  Their focus was a study commissioned by a think tank called the Club of Rome in the 1970s. I've blogged on this before.  The club’s research developed a model using of key factors including population but also - industrialization, food, use of resources, and environmental pollution. Their data base was modest by today’s standards but they had 20^th century data up to 1970.  To look forward they developed a range of scenarios (optimistic, pessimistic, likely etc.) out to 2100. An optimistic view was that human societies and institutions would take the problem seriously and take substantial action on environmental and resource issues. Well we know that these along with carbon abatement didn’t happen. The club’s central warning that “the earth is finite” and the quest for unlimited growth in population, material goods etc. would eventually lead to a crash was, much criticized and shouted down by the establishment and its operatives such as the Club for Growth. After all business as usual and its growth was threatened as it is by a serious response to climate change. Indeed even in the “business-as-usual” scenario rather than the pessimistic view the club’s model predicted “overshoot and collapse” within the economy (yes Club for Growth think of 2007-8), environment and population before 2070.  As the population grows resources are used up and get more expensive, we metaphorically cut down our trees like the Easter islanders and impoverish our environment.

So where are we now as we are half way from the 1970s to 2070?  Right on schedule for overshoot and collapse it seems as the Guardian reports the models are on track.

“The results show that the world is tracking pretty closely to the Limits to Growth “business-as-usual” scenario. The data doesn’t match up with other scenarios.

These graphs show real-world data (first from the MIT work, then from our research), plotted in a solid line. The dotted line shows the Limits to Growth “business-as-usual” scenario out to 2100. Up to 2010, the data is strikingly similar to the book’s forecasts.”

To be clear the Club’s models developed by MIT are not as good as we have now but their crustal ball has been better than the business as usual folks. As Turner and Alexander say their research like the earlier work is not a definitive prediction of worldwide economic, environmental and population collapse. They aren’t here to say the future will unfold exactly in the pattern described in the “Limits to Growth” scenarios. We don’t know enough to predict things like resources wars or large panic migrations or as they say the emergence of “genuine environmental leadership” that could dramatically affect what happens.

Turner and Alexander end their article by quoting a paragraph from the conclusion of “Limits to Growth” which still seems like good advice even if we are 40 years closer to 2100:

If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity. (from Current Trends Follow Book Predicting Global Collapse)