Women's Voices Needed

by Edd Doerr

Disgusting. That's the right word to use to describe the defense of misogynist ideology displayed at a congressional hearing a few days ago by a panel of five male clerics who were opposing the Obama administration's inclusion of birth control in the insurance programs of church-related hospitals, colleges and social service agencies. The Catholic bishops and assorted Religious Right leaders (all male, of course) elevated medieval theology over the health and freedom of religion and conscience claims of the vast numbers of Catholics and non-Catholics employed and/or served by these institutions. Virtually lost in the kerfuffle has been mention of the fact that these institutions are generously subsidized by taxes extracted from citizens of every religious persuasion.

Women make up at least 51% of the US population but only 17% of Congress. No wonder women's health and conscience claims get shortchanged. Then, too, women's voices are just not loud enough. In 2006 I conducted a survey (reported in The Nation) of the gender of the authors of letters to the editor published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Washington Times. Of the letters published in the New York Times 31% were by women, in the Washington Post 26%, and in the hyperconservative Washungton Times 15%. Replicating the survey three years later found very little change.

What we need, then, are more writers like Maureen Dowd, Gail Collins, and the late, incomparable ass-kicker Molly Ivins. We need to see more of the likes of Rachel Maddow, Nancy Pelosi, Debbie Wasserman-Schults, and Jan Shakovsky.

Fortunately, the HHS birth control battle has led to the creation of the Coalition to Protect Women's Health Care, a coalition of about 50 (so far) organizations such as AAUW, AFSCME, Catholics for Choice, EMILY's List, NARAL, Planned Parenthood, and the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice. (Americans for Religious Liberty will join in a couple of days.)

More individual Humanist women -- and men -- need to get into this fight.

Theism is an existence claim

By Mathew Goldstein

Janet Daley, writing for the British newspaper Telegraph, cites the "clash between President Obama and the Roman Catholic Church over the matter of whether Church institutions should be obliged by federal statute to provide free contraception. There can be no question of where the Constitution stands on this issue: if a case should ever come to the Supreme Court, it is the Church that will win." in her article "A good week for the smiting of the ungodly". Did Janet Daley miss the news that the Obama administration granted religiously affiliated Institutions an exemption that allows their employees to acquire the contraception coverage from the insurance companies without employer subsidies? Any lawsuits would now be against the contraception coverage subsidy required for institutions not affiliated with a religious institution. Legal precedent says that government can enforce a "neutral law of general applicability" that conflicts with some citizen's religious beliefs provided that the law can be shown to benefit the general welfare of citizens.

She then points out that there are questions whose answer is not based on evidence such as: Is it wrong to hurt people unnecessarily? She correctly points out that it is a mistake to require evidence for "those kinds of belief that do not rest on empirical evidence but which are still central to human experience." She then incorrectly concludes that theists are therefore correct to believe without evidence. That final therefore is incorrect because theism is not one of "those kinds of belief" that is exempted from the need for empirical evidence. Claims that theism has moral benefits are derivative, they come after acceptance of the existence claim. Therefore theism is not a moral axiom like the axiom that it is wrong to hurt people. Theism is an existence assertion like the claim that God the Holy Ghost exists as part of a Holy Trinity. So atheists are correct to look to evidence for evaluating the merit of theism.

She then calls it "a very odd kind of obtuseness in people who clearly see themselves as possessing superior intelligence. Do they really not understand what it is that it is so unsatisfactory about “scientific” accounts which reduce life to the ticking over of sensory apparatus?". This is also mistaken. First of all, atheists really do understand that both theists and atheists posses a full range of intelligence. The difference here is that atheists are applying their intelligence better on this question. Secondly, accurate explanations do not "reduce" that which is being explained. Life continues to be exactly the same phenomena, neither enhanced nor reduced, by the availability of previously unavailable explanations for how it originated and evolved. The obtuseness here is on the side of people like Janet Daley who have this very odd notion that an explanation should be rejected if it is subjectively deemed to change the value of that which is explained in a direction that some people decide is undesirable. We are obliged to follow the evidence wherever it takes us. Since we are not the creators of the universe we don't have carte blanche to redefine the explanations to match our preferences. When a preference conflicts with the evidence the proper way to resolve the conflict is to abandon the preference.

Janet Daley then asserts about Dawkins "Most to the point was the comment that he had failed to “understand the nature of faith”. It is that incomprehension which is perhaps the weakest element in the scientific rationalist atheist case." On the contrary, the irony is that it is the atheists who understand faith better than those who live by it. If the people of faith acknowledged how vacuous this reliance on faith is as a source of knowledge about what exists then they wouldn't be so proud to publicly assert their beliefs are faith-based as if that was a positive attribute or sufficient justification.
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In defense of faith, Janet Daley returns again to questions of morality, asking: "Why do they, and we, feel such unbearable compassion even for those unknown to us – even, indeed, for hypothetical tortured children who have been invented for the purpose of argument? Why is sympathy, and revulsion at the pain of others, such a characteristic feature of our condition that it is actually called “humanity” and its lapses regarded as “inhuman”? Presumably, the Dawkins lobby would say it arose from the need to preserve our collective genes. What an impoverished view of life and its moral complexity, that is.". Having previously mischaracterized the correct insistence that evidence be provided to support the existence claims intrinsic to theism as " facile atheism", it is actually Janet Daley who is the one being facile here. The explanations for moral sensibility, and life, provided by biology are rich. They combine a deep simplicity with incredible complexity, have broad implications, and are anything but "impoverished". Most to the point, we are justified in believing that this "view of life", unlike theism, is true because the evidence tells us it is true. And that is what counts here, everything else is hot air.

Invasion of the Soul Snatchers

by Edd Doerr

Let me recommend what may well be one of the most important books published this year -- The Good News Club: The Christian Right's Stealth Assault on America's Children, by Katherine Stewart (Public Affairs Press, 2012, 291 pp, $25.99). My 1,000-word review of the book will appear in the next issue of Free Inquiry, so I need not expand here.

Stewart details this metastasizing invasion of the soul snatchers from mid-town Manhattan to the boonies. Buy it. Read it.

The Robins of February: Following the 37 Degree Isotherm to a New Climate

By Gary Berg-Cross

Heard this song in the morning? It’s a robin song. I woke up to that sound several days ago. Over a hot drink I had an avian voyeuristic morning watching waves of robins cleaning my back yard for worms.

Spring is not yet here in February, but the robins, harbingers of spring, are and you and track their path north at http://www.learner.org/jnorth/robin/index.html In late January they were in Roanoke VA and as far as Hauppauge NY. Our neighbors in Berryville VA reported seeing 2 of the birds on Feb 2^nd and a week later there were flocks of them in my neighborhood. By the 12^th they were seen in upstate NY.

To be sure robins and other birds have to be practical and opportunistic about getting food. If local conditions are favorable, such as soft rains to surface their wormy food, they may do well if the temperature dips a bit lower. This year more Robins than usual seem to have wintered over in our area and apparently they have found places as far north as Vermont as a tolerable enough place to spend the winter finding food on sunny hillside and warmth near houses ( report from Katja Bahnemann-Evans of Braintree, Vt.)

The sharp, clear air feels a but like early Spring. Many people have noted curious sign of an early Spring including folks in Michigan. Besides the robins it’s the house finches. In spring, the males turn a very purple/red color to strut their stuff for their bird girlfriends during mating season. In this February’s Michigan some males are starting to turn that sexy finch red. Then again in some places people report seeing streaks of eastern gray squirrels chasing each other up and down trees getting ready for an early mating season. It used to begin in mid-March. Now they are scampering in my yard with some bold ones lazily scratching in the sun on my deck.

This is all a bit unscientific but it did get me to dip a toe into a bit of the science. I learned something about the Spring movements of robins. They usually follow what is called the 37 degree isotherm. We are well above that, our recent low of 39 was higher than that. What such temperatures allow is what is called a "vertical migration" allowing the first
earthworms of the season. In the fall Earthworms migrate down into the earth to escape below the frostline. Research finds that they sometimes they ball up in wormy groups to reduce moisture loss. A ball may have as many as a hundred worms all bunched together and in this community they spend an inactive winter. But when the weather when drives frost from the soil, the earthworms become vertical migrants and tunneling upward and appear at the surface. A warm rain, of course, helps loosen the ground and you might have noticed we’ve had these along with high average temperatures that have left our ground reaches above 36 degrees. If you look at the WAPO weather page you can see this winter’s stats on “heating degree days” – an index of fuel consumption tell us by how many degrees the daily average fell below 65 degrees and thus required that degree of heating to be comfortable. By this time in February the historical total of such heating has been 2835. We had a cooler than normal winter last year and needed 2913 or some 80 degrees more of heating. This year our total is only 2330 and thus we’ve needed almost 500 degrees less of heating than normal. A measure of how deviant we and many other parts of the US have been.

What's happening is so noticeable in the last few years that scientists can track it from space. A few years ago Satellites measuring when land turns green found that spring "green-up" is arriving eight hours earlier every year on average since 1982 north of the Mason-Dixon line. These trends are showing up in the northern climes more than the south, and up north it affects what is called phenology or biological timing. The mutual timing of worms and robin arrival is one example. To a large extent biological spring is based on the tilt of the Earth as it circles the sun. But climate change seems to be having an influence and we need to better understand the changes, and what do they mean for humanity and our fellow creatures.

Back in 2008 people were talking about winners as well as losers in any change but we still are unsure of the range of ] effect that consistent global warming will have. It is like to confuse the natural coupled timing that evolution has provided. Sure we will appreciate savings from heating bills with milder winters and more bird songs. We and Canada will get a longer growing season and Maryland wines will be taste better.

But the sobering expectation is such things as a broader biological view that foresees big problems such as species to extinction. As with the robins and worms certain plants and animals are dependent on each other for food and shelter. In my garden some of the bulbs are up. If plants bud too early they are vulnerable to a late freeze from an arctic high and weather variability is one thing that may come with the early phases of climate change.

If the plants bloom or bear fruit before animals return or surface from hibernation, our animal friends and their young may not be able to cope and could starve. Tree swallow chicks are laying eggs 9-10 days earlier than in the 1960s in places like NY. They now starve if we have late cold snaps because insects stop flying in the cold, according to reports from ornithologists like University of Maryland biology professor David Inouye.

A more recent story notes:

"U.S. Forest Service researchers have confirmed what has long been suspected about a valuable tree in Alaska's Panhandle: Climate warming is killing off yellow cedar.


The mighty trees can live more than 1,000 years, resisting bugs and rot and even defending themselves against injury, but their shallow roots are vulnerable to freezing if soil is not insulated by snow. And for more than a century, with less snow on the ground, frozen roots have killed yellow cedar on nearly a half-million acres in southeast Alaska, plus another 123,000 acres in adjacent British Columbia. "

I’m enjoying the reset of nature’s clock to an early Spring and my earlier than usual birding and bulb blooms, but I do worry that it is all not just for the good.

Religious Americans enjoy higher-what?

By Hos
A number of recent Gallup polls have been put together by the polling organization, leading to the conclusion that the most religious Americans have the highest level of "wellbeing". You can find the data here, here and here. The neologism not withstanding, the data can be taken to mean that faith brings you physical and mental health.
And yet it doesn't take a genius or social scientists to poke holes in this conclusion the size of your average megachurch.
To start with, the study is based entirely on self reporting. This problem with surveys having to do with religion never seems to bother religious folks who quote them as they tout the glory brought on humanity by the wonderful institution. You ask someone how religious they are, and in the next breath you ask them how much they drink. What is the likelihood that your next door Muslim, Baptist or Mormon will under-report, consciously or not?
The second problem is that it doesn't take into consideration the benefits of community bestowed on the faithful by their houses of worship. Undeniably that is an area where we have fallen short, even though things are getting better. Having long lasting friendships in the context of service attendance could well be helpful in reducing anxiety and depression.
Another factor possibly skewing the results (and not adjusted for in the surveys) is the location of the most versus least religious. Anecdotally at least, rural areas in the US happen to have the most religious populations, while the least religious live in major urban centers. City life stress, plus other factors affecting urban lifestyle (such as diet and exercise) may also be affecting the findings.
There are other effects of religion on health that are a lot more subtle and cannot be surveyed for. One notorious example is HIV. Condemnation and denial of homosexuality among a number of ethnic and religious communities only leads to delayed diagnosis and further spread of the disease among men and women alike. Other examples includes denial of blood transfusions by Jehovah's Witnesses and faith healing leading to delayed care, which at times can be deadly.
Last but not least, let's not forget the hostility directed at non-believers. The kind of threats that activists like Jessica Ahlquist have to deal with represent only the tip of the iceberg. The social situations atheists face are all too similar: keep it to yourself or put your career in jeopardy and risk shunning by friends, family and community. No surprise that the religion report higher levels of "wellbeing".

Faith and Mountains

by Augusto Monterroso (from "The Black Sheep and Other Fables"), Translated from the Spanish by Edd Doerr

In the beginning Faith moved mountains only when absolutely necessary, so that the landscape remained the same for millenia. But when Faith began to spread and people found it fun to move mountains, these began to change locations and it became hard to find where they had been left the previous day; and this created more difficulties than could be resolved. So people preferred to abandon Faith and now mountains generally remain in their place. But when there is a huge pile-up on the Interstate and many people are killed, it is because someone somewhere indulged in a little Faith,

-- oOo --

In spite of what they say, the idea of a Heaven inhabited by Horses and presided over by an equine Deity is repugnant to good taste and elementary logic. So reasoned the Horse the other day. Everyone knows, he reasoned, that if Horses were able to imagine a Deity he would be in the form of a Rider.

-- oOo --

In the home of a rich merchant in Mexico City, surrounded by every sort of luxury and devices, there lived a Dog who decided that he wanted to be a human, and he worked at it in earnest. After a few years and persistent effort he was able to walk upright on two feet and at times felt that he was on the point of becoming human, except that he didn't bite, wagged his tail when he encountered someone he knew, would turn around three times before lying down, would salivate when he heard the church bells, and would howl at the moon.

-- 30 --

Identity versus evidence

A common theme of those who argue in favor of government establishment of a majority's religion is "religious identity". In her speech against "militant secularists" promoting "totalitarian regimes" and "denying people the right to a religious identity", British Cabinet Minister without Portfolio, Sayeeda Warsi, mentioned identity three times in the first three minutes. "In order to encourage social harmony, people need to feel stronger in their religious identities and more confident in their beliefs", "in a globalized world it is easy to think that, to relate to others, you must water down your religious identity", and "it demonstrates similar traits to totalitarian regimes, denying people the right to a religious identity". What is the relationship between belief and identity and secularism?

Religious conservatives have a tendency to assert that a primary purpose of belief is to define individual and group identity. However, that isn't generally true. We believe that cows exist and dragons do not exist, not as a means to give ourselves an identity, but as a result of the evidence for the existence of cows and against the existence of dragons. What religious conservatives are doing here is inconsistent. They are insisting on two conflicting standards for belief justification, one rational, based on the evidence, and another arational, based on maintaining a self-confident identity.

Maintaining self-confidence isn't an issue with rational beliefs. We are self-confident in our rational beliefs in proportion to the evidence. Because rational beliefs are not about self-identity, there is no need for a preset and never changing self-confidence in our beliefs. As additional evidence is accumulated over time, rational beliefs adjust to fit the available evidence. The past is not the future, and rational beliefs are flexible enough to respect and accommodate future changes. Neither self-identity nor self-confidence are dependent on rational beliefs.

In contrast, the religious belief based self-identity, having thus entangled itself with self-confidence, does not like being confined to individual expression. Because religious belief is insecure and entangled with self-confidence, it seeks support from the nation as a whole. Without active and ongoing governmental expression of the majority's religious practice, the otherwise insecure majority religious beliefs are "sidelined, marginalised and downgraded" in the words of Ms. Warsi. Confidence in religious beliefs merges with self-confidence, religious beliefs merge with self-identity, self-identity merges with national identity, and the government sphere merges with the non-governmental sphere. There is then just one comprehensive and indivisible identity and public sphere, and that identity and public sphere are themselves merged together with, and defined for everyone by, a majority religious belief.

Thus, according to Ms. Warsi, merely forbidding a prayer ritual at the start of government meetings becomes a denial of "the right to a religious identity" for people generally. But of course, it is no such thing. Government meeting prayer rituals are not even a denial of the right to an atheist identity. If not having a prayer ritual were a denial of the right to a religious identity then the right to a religious identity would necessarily be incompatible with the right to an atheist identity, or to any conflicting, unrepresented minority religious identity, since the government meeting cannot simultaneously have an opening ritual affirming all conflicting beliefs. That is nonsense, and that is the real core problem here. The people who are insisting on government establishments of their preferred religions are in effect asserting a right to impose promotion of their insecure and arational religious self-identity, practices, and beliefs on all the citizens of the nation through the common government. There is no such right.

Starting with the false foundations that individual identity is the same identity as national identity, government actions are the same public actions as non-government actions, confidence in a particular set of beliefs is the same confidence as self-confidence in one's self, and the purpose and function of beliefs is to define and maintain an identity, is it any surprise that arguments for establishment of religion go awry, descending into bombast and ending in self-contradiction?

The applicable right here is for individuals to freely form and express their own beliefs and identities without government interference. This requires unbiased government with no religious identity. Practice your religion as you wish, in public or privately, government has nothing to say about which religious beliefs, or identities, or rituals and practices, are preferred or patriotic. People do not need their government to practice their religious beliefs for them, or define a national religious identity for them, and there is no civic right to a government favoring your own religious beliefs or identities over competing beliefs or identities. If Ms. Warsi really thinks that is an intolerant prescription that is reminiscent of totalitarian regimes then she is a very confused lady representing a very confused government.

Simple Help to Understand Difficult Issues and its Argumentation

Gary Berg-Cross

The recent arguments on this Blog about supporting language-based charter schools in DC raised some fundamental issues about argumentation and bias in my mind. It starts from the obvious observation that there are usual many sides to an issue like this. But our experiences, values and broad stances often frames what we consider good arguments. Facts are certainly important in an argument. So the fact that “there are Christian Arabs” is one of many facts that can be cited to support an argument. They may be used to support or oppose principles and thus provide a coherent argument. But since there may be so many relevant facts it is often hard to focus down to critical facts and arguments can quickly become so complex they are difficult to follow, especially when the various sides of an issues have a large history and many interacting factors. In addition to heaps of facts in an argument one may cite such things as:

· Principles (schools should serve broad student bodies)

· Hidden agenda and motivation (Christian evangelical kids learning Hebrew so that they can proselytize in Israel) Again facts may be used to expose or distract from agendas ,

· Ideology and values (English is our official language or Charter movement is said to have shifted into an effort to privatize education and attack teachers' unions,) but (we shouldn’t have publish money going into religious schools and “Two yet-to-be-opened Hebrew charter schools in New Jersey each received federal grants of $200,000”)

· Backers & group associations (Some Charter schools have ties to religious groups ), and a variety of other factors that go into human situations and our understanding of them.

· Uncomfortable trends (Religious Charter Schools are proliferating)

Some of these as well as supporting facts I may have only a small knowledge of for example who is in back of language-based charter schools. I may have a general sense of how is in back of charter schools and wonder if this is a camel’s nose under the tent strategy. I may connect this to larger, religious agendas such as abortion control or teaching creationism is schools that work tirelessly to nibble away at resistance to their broader agenda. In such grey areas I may be in conflict because I can see a goal that has potential good, but may afford and opportunity for some downside too. If I hear that New Gingrich favors Hebrew language charter schools for DC and these are getting funds from Sheldon Adelstein, who is know to fund Independent Jewish schools, I might worry that there is an agenda here, although it is a loose chain of reasoning.

How do we assess all these factors and role them into a judgment on issues that are complex like this and where only limited facts are know and the environment is not transparent enough to be sure? One may ask how humans reach a reasoned judgment when there are so many factors. Learning a language, for example, is good while supporting schools that are anti-union is bad. It’s all more than a direct calculating and adding up of all supporting and opposing factors in some type of vast numerical calculation. Critical thinking & reducing complexity by analysis that breaks things down a bit helps. I’ve done just a bit of this in my bullets. Using argument maps to explore what has been said can be useful. Argument maps allow us to clarify the thoughts and look at various parts of an argument. But it takes time and training so it is a selective improvement.

This is now well enough researched in Cognitive Psychology and Decision Science to offer some insights. But it itself is complex enough that only a gesture to the full story is attempted here.

So how do we reach judgment under such complex situation? Our mind often shortcuts the complexity. One factor are frames that influence what we believe are facts and have much to do with our arguments on complex issues helping us simplify them down to what seems like a coherent argument. But another is active filtering and biases. We choose to seek out and accept the information that fits our existing mental model or viewpoint, instead of all information available. And so yes this often involves biases in our reasoning process.

One big factor in such judgments is a confirmatory bias - a tendency for us to favor information that confirms our beliefs, hypotheses or even our identities. So if we already hold a belief that teaching Hebrew is good (proselytize in Israel or maybe the tourist trade is good for the Israeli state) you can you can find data to support this and even the general notion that learning any new language is good confirms your belief. In other words, our judgment may be biased by seeking information which confirms an existing viewpoint. This simplifies things. We don’t have to worry about competing ideas such as, “well learning a new language is good, but why learn Arabic and not Spanish (with a growing population) or Italian (a nice place to visit)?”

What about new data? Well frames and a confirmatory bias helps direct interpretation of new “facts. ” It can be as simple as ignoring or downplaying information that doesn’t fit our concepts. But it can be active as new information is reinterpreted to match expectations and preconceptions. In controlled studies even if two people observed the same events, their interpretation can be completely different and influenced by preconceptions (shades of ideological thinking!).

So how do we get beyond things like confirmatory biases to understand what going on? Well being aware of the bias is a start. Critical thinking and a skeptical attitude helps. No matter what side you are on there are some general ideas such sharing your arguments with other critical thinkers. Since we are weak in finding flaws in our own reasoning other people may see the biases and fallacies. It can be hard on the ego though. Exposing arguments on a Blog like this is a way to do that, but one has to be open to personal progress and not rigid.

As to methods 2400 years ago or so Socrates came up with a dialogue method to help us get unstuck from our pre-judgments. It takes extended discussion that is less of one advocate clashing with another like 2 lawyers representing clients. It is more like a cooperative search for the truth.

We also have the rational, empirical scientific method which values challenging but testable hypotheses, questions data and has a way of converging on hypothesis that are supported by validated facts through systematic observation. Being more like a scientist and less like a lawyer just sounds better to me.