Showing posts with label freedom. Show all posts
Showing posts with label freedom. Show all posts
Saturday, May 23, 2026
Sunday, April 4, 2021
Truth, Again
"I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. That is my point of view, and I adhere to that absolutely and unconditionally. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organised; nor should any organisation be formed to lead or to coerce people along any particular path. If you first understand that, then you will see how impossible it is to organise a belief. A belief is purely an individual matter, and you cannot and must not organise it. If you do, it becomes dead, crystallised; it becomes a creed, a sect, a religion, to be imposed on others."
--Jiddu Krishnamurti
"The constant assertion of belief is an indication of fear."
https://jkrishnamurti.org/
--Jiddu Krishnamurti
"The constant assertion of belief is an indication of fear."
--Jiddu Krishnamurti
Monday, January 4, 2021
Saturday, November 28, 2020
Monday, November 2, 2020
Wednesday, October 7, 2020
Go Kamala!
Have a great debate tonight! Looking forward to seeing you call out the current administration's Fascism, racism, misogyny, homophobia, cruelty, ineptitude, callousness, corruption, hypocrisy, destruction, etc. etc. ad infinitum.
Please consider making a donation, and for the love of our literal freedom, democracy, and future as humans, vote for Biden-Harris.
Thursday, June 6, 2019
Friday, May 10, 2019
Thursday, May 9, 2019
"After Earth" by Ben Böhmer
"After Earth" by Ben Böhmer.
Sounds like freedom.
https://soundcloud.com/ben-bohmer
https://www.facebook.com/benbohmermusic/
Sounds like freedom.
https://soundcloud.com/ben-bohmer
https://www.facebook.com/benbohmermusic/
Friday, December 1, 2017
Trump Stains Democratic Ideals by James Cook
Sorry to darken the holiday spirit, but we are living in dark times...
Embracing the far right, Trump stains a history of democratic ideals
By James Cook
North America correspondent/BBC News
One of my cherished possessions, which I cart with me around the world, is a tattered paperback copy of the Penguin Book of Twentieth-Century Speeches.
On the front cover, John F Kennedy stands gripping a lectern, in full flow; on the back, Martin Luther King raises a hand before the crowd at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC.
As you gaze at that second picture, you can hear his preacher's voice, resonant and rhythmic. You can hear the cadences rise and fall, a hint of vibrato, as he describes his dream.
On the pages in between, the speeches shine brightly with democratic ideals, many proclaimed by American presidents.
There is Woodrow Wilson, promoting the League of Nations in Pueblo, Colorado in September 1919: "There is one thing that the American people always rise to and extend their hand to, and that is the truth of justice and of liberty and of peace."
There is Herbert Hoover's great rallying cry for conservatism in New York in October 1928: "The march of progress" founded on "ordered liberty, freedom and equal opportunity to the individual."
The Wall Street crash of the following year brought that march to an abrupt halt, and by the spring of 1933, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt's inauguration speech crackled across the radio airwaves, the nation was in the desolation of the Great Depression.
Roosevelt's watershed inaugural is best remembered for its signature line - "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself" - but it contained much else besides, not least a warning of the "false belief that public office and high political position are to be valued only by the standards of pride of place and personal profit".
A Democrat, Roosevelt might have abjured the "rugged individualism" of his Republican predecessor, but the two presidents shared a commitment to liberty, characterised by Roosevelt in his 1941 address to Congress as "four freedoms": namely the freedoms of speech and religion and freedoms from want and fear.
"Enduring peace cannot be bought at the cost of other people's freedom," he declared.
Roosevelt had a year earlier started his country on the long, slow turn away from isolationism and toward engagement in the fight against fascism, with his "arsenal of democracy" speech, in which he urged reluctant citizens to lend their vast resources to the British war effort.
Thirteen presidents later, the debate about whether to turn inward or to engage with the world has been resurrected by Donald Trump. He insists that he is not an isolationist but he describes US foreign policy in unilateral, transactional terms and has championed "America First" — a phrase originally associated with opposition to Roosevelt's desire to fight Hitler.
The most prominent spokesman for the 1940s America First Committee, the celebrated aviator Charles Lindbergh, accused Jewish groups of "agitating for war" and was himself accused of being pro-Nazi.
Embracing the phrase "America First" does not in itself indicate fascism, but there is more to the picture than that.
For Lindbergh and Roosevelt, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor changed everything. In 1944 American troops waded through the surf of Normandy's beaches and into the path of Nazi bullets.
Half a lifetime later, at Pointe du Hoc on the English Channel, Ronald Reagan commemorated their sacrifice with the words: "Here the Allies stood and fought against tyranny in a giant undertaking unparalleled in human history." That's in my book of speeches too.
Of course, the United States has not always lived up to its own ideals.
This week marks the 153rd anniversary of the Sand Creek Massacre, when US troops murdered and mutilated women and children of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes in Colorado, just one atrocity among many as white Europeans vanquished the native peoples of the New World.
Then a country founded on genocide and slavery covered its ears for shameful ages before it heard Martin Luther King's insistence that it "make real the promises of democracy" for African Americans. Woodrow Wilson, for one, used fine words but he introduced racist policies too. Even now, that promise of democracy remains only partially fulfilled.
The US has been guilty of bombing civilians, of torture and imprisonment without trial and of subverting the very democracy it professes to hold sacred when it does not like what democracy delivers.
The 45th US president appears to recognise some of this. Shortly after taking office, Mr Trump told Fox News that he respected the Russian president Vladimir Putin.
The interviewer objected: "He's a killer though. Putin's a killer."
"There are a lot of killers," Mr Trump replied. "We've got a lot of killers. What, you think our country's so innocent?"
He may have been correct, but for an American president to casually and publicly equate his country with a murderous kleptocracy was nonetheless a stunning and revealing moment.
For much of its history, America's leaders have, at the very least, paid lip service to upholding the virtues on which their nation was founded - often in the face of existential totalitarian threats, not least from Moscow.
"Freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect," President Kennedy acknowledged in Berlin in 1963, "but we have never had to put up a wall to keep our people in, to prevent them from leaving us."
Mr Trump's rhetoric has been rather different.
Far from prioritising freedom of religion and racial reconciliation, he has repeatedly played to a gallery of the far right. He spread the racist lie that Barack Obama was not born in the US.
He has sought to undermine the free press, repeatedly dismissing inconvenient or critical journalism as "fake news".
He has cosied up to autocrats, from Turkey's Erdogan ("very high marks") to Duterte of the Philippines (a "great relationship") to Egypt's Sisi ("love your shoes").
His reaction to news of a terrorist attack in London was not to express solidarity with the mayor of the city, Sadiq Khan, but to attack him. Mr Khan is a Muslim.
And now, in perhaps the most shocking move of all, Mr Trump has used his Twitter account with more than 40 million followers to deliver a huge boost to Britain First, a racist group on the far-right fringes of UK politics, and followed up with an attack on the British prime minister Theresa May, in theory his closest international ally.
So much for the special relationship.
It is hard to imagine now that the president's delayed state visit to the UK, scheduled for early next year, can go ahead without howls of outrage from a large section of the British public. Downing Street, desperate for a post-Brexit trade deal with the US, insists that the trip remains on.
It is a far cry from the time that the two nations fought side by side to defeat Nazism.
Sprinkled among the fine and idealistic speeches in my book, like granules of arsenic, are the words of fascists and racists. Nazis Adolf Hitler ("my patience is now at an end") and Reinhard Heydrich ("the final solution"), the British fascist Oswald Mosley ("England again dares to be great"), and, later, the Conservative MP Enoch Powell ("the River Tiber foaming with much blood").
Reading them now, a question comes to mind: did American soldiers fight and die on the beaches of Normandy so their president could promote fascism?
It is an astonishing question, absurd even. To many it may seem offensive even to ask.
But it falls to reporters to describe in plain language what we see, and promotion of fascism and racism is all too easy to observe in the United States of 2017.
Mr Trump amplified the fascism of Britain First, sending its message booming and bouncing around the world. It is a message which continues where Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists, left off. His huge rally at London's Earl's Court in July 1939 was advertised using the slogan Britain First and he uttered it himself in his speech that night, a speech in which he also defended Hitler and attacked the "corrupt interest of Jewish finance".
According to Wikipedia, citing a now deleted web page, today's Britain First aims to protect "British and Christian morality", to preserve "our ancestral ethnic and cultural heritage" and to maintain "the indigenous British people" as the nation's "demographic majority".
Mr Trump insists he wants to put America First for all Americans, regardless of race or religion, but the president's opponents have accused him of using so-called "dog-whistle" politics to appeal to like-minded voters.
The president opened his campaign for the White House by promising to wall off Mexico and create a "deportation force" to expel more than 10 million illegal immigrants from the country.
"When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best…they're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime, they're rapists, and some I assume are good people but I speak to border guards and they tell us what we're getting," he said.
He tweeted (and later deleted) false statistics about the percentage of white people killed by black people.
His initial reaction to the murder of Heather Heyer as she protested about a neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia was to insist there was blame "on many sides" and to defend some "very fine people" who marched with the fascists. The comments, which appeared to place the Nazis and their opponents on the same moral plain, left members of his own party reeling in horror.
The former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney spoke for many when he tweeted: "No, not the same. One side is racist, bigoted, Nazi. The other opposes racism and bigotry. Morally different universes."
On Islam too Mr Trump is sharply at odds with his party predecessors, who generally took great care not to link radical extremist ideology with the wider views of a religion followed by nearly a quarter of the world's population, an estimated 1.8bn people.
When, in March 2016, CNN's Anderson Cooper asked Mr Trump whether he thought Islam was at war with the West, the presidential candidate's reply was remarkable.
"I think Islam hates us. There's something there. There's a tremendous hatred there… There is an unbelievable hatred of us," he said. Pressed on the subject, he declined to draw a distinction between mainstream Muslims and jihadists. "It's very hard to separate," he said.
On the campaign trail, Mr Trump called for "a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States" and he has at least contemplated closing mosques and creating a database of Muslims in the US.
At the end of this century, how will such words sit alongside those from Hoover and Roosevelt, Kennedy and Reagan? Will they look strange or normal? Will the United States again be promoting plurality, or will it be retreating into the supposed security of a white Christian society?
In the past two years I have met many, many Trump supporters who are decent, hard-working Americans with no axe to grind against minorities, but I have also met more than a handful of racists and white supremacists who cheer on the man in Pennsylvania Avenue.
And Mr Trump is championed by the influential new media of the far-right, led by none other than the president's former chief strategist, Steve Bannon of Breitbart.
Mr Trump is far from the first president to diverge from the democratic ideals of the United States, but in doing so as brazenly, as often, and in such a racially and religiously charged manner, he fosters division at home and imperils his country's reputation abroad.
The flame of American idealism, which shone so brightly from my book of speeches, is guttering.
Link to original article
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42197006
Embracing the far right, Trump stains a history of democratic ideals
By James Cook
North America correspondent/BBC News
One of my cherished possessions, which I cart with me around the world, is a tattered paperback copy of the Penguin Book of Twentieth-Century Speeches.
On the front cover, John F Kennedy stands gripping a lectern, in full flow; on the back, Martin Luther King raises a hand before the crowd at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC.
As you gaze at that second picture, you can hear his preacher's voice, resonant and rhythmic. You can hear the cadences rise and fall, a hint of vibrato, as he describes his dream.
On the pages in between, the speeches shine brightly with democratic ideals, many proclaimed by American presidents.
There is Woodrow Wilson, promoting the League of Nations in Pueblo, Colorado in September 1919: "There is one thing that the American people always rise to and extend their hand to, and that is the truth of justice and of liberty and of peace."
There is Herbert Hoover's great rallying cry for conservatism in New York in October 1928: "The march of progress" founded on "ordered liberty, freedom and equal opportunity to the individual."
The Wall Street crash of the following year brought that march to an abrupt halt, and by the spring of 1933, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt's inauguration speech crackled across the radio airwaves, the nation was in the desolation of the Great Depression.
Roosevelt's watershed inaugural is best remembered for its signature line - "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself" - but it contained much else besides, not least a warning of the "false belief that public office and high political position are to be valued only by the standards of pride of place and personal profit".
A Democrat, Roosevelt might have abjured the "rugged individualism" of his Republican predecessor, but the two presidents shared a commitment to liberty, characterised by Roosevelt in his 1941 address to Congress as "four freedoms": namely the freedoms of speech and religion and freedoms from want and fear.
"Enduring peace cannot be bought at the cost of other people's freedom," he declared.
Roosevelt had a year earlier started his country on the long, slow turn away from isolationism and toward engagement in the fight against fascism, with his "arsenal of democracy" speech, in which he urged reluctant citizens to lend their vast resources to the British war effort.
Thirteen presidents later, the debate about whether to turn inward or to engage with the world has been resurrected by Donald Trump. He insists that he is not an isolationist but he describes US foreign policy in unilateral, transactional terms and has championed "America First" — a phrase originally associated with opposition to Roosevelt's desire to fight Hitler.
The most prominent spokesman for the 1940s America First Committee, the celebrated aviator Charles Lindbergh, accused Jewish groups of "agitating for war" and was himself accused of being pro-Nazi.
Embracing the phrase "America First" does not in itself indicate fascism, but there is more to the picture than that.
For Lindbergh and Roosevelt, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor changed everything. In 1944 American troops waded through the surf of Normandy's beaches and into the path of Nazi bullets.
Half a lifetime later, at Pointe du Hoc on the English Channel, Ronald Reagan commemorated their sacrifice with the words: "Here the Allies stood and fought against tyranny in a giant undertaking unparalleled in human history." That's in my book of speeches too.
Of course, the United States has not always lived up to its own ideals.
This week marks the 153rd anniversary of the Sand Creek Massacre, when US troops murdered and mutilated women and children of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes in Colorado, just one atrocity among many as white Europeans vanquished the native peoples of the New World.
Then a country founded on genocide and slavery covered its ears for shameful ages before it heard Martin Luther King's insistence that it "make real the promises of democracy" for African Americans. Woodrow Wilson, for one, used fine words but he introduced racist policies too. Even now, that promise of democracy remains only partially fulfilled.
The US has been guilty of bombing civilians, of torture and imprisonment without trial and of subverting the very democracy it professes to hold sacred when it does not like what democracy delivers.
The 45th US president appears to recognise some of this. Shortly after taking office, Mr Trump told Fox News that he respected the Russian president Vladimir Putin.
The interviewer objected: "He's a killer though. Putin's a killer."
"There are a lot of killers," Mr Trump replied. "We've got a lot of killers. What, you think our country's so innocent?"
He may have been correct, but for an American president to casually and publicly equate his country with a murderous kleptocracy was nonetheless a stunning and revealing moment.
For much of its history, America's leaders have, at the very least, paid lip service to upholding the virtues on which their nation was founded - often in the face of existential totalitarian threats, not least from Moscow.
"Freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect," President Kennedy acknowledged in Berlin in 1963, "but we have never had to put up a wall to keep our people in, to prevent them from leaving us."
Mr Trump's rhetoric has been rather different.
Far from prioritising freedom of religion and racial reconciliation, he has repeatedly played to a gallery of the far right. He spread the racist lie that Barack Obama was not born in the US.
He has sought to undermine the free press, repeatedly dismissing inconvenient or critical journalism as "fake news".
He has cosied up to autocrats, from Turkey's Erdogan ("very high marks") to Duterte of the Philippines (a "great relationship") to Egypt's Sisi ("love your shoes").
His reaction to news of a terrorist attack in London was not to express solidarity with the mayor of the city, Sadiq Khan, but to attack him. Mr Khan is a Muslim.
And now, in perhaps the most shocking move of all, Mr Trump has used his Twitter account with more than 40 million followers to deliver a huge boost to Britain First, a racist group on the far-right fringes of UK politics, and followed up with an attack on the British prime minister Theresa May, in theory his closest international ally.
So much for the special relationship.
It is hard to imagine now that the president's delayed state visit to the UK, scheduled for early next year, can go ahead without howls of outrage from a large section of the British public. Downing Street, desperate for a post-Brexit trade deal with the US, insists that the trip remains on.
It is a far cry from the time that the two nations fought side by side to defeat Nazism.
Sprinkled among the fine and idealistic speeches in my book, like granules of arsenic, are the words of fascists and racists. Nazis Adolf Hitler ("my patience is now at an end") and Reinhard Heydrich ("the final solution"), the British fascist Oswald Mosley ("England again dares to be great"), and, later, the Conservative MP Enoch Powell ("the River Tiber foaming with much blood").
Reading them now, a question comes to mind: did American soldiers fight and die on the beaches of Normandy so their president could promote fascism?
It is an astonishing question, absurd even. To many it may seem offensive even to ask.
But it falls to reporters to describe in plain language what we see, and promotion of fascism and racism is all too easy to observe in the United States of 2017.
Mr Trump amplified the fascism of Britain First, sending its message booming and bouncing around the world. It is a message which continues where Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists, left off. His huge rally at London's Earl's Court in July 1939 was advertised using the slogan Britain First and he uttered it himself in his speech that night, a speech in which he also defended Hitler and attacked the "corrupt interest of Jewish finance".
According to Wikipedia, citing a now deleted web page, today's Britain First aims to protect "British and Christian morality", to preserve "our ancestral ethnic and cultural heritage" and to maintain "the indigenous British people" as the nation's "demographic majority".
Mr Trump insists he wants to put America First for all Americans, regardless of race or religion, but the president's opponents have accused him of using so-called "dog-whistle" politics to appeal to like-minded voters.
The president opened his campaign for the White House by promising to wall off Mexico and create a "deportation force" to expel more than 10 million illegal immigrants from the country.
"When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best…they're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime, they're rapists, and some I assume are good people but I speak to border guards and they tell us what we're getting," he said.
He tweeted (and later deleted) false statistics about the percentage of white people killed by black people.
His initial reaction to the murder of Heather Heyer as she protested about a neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia was to insist there was blame "on many sides" and to defend some "very fine people" who marched with the fascists. The comments, which appeared to place the Nazis and their opponents on the same moral plain, left members of his own party reeling in horror.
The former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney spoke for many when he tweeted: "No, not the same. One side is racist, bigoted, Nazi. The other opposes racism and bigotry. Morally different universes."
On Islam too Mr Trump is sharply at odds with his party predecessors, who generally took great care not to link radical extremist ideology with the wider views of a religion followed by nearly a quarter of the world's population, an estimated 1.8bn people.
When, in March 2016, CNN's Anderson Cooper asked Mr Trump whether he thought Islam was at war with the West, the presidential candidate's reply was remarkable.
"I think Islam hates us. There's something there. There's a tremendous hatred there… There is an unbelievable hatred of us," he said. Pressed on the subject, he declined to draw a distinction between mainstream Muslims and jihadists. "It's very hard to separate," he said.
On the campaign trail, Mr Trump called for "a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States" and he has at least contemplated closing mosques and creating a database of Muslims in the US.
At the end of this century, how will such words sit alongside those from Hoover and Roosevelt, Kennedy and Reagan? Will they look strange or normal? Will the United States again be promoting plurality, or will it be retreating into the supposed security of a white Christian society?
In the past two years I have met many, many Trump supporters who are decent, hard-working Americans with no axe to grind against minorities, but I have also met more than a handful of racists and white supremacists who cheer on the man in Pennsylvania Avenue.
And Mr Trump is championed by the influential new media of the far-right, led by none other than the president's former chief strategist, Steve Bannon of Breitbart.
Mr Trump is far from the first president to diverge from the democratic ideals of the United States, but in doing so as brazenly, as often, and in such a racially and religiously charged manner, he fosters division at home and imperils his country's reputation abroad.
The flame of American idealism, which shone so brightly from my book of speeches, is guttering.
Link to original article
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42197006
Thursday, September 10, 2015
"All Scientists Should Be Militant Atheists" by Lawrence M. Kruss
From The New Yorker.
Thank you, Lawrence!
SEPTEMBER 8, 2015
All Scientists Should Be Militant Atheists
BY LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS
As a physicist, I do a lot of writing and public speaking about the remarkable nature of our cosmos, primarily because I think science is a key part of our cultural heritage and needs to be shared more broadly. Sometimes, I refer to the fact that religion and science are often in conflict; from time to time, I ridicule religious dogma. When I do, I sometimes get accused in public of being a “militant atheist.” Even a surprising number of my colleagues politely ask if it wouldn’t be better to avoid alienating religious people. Shouldn’t we respect religious sensibilities, masking potential conflicts and building common ground with religious groups so as to create a better, more equitable world?
I found myself thinking about those questions this week as I followed the story of Kim Davis, the county clerk in Kentucky who directly disobeyed a federal judge’s order to issue marriage licenses to gay couples, and, as a result, was jailed for contempt of court. (She was released earlier today.) Davis’s supporters, including the Kentucky senator and Presidential candidate Rand Paul, are protesting what they believe to be an affront to her religious freedom. It is “absurd to put someone in jail for exercising their religious liberties,” Paul said, on CNN.
The Kim Davis story raises a basic question: To what extent should we allow people to break the law if their religious views are in conflict with it? It’s possible to take that question to an extreme that even Senator Paul might find absurd: imagine, for example, a jihadist whose interpretation of the Koran suggested that he should be allowed to behead infidels and apostates. Should he be allowed to break the law? Or—to consider a less extreme case—imagine an Islamic-fundamentalist county clerk who would not let unmarried men and women enter the courthouse together, or grant marriage licenses to unveiled women. For Rand Paul, what separates these cases from Kim Davis’s? The biggest difference, I suspect, is that Senator Paul agrees with Kim Davis’s religious views but disagrees with those of the hypothetical Islamic fundamentalist.
The problem, obviously, is that what is sacred to one person can be meaningless (or repugnant) to another. That’s one of the reasons why a modern secular society generally legislates against actions, not ideas. No idea or belief should be illegal; conversely, no idea should be so sacred that it legally justifies actions that would otherwise be illegal. Davis is free to believe whatever she wants, just as the jihadist is free to believe whatever he wants; in both cases, the law constrains not what they believe but what they do.
In recent years, this territory has grown murkier. Under the banner of religious freedom, individuals, states, and even—in the case of Hobby Lobby—corporations have been arguing that they should be exempt from the law on religious grounds. (The laws from which they wish to claim exemption do not focus on religion; instead, they have to do with social issues, such as abortion and gay marriage.) The government has a compelling interest in insuring that all citizens are treated equally. But “religious freedom” advocates argue that religious ideals should be elevated above all others as a rationale for action. In a secular society, this is inappropriate.
The Kim Davis controversy exists because, as a culture, we have elevated respect for religious sensibilities to an inappropriate level that makes society less free, not more. Religious liberty should mean that no set of religious ideals are treated differently from other ideals. Laws should not be enacted whose sole purpose is to denigrate them, but, by the same token, the law shouldn’t elevate them, either.
In science, of course, the very word “sacred” is profane. No ideas, religious or otherwise, get a free pass. The notion that some idea or concept is beyond question or attack is anathema to the entire scientific undertaking. This commitment to open questioning is deeply tied to the fact that science is an atheistic enterprise. “My practice as a scientist is atheistic,” the biologist J.B.S. Haldane wrote, in 1934. “That is to say, when I set up an experiment I assume that no god, angel, or devil is going to interfere with its course and this assumption has been justified by such success as I have achieved in my professional career.” It’s ironic, really, that so many people are fixated on the relationship between science and religion: basically, there isn’t one. In my more than thirty years as a practicing physicist, I have never heard the word “God” mentioned in a scientific meeting. Belief or nonbelief in God is irrelevant to our understanding of the workings of nature—just as it’s irrelevant to the question of whether or not citizens are obligated to follow the law.
Because science holds that no idea is sacred, it’s inevitable that it draws people away from religion. The more we learn about the workings of the universe, the more purposeless it seems. Scientists have an obligation not to lie about the natural world. Even so, to avoid offense, they sometimes misleadingly imply that today’s discoveries exist in easy harmony with preëxisting religious doctrines, or remain silent rather than pointing out contradictions between science and religious doctrine. It’s a strange inconsistency, since scientists often happily disagree with other kinds of beliefs. Astronomers have no problem ridiculing the claims of astrologists, even though a significant fraction of the public believes these claims. Doctors have no problem condemning the actions of anti-vaccine activists who endanger children. And yet, for reasons of decorum, many scientists worry that ridiculing certain religious claims alienates the public from science. When they do so, they are being condescending at best and hypocritical at worst.
This reticence can have significant consequences. Consider the example of Planned Parenthood. Lawmakers are calling for a government shutdown unless federal funds for Planned Parenthood are stripped from spending bills for the fiscal year starting October 1st. Why? Because Planned Parenthood provides fetal tissue samples from abortions to scientific researchers hoping to cure diseases, from Alzheimer’s to cancer. (Storing and safeguarding that tissue requires resources, and Planned Parenthood charges researchers for the costs.) It’s clear that many of the people protesting Planned Parenthood are opposed to abortion on religious grounds and are, to varying degrees, anti-science. Should this cause scientists to clam up at the risk of further offending or alienating them? Or should we speak out loudly to point out that, independent of one’s beliefs about what is sacred, this tissue would otherwise be thrown away, even though it could help improve and save lives?
Ultimately, when we hesitate to openly question beliefs because we don’t want to risk offense, questioning itself becomes taboo. It is here that the imperative for scientists to speak out seems to me to be most urgent. As a result of speaking out on issues of science and religion, I have heard from many young people about the shame and ostracism they experience after merely questioning their family’s faith. Sometimes, they find themselves denied rights and privileges because their actions confront the faith of others. Scientists need to be prepared to demonstrate by example that questioning perceived truth, especially “sacred truth,” is an essential part of living in a free country.
I see a direct link, in short, between the ethics that guide science and those that guide civic life. Cosmology, my specialty, may appear to be far removed from Kim Davis’s refusal to grant marriage licenses to gay couples, but in fact the same values apply in both realms. Whenever scientific claims are presented as unquestionable, they undermine science. Similarly, when religious actions or claims about sanctity can be made with impunity in our society, we undermine the very basis of modern secular democracy. We owe it to ourselves and to our children not to give a free pass to governments—totalitarian, theocratic, or democratic—that endorse, encourage, enforce, or otherwise legitimize the suppression of open questioning in order to protect ideas that are considered “sacred.” Five hundred years of science have liberated humanity from the shackles of enforced ignorance. We should celebrate this openly and enthusiastically, regardless of whom it may offend.
If that is what causes someone to be called a militant atheist, then no scientist should be ashamed of the label.
Lawrence M. Krauss is the foundation professor and director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University, and the chair of the board of sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. His books include “The Physics of Star Trek” and, most recently, “A Universe from Nothing.”
Original article here:
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/all-scientists-should-be-militant-atheists
Thank you, Lawrence!
SEPTEMBER 8, 2015
All Scientists Should Be Militant Atheists
BY LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS
As a physicist, I do a lot of writing and public speaking about the remarkable nature of our cosmos, primarily because I think science is a key part of our cultural heritage and needs to be shared more broadly. Sometimes, I refer to the fact that religion and science are often in conflict; from time to time, I ridicule religious dogma. When I do, I sometimes get accused in public of being a “militant atheist.” Even a surprising number of my colleagues politely ask if it wouldn’t be better to avoid alienating religious people. Shouldn’t we respect religious sensibilities, masking potential conflicts and building common ground with religious groups so as to create a better, more equitable world?
I found myself thinking about those questions this week as I followed the story of Kim Davis, the county clerk in Kentucky who directly disobeyed a federal judge’s order to issue marriage licenses to gay couples, and, as a result, was jailed for contempt of court. (She was released earlier today.) Davis’s supporters, including the Kentucky senator and Presidential candidate Rand Paul, are protesting what they believe to be an affront to her religious freedom. It is “absurd to put someone in jail for exercising their religious liberties,” Paul said, on CNN.
The Kim Davis story raises a basic question: To what extent should we allow people to break the law if their religious views are in conflict with it? It’s possible to take that question to an extreme that even Senator Paul might find absurd: imagine, for example, a jihadist whose interpretation of the Koran suggested that he should be allowed to behead infidels and apostates. Should he be allowed to break the law? Or—to consider a less extreme case—imagine an Islamic-fundamentalist county clerk who would not let unmarried men and women enter the courthouse together, or grant marriage licenses to unveiled women. For Rand Paul, what separates these cases from Kim Davis’s? The biggest difference, I suspect, is that Senator Paul agrees with Kim Davis’s religious views but disagrees with those of the hypothetical Islamic fundamentalist.
The problem, obviously, is that what is sacred to one person can be meaningless (or repugnant) to another. That’s one of the reasons why a modern secular society generally legislates against actions, not ideas. No idea or belief should be illegal; conversely, no idea should be so sacred that it legally justifies actions that would otherwise be illegal. Davis is free to believe whatever she wants, just as the jihadist is free to believe whatever he wants; in both cases, the law constrains not what they believe but what they do.
In recent years, this territory has grown murkier. Under the banner of religious freedom, individuals, states, and even—in the case of Hobby Lobby—corporations have been arguing that they should be exempt from the law on religious grounds. (The laws from which they wish to claim exemption do not focus on religion; instead, they have to do with social issues, such as abortion and gay marriage.) The government has a compelling interest in insuring that all citizens are treated equally. But “religious freedom” advocates argue that religious ideals should be elevated above all others as a rationale for action. In a secular society, this is inappropriate.
The Kim Davis controversy exists because, as a culture, we have elevated respect for religious sensibilities to an inappropriate level that makes society less free, not more. Religious liberty should mean that no set of religious ideals are treated differently from other ideals. Laws should not be enacted whose sole purpose is to denigrate them, but, by the same token, the law shouldn’t elevate them, either.
In science, of course, the very word “sacred” is profane. No ideas, religious or otherwise, get a free pass. The notion that some idea or concept is beyond question or attack is anathema to the entire scientific undertaking. This commitment to open questioning is deeply tied to the fact that science is an atheistic enterprise. “My practice as a scientist is atheistic,” the biologist J.B.S. Haldane wrote, in 1934. “That is to say, when I set up an experiment I assume that no god, angel, or devil is going to interfere with its course and this assumption has been justified by such success as I have achieved in my professional career.” It’s ironic, really, that so many people are fixated on the relationship between science and religion: basically, there isn’t one. In my more than thirty years as a practicing physicist, I have never heard the word “God” mentioned in a scientific meeting. Belief or nonbelief in God is irrelevant to our understanding of the workings of nature—just as it’s irrelevant to the question of whether or not citizens are obligated to follow the law.
Because science holds that no idea is sacred, it’s inevitable that it draws people away from religion. The more we learn about the workings of the universe, the more purposeless it seems. Scientists have an obligation not to lie about the natural world. Even so, to avoid offense, they sometimes misleadingly imply that today’s discoveries exist in easy harmony with preëxisting religious doctrines, or remain silent rather than pointing out contradictions between science and religious doctrine. It’s a strange inconsistency, since scientists often happily disagree with other kinds of beliefs. Astronomers have no problem ridiculing the claims of astrologists, even though a significant fraction of the public believes these claims. Doctors have no problem condemning the actions of anti-vaccine activists who endanger children. And yet, for reasons of decorum, many scientists worry that ridiculing certain religious claims alienates the public from science. When they do so, they are being condescending at best and hypocritical at worst.
This reticence can have significant consequences. Consider the example of Planned Parenthood. Lawmakers are calling for a government shutdown unless federal funds for Planned Parenthood are stripped from spending bills for the fiscal year starting October 1st. Why? Because Planned Parenthood provides fetal tissue samples from abortions to scientific researchers hoping to cure diseases, from Alzheimer’s to cancer. (Storing and safeguarding that tissue requires resources, and Planned Parenthood charges researchers for the costs.) It’s clear that many of the people protesting Planned Parenthood are opposed to abortion on religious grounds and are, to varying degrees, anti-science. Should this cause scientists to clam up at the risk of further offending or alienating them? Or should we speak out loudly to point out that, independent of one’s beliefs about what is sacred, this tissue would otherwise be thrown away, even though it could help improve and save lives?
Ultimately, when we hesitate to openly question beliefs because we don’t want to risk offense, questioning itself becomes taboo. It is here that the imperative for scientists to speak out seems to me to be most urgent. As a result of speaking out on issues of science and religion, I have heard from many young people about the shame and ostracism they experience after merely questioning their family’s faith. Sometimes, they find themselves denied rights and privileges because their actions confront the faith of others. Scientists need to be prepared to demonstrate by example that questioning perceived truth, especially “sacred truth,” is an essential part of living in a free country.
I see a direct link, in short, between the ethics that guide science and those that guide civic life. Cosmology, my specialty, may appear to be far removed from Kim Davis’s refusal to grant marriage licenses to gay couples, but in fact the same values apply in both realms. Whenever scientific claims are presented as unquestionable, they undermine science. Similarly, when religious actions or claims about sanctity can be made with impunity in our society, we undermine the very basis of modern secular democracy. We owe it to ourselves and to our children not to give a free pass to governments—totalitarian, theocratic, or democratic—that endorse, encourage, enforce, or otherwise legitimize the suppression of open questioning in order to protect ideas that are considered “sacred.” Five hundred years of science have liberated humanity from the shackles of enforced ignorance. We should celebrate this openly and enthusiastically, regardless of whom it may offend.
If that is what causes someone to be called a militant atheist, then no scientist should be ashamed of the label.
Lawrence M. Krauss is the foundation professor and director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University, and the chair of the board of sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. His books include “The Physics of Star Trek” and, most recently, “A Universe from Nothing.”
Original article here:
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/all-scientists-should-be-militant-atheists
Friday, June 26, 2015
MARRIAGE EQUALITY 2015
It is a wonderful day for freedom, equality, and human rights today in the United States. The Supreme Court--well, at least the five sane members of the Court--believe that marriage is about two people who love each other, and that such a union between those two people should be legally recognized and sanctioned, NO MATTER WHO THEY MIGHT BE. That recognition is not something that only goes to some couples and not to others; that is not how we do things in the United States. If some people get to marry, then all people may be married. That is how we do it.
The closing paragraph from Justice Anthony Kennedy's statement says it all:
"No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.
The judgment of the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit is reversed.
It is so ordered."
It's no longer "gay marriage"...it's now just marriage.
We can and should celebrate today, but there is still a lot of work to be done. Job discrimination and housing discrimination issues are next: shockingly, you can be fired from your job for being gay in THIRTY TWO STATES. That means that in two thirds of the country, you can be fired for no actual reason other than who you love, and you will be unable to do anything about it. And currently only 22 states including the District of Columbia have laws prohibiting housing discrimination based on sexual orientation, which means that, in TWENTY NINE STATES one can be evicted from an apartment or denied a home for no actual reason other than who one loves. And please don't think this is only rhetorical or theoretical as gay men and women are routinely fired from jobs and denied housing. Still. Yes, today is a good day. But let's keep going...
Sunday, January 11, 2015
A moment...
Before I post the next round-up of shows from today's London Collections: Men, and before I delve into a milieu that seems to many to be extremely frivolous and shallow, I want to take a moment to acknowledge the horrific incidents that have transpired in France and Germany over the last many days. I have spent a great deal of time in Paris and can only imagine the texture and feeling in the city and amongst its citizens at this moment. Our hearts and minds go out to the victims, their families, and all who are touched by such a tragedy...which, ultimately, is all of us.
The world is a tighter, uglier, more volatile place than it was, say, even ten years ago. But there is also such tremendous hope and potential. And art plays a part in this potential, whether it is a satirical political cartoon, a film, a play, a painting, or a sculpture. And couture at this level and in the hands of artists who work in cloth and fabric, is certainly an art whose concepts and execution can either offer a mirror to our troubled times or a soothing balm to remind us that there is still beauty to be had.
The world is a tighter, uglier, more volatile place than it was, say, even ten years ago. But there is also such tremendous hope and potential. And art plays a part in this potential, whether it is a satirical political cartoon, a film, a play, a painting, or a sculpture. And couture at this level and in the hands of artists who work in cloth and fabric, is certainly an art whose concepts and execution can either offer a mirror to our troubled times or a soothing balm to remind us that there is still beauty to be had.
Saturday, September 28, 2013
California Leads The Way...As Usual
Bill Maher's "New Rules" segment from the September 27, 2013 episode of "Real Time" on HBO.
"New Rule: Conservatives who love to brag about American exceptionalism must come here to California, and see it in person. And then they should be afraid. Because while right-wingers are taking over places like North Carolina, Texas and even Wisconsin, California is going in the opposite direction and creating the kind of modern, liberal nation the country as a whole can only dream about. And not only can't the rest of the country stop us--we're going to drag you with us.
It wasn't that long ago that pundits were calling California a failed state and saying it was ungovernable. But in 2010, when other states were busy electing whatever Tea Partier claimed to hate government the most, we elected a guy who actually liked it, Jerry Brown.
Without a Republican governor and without a legislature cock-blocked by Republicans, a $27 billion deficit was turned into a surplus. How? Well, it's amazing, really. We did something economists call cutting spending AND raising taxes. I know, it sounds like some crazy science fiction story, but you see, here in California, we're not just gluten-free and soy-free and peanut-free, we're Tea Party free! Yes, we can live in reality! Texas could do it too, but they ‘love freedom’ too much, like when that unregulated fertilizer plant blew up. In California, when things blow up, it's because we're making a Jason Statham movie.
California isn't perfect, but it is in our nature to try new things. For example, now that it’s clear Obamacare is going to be a success here, the movement to just go all the way to a single payer system is gathering steam. In lots of areas, California has decided not to wait around for the ‘caboose’ part of America to get on board. Yokels can mock 'European style democracies' all they want, we are building one here--gay marriage, pot smoking, regulating carbon--and people like it, the same way when Americans come back from a vacation in Europe they all say the same thing: 'I saw titties on the beach!' But they also remark on the modern airports and train stations over there, and the absence of beggars in the street, and food that tastes like FOOD. And they wonder, 'Why can't we get that here?' Well, you will be getting that here, courtesy of the Golden State. Why? Because we're huge. WE’RE HUGE. 40 MILLION OF US. When we demand something, the market must supply it. Like when California set a higher mileage standard for cars sold in this state, Detroit had to make more efficient cars. California by itself is the 8th largest economy in the world, the fifth largest agricultural exporter in the world, and of course number one in laser vaginal rejuvenation.
It's so ironic: the two things conservatives love the most--the free market and states rights--are the two things that are going to bend this country into California's image as a socialist fagtopia. Maybe our constipated Congress in Washington can't pass gun control laws, but we just did. Because we don't give a sh*t about the NRA. Out here that stands for 'Nuts, Racists, and A**holes.' And while other state governments are working with Jesus to make abortion more miserable, because otherwise women would just use it for weight loss, California is making it easier. And while immigrants are demonized in Washington and elsewhere, in California we just okayed driver’s licenses for undocumented aliens. We’re letting them drive cars just like white people! Because we can't be worrying about all the nonsense that keeps Fox News viewers up at night when they should be in bed adjusting their sleep apnea mask.
So in conclusion, my message to the rest of America is just this: do not resist. Kneel before Zod! California has been setting the trend in America for decades and it's not going to stop now. We say jump, you say, 'Please sell me new exercise clothes for jumping.' We said put cilantro in food, and dammit, you did, you put cilantro in food, even though neither one of us knows what it is. And almond milk? Come on. We just had some extra almonds and thought we'd f**k with you."
http://www.hbo.com/real-time-with-bill-maher
http://billmaher.com/
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