Living with Consequences: Principles v People

What I have never been able to understand about the reasoning of the American Republican party, is how it manages to separate principle from consequence with no apparent self-awareness whatsoever. It's tempting to label this as simple, blatant and willful hypocrisy or bad intentions, but that is too easy: we can't just dismiss a significant portion of the population as evil and leave it at that. For one thing, I personally know several Republicans who suffer this disconnect in their thinking, and I can tell you that they are not evil people. Quite the contrary: some are among the kindest people I know. Some are also quite bright, as are many Republicans (despite what left-wing talking heads would like you to believe), so we can't set their beliefs aside as the inevitable outcome of unintelligent people making policy.

So whence the disconnect? I think it stems from two things: 1) an inability to empathize with anyone outside your own sphere of direct experience and 2) an inability to connect principles on the one hand with the logical consequences of acting on those principles on the other. I won't touch that first point as I am neither psychologist nor father confessor. Lack of empathy is a personal problem people need to address through self-examination. But let's look at some examples of that second point.

1) Principle: A combination of small government/low taxes increases freedom and thus happiness. Practical consequence: poor services and infrastructure reduce the quality of life for all. This wouldn't be so bad if Republicans admitted the relationship between these two and asserted that the consequence was worth the principle. But they defiantly refuse to admit that there is a direct, indisputable link between starving a government of funds and that government being unable to provide services and infrastructure that everyone, Republicans included, takes for granted. You hear examples of this all the time, every time you hear a Republican friend complain about potholes or bad schools or poor funding for the police in one breath, while in the next breath bemoaning their high tax burden. There is no such thing as a free lunch: you either pay the price for civilization (i.e., taxes) or you live without the trappings of a civilized society, leading to generally low levels of life satisfaction. Ah, Republicans counter, but wait! It's not that we are saying that all taxes are bad, just that we could have all these nice things with current taxation if only the government didn't waste so much/wasn't so bloated. There's just one small problem with this argument: it has little basis in reality. I am not suggesting the government doesn't waste money. No government since the dawn of civilization could make such a boast. But if you actually take the time to look at the US federal budget and cut away every single thing you could conceivably consider as wasteful, then add in all the things we all want (but that some of us refuse to pay for), you come up with a total that is greater than the sum of taxation that Republicans are willing to pay. Don't take my word for it. Look at the federal budget. Cut away whatever you hate (foreign aid, assistance to the poor, whatever); leave the stuff you like (military spending, servicing the debt in order not to default, Social Security and Medicare, national parks, law enforcement, etc.) and add in what it would take to meet the needs not currently being met (the ones you complain about all the time, e.g. poor roads and bridges, unevenly and poorly funded schools, understaffed agencies that make you wait longer than you'd like, etc., etc.). I guarantee you that unless you are the most hard-core libertarian around, you still have a budget whose needs are not met by the size and revenues of our current government. Do the math. You will be amazed.

2) Principle: government debt is bad and must be stopped at all costs. Practical consequence: starving the economy, harming our creditworthiness and creating an unstable economic environment. First a major correction to the conventional wisdom that right-wing governments are more responsible with spending that left-wing governments: this simply isn't true, either here in the US or in Europe, as I showed in a 2012 post. The indisputable, easily verifiable fact is that most of the current US federal debt was run up under Republican administrations. But let's put aside blame and focus on consequences. The fact is that national debt is not (despite the folksy wisdom of some populists) anything like extravagant household credit card debt; it can be and often is an investment in growth, and, depending on interest rates and needs, can be a very smart thing to have. For example, if you have a bridge that is falling apart today and you can borrow $100,000 at 3% to fix it now versus waiting til it collapses in five years and spending $10,000,000 to rebuild it, is debt bad here? If unemployment is high now and that is draining resources from unemployment funds while also reducing the tax base, is it better to allow that to continue with no debt or invest in fixing both the drain on resources and the damaged tax base? Government debt is an investment tool. When used wisely, it is not inherently evil. Granted, we have often used it very unwisely, but for those cases, you might want to look more at Reagan in the 1980s and Bush II in the 2000s, when all we got were irresponsible,  deficit-ballooning tax cuts and huge spending programs that did nothing to boost the long-term health of the economy.

3) Principles: government shouldn't tell the private sector how much to pay workers and government aid to the poor in unsustainable. Practical consequence: a poor minimum wage that has failed to keep up with inflation means that there is ever MORE pressure for the government to help the poor. You want to reduce Medicaid and welfare and food stamps? Much of this money goes not to the so-called 'idle poor' but to the working poor, including the lower ranks of our disgracefully-paid military servicemen and -women. So you can't have your cake and eat it, too: we either have to insist on a decent minimum wage and benefits to allow the working poor to support themselves, or you have to accept higher expenditures on aid to the poor. You can't have both a low minimum wage and a self-reliant lower economic class. It simply isn't realistic. Again, no free lunch.

4) Principle: sex education is immoral and it corrupts children. Practical consequence: higher teen pregnancy rates and more abortions, two things Republicans also decry. There are few areas where disregard for the practical consequence of principles does more harm than here. The bottom line is that abstinence-only 'education' simply doesn't work. Giving children the real facts about sex, birth control and sexually transmitted diseases, is far more effective at reducing teen pregnancy, the demand for abortions and STDs. This is not an opinion: there are mountains of data to prove this. Don't believe me? Try looking at a map of the distribution of teen pregnancies and STDs and comparing them to the red state v blue state electoral map and tell me you don't see a pattern.

I could go on, but the picture is clear: Republican principles are completely divorced from their practical outcomes. But what causes this disconnect? I think part of it is the nature of what drives the Republican mentality: unquestioning conformity to principles that are often seen as either divinely mandated or as part of an obligatory legacy of the Founding Fathers. I can't understand the logic of either of these. Even if I believed in a god, it would be one who cared about the actual outcomes for its children. And as for the Founding Fathers, the one thing people forget is that their real legacy is a framework in which we are free to create (and re-create) our own country for our own times. With all due respect to them, they were creatures of their age, and I don't know about you, but I don't want to live in the 18th century. They were a wise group, but they were, by our modern standards, also pretty misogynistic and racist. I do not judge them for that: we are all products of the age in which we live; but neither do I set such people as infallible demi-gods to whose values and ideas and structures I must cling. And they never expected us to: that's why the Constitution is a living, changeable document and one subject to the tradition of juris prudence, a tradition that allows us to adapt this document to changing values and circumstances. Such malleability is key if we are to maintain our Constitution in an ever-changing world. The Fathers couldn't have foreseen ICBMs and Uzis, the end of slavery and the liberation of women and minorities.

So how do we work with people who believe that they cannot be wrong because their principles come from on high? Well.....we don't. Sorry. Not that I don't want to, not that I don't wish we could, but by definition of who they are, it simply isn't possible to treat with the more radical wing, especially the Tea Party extremists, because their mentality leads them to classify reason and compromise as treason. You can't negotiate with someone who believes he is divinely instructed to do what, and only what, he thinks is necessary, facts and the practical consequences be damned. So all we can do is build as large a coalition as possible of liberals, centrists and the ever-fewer reasonable right-wingers and try to work around, over and under this group and wait for what always happens to reactionaries: their burial by the crushing judgement of history and the unstoppable (if slow) wave of change. The worse they can do is slow us down for a while. 

Why I Don't Believe

A friend of mine posted a link the other day to an article about so-called 'Out-of-ordinary experiences' (e.g. religious epiphanies) and why they shouldn't be dismissed as kooky, why indeed they should be fêted and cherished. I read the piece with mild interest, then moved on. But I couldn't get the article out of my head. For some reason it just nagged at me. Why did it bother me so much this idea that, whatever their provenance, such experiences should be embraced? Forced to confront the idea consciously, I had to spell out to myself what was wrong with this line of reasoning. Finally, it boiled down to this: treating 'Out-of-ordinary experiences' as something to be validated and embraced is dangerous not because of the value they serve to the person experiencing them, but for the harm to which they lead for everyone else. If my belief that the Almighty is whispering career advice to me ends with me trying harder at work, then fine. But it rarely ends there, does it? It usually leads to things like 'well, if God wants me to do this, and God's will is supreme, then anyone standing in my way must be evil; ergo, I am divinely mandated to remove that person from my path at any cost.' Eventually, your experience of divine communication almost always ends up hurting someone else. We don't hear a lot of stories about God saying, 'hey, just stop being such a jackass, be nice to everyone and leave them be', do we? Invariably, God always communicates something that, sooner or later, gets translated into bad news for someone else.

All this gets me to thinking about why I am a non-believer. I didn't start out my life as one. Quite the contrary. I grew up in the American South, the Bible Belt. As a child, I attended a very strict, conservative, Southern Baptist church. And it suited me just fine at the time. I was fervent in my beliefs as a child. I saw Satan as a very real enemy, someone who used things like rock music to bend sinners to his will.* I even wanted to be a preacher at one point. But starting at about age 15, I started to question things. The first impetus for questioning came from my sense of justice, combined with a growing sense of history. I remember being horrified when I realized that, for example, according to the logic of the church, all people born outside the Middle East before Christ, and outside of Western Asia, Europe, North Africa and the Middle East up through the 15th century, were all burning in hell for the crime of having been born in the wrong place at the wrong time (since they couldn't possibly know Christ). I also began wondering about other accidents of birth: given that most people in the Middle East grow up to be the same religion (Islam) as their elders and given that most people in my country did the same with Christianity, then had my soul been saved only because I was 'lucky' enough to have been born here v there? What a random way to decide the fate of a human soul. How could a just God allow this?

Terribly conflicted but desperate to conserve my faith, I finally sought out the advice of my religion's equivalent of a pope: Adrian Rogers, the president of the American Southern Baptist Convention and, as it happened, the pastor of my church (Bellevue Baptist in Memphis, where I grew up). He kindly made time in his busy schedule to meet with me at his office at the church in midtown. I posed all these questions to him, expecting that this font of Christian wisdom would put all my doubts to rest and I wouldn't have to keep lying awake at night thinking about 10th-century Native Americans burning in hell. He had no answers. He spouted some clichés, gave stock answers that addressed none of my concerns, then sent me on my way with the words, "I know God has great plans for you, young man."  With those patronizing words - he practically patted me on the head - religion started to die in me. It took a lot longer (about another 15 years in fact) before I self-identified as atheist - after all, life is not a TV drama wrapped up in 44 minutes after one meaningful epiphany - but that was more about labels and exhausting other possibilities than holding out any real hope that I could un-lose my religion. The last nail in the coffin of my faith came from living outside the South for many years, experiencing things that caused me to question my belief system even more.

So why don't I believe? There are many reasons, some to do with the nature of deities, others to do with the nature of belief itself, others to do with how Christianity works in practice.

The nature of eternity. I don't think believers really think this through. One hundred years is a very long time to live. Many people who live that long get frankly bored with life and are ready for death. Now multiply that times a trillion. Then multiply that by a trillion a trillion more times. Add more zeros than there are stars in the sky. And you're still no closer to the infinite amount of time that eternity entails. Eternity is temporal infinity. Can you imagine existing that long? Imagine getting to understand the internal structure of every atomic particle that has ever existed or will ever exist and STILL having eternity to look forward to. Sounds maddening to me. I can't imagine any loving deity would subject anyone to such torture. So when Christians talk about their castles in heaven (as though heaven were just prime real estate for churchgoers), ask them how many trillions of trillions of centuries they could stand to live in even the most beautiful chateau before madness set in.

Polytheism that masquerades as monotheism. Dance on the pinhead all you want: if you step back and really look at the whole Jesus thing, it just doesn't make any sense at all for a religion claiming to be monotheistic. Christians were desperate to follow the monotheistic tradition of their parent religion, but still allow for this 'blood of the son' thing. So - and mind you, this was a sophistry added several centuries AFTER the fact - they came up with the Trinity, a bizarre logical morass in which there is only one god, but 'he' (more on that pronoun later) has a son - but no wife...single dad? - and a holy spirit. Now, I kind of get the logic of the holy spirit, since one could argue that it's just a question of god having a soul himself (though that particular approach doesn't seem to be the one taken by Christians). But a son? Really? Did he create this son himself, in which case Jesus was not eternal? If Jesus is eternal, then how did his dad beget him? And if they are one in the same, how is it one is the son of the other?**

Killing a son who isn't a son to pay a price that you made up yourself. Wait, what? So god is an all-powerful, supreme overlord who created the universe AND wrote the rule book. And into these rules, he decided to put a clause stating that things like knowledge and sex are bad. And when humankind discovers these things (from a snake, mind you, and a snake that he created himself to boot), he punishes them and sends them out into a cruel world.***  To pay the price for doing a thing that an omniscient god must have known they would do in the first place, humankind has to make all sorts of weird animal sacrifices for the next few millenia. But then one day, to pay the price god himself established to begin with, he has to make humankind kill his only son. Seriously, if you came from another planet and somebody told you this story, you'd laugh out loud at the sheer silliness of this tale. But since you grew up hearing it from such a young age, it all makes sense. But if some psychopath murdered his son and claimed it was to make up for something he made you do to begin with, that man would end up in jail, and rightly so.

What does god do with a penis? This one is one of the craziest of all. We refer to god as a male, as a father, and one after whose image men were fashioned. So given that what makes a man a man v a woman are his male genitalia and male hormones, are we saying god has a penis and testosterone? What does he do with those things? The penis is used for waste removal and sex. Which of these two things is god doing? Both? Neither? If neither, in what sense is he a male (and why the penis)? If he isn't a male, is the bible false and in what sense is he a father? If you're going to espouse Christianity as a story of literal truth, you aren't allowed to dismiss these questions. They require answers. And if you are a Christian who dismisses the literalness of the stories, then in what sense are you really Christian? And how do you decide which stories are literally true v just allegorically useful? Doesn't elevating yourself to editor of holy scripture seem rather arrogant?

If Christians truly believed, they'd go around sobbing in horror all the time. If I really, truly, honestly believed that my spouse or child or parent or even acquaintance was going to spend all of eternity in searing agony, I simply couldn't cope. If I truly believed for one second that some or all the people I loved had that kind of future ahead of them, I simply couldn't function. I would have to spend every minute of every day doing everything humanly possible to stop that fate, and nothing else - not work, not play, not money, nothing - would distract me from that goal. After all, who cares about my 70-odd years on this planet compared to an eternity of agony for everyone I care about? Since few Christians behave in this way, I doubt the sincerity of their belief.

If Christians truly believed, their suicide rate would be higher. If I am meant to endure for eternity and life here on Earth is under a century - and a tough century at that - and I am 100% convinced that my death will bring me to blissful communion with a god, why not just kill myself? Yes, it's a sin, but committing this one sin would keep me from committing a lifetime of sin, so the net effect will be less sin, not more. And if Christians are willing to overlook things like getting tattoos and failing to stone their neighbors to death for working on the Sabbath, then surely they can overlook this one sin as a small price to pay for being with god sooner? But of course they do not behave this way  - and I am glad they don't as I'd miss my Christian friends terribly. This tells me they can't believe all that fervently in the future that awaits them after death.

I don't need to believe to be a good person. In fact, not believing is what makes me a morally centered person. There is a very twisted rationalization for belief that says that one must believe in order to be good, the reasoning being that only god can confer morality. What silliness. In my experience the exact opposite is true. If I know that god will forgive me for every horrible thing I can think of, just by me asking him for that forgiveness, then I can commit any sin I want! I can rob, kill, pillage, whatever I like, because god will just forgive me with a simple prayer. And anyway, who cares, because what really matters is eternity, right? I mean, killing is bad, but if that person is going to heaven anyway, I have done him a favor, and god will forgive me. But if I reject the idea of god-given forgiveness and I believe life ends with death, then I must do everything I can to ensure I lead a good life, because it's the only one I (and those around me) will ever get, and no one will remove my guilt if I do something evil. If this life is all there is, I must work hard to make it the best I possibly can, and since humans tend to feel worse when they commit bad acts and cause suffering around them, being good just makes sense. This is my response when Christians say that without a god there is no morality, or when they make silly claims like, 'well, if there's no god, why don't we all just go around murdering, raping and pillaging?!' I also want to ask them: what kind of person are you if the only things stopping you from doing horrible things are a god and an ancient text full of contradictions and its own slate of horrid acts? Bottom line is that if fears of retribution and promises of eternal rewards in the afterlife are the only things keeping you from being a horrible person, then I have bad news for you: you already are a horrible person. 

So that in a nutshell is why I don't believe in a Christian god. If you do believe, I don't begrudge you that and I won't try to dissuade you. If it works for you, go with it. Just make sure your faith makes you a better, not a worse, person, and don't use god as an excuse for doing harm to others. Stick to that common-sense rule and we'll get along just fine!

One final note. On the rare occasions I discuss my (lack of) faith with people, I hear a lot of 'well, I don't believe in the literal truth of the Bible, just its message of love and God's mercy.' To that I say, 'then you clearly haven't read this book.' Unlike what I suspect is the vast majority of Christians, I have in fact read the Bible cover to cover. I would say its ratio of hatefulness and bigotry to its goodness and forgiveness, is pretty staggeringly high. And if you don't believe in its literalness, what do you need with the book anyway? Why can't you just be a good person and, if you think it's really necessary, commune with your deity without all the added fairy tales? (Admittedly, I think the god is part of the fairy tales, but the point stands.)

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Footnotes:

*There was an upside to this. Since I avoided popular music until the age of about 15, my entire musical world consisted of classical music. So while the churchiness didn't stick, I can at least be thankful to religion for my lifelong love of Beethoven and Wagner.

**These are exactly the kinds of questions children are smart enough to ask, before adults bully this logic out of them. Kids can smell bullshit much better than adults can, but they lose the ability to do so as they age because adults keep telling them the bs is actually caviar. You can see this when you hear kids asking quite reasonable (but superficially silly) questions of logic such as, 'Can God microwave a burrito too hot for him to eat?' This may seem like a childish question, but the logic it employs is quite valid and the underlying question deserves an answer that you can't provide. So you tell little Timmy to shut up and read his bible that for some reason still uses a translation done  in archaic English. Oh, dear.

***And then they found the human race from just two sets of DNA. Then magically a bit later in the same story, they suddenly have all these other people around. So....were their children coupling with each other? Or were the children reproducing with Mom and Dad? Either way, some serious incest going on there. So much for genetic viability.