A (Very) Short History of Abortion in the United States

In light of the expected overturning of Roe v Wade, I wanted to look at the not-so-long history of abortion as a political issue in the United States today.

First, let's burst a bubble.

The Founding Fathers whom conservatives idolize so much did not outlaw abortion.

What many people might find surprising about that statement is the underlying fact that abortion even existed in the 1700s. So let's take a quick detour. Not only were abortions performed in Colonial times; we have evidence of artificially-induced abortions going back thousands of years in civilizations all over the world, using a variety of methods, from surgical to herbal. And I emphasize 'artificially-induced' because as any ob/gyn can tell you, Nature herself performs far more abortions than humans do themselves: 30-40% of all pregnancies are terminated by the human body itself in spontaneous abortion or miscarriage.

Now back to those old White guys in powdered wigs...

Before a shift in doctrine beginning in the 19th century, and accelerating in the 20th, the mainstream Protestant belief in force at the time our country was founded was that life didn’t begin until “quickening,” at a minimum 15 weeks, often about 20. Until then, abortions were allowed, and it was definitely not considered “murder.” It was procedure, albeit admittedly a risky one, given the poor hygiene and medical practices of the day. So if you pictured our Founding Fathers solemnly devoting themselves to a policy of respecting the sanctity of unborn life, think again. Their belief, shared by the Catholic Church (on which more below), was that a fetus had no soul until it quickened roughly halfway through the pregnancy.

Only much later did conservative American politicians realize that abortion was an opportunity to create a divide among people and to control women, their two favorite pastimes in my experience. Meanwhile, the Catholic Church held substantially the same belief as Protestants. Abortion was a non-issue all the way up until 1869, when Pius IX did a 180 and turned the supposedly eternal and consistent Church into enemies of something they’d previously had no problem with whatsoever. Prior to that, the doctrine was in lockstep with Protestant belief, albeit with a different lexicon: in the language of the Vatican, life began upon “ensoulment,” which corresponds to that same notion of “quickening” Protestants had always embraced, i.e. around 15-20 weeks into the pregnancy. So where do Christians in America stand today? Now, of course, it is a very political issue, and if you observe the actual numbers, it is one rife with hypocrisy. It works like this: If you’re a Christian woman (or, say, a Republican Christian politician with a pregnant mistress) and you need access to a safe abortion, you get it. Indeed, 70% of all abortions are performed on women who identify as Christians, and 23% of those are evangelicals. That means that every year, there are approximately 100,000 evangelicals terminating their pregnancies, and about another 340,000 non-evangelical Christian women terminating theirs. But if you’re a Christian and someone else needs an abortion, that is apparently very wrong and that person is going to hell, and they must be prevented from accessing safe abortion care. This has serious consequences for women's health. Completely putting aside considerations of risks tied to such issues as giving birth too young or while suffering certain medical conditions, childbirth is at the best of times a risky thing, resulting in the death of the mother 14 times more often than a safe, legal abortion performed by a doctor does.

The point of this essay is not to change anyone’s mind about abortion. I am not up to that task.

But regardless of your feelings about the issue, let’s all deal in verifiable facts.

Being “pro-life” isn’t about your Bible and it’s not about your religion’s long-standing beliefs about abortion or the nature of life's beginning, because the Bible never even mentions this medical procedure, and your religion had no problem with it until a relatively short time ago, going back less than 8% of its history. Abortion is now solely about politics, and it’s about controlling women in service to a very specific political agenda in that sphere. Religion is simply a convenient excuse, as it so often is when evil people need to justify evil actions that deprive others of their fundamental rights and human dignity.

An Unemotional, Amoral Argument Against Capital Punishment

This past week, the state of Texas executed white supremacist John William King for the 1998 hate-crime of murdering an African American truck driver named James Byrd, Jr. While I can't say I personally mourned Mr. King's passing, I do object to the fact that we as a society murdered him in an act of primitive revenge unworthy of a so-called civilized society. And I was disturbed to see how many so-called liberals were cheering his execution. To me, the idea of a pro-capital punishment liberal makes as much sense as a pro-KKK civil rights activist.

But of course, as soon as one begins a debate about capital punishment, emotions immediately flare and the 'arguments' for and against rely very little on facts and logic and very much on appeals to our baser instincts. Inevitably, religion gets brought into the argument. As usual, either side of this moral argument (as with every other moral argument) can equally rely on their favorite holy book to support their position. Just as I could make equally strong arguments for or against rape, incest, slavery, murder, infanticide, and even polytheism using the Bible, for example, I could build a strong case both for and against capital punishment using that maddeningly inconsistent and morally ambiguous text. (Yet another reason I am not a believer.)

So let's just leave morality, emotion, and religion completely out of the debate, shall we? If none of these can give us clarity and each can be used equally easily by both sides, it seems illogical to rely on any of them to settle the argument. Let's just proceed with facts and evidence, and in the process dispel some myths and misunderstandings about capital punishment, to wit:

1) Its value as a deterrent to others. The argument here is based in human psychology. It's very simple: I don't want to die, so I will be less likely to commit a capital offense knowing that doing so could cost me my life. This argument shows a very poor understanding of both 1) the evidence we've accumulated about the deterrent value of capital punishment and 2) basic human psychology. To the first point, the most obvious flaw in the argument that it is a deterrent is the fact that the United States executes more people than all but five other countries (China, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, Somalia) and yet has the highest violent crime rate of any highly developed industrial country (by quite a wide margin). So if capital punishment is doing such a bang-up job of scaring potential murderers, why don't we have the sixth-lowest violent crime rate after those other countries who execute so many people? (Note that none of those other five countries is exactly a peaceful paradise either.)

But, you may understandably object, is it fair to compare us to other countries, given our other unique qualities, especially the ubiquity of firearms in the U.S.? OK, so let's compare internally. Do the states that execute the most have lower violent crime rates than non-death penalty states? Surely all those potential murderers are too scared to do the deed in bloodthirsty Texas, for example? Well, apparently they aren't. Texas has a homicide rate that is three times higher than Maine, which does not have the death penalty. And the most violent state in America, Louisiana, ranks 13th in total number of executions since 1976.

I believe this failure of capital punishment to act as a deterrent is strongly related to the second weakness of the deterrent argument itself: basic human psychology. First of all, even if a murderer is acting on a premeditated  plan, few criminals count on being caught, so I do not believe there is much mulling over the consequences going on here. In other words, the idea of being executed only impedes one's plot to the extent that one plans on getting caught in the first place.

But secondly and most importantly, most murders are not committed while the perpetrator is in a state of mind to consider the consequences in any rational way.

Let’s say I am an abusive husband intent on permanently silencing my wife and dispatching my children while I’m at it, I am hardly in the frame of mind to stop and carefully consider what this means for my life expectancy. That's the last thing on my mind until after the deed is done, at which point it is too late for the death penalty to weigh on my reasoning. 

But of course, once I have committed these murders, suddenly the death penalty is all I can think about. And what exactly am I now thinking? The police are closing in. A cop has just pulled me over. I have my gun at the ready. I strongly suspect he's pulled me over because the jig is up and there is an APB out on me and my vehicle. So if self-preservation is my goal, what is the logical thing for me to do in a state with the death penalty? Simple: murder the cop, because I know it's them or me. And I should also eliminate anyone else who stands in my way. 

And this is not a hypothetical at all: how many times have you read stories of murderers going on sprees after they kill their first victim(s), only to die in a hail of bullets in a shootout that often takes law-enforcement officers' and other innocent lives? But what's my smart play if I am in a non-death penalty state and the cops are closing in? Simple: try my best to get away, but, if all else fails, turn myself in peacefully, because that guarantees my survival (while violently resisting risks getting me shot).

The third and final issue with the appeal to the psychology of the human survival instinct is that it is by no means a given that a rational person will view life imprisonment as preferable to the death penalty. While some people might desperately seek to avoid it (and thus become even more violent once one crime has been committed, as above), others may find the prospect of execution as preferable to life imprisonment and thus not be deterred at all. Indeed, for people of this mentality, capital punishment may seem like an easy way out compared to the alternatives of either prison or suicide.

So in summary, the deterrent argument is supported neither by the actual evidence we've accumulated nor by what we know about human psychology and basic human nature. 

2) Its cost. Perhaps I should have led with this, given that it is most frequently the first non-emotional argument I hear. It is simple in its chilling calculus: "Why should I, an American taxpayer, have to pay to keep a murdering scumbag alive, fed, clothed, and housed for life?" It's extremely easy to dispense with this argument: lawfully killing people in a country with a strong commitment to rule of law is a very expensive business, and is far, far more expensive than simply imprisoning them for life. This is so well documented and such an easy calculation that I won't bother going into further detail when others have already done all the research.

Of course, the obvious counter to this argument is that we should simply streamline this process and kill our victims more quickly and efficiently. And all we have to do to achieve this goal of emulating countries like Iran, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, and China, is to completely abandon our centuries-long commitment to the rule of law and our tradition of juris prudence. In short, all we have to do shake off is our democracy and everything our country stands for. Easy peasy.

3) Its equality of application. Another argument typically thrown out to support the death penalty is that it serves to reinforce our collective moral beliefs by teaching citizens that actions have consequences. However, objectively evaluated, it teaches no such lesson at all. Quite the contrary: even a casual observer of our penal system would quickly conclude that the true lesson to be drawn is that in our society, at best, some actions have some consequences for some people some of the time. This is not a matter of debate. Simply look at how the death penalty is applied. According to the ACLU, people of color, for example, make up 43% of those executed since 1976, far out of proportion either to their population or to their crimes. And your skin color as an accused criminal isn't the only area in which the system is unfair: your skin color as a victim matters, too. People accused of killing white people are far more likely to be executed than people accused of killing people of other races. So if capital punishment is meant to be an expression of our values, what does it say about our values when it so clearly favors whites? I blush at the thought of answering that damning question.

4) Its reversibility. This takes no time to cover. There are two easily proven statements here: 1) the United States has often executed innocent people and 2) to my knowledge, death remains an irreversible condition. If both of these statements are accepted as true, and in the absence of a methodology to reverse the first fact going forward (quite impossible), then the death penalty cannot be called a workable solution for a society that claims to value justice. If we could magically ensure that all those convicted  of capital crimes are indeed guilty, we would "only" have the three issues above to contend with. But given that University of Michigan professor Samuel Gross estimates that up to 4% of current death row inmates may in fact be innocent of their crimes, I would say we're in no pending danger of having to fall back solely on those other factors.

So in conclusion, the death penalty is not a deterrent, is not cost-effective, is not evenly applied in a way that reflects our aspirational values, and is irreversible and thus cannot be fairly applied, given our imperfect system of determining true guilt. Therefore, the death penalty is, logically, an unacceptable option for any civilized and rational society. 

Quod Erat Demonstrandum. 

The SCOTUS Ruling on Gay Marriage

I have three issues with conservative Christians' reactions to the Supreme Court’s decision about gay marriage (and, in case anybody missed it, about the overall question of the citizenship rights of gays, marriage aside): one to do with civil rights and democracy, one to do with the (mis)understanding of the role of the SCOTUS, one to do with the Bible’s view on homosexuality.

1) Civil Rights & Democracy. Conservative Christians are making the argument that in red states, huge majorities are against gay marriage, so the SCOTUS decision is a subversion of democracy, effectively disenfranchising millions who have voted in referenda over the years to prohibit gay marriage. On many other subjects, I might agree that the overruling by nine people of the votes of millions of people would be an outrage. (Right, Mr. Scalia?) But this issue is about civil rights, and you cannot morally submit basic civil rights to a vote. In the late 18th century, slavery was still permitted even in northern states (except, bless their liberal hearts, Vermont), so if you had conducted a national referendum on slavery, I have little doubt slavery would have come out the winner. Would that have made slavery morally right and provided it legitimacy? If you had held a referendum on women's rights (particularly the right to vote) in, say, 1850, I guarantee you the all-male electorate would have soundly rejected the notion. Would that result have morally justified oppressing women? If, in 1930s Germany, you had submitted to referendum the question of Jewish rights, what do you think the outcome would have been? Would that outcome have justified the Holocaust, simply because a majority deemed it acceptable to strip a minority of its rights? (Heavens, I am only two paragraphs in and I’ve already fulfilled Godwin’s Law!) The majority simply does not have the moral right to take away basic freedoms from the minority. Ever. And by the way, that concept was best spelled out by Founding Father James Madison, most notably in the Federalist Papers, those documents most venerated among conservatives. And yet this key concept is downplayed by conservatives to the point that even the venerable Heritage Foundation doesn’t mention it in their introduction to the Papers.

2) Role of the Supreme Court. I have heard many a conservative Christian say since the ruling, that SCOTUS either doesn’t have the right to decide such matters, or shouldn’t be so ‘activist’ when considering such issues. To the first point, I would refer you to the paragraph above: we need a body that fights the tyranny of the masses. But my feelings on morality aside, I would point out what is obvious to anyone who knows even a little about the Supreme Court: that since 1803, the Supreme Court has indeed been recognized as the final arbiter in judicial review, so they absolutely do have the right to rule here. And to the second point, notice that, pretty much without exception, conservatives always endorse legal decisions that reinforce their prejudices and don’t mind if these clearly smack of judicial activism, while they reserve that term for any decision with which they do not agree. And since we are talking about legal history, let me insert here that the vilest thing I have heard yet is a comparison of this ruling to Dred Scott, the infamous 1857 SCOTUS ruling that codified the idea that African Americans were not even to be considered as citizens worthy of rights. That ruling stripped a whole people of their rights, while the ruling in favor of gay marriage did the exact opposite, insisting that we recognize our LGBT brothers and sisters as citizens who absolutely deserve equal rights and the privileges afforded to other Americans.

3) Biblical perspective. Of course, more than anything, conservative Christians insist that no matter what earthly institutions may say, the Bible commands us to condemn homosexuals and, by extension, their right to marry. I am the wrong person to challenge on this: I was a devout Christian the first couple of decades of my life, and, more relevantly, (unlike, I would say, 99% of Christians), I have actually read the Bible, cover to cover. Twice. So grab your wet-suit and let's deep-dive this from a Biblical perspective. (Note in advance that I am not even going to go into the quite demonstrably false statement that Biblical marriage is defined as being between a man and a woman. Why bother when a meme sums it up so well?)

Many people opposed to homosexuality (and who thus feel entitled to condemn gay folks) cite various passages from the Bible. The most obvious is Leviticus 20:13: "If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death; their blood is upon them." The problem with this verse is not actually the verse itself - it's pretty clear in its proscription. The issue is that if you rely on the Old Testament for your morality, there are many things that many a Christian does that are equally prohibited, e.g. eating shellfish, getting divorced, committing adultery, laboring on the Sabbath, and so on. So why this selectivity? If you can be murdered for being gay, you are equally liable to have those same stones kill you for working on the Sabbath, for doing something as mundane as picking up sticks on that day. (No, seriously, it actually cites that as an example in the book of Numbers. Look it up.)

Ah, says the clever Christian, but Jesus came along and replaced the Law and washed away all previous sins with his forgiveness, but then he reinstated the prohibition against homosexuality in the New Testament itself by mentioning it several times there! Ha! Gotcha! Well.....except no. Let's break it down. First of all, even post-Jesus you are still bound by Old Testament law (including fun stuff like selling your daughter to her rapist for 50 shekels and going to hell if you suffer an accident or disease that damages your 'manhood'....seriously, have you READ this book?!). See Matthew 5:17-18, the words of Jesus himself: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished." [Emphasis mine.] So here we see Jesus saying that all that old-school stuff stays in effect. Now you're in a pickle here, Christian literalists. If Jesus didn't come to replace the old Laws, you're in trouble, and for one obscure sin or another, you deserve to be stoned to death (or worse: see above about selling your daughters, dads).

But  let's go deeper, since Christians might say I have misinterpreted Jesus's words in Matthew (though these words seem very straightforward to me). Let's say the old Laws are therefore gone. But gays are still condemned by verses from the New Testament, right? Not so fast. That I know of, there are three verses about homosexual activity in the New Testament, and the very first thing to notice is that none represents Jesus's personal stance or his own words. (He mentions homosexuality exactly zero times.)  So let's look at those three verses.

All three (in 1^st Corinthians, 1^st Timothy, and Romans) had better be disregarded by Christians for their own sakes! Read 1^st Corinthians chapter 6 (and stop being a cafeteria Christian for once and read the WHOLE CHAPTER!): homosexuality is simply one among many equally condemned sins. That's right, 1^st Corinthians makes no distinction between a gay person's 'sin' and, say, an adulterer's sin, or that of an idolater or a thief or a drunkard or slanderer or swindler. So if you use 1^st Corinthians to condemn gays as sub-human abominations before the Lord, my Christian friend, you better watch yourself. That piece of candy you stole in second grade; that time you got drunk back in....well, yesterday; that time you cheated on a test or lied about an enemy: according to the Bible, all are regarded by God as equally reprehensible. So stop looking at that sty in your gay neighbor's eye and see to the plank in your own (to paraphrase Matthew 7:5).   

(Interesting side note here: the part of chapter 6 that mentions homosexuality has an overall context of prohibiting lawsuits among Christians. So that divorced, Christian, litigation-specializing lawyer who cheated on his ex-wife is WAY WORSE than the gay man or woman he condemns, in terms of sheer volume of sin committed. Still more fascinating is that the second half of that chapter has to do with sexual immorality, but it fails to mention homosexuality by name or inference at all, though to be fair, it doesn’t mention, say, adultery by name, either, and we can safely assume that would be condemned. The point is that nowhere in the Bible is homosexuality called out as being any worse than other sins like adultery.)

First Timothy chapter 1 and Romans chapter 1 are no different than Corinthians above: homosexuality is simply listed as an equal among those other sins that our Christian brothers and sisters commit all the time (but which for some reason they see as less evil, which I am sure is not at all self-serving). But lest one think I am skimming over this because these verses weaken my point, here are the verses in question: 

1^st Timothy: “We know that the law is good if one uses it properly. We also know that the law is made not for the righteous but for lawbreakers and rebels, the ungodly and sinful, the unholy and irreligious, for those who kill their fathers or mothers, for murderers, for the sexually immoral, for those practicing homosexuality, for slave traders and liars and perjurers—and for whatever else is contrary to the sound doctrine that conforms to the gospel concerning the glory of the blessed God, which he entrusted to me.” (The ‘me’ here is Paul; oddly, for a book called Timothy, the writer is not Timothy, but Paul; Timothy is the recipient.) 

Romans chapter 1: Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.”


[Here is where the lazy Christian stops reading, since his or her own prejudice has been sufficiently reinforced. Alas, there is more.]

“Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done. They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy. Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.” [Emphasis mine.]

Bottom line: if gays deserve to be cheated of their civil rights, or even killed, because their ‘sin’ is mentioned in the Bible, then almost every Christian alive deserves the same fate based on sins they have all committed, sins that nowhere in the Bible are called out as being any worse or better than homosexuality

One last point in order to address the obvious, last-ditch attempt conservative Christians can make in rebuttal here. They claim that the difference between gays v. gossips, slanderers, thieves, the greedy, the lustful, divorcees, adulterers, et al, is these latter do not live their lives in constant, unrepentant opposition to God, that they at some point stop committing their sins. Someone who commits adultery, for example, may do it only once and then plead for God's forgiveness and be absolved, while the gay person 'chooses' to spend his or her life in constant rebellion. I shouldn't need to point out the obvious flaws here, but for the sake of thoroughness, I will. There are two problems: 

1) People in this latter group in fact rarely seem to stop living in defiance of 'God's will'. How many gossipers do you know who stop gossiping? Ask Newt Gingrinch's ex-wives how contrite he was when he cheated on them and divorced them. Ask Donald Trump how many times he has been married and divorced. (Christians conveniently forget that only a spouses's 'immorality' excuses divorce, per Jesus himself.) Ask the Christian investment banker if he ever stopped being greedy from the day he finished his MBA to the day he lay on his deathbed. Know a lot of people who stop lusting until age begins to rob them of it, quite against their will? Of course, there are outliers, but the bottom line is that a group of LGBT-haters screaming 'God hates fags' is full of people in a constant state of sin and quite unrepentant. Which brings us to the second point. 

2) Gays are the only people conservative Christians are constantly trying to punish through legislation and institutionalized prejudice. Do we have laws against adultery? Not anymore. Greed? Please. It's the foundation of our economy. Lust? People try to limit it, but with limited success (and one suspects they like it that way). (Besides, without lust, we'd lose 80% of the internet.) Gossiping? How much do you figure TMZ alone makes every year, and how many people view it? Thievery? We choose to impose real penalties on only a subset of thieves. If you steal a car, you can go to jail for years. But steal from millions of homeowners and your company - not even you personally - pays a fine and you move on. No, alone among all these 'sinners' are gays, because what conservative Christians can't allow themselves to admit is that most of them just can't relate to that 'sin' the way they so easily do to lust, greed, gossiping, adultery, etc. In short, they find it 'icky' and then build up their case from there. But you being grossed out by something doesn't give you the right to persecute those who do it. People's basic human rights cannot be stripped away because their behavior simply doesn't appeal to you.

So from a civil rights, legal, and Biblical point of view, conservative Christians simply do not have a leg to stand on here. They may on a visceral level disagree with everything I have written here; but on a factual level, they can provide no meaningful rebuttal.

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.