Saturday, December 20, 2014

On Christians, atheists, and torture

I have this tendency to be most critical of the groups that I'm part
of. You see this a lot in terms of my thinking about the Democratic
Party. But I dare say you see it most of all with my thinking about
atheists. And there is a lot to dislike about the modern atheist
movement. I am an atheist in the Arthur Schopenhauer tradition. Much of
modern atheism is intellectually vacuous. But as popular movements go,
it is still pretty good. There isn't likely to be a mass movement that I
have any less criticism of.

Probably the best aspect of modern atheism is that there is a strong
current of humanism in it. I think it is the case that people like Sam
Harris and Christopher Hitchens are admired despite being torture
proponents, not because of it. What's more, I don't so much see myself
as part of the atheist community in the sense that I read atheist blogs
and go to atheist conventions. I see myself as a member of the growing
numbers of people who just aren't religious. And by and large, this is a
mighty fine group.

I found the recent release of the torture report as upsetting as it was unsurprising. So I was somewhat pleased to read Steve Benen's "This Week in God" today. Its focus was on a new Washington Post/ABC News poll on attitudes about torture. It confirms the results of a 2009 poll
by Pew. As you've probably heard, Americans are overwhelmingly in favor
of torture. Of those polled, 59% were just peachy with what the CIA
did; only 31% had a problem with it. Obviously, that was not what
pleased me.

This poll subdivided people by their religious affiliations. So Benen
put together the following graph that sums up the main categories:

Benen pointed out that people with "no religion" were pretty much the
only group in the report that were against torture. I wish the numbers
were better than they are, but they are far better than average. And the major Christian groups are all worse
than average. It's disgusting, but again, unsurprising. It goes along
with my primary complaint against modern American Christians: their
religion is all culture and no theology. The one thing they absolutely
believe is that people like them are "good" and people not like them
(e.g., Muslims) are "bad." Thus they don't really care. After all, it's
not like anyone is suggesting burning the evildoers alive. (Not that
they would be against that either.)

As much as I'm pleased that we non-believers demonstrate more
humanity than average, this information is profoundly disturbing. We
are, after all, an almost 80% Christian country. And the only takeaway
from that is that Christianity is "right" and that Christians are
oppressed whenever someone says "Happy holidays!" to them. We live in a
sad world.

Friday, December 19, 2014

American torture: Gul Rahmân and Dick Cheney

I don't actually know who Gul Rahmân was, and neither do most Americans,
which is unfortunate. One salient fact about him is known, however --
he was not a terrorist. Nevertheless, due to an error, he was
apparently arrested on suspicion of being one. He later died under
torture in CIA custody.

Take a moment to let that sink in. An innocent man died under torture,
torture inflicted by Americans, as part of a program officially
sanctioned by the American government at the time.

CHUCK TODD: Let me ask you, what do you say to Gul Rahman, what do
you say to Sulaiman Abdula, what do you say to Khalid al-Masri? All
three of these folks were detained, they had these interrogation
techniques used on them. They eventually were found to be innocent. They
were released, no apologies, nothing. What do we owe them?

DICK CHENEY: Well --

CHUCK TODD: I mean, let me go to Gul Rahman. He was chained to the
wall of his cell, doused with water, froze to death in C.I.A. custody.
And it turned out it was a case of mistaken identity.

DICK CHENEY: -- right. But the problem I had is with the folks that
we did release that end up back on the battlefield. Of the 600 and some
people who were released out of Guantanamo, 30% roughly ended up back
on the battlefield. Today we're very concerned about ISIS. Terrible new
terrorist organization. It is headed by named Baghdadi. Baghdadi was in
the custody of the U.S. military in Iraq in Camp Bucca. He was let go
and now he's out leading the terror attack against the United States.
I'm more concerned with bad guys who got out and released than I am with
a few that, in fact, were innocent.

CHUCK TODD: 25% of the detainees though, 25% turned out to be innocent. They were released.

DICK CHENEY: Where are you going to draw the line, Chuck? How are --

CHUCK TODD: Well, I'm asking you.

DICK CHENEY: -- you going to know?

CHUCK TODD: Is that too high? You're okay with that margin for error?

DICK CHENEY: I have no problem as long as we achieve our objective.

And there you have it. Leave aside the consensus, among most who
understand the issue, that torture almost never produces reliable or
useful information. Cheney has "no problem" with using torture even
though a quarter of the victims were innocent, even though at least one
innocent person (and I certainly don't believe he was the only one) died
under torture. This is a former Vice President of the United States,
but the words coming out of his mouth sound better suited to Lenin or
Himmler.

Cheney justifies the use of torture on the basis of the 9/11 attack,
which was indeed a horrific atrocity. The problem is that almost every
regime we have ever condemned for using torture could advance a
comparable argument. North Vietnam, for example, lost a lot more than
3,000 innocent civilians to American bombing during the war in which it
tortured John McCain. There are certain lines which a civilized state
doesn't cross, even under that kind of provocation. Such standards are
what distinguish us from a communist dictatorship or a fascist
gangster-state.

Or used to.

McCain, the only Republican to really distinguish himself honorably
in the wake of the torture report's release, understands this. The
many members of his party who continue to defend the program and attack
its detractors do not.

And this means that I owe some people an apology. In the past I've been
very critical of bloggers who compared the Republican party to the
Nazis. I believed that they were weakening a strong case against the
Republicans by making an absurdly overblown comparison. Yes, there is
much evil in the Republican Party, but comparing them to the Nazis was
going much too far, offensively so.

Those bloggers were right. I was wrong. Not that the Republicans are guilty of everything
the Nazis were guilty of, of course, but if a politician of Cheney's
stature can defend torture, even torture of the innocent, and if a broad
range of political figures from the party can continue to support that
position, then yes, they are straying onto the same ideological turf.

These people have no idea what they've done. This program, and the
continued defense of it by a major part of our political establishment,
have done damage to our country's moral authority and global standing
that can probably never be repaired.

A lot of ordinary Americans don't yet understand it either. As
commenter Tommykey observed in response to last weekend's link round-up over at my blog:

Of course, my Facebook feed was filled with people posting pictures
of the Twin Tower burning with captions like "Waterboarding is fine with
me" or some variations of approval for torture juxtaposed with a
picture of 9/11, as if that automatically justifies it.

And, of course, from Pakistan to Morocco there are probably millions of
people reading the revelations of the torture report and thinking,
"Terrorist attacks on the United States are fine with me -- now."

Thursday, December 18, 2014

Obama's bad bet on Republicans

Last weekend, Jane Mayer wrote about "Torture and the Truth." I know that many people are thinking, "Torture! Again?! That's so
last week!" Actually, this article is not about torture. But the truth
of the matter is that, for me, torture will never be so last whatever.
It's not that I ever thought that the United States was lily white, but I
was appalled when Cheney started talking about the "dark side" and
people began to discuss when torture might be okay. From grammar school
on, I always thought that the willingness to torture was the prime thing
that separated the "good guys" from the "bad guys." So I'm never
getting over this. But that's not what I'm going to discuss here.

In Mayer's article, she discussed how Obama blew the response to this
issue. By leaving it for so long to be dealt with by the Senate, he
allowed it to become just another partisan issue. She quoted political
science professor Darius Rejali: "It's becoming a lot like the death
penalty." (I find this terrifying; I really do think that the
Republicans have devolved into nothing short of fascism.) But it isn't
like the issue was off the table. Mayer explained that in early 2009,
pretty much all of Obama's advisers were in favor of "the formation of
an independent commission." It wasn't done. "Obama, however, said that
he didn't want to seem to be taking punitive measures against his
predecessor, apparently because he still hoped to reach bipartisan
agreement on issues such as closing Guantánamo."

I recently quoted Garry Wills's "The Problem With Obama."
In it, Wills said that Obama is so keen to maintain continuity that he
often (usually?) does the wrong thing. I think that is at work here. But
there is a political aspect here as well — one that gets to the heart
of why Obama was exactly the wrong president for this period. He was so
eager to placate to stop people from attacking him as a foreign radical.
And what he got for that was absolutely nothing. And that will continue
going forward.

Can anyone doubt that if Ted Cruz is elected president in 2016 he will prosecute the previous administration for any actual
scandal that turns up? The Republicans — almost twenty years ago when
they were a hell of lot more reasonable than they are now — impeached a
president because he lied about an affair with an intern. I'm not even
convinced that if the Republicans control all of Washington in 2017 they won't continue on with their Benghazi and IRS fake scandal-mongering.

As I mention a whole lot around here, I'm not that ideological. I'm a pragmatist. That's why I gave the Democrats a pass on the CRomnibus.
But there is a huge difference between knowing what is possible and
pretending that you live in a world of fairies and elves where you can
have all the candy you want. And that was certainly the world that Obama
used to live in. And to a significant, but reduced, degree, I think he
still does.

Politics is about power. Smart power. It isn't about rubbing your
opponent's nose in his defeat. In fact, providing face-saving
concessions to your enemies is a big part of correcting wielding power.
(This is something that the United States is famously bad at
internationally.) But it is not about cajoling. All Obama's
efforts to entice and prove that he is a moderate (by our far-right-skewing system) have only hurt his efforts to get things done. If he had
called for a single-payer health-care system, he would have been called a
socialist. So he didn't call for a single-payer health-care system, and
he was called a socialist.

Well played, Mr. President!

Afterword

For the record, I know that the reason we couldn't have a
single-payer health-care system is because of all those Blue Dog
Democrats — like Obama himself! I should point out, however, that the
vast majority of those conservative Democrats were swept out of office
in 2010, so I don't really know what they thought they were buying. And
that was as predictable as anything in politics. Conservative Democrats
get elected in nominally red districts. Outside of a wave, Democrats
won't get elected there, so they are sure to lose the next time. So they
might as well stand up for liberal policy.

(This is assuming that they
believe in liberal policy. And I have to admit that I just don't know
anymore.)

Wednesday, December 17, 2014

Exodus story reveals Bible's dishonesty

Although some might be loath to admit it, many educated adults (even
non-fundamentalist Christians) are aware that the Bible is perhaps not
the best source of history.

I mean, how many people still take the story of Adam and Eve seriously
any more? But I suspect that most people are still unaware of just how
totally wrong the Bible is as far as anything remotely approaching real
history.

This wouldn't be that big a deal, except for the fact that so many
people take the Bible very seriously as a profound book of wisdom. The
massive and growing population of Fundamentalists continue to believe
the Bible is nothing less than the divinely-inspired, inerrant Word of
God.

But the Bible is profoundly wrong in its historical accuracy. The Exodus story (now the subject of a big-budget Hollywood movie by Ridley
Scott) is a good example. Some people might question certain
fantastic aspects of the story (like the parting of the Red Sea). But I
think most people accept that there must be at least a kernel of
truth to the story's main points (such as that there really was once a
big enslavement of the Israelites in Egypt). Many people continue to
believe that this has been confirmed in the archaeological record.

But there's a big problem to this belief: it's simply not true. Nothing
in the Exodus story has ever been confirmed by any serious
archaeologist, despite long quests to try to confirm anything remotely
related to the Bible story.

The fact is, even many Bible apologists have quietly abandoned their
quest to try to confirm the Exodus story. The problem is that there is
simply not a shred of historical evidence that any of this really
happened. Forget wild tales like the parting of the Red Sea -- there
isn't even the slightest bit of evidence that there was an Exodus
captivity in the first place.

This whole story is a fairy tale. The fact is, the story of Exodus is one big lie. And if this well-known Bible story is a lie, then, really, how truthful is any aspect of the Bible?

The Bible is a dishonest book, period.

A lot of agnostics spend their time attacking the absurdities,
contradictions and sheer nonsense of the Bible's philosophical
teachings. But if they're trying to convince believers, they're wasting
their time. The Bible is so vague and archaic that the sort of people
who take it seriously are never going to be dissuaded via that approach.

What agnostics should be doing is attacking the historicity of the Bible
itself. People should be aware of just how many of these Bible tales
lack the slightest shred of historical evidence to support them.

It's time for humanity to move beyond the fairy tales, nonsense and superstition of absurd books like the Bible.

In much of Europe, this is already taking place. Sadly, in America,
large numbers of people continue to take the Bible seriously (and try to
ram their twisted beliefs down the throats of other people).