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Topic: 300 Million Very Silly People Now Living In America (Read 993 times) |
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300 Million Very Silly People Now Living In America
« on: 2006-10-17 07:54:57 » |
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[Hermit] Today is a very special day. Now may be a very special moment. Pehaps it would be a good time to apologise to the planet.
U.S. population to break 300 million today
U.S. Census Bureau includes legal, illegal immigrants in population figure.
The U.S. Census Bureau predicts the the population will reach 300 million early Tuesday morning. The population reached 200 million in 1967.
Source: Kansan.com
Authors: Mark Vierthaler, Aly Barland (Editor)
Dated: 2006-10-17
It will happen today about 6:45 a.m.
The 300 millionth American will be born. Or he or she will cross the border. The United States Census Bureau isn’t exactly sure how it will happen, but it is sure it’s going to be today.
The bureau has said in recent weeks it could predict the arrival of the landmark number based on three statistics: Someone is born in the U.S. every seven seconds. Someone dies every 13 seconds. An immigrant enters the nation every 31 seconds. Both legal and illegal immigrants are counted in population tallies.
This amounts to a net gain of one person every 11 seconds.
These three statistics have led the bureau to predict that number 300 million would appear today. A population clock can even be seen on the Web site www.census.gov racking up the people in real time.
Meredith Kleycamp, assistant professor of sociology and social demographer, said one of the hardest things for demographers to figure out was whether landmark population numbers would come from newborns or immigrants.
“It’s highly likely it’s going to be an illegal or legal immigrant,” Kleycamp said.
Although population is still driven by birth, a large number of those births are from immigrants to the United States, Kleycamp said.
The last milestone — 200 million — was reached in 1967. Life magazine memorialized the moment by dubbing Robert Ken Woo Jr. of Atlanta as the landmark baby. Life assigned Woo the title because he was born at the exact time the Census Bureau had predicted number 200 million would show up.
A recent study released by the Center for Environment and Population showed the U.S. population had almost doubled since 1950. The study also reported that the U.S. was the world’s third most-populated country after India and China. The South and the West Coast are the fastest-growing regions.
<snip Kansas related info>
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Hermit
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Re:300 Million Very Silly People Now Living In America
« Reply #1 on: 2006-10-17 09:11:39 » |
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Precious Medals
Will the next generation of Americans' weak grasp of science eventually send Nobel Prizes to other nations?
Source: Seed
Authors: Nikhil Swaminathan
Dated: 2006-10-11
Last week, Uncle Sam stormed Sweden and, to paraphrase a classic piece of viral Internet media, decreed: All your Nobels are belong to us. For the first time since 1983, all the 2006 Nobel laureates in science are Americans. The Nobel sweep—in which American researchers claimed the medicine, physics, and chemistry prizes—highlights a striking juxtaposition in American science: While the U.S. towers over its global peers at the highest levels of science, in terms of elementary and secondary education, we're lagging far behind. With a corroded pipeline of homegrown talent, many of the country's scientific elite worry that this could be one of the last American Nobel three-peats.
On Monday, Oct. 2, Stanford University's Andrew Z. Fire and Craig C. Mello of the University of Massachusetts won the physiology or medicine prize for their work on RNA interference. They discovered that a strand of double-stranded RNA corresponding to a certain gene can enter a cell and, once there, silence the corresponding gene. The mechanism, called RNA interference, is useful for controlling viruses, which can be disabled by interference, and gene expression: A recent study proved that in animals, a gene known for causing high cholesterol could be silenced via RNA interference.
Tuesday, Oct. 3, John C. Mather of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and George F. Smoot of the University of California, Berkeley took home the physics prize for their work measuring cosmic background radiation, a relic of the Big Bang. Using a NASA satellite, the pair measured the temperature distribution of the electromagnetic radiation emitted just after the beginnings of the universe. They also detected small variations in temperature in the cosmic background, confirming that galaxies and stars would have been able to form in the infant universe.
Then, on Wednesday, Stanford's Roger Kornberg, whose father won a physiology or medicine Nobel in 1959, snagged the chemistry award for his detailed description of transcription in eukaryotes, organisms whose cells have nuclei. Kornberg created a crystallographic picture of the process, in which DNA is transcribed into RNA for transport out of the nucleus. This process is disrupted in both cancer and heart disease.
"How fitting that Alfred Nobel made his fortune in dynamite," Stephen Colbert remarked on "The Colbert Report" Wednesday night, "because America is blowing every other country out of the water!"
The U.S. can claim a total of 232 science Nobelists, out of the 513 recognized since the prizes were first bestowed in 1901. Since 1950, the U.S. has truly dominated the field, racking up 202 science Nobels.
"Nobel Prizes are not entirely new to America," said Norman Augustine, the retired CEO of Lockheed Martin, who chaired a 2005 National Academies of Sciences report that helped alert the U.S. government to America's dwindling competitive edge in the sciences. "But the trends are all in the wrong direction."
Over the past 10 months or so, a steady stream of distressing numbers and facts has created alarm about the future of American science: A recent study found that out of 39 countries surveyed, American 15-year-olds placed 27th in math literacy. In a measure of science literacy among high school seniors, the U.S. placed 42nd out of 44 countries. According to a 2002 poll by the National Science Foundation (NSF), only half of the American public knows that dinosaurs and humans never coexisted or that atoms are larger than electrons.
Nonetheless, according to Daniel Sarewitz, director of the Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes, a lack of public science literacy is neither a new phenomenon nor a cause for alarm.
"We basically have a scientifically illiterate public," he said. The Nobel Prize winners, he said, were members of the country's scientific elite, and America's future ability to win Nobels "has nothing to do with the average level of scientific literacy."
Instead, that prospect is likely more dependent upon the amount of money the U.S. pours yearly into research. In 2004, that was more than $300 billion, according to the NSF, a sum greater than the combined investment by the U.K., Canada, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan.
"The U.S. has always been one of the friendliest places for creative science," said Henry Kelly, president of the Federation of American Scientists.
The view is buoyed by Associated Press reports in which members of the European scientific community openly envied the luxuries the U.S. affords its researchers. Gunnar Oquist, who oversees the science Nobels, called for European governments to match America's funding levels and its intense commitment to making new discoveries.
"The U.S. benefits from a numerous and brilliant scientific community with generally good facilities and substantial federal funding, particularly in the areas in which Nobel prizes are awarded," said John H. Marburger, presidential science advisor and Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Anders Liljas, another Nobel committee member, told the AP that the U.S. also encourages interaction between scientists, a practice that clearly pays off come prize time. Over the past 50 years, Nobels have typically been awarded for collaborations. In fact, in the last 20 years, only 11 laureates have taken home prizes for solo work.
This fact stands in sharp contrast to the way science is done in China, where helpful collaboration is often replaced by fierce competitiveness. Reports out of China, the nation most often cited as a threat to American scientific dominance, indicate that the country does not have an atmosphere conducive to the free exchange of ideas needed to produce prizewinners.
Nor does it seem to encourage the kind of research that may only yield benefits in the long-term. Instead, a Calvinist, publish-or-perish system dominates, complete with performance reviews every couple of years that can result in reduced pay or even job loss based on their level of output.
It's a system that's familiar to scientists in many other countries.
"A granting system in which you can survive doing science with nothing publishable for a long period of time is certainly not what we have in Sweden, and probably other countries as well," Liljas told the AP.
As long as American institutions remain rich in cash and committed to the free exchange of ideas, the U.S. will remain a destination for the best and brightest scientists, no matter where they were reared. And, as a result, the Nobels will continue to roll in.[Hermit: I note a vast number of clearly invalid assumptions buried here - including assumptions that are already known to be completely wrong. The growth in the US public debt has exceeded the US population growth, resulting in a current debt of around $150,000 per person living in America. The "permanent" tax reductions brought in by Bush means that even if we could simply maintain the status quo, that interest payments will exceed the budget in around 2040. But we can't. This is why US science spending is declining in real terms (while program costs soar) and why NASA and the DOE are both slashing programs in all directions in an attempt to keep their massively redefined "core programs" operational (e.g. putting men on the Moon, maintaining the shuttle in operation until 2010 despite the complete lack of a budget for a successor program).]
After all, who cares if our next generation of Nobelists aren't U.S.-born? Isn't that what America is supposed to be about?
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Re:300 Million Very Silly People Now Living In America
« Reply #2 on: 2006-10-17 10:33:04 » |
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The Christian Paradox
How a faithful nation gets Jesus wrong
[Hermit: Not often we see an article about Christianity on the COV. Having a thread on the great unwashed masses as well as on stupidity probably means this article just happened to be in the right place at the right time and speaking about the right things. Much of what is in it reminds me of the last time I spoke to a particular Christian fanatic who had just added some bumper stickers to his car. One of them read, "Proud American Christians." I don't think he even got the point when I asked him, "Isn't pride supposed to be a sin?" He was pissed when I suggested that if he thought that Hypatia was going to travel with him, he'd have to add another, "But the smart beautiful one, like all children, is an atheist."
P.S. Noting the very many spelling errors in the original article, it seems clear to me that it is not "just" some smart atheists who are spelling impaired :-) ]
Source: Harpers
Authors: Bill McKibben
Dated: 2006-09-15
What it means to be Christian in America.
Only 40 percent of Americans can name more than four of the Ten Commandments, and a scant half can cite any of the four authors of the Gospels. Twelve percent believe Joan of Arc was Noah's wife. This failure to recall the specifics of our Christian heritage may be further evidence of our nation's educational decline, but it probably doesn't matter all that much in spiritual or political terms. Here is a statistic that does matter: Three quarters of Americans believe the Bible teaches that “God helps those who help themselves.” That is, three out of four Americans believe that this uber-American idea, a notion at the core of our current individualist politics and culture, which was in fact uttered by Ben Franklin, actually appears in Holy Scripture. The thing is, not only is Franklin's wisdom not biblical; it's counter-biblical. Few ideas could be further from the gospel message, with its radical summons to love of neighbor. On this essential matter, most Americans—most American Christians—are simply wrong, as if 75 percent of American scientists believed that Newton proved gravity causes apples to fly up.
Asking Christians what Christ taught isn't a trick. When we say we are a Christian nation—and, overwhelmingly, we do—it means something. People who go to church absorb lessons there and make real decisions based on those lessons; increasingly, these lessons inform their politics. (One poll found that 11 percent of U.S. churchgoers were urged by their clergy to vote in a particular way in the 2004 election, up from 6 percent in 2000.) When George Bush says that Jesus Christ is his favorite philosopher, he may or may not be sincere, but he is reflecting the sincere beliefs of the vast majority of Americans.
And therein is the paradox. America is simultaneously the most professedly Christian of the developed nations and the least Christian in its behavior. That paradox—more important, perhaps, than the much touted ability of French women to stay thin on a diet of chocolate and cheese—illuminates the hollow at the core of our boastful, careening culture.
* * *
Ours is among the most spiritually homogenous rich nations on earth. Depending on which poll you look at and how the question is asked, somewhere around 85 percent of us call ourselves Christian. Israel, by way of comparison, is 77 percent Jewish. It is true that a smaller number of Americans—about 75 percent—claim they actually pray to God on a daily basis, and only 33 percent say they manage to get to church every week. Still, even if that 85 percent overstates actual practice, it clearly represents aspiration. In fact, there is nothing else that unites more than four fifths of America. Every other statistic one can cite about American behavior is essentially also a measure of the behavior of professed Christians. That's what America is: a place saturated in Christian identity.
But is it Christian? This is not a matter of angels dancing on the heads of pins. Christ was pretty specific about what he had in mind for his followers. What if we chose some simple criterion—say, giving aid to the poorest people—as a reasonable proxy for Christian behavior? After all, in the days before his crucifixion, when Jesus summed up his message for his disciples, he said the way you could tell the righteous from the damned was by whether they'd fed the hungry, slaked the thirsty, clothed the naked, welcomed the stranger, and visited the prisoner. What would we find then?
In 2004, as a share of our economy, we ranked second to last, after Italy, among developed countries in government foreign aid. Per capita we each provide fifteen cents a day in official development assistance to poor countries. And it's not because we were giving to private charities for relief work instead. Such funding increases our average daily donation by just six pennies, to twenty-one cents. It's also not because Americans were too busy taking care of their own; nearly 18 percent of American children lived in poverty (compared with, say, 8 percent in Sweden). In fact, by pretty much any measure of caring for the least among us you want to propose—childhood nutrition, infant mortality, access to preschool—we come in nearly last among the rich nations, and often by a wide margin. The point is not just that (as everyone already knows) the American nation trails badly in all these categories; it's that the overwhelmingly Christian American nation trails badly in all these categories, categories to which Jesus paid particular attention. And it's not as if the numbers are getting better: the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported last year that the number of households that were “food insecure with hunger” had climbed more than 26 percent between 1999 and 2003.
This Christian nation also tends to make personal, as opposed to political, choices that the Bible would seem to frown upon. Despite the Sixth Commandment, we are, of course, the most violent rich nation on earth, with a murder rate four or five times that of our European peers. We have prison populations greater by a factor of six or seven than other rich nations (which at least should give us plenty of opportunity for visiting the prisoners). Having been told to turn the other cheek, we're the only Western democracy left that executes its citizens, mostly in those states where Christianity is theoretically strongest. Despite Jesus' strong declarations against divorce, our marriages break up at a rate—just over half—that compares poorly with the European Union's average of about four in ten. That average may be held down by the fact that Europeans marry less frequently, and by countries, like Italy, where divorce is difficult; still, compare our success with, say, that of the godless Dutch, whose divorce rate is just over 37 percent. Teenage pregnancy? We're at the top of the charts. Personal self-discipline—like, say, keeping your weight under control? Buying on credit? Running government deficits? Do you need to ask?
* * *
Are Americans hypocrites? Of course they are. But most people (me, for instance) are hypocrites. The more troubling explanation for this disconnect between belief and action, I think, is that most Americans—which means most believers—have replaced the Christianity of the Bible, with its call for deep sharing and personal sacrifice, with a competing creed.
In fact, there may be several competing creeds. For many Christians, deciphering a few passages of the Bible to figure out the schedule for the End Times has become a central task. You can log on to RaptureReady.com for a taste of how some of these believers view the world—at this writing the Rapture Index had declined three points to 152 because, despite an increase in the number of U.S. pagans, “Wal-Mart is falling behind in its plan to bar code all products with radio tags.” Other End-Timers are more interested in forcing the issue—they're convinced that the way to coax the Lord back to earth is to “Christianize” our nation and then the world. Consider House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. At church one day he listened as the pastor, urging his flock to support the administration, declared that “the war between America and Iraq is the gateway to the Apocalypse.” DeLay rose to speak, not only to the congregation but to 225 Christian TV and radio stations. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “what has been spoken here tonight is the truth of God.”
The apocalyptics may not be wrong. One could make a perfectly serious argument that the policies of Tom DeLay are in fact hastening the End Times. But there's nothing particularly Christian about this hastening. The creed of Tom DeLay—of Tim LaHaye and his Left Behind books, of Pat Robertson's “The Antichrist is probably a Jew alive in Israel today”—ripened out of the impossibly poetic imagery [Hermit: More like the ravings of in illiterate crackwhore - which given its hallucinogenic origin, isn't far off the mark] of the Book of Revelation. Imagine trying to build a theory of the Constitution by obsessively reading and rereading the Twenty-fifth Amendment, and you'll get an idea of what an odd approach this is. You might be able to spin elaborate fantasies about presidential succession, but you'd have a hard time working backwards to “We the People.” This is the contemporary version of Archbishop Ussher's seventeenth-century calculation that the world had been created on October 23, 4004 B.C., and that the ark touched down on Mount Ararat on May 5, 2348 B.C., a Wednesday. Interesting, but a distant distraction from the gospel message.
The apocalyptics, however, are the lesser problem. It is another competing (though sometimes overlapping) creed, this one straight from the sprawling megachurches of the new exurbs, that frightens me most. Its deviation is less obvious precisely because it looks so much like the rest of the culture. In fact, most of what gets preached in these palaces isn't loony at all. It is disturbingly conventional. The pastors focus relentlessly on you and your individual needs. Their goal is to service consumers—not communities but individuals: “seekers” is the term of art, people who feel the need for some spirituality in their (or their children's) lives but who aren't tightly bound to any particular denomination or school of thought. The result is often a kind of soft-focus, comfortable, suburban faith.
A New York Times reporter visiting one booming megachurch outside Phoenix recently found the typical scene: a drive-through latte stand, Krispy Kreme doughnuts at every service, and sermons about “how to discipline your children, how to reach your professional goals, how to invest your money, how to reduce your debt.” On Sundays children played with church-distributed Xboxes, and many congregants had signed up for a twice-weekly aerobics class called Firm Believers. A list of bestsellers compiled monthly by the Christian Booksellers Association illuminates the creed. It includes texts like Your Best Life Now by Joel Osteen—pastor of a church so mega it recently leased a 16,000-seat sports arena in Houston for its services—which even the normally tolerant Publishers Weekly dismissed as “a treatise on how to get God to serve the demands of self-centered individuals.” Nearly as high is Beth Moore, with her Believing God—“Beth asks the tough questions concerning the fruit of our Christian lives,” such as “are we living as fully as we can?” Other titles include Humor for a Woman's Heart, a collection of “humorous writings” designed to “lift a life above the stresses and strains of the day”; The Five Love Languages, in which Dr. Gary Chapman helps you figure out if you're speaking in the same emotional dialect as your significant other; and Karol Ladd's The Power of a Positive Woman. Ladd is the co-founder of USA Sonshine Girls—the “Son” in Sonshine, of course, is the son of God—and she is unremittingly upbeat in presenting her five-part plan for creating a life with “more calm, less stress.”
Not that any of this is so bad in itself. We do have stressful lives, humor does help, and you should pay attention to your own needs. Comfortable suburbanites watch their parents die, their kids implode. Clearly I need help with being positive. And I have no doubt that such texts have turned people into better parents, better spouses, better bosses. [Hermit: I do. Have doubts about this. Serious doubts.] It's just that these authors, in presenting their perfectly sensible advice, somehow manage to ignore Jesus' radical and demanding focus on others. It may, in fact, be true that “God helps those who help themselves,” both financially and emotionally. (Certainly fortune does.) But if so it's still a subsidiary, secondary truth, more Franklinity than Christianity. You could eliminate the scriptural references in most of these bestsellers and they would still make or not make the same amount of sense. Chicken Soup for the Zoroastrian Soul. It is a perfect mirror of the secular bestseller lists, indeed of the secular culture, with its American fixation on self-improvement, on self-esteem. On self. These similarities make it difficult (although not impossible) for the televangelists to posit themselves as embattled figures in a “culture war”— they offer too uncanny a reflection of the dominant culture, a culture of unrelenting self-obsession.
* * *
Who am I to criticize someone else's religion? After all, if there is anything Americans agree on, it's that we should tolerate everyone else's religious expression. [Hermit: Tolerating stupidity is fatuous. That is how you end up with Our Dear Misleadertm as the perfect representative of the USA. And look where that has gotten us.] As a Newsweek writer put it some years ago at the end of his cover story on apocalyptic visions and the Book of Revelation, “Who's to say that John's mythic battle between Christ and Antichrist is not a valid insight into what the history of humankind is all about?” (Not Newsweek, that's for sure; their religious covers are guaranteed big sellers.) To that I can only answer that I'm a . . . Christian.
Not a professional one; I'm an environmental writer mostly. I've never progressed further in the church hierarchy than Sunday school teacher at my backwoods Methodist church. But I've spent most of my Sunday mornings in a pew. I grew up in church youth groups and stayed active most of my adult life—started homeless shelters in church basements, served soup at the church food pantry, climbed to the top of the rickety ladder to put the star on the church Christmas tree. My work has been, at times, influenced by all that—I've written extensively about the Book of Job, which is to me the first great piece of nature writing in the Western tradition, and about the overlaps between Christianity and environmentalism. In fact, I imagine I'm one of a fairly small number of writers who have had cover stories in both the Christian Century, the magazine of liberal mainline Protestantism, and Christianity Today, which Billy Graham founded, not to mention articles in Sojourners, the magazine of the progressive evangelical community co-founded by Jim Wallis.
Indeed, it was my work with religious environmentalists that first got me thinking along the lines of this essay. We were trying to get politicians to understand why the Bible actually mandated protecting the world around us (Noah: the first Green), work that I think is true and vital. But one day it occurred to me that the parts of the world where people actually had cut dramatically back on their carbon emissions, actually did live voluntarily in smaller homes and take public transit, were the same countries where people were giving aid to the poor and making sure everyone had health care—countries like Norway and Sweden, where religion was relatively unimportant. How could that be? For Christians there should be something at least a little scary in the notion that, absent the magical answers of religion, people might just get around to solving their problems and strengthening their communities in more straightforward ways.
But for me, in any event, the European success is less interesting than the American failure. Because we're not going to be like them. Maybe we'd be better off if we abandoned religion for secular rationality, but we're not going to; for the foreseeable future this will be a “Christian” nation. The question is, what kind of Christian nation?
* * *
The tendencies I've been describing—toward an apocalyptic End Times faith, toward a comfort-the-comfortable, personal-empowerment faith—veil the actual, and remarkable, message of the Gospels. When one of the Pharisees asked Jesus what the core of the law was, Jesus replied:
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.
Love your neighbor as yourself: although its rhetorical power has been dimmed by repetition, that is a radical notion, perhaps the most radical notion possible. Especially since Jesus, in all his teachings, made it very clear who the neighbor you were supposed to love was: the poor person, the sick person, the naked person, the hungry person. The last shall be made first; turn the other cheek; a rich person aiming for heaven is like a camel trying to walk through the eye of a needle. On and on and on—a call for nothing less than a radical, voluntary, and effective reordering of power relationships, based on the principle of love.
I confess, even as I write these words, to a feeling close to embarrassment. Because in public we tend not to talk about such things—my theory of what Jesus mostly meant seems like it should be left in church, or confined to some religious publication. [Hermit: Or in a gay bar. Isn't it wonderful how one so often meets a better class of person in gay bars. With working minds. But I digress.] But remember the overwhelming connection between America and Christianity; what Jesus meant is the most deeply potent political, cultural, social question. To ignore it, or leave it to the bullies and the salesmen of the televangelist sects, means to walk away from a central battle over American identity. At the moment, the idea of Jesus has been hijacked by people with a series of causes that do not reflect his teachings. The Bible is a long book, and even the Gospels have plenty in them, some of it seemingly contradictory and hard to puzzle out. But love your neighbor as yourself—not do unto others as you would have them do unto you, but love your neighbor as yourself—will suffice as a gloss. There is no disputing the centrality of this message, nor is there any disputing how easy it is to ignore that message. Because it is so counterintuitive, Christians have had to keep repeating it to themselves right from the start. Consider Paul, for instance, instructing the church at Galatea: “For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment,” he wrote. “‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”
American churches, by and large, have done a pretty good job of loving the neighbor in the next pew. A pastor can spend all Sunday talking about the Rapture Index, but if his congregation is thriving you can be assured he's spending the other six days visiting people in the hospital, counseling couples, and sitting up with grieving widows. All this human connection is important. But if the theology makes it harder to love the neighbor a little farther away—particularly the poor and the weak—then it's a problem. And the dominant theologies of the moment do just that. They undercut Jesus, muffle his hard words, deaden his call, and in the end silence him. In fact, the soft-focus consumer gospel of the suburban megachurches is a perfect match for emergent conservative economic notions about personal responsibility instead of collective action. Privatize Social Security? Keep health care for people who can afford it? File those under “God helps those who help themselves.”
Take Alabama as an example. In 2002, Bob Riley was elected governor of the state, where 90 percent of residents identify themselves as Christians. Riley could safely be called a conservative—right-wing majordomo Grover Norquist gave him a Friend of the Taxpayer Award every year he was in Congress, where he'd never voted for a tax increase. But when he took over Alabama, he found himself administering a tax code that dated to 1901. The richest Alabamians paid 3 percent of their income in taxes, and the poorest paid up to 12 percent; income taxes kicked in if a family of four made $4,600 (even in Mississippi the threshold was $19,000), while out-of-state timber companies paid $1.25 an acre in property taxes. Alabama was forty-eighth in total state and local taxes, and the largest proportion of that income came from sales tax—a super-regressive tax that in some counties reached into double digits. So Riley proposed a tax hike, partly to dig the state out of a fiscal crisis and partly to put more money into the state's school system, routinely ranked near the worst in the nation. He argued that it was Christian duty to look after the poor more carefully.
Had the new law passed, the owner of a $250,000 home in Montgomery would have paid $1,432 in property taxes—we're not talking Sweden here. But it didn't pass. It was crushed by a factor of two to one. Sixty-eight percent of the state voted against it—meaning, of course, something like 68 percent of the Christians who voted. The opposition was led, in fact, not just by the state's wealthiest interests but also by the Christian Coalition of Alabama. “You'll find most Alabamians have got a charitable heart,” said John Giles, the group's president. “They just don't want it coming out of their pockets.” On its website, the group argued that taxing the rich at a higher rate than the poor “results in punishing success” and that “when an individual works for their income, that money belongs to the individual.” You might as well just cite chapter and verse from Poor Richard's Almanack. And whatever the ideology, the results are clear. “I'm tired of Alabama being first in things that are bad,” said Governor Riley, “and last in things that are good.”
* * *
A rich man came to Jesus one day and asked what he should do to get into heaven. Jesus did not say he should invest, spend, and let the benefits trickle down; he said sell what you have, give the money to the poor, and follow me. Few plainer words have been spoken. And yet, for some reason, the Christian Coalition of America—founded in 1989 in order to “preserve, protect and defend the Judeo-Christian values that made this the greatest country in history”—proclaimed last year that its top legislative priority would be “making permanent President Bush's 2001 federal tax cuts.”
Similarly, a furor erupted last spring when it emerged that a Colorado jury had consulted the Bible before sentencing a killer to death. Experts debated whether the (Christian) jurors should have used an outside authority in their deliberations, and of course the Christian right saw it as one more sign of a secular society devaluing religion. But a more interesting question would have been why the jurors fixated on Leviticus 24, with its call for an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. They had somehow missed Jesus' explicit refutation in the New Testament: “You have heard that it was said, ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also.”
And on and on. The power of the Christian right rests largely in the fact that they boldly claim religious authority, and by their very boldness convince the rest of us that they must know what they're talking about. They're like the guy who gives you directions with such loud confidence that you drive on even though the road appears to be turning into a faint, rutted track. But their theology is appealing for another reason too: it coincides with what we want to believe. How nice it would be if Jesus had declared that our income was ours to keep, instead of insisting that we had to share. How satisfying it would be if we were supposed to hate our enemies. Religious conservatives will always have a comparatively easy sell.
But straight is the path and narrow is the way. The gospel is too radical for any culture larger than the Amish to ever come close to realizing; in demanding a departure from selfishness it conflicts with all our current desires. Even the first time around, judging by the reaction, the Gospels were pretty unwelcome news to an awful lot of people. There is not going to be a modern-day return to the church of the early believers, holding all things in common—that's not what I'm talking about. Taking seriously the actual message of Jesus, though, should serve at least to moderate the greed and violence that mark this culture. It's hard to imagine a con much more audacious than making Christ the front man for a program of tax cuts for the rich or war in Iraq. If some modest part of the 85 percent of us who are Christians woke up to that fact, then the world might change.
It is possible, I think. Yes, the mainline Protestant churches that supported civil rights and opposed the war in Vietnam are mostly locked in a dreary decline as their congregations dwindle and their elders argue endlessly about gay clergy and same-sex unions. And the Catholic Church, for most of its American history a sturdy exponent of a “love your neighbor” theology, has been weakened, too, its hierarchy increasingly motivated by a single-issue focus on abortion. Plenty of vital congregations are doing great good works—they're the ones that have nurtured me—but they aren't where the challenge will arise; they've grown shy about talking about Jesus, more comfortable with the language of sociology and politics. More and more it's Bible-quoting Christians, like Wallis's Sojourners movement and that Baptist seminary graduate Bill Moyers, who are carrying the fight.
The best-selling of all Christian books in recent years, Rick Warren's The Purpose-Driven Life, illustrates the possibilities. It has all the hallmarks of self-absorption (in one five-page chapter, I counted sixty-five uses of the word “you”), but it also makes a powerful case that we're made for mission. What that mission is never becomes clear, but the thirst for it is real. And there's no great need for Warren to state that purpose anyhow. For Christians, the plainspoken message of the Gospels is clear enough. If you have any doubts, read the Sermon on the Mount.
Admittedly, this is hope against hope; more likely the money changers and power brokers will remain ascendant in our “spiritual” life. Since the days of Constantine, emperors and rich men have sought to co-opt the teachings of Jesus. As in so many areas of our increasingly market-tested lives, the co-opters—the TV men, the politicians, the Christian “interest groups”—have found a way to make each of us complicit in that travesty, too. They have invited us to subvert the church of Jesus even as we celebrate it. With their help we have made golden calves of ourselves—become a nation of terrified, self-obsessed idols. It works, and it may well keep working for a long time to come. When Americans hunger for selfless love and are fed only love of self, they will remain hungry, and too often hungry people just come back for more of the same.
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Blunderov
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"We think in generalities, we live in details"
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Re:300 Million Very Silly People Now Living In America
« Reply #3 on: 2006-10-17 14:57:42 » |
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[Blunderov]"How a faithful nation gets Jesus wrong" was fascinating. My mother pointed out to me some time ago that one of the major revisionisms of Christianity is the prohibition of usury. This is now so completely ignored that it may as well have never existed.
http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/usury2.htm
<snip>The ecclesiastical doctrine of interest was the greatest obstacle to modern banking. It was primarily based upon 1) Aristotle's condemnation of interest as an unnatural breeding of money by money, 2) Christ's (supposed) condemnation of interest (Luke 6:34) and the reaction of the Fathers of the Church against commercialism and usury in Rome. (Will Durant, THE AGE OF FAITH 630, 1950). The moral condemnation of this ancient practice has been summarized: "It comes as news to most people to learn that practically all important ethical teachers -- Moses, Aristotle, Jesus, Mohammed, and Saint Thomas Aquinas, for instance -- have denounced lending at interest as usury and as morally wrong" (Lawrence Dennis, "The Squirrel Cage of Debt," Saturday Review of Literature 661, June 24, 1933)...
...The Old Testament "classes the usurer with the shedder of blood, the defiler of his neighbor's wife, the oppressor of the poor, the spoiler by violence, the violator of the pledge, the idolater, and pronounces the woe upon them, that they who commit these iniquities shall surely die." Id. at 2. The usurer was put in the same category with extortioners, Sabbath-breakers, those who vex the fatherless and widows, dishonor parents and accept bribes (Ezekiel 22). Id. at 17. The usurer was also classed with the liar, the unrighteous, the backbiter, the slanderer and perjurer, and denied the right to inherit the New Jerusalem (Psalm 15). Id. The usurer is further classed with the meanest and lowest of men and the vilest of criminals (Ezekiel 18). Id. </snip>
[Bl.] We see that Christian religious precepts are required to be not only divinely mandated but also financially expedient in order to survive.
Here is something else tasty and "full of crunchy goodness" about the 300 million milestone.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_james_br_061012_people.htm
October 16, 2006 at 18:58:29
People
by James Brett
http://www.opednews.com
People. I think of Barbra Streisand. I think of crowds shopping at Christmas. I think of crowds at football games, and traffic on Manhattan streets leading to the tunnels in the late afternoon. I think of L.A.'s freeways. I think of whole systems of education created to deal first with Boomers and then Generation X then the Millennials.
When I was born there were 147 million people in the United States. Today there are 300 million. By 2050, unless something major disturbs the trend, there will be 395 million here in America.
If you believe in IQs, you know that no matter how many people there are the average IQ will, by definition, be 100. I don't really believe in IQ, because IQ is a terrible predictor of behavior. Other factors seem to play a considerable part, such as motivation. With the Stanford-Binet IQ test theoretically people would top out at some number and never exceed it. Because of this, our culture began to think of people as having some upper limit of intelligence, verbal and mathematical intelligence, that is, not musical or caring or theatric or sports or craftmanship intelligence. When you have a culture that has a bell-shaped curve of people who are, on average, average at verbal skills and average at arithmetic, then you have a lot of average people if the population is 300 million.
That's what we have. But some say, we have a population in the United States that is smarter than the population a hundred years ago. We have learned some important lessons and not learned other lessons despite the beatings we took on battlefields around the world and in the trenches of the Great Depression. But, we are now a population that understands the uses and abuses of the internet, the good things and bad things about our food industries, the goals and inconsiderations of corporations, the ways of politicians and civil servants. We have been trained and tutored and formally educated to fit into the society that evolved out of the industrial revolution.
Some of us are here only because of the evolution of society. Our parents would have died before we were conceived but for penicillin or polio vaccine or seat belts or some other improvement in techology or medical practice. Some of us are alive now because our parents had the idea from their parents' culture that lots of children create a good domestic work force and show parental prowess and wealth. Some are here because the federal government was understood to be subsidizing procreation by giving AFDC moneys to children's parents. Some of us are here because our parents were too stupid to know better or because they did not care whether we had advantages they did not when they were children. Some of us are insane. Lots of us are unhappy with the way the world is, and we don't know what to do about it.
Lenin (and probably others) said: "After a while quantity has its own quality." Last week in America we passed that 300 million people milestone and are whirring along to the next marker along the way. What will our Quality be? What will be the effect of so many people in such a rich and consumption-oriented society? How will America change because of soon being a third of a billion strong?
Global warming is a result of two things: population pressure on the biosphere and use of technologies that are inappropriate for increasing numbers of people. Ironically, global warming may contain within its processes the automatic regulating mechanism, the governor, that will trim us back world-wide. America will feel some of this, but at first it will not be directly affected by mass starvation in Africa and Asia. We will be thanking our lucky stars that we are so well-organized that our unique civilization has cushions to protect us from climate change. Well, that's wrong! If the Sahara and Gobi Deserts expand then the desert regions of North American can expand, too. If now fertile regions become unplantable in Asia, then the great American bread basket from Nebraska to Ohio can be destroyed, as well. And there goes our country down the well-known tube. If the central valley of California goes, your dinner plate is going to look a lot more like beans and less like fried chicken and mashed potatoes with gravy. America is not applying the population pressure on the biosphere yet, but by consuming 25% of the world's energy resources using inappropriate technology we are the major source of pressure creating global warming. People in other countries who are severely affected in the next few years are going to begin to resent us ... all 300 million of us.
"Earth's great treasure is the human personality." This is a part of the motto of Jaycees. I was astounded that such a boosterish, sometimes "average" group of people could understand something this profound. Their creed nevertheless makes me wonder if there is a limit to the fund of goodwill we have for members of our species such that as the populations grows our personal share of the general goodwill contracts? Judging from my mid-sixties I would say yes. We still hold dear some of the old traditional views of the value of an individual human being, but even in my lifetime there has been a growing sense that some people are expendable.
When I talk to conservatives about welfare or Iran or Katrina or avian flu or any of the conditions of man and the hazards of existence I hear from conservatives the idea that some people are already written off. A preacher in fabled Riverside County California harangued his audience at my friend's funeral ten years ago with this. He said, "There are those who take the lord Jesus into their hearts; the rest are trash." I confronted him after the service and found that, to my utter surprise, this was the backbone of his teaching. Somehow this "Christian" had come to the notion that he could write off 65% of the world population. I think this was partly because he has no idea how many 6.5 billion people is. It only takes a quarter billion people standing on one another's shoulders to reach the moon. I think it was partly because he knows nothing of the world, except that which he takes on faith. He is obviously an idiot.
People look at the "welfare mess" and throw up their hands. God, they say, that woman they high-lighted in the Chicago projects they are tearing down had fifteen children! Soon their imaginations run away with that number and all welfare mothers suddenly have fifteen. It is part of the process of writing these people off. The arithmetic is too big, we cannot handle these large numbers, they become meaningless, and we collapse mentally under them. We give up and begin to write precious people off.
Precious, some will ask? Yes, precious. Those soldiers in North Korea ready to rain down destruction on Seoul are all sons and daughters of their mothers and, although they are fierce warriors now, in a few years they will mature into frightened middle aged people, too afraid to change, but fully cognizant of the peril and the horror they may have already created. In Tehran there are a million children whose only vice is that they were born in Iran to Iranian parents, attended Iranian schools, and will perish suddenly and painfully when Cheney and Rumsfeld rain down thermonuclear destruction on them to settle a score with fewer than two hundred and fifty people in that country.
Yes we are 300 million now, but are we really smarter? If there are 300 million of us, then don't the statistics say there will be more people with good sense. Yes, that is possible, but will they act?
JB
http://americanliberalism.org
James Richard Brett is a retired academic administrator with a doctoral degree in Modern Russian and Soviet History. He is the founder and publisher of The American Liberalism Project.
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