We can learn much about the event, and ourselves, by understanding the language used to justify and support the gathering. Some of the juiciest tidbits come from an article by Mimi Hall in USA Today on Friday, August 27. Patti Weaver, leader of the Tea Party in Pittsburgh, is bringing 900 people to the show because “people are upset with the direction of the country” and these folks are organizing so that they “can take our country back.”

On a pilgrimage bus with 50 devotees, rider Dan Baltes of Utah says that “It’s time for Americans to let themselves be heard instead of being spoken to or spoken for by people who don’t represent us. The government is deaf to our best interests.” Dan leads a group calling itself Americans Against Immigration Amnesty.

Houston resident Thelma Taormina, beating Dan by bringing two busloads, expresses concern that Obama and Congress are passing legislation that strips Americans of their civil rights. As evidence she cites the new health care reform that will mean Americans are going to “lose our human rights in one fell swoop.” The lunacy of that comment is its own self-refutation.

None of these concerns stands up to even the most cursory examination. You cannot claim to want to take the country back without explaining exactly from whom you want to take it — and to whom you want to give it. Take it from blacks and give it to whites maybe? Take it from liberals and give it to conservatives perhaps? But if that maneuver were to be successful, would not the blacks and liberals then want to “take the country back” from whites and conservatives who would then “have it”? The idea of “taking the country back” is babbling doublespeak with no meaning.

The claim that Americans must be heard is equally suspect given that we had a presidential election just over a year ago in which a record number of voters participated. Not liking the results of an election in a democracy does not mean voters are not being heard; it means the majority voted differently than you, and the majority was indeed heard. Liberals suffered eight years of hell under an incompetent president who pursued a radical agenda with no popular mandate. Now Tea Party candidates and conservatives are doing well in the current mid-terms election primaries; so the claim that the government is speaking for people “who don’t represent us” makes no sense at all.

But we can indeed make sense of what Beck supporters are saying by decoding the message. The language we hear from rally participants is the language of hate and intolerance couched in terms of civility. Let’s just clear the air and say what everybody is really thinking: some white middle class Americans do not like having a black president and fear that Latinos are overrunning the country. From that perspective the nonsense uttered by Beck supporters makes perfect sense in their worldview of narrow minded nationalism.

So soon after the joy of watching President Obama take the oath of office we now experience the crushing depression of seeing America at her worst, when bigotry, fear, hatred and jingoism rule the day. But any victory claimed by these forces of intolerance will be pyrrhic at best. Beck and his ilk advocate for a government that looks like the governed rather than one more pluralistic. They will regret what they wished for. In rejecting the foundation of pluralism, Beck and his supporters are setting themselves up for a rough time when whites are no longer the majority in major regions of political importance. The very logic they are using now will be turned directly against them. Intolerance can work both ways. With what moral authority will Beck supporters demand a voice in their government when the non-white majority demands a government that “represents them”?

What saddens me in watching the rise of the Tea Party, Palin, Beck and other voices of the far right is not the existence of extremism, but the fact that extreme views are now considered mainstream by nearly half the American population. But we must not confuse popularity with legitimacy. During the McCarthy era good people were ruined when labeled “commie sympathizer” and any opposition to the witch hunt was considered “anti-American.” We suffer the shame of interring Americans of Japanese descent during World War II. As we now look back on those times with regret, so too will we look back on the current epoch with shame once free from the passions of the moment.

In times of economic stress, demagoguery easily grows in the fertile grounds of fear and hate. We should be better than that, but Beck and his obscene rally prove we are not. Nelson Mandela left prison after 27 years and forgave his jailers. Beck cannot even forgive the majority for voting in their favored presidential candidate.

In pushing so hard to “take back the country” followers of Beck and other demagogues should take heed of the wise words from our founders, including Thomas Jefferson, who wrote in a letter to Abigail Adams in 1804:

Both of our political parties, at least the honest portion of them, agree conscientiously in the same object: the public good; but they differ essentially in what they deem the means of promoting that good. One side believes it best done by one composition of the governing powers, the other by a different one. One fears most the ignorance of the people; the other the selfishness of rulers independent of them. Which is right, time and experience will prove. We think that one side of this experiment has been long enough tried and proved not to promote the good of the many, and that the other has not been fairly and sufficiently tried. Our opponents think the reverse. With whichever opinion the body of the nation concurs, that must prevail.

Obama won the election. Not in a coup, not with military might, but with his ideas, and in contrast to the failed presidency preceding his. Just as Republicans dominated policy and legislation for eight years under Bush, the people have spoken and Democrats under Obama have their four years to succeed or fail, with whatever adjustment naturally comes with a mid-term election. Talk of “taking the country back” is anti-democratic. Nobody “took” the country in the first place. Current leaders came out with more votes in an election.
Beck represents the worst in America when we when we should be striving for the best. That any American would follow this megalomaniac is sad testimony to our poisonous decline. I weep for our country with clenched angered fists of frustration. We can be so much better than this.

Jeff Schweitzer is a scientist, former White House senior policy analyst and author of Beyond Cosmic Dice: Moral Life in a Random World (Jacquie Jordan, Inc.). Follow him on Facebook.

Author Oliver Thomas answered his headline question, “Why Religion” in the August 9, 2010, issue of USA Today with three justifications. All three are deeply flawed, revealing the soft white underbelly of religion’s foundation. He claims that:

1) religion makes us want to live; 2) religion makes it easier to be decent; and 3) religion gives us a sense of purpose and meaning.

He goes on to present three questions that “are not amenable to the scientific method” but that somehow reveal the value of religion: Why are we here? What does it all mean? How should we then live?

The foundational premise of these assertions and questions is fundamentally wrong. The first claim is perhaps the most egregiously absurd. Like millions of others, I reject religion completely and absolutely, but love life and want to live mine fully. Concerning the second claim, we know that morality and decency are not derived from religion, and Thomas himself admits this later in his article (also, see here). The third claim we will disprove in a moment.

As to his three questions, I could ask with equal validity, “Why is the sky purple?” The question cannot be answered because the premise of the query is flawed; asking why something is so does not make it so. Every question Thomas poses rests on the unquestioned but false idea that life has purpose and meaning. We are told we only need to discover what that meaning might be, and only by answering that question can we determine how we should live our lives. This logic is the worst tautology: we posit that life might have meaning, then go about searching for that meaning, and in the act of searching create the unexamined assumption that life has meaning! We assume the answer in asking the question, which makes no sense. By posing the question we’ve created a false premise; we have made the sky purple by asking why the sky is that color.

We can however avoid these logical inconsistencies by answering the question, “Why religion?” without invoking religion as the answer.

We start by noting that Thomas unwittingly negates his own thesis about why we have religion. Unrelated to his three questions or three justifications, Thomas summarizes the conclusions from Viktor Frankl’s research into Nazi death camps, from which Frankl concludes that there are two basic types of people: decent ones and indecent ones (some being stronger in their disposition than others). That division does not fall between people with religion and those without, thereby undermining any claim that religion is a contributory component of decency. Thomas says explicitly that “not all religion is good.” Since we have good people without religion and evil people with religion, on what basis would Thomas conclude that “religion makes it easier to be decent”? Thomas tries to get around this problem by quoting Albert Schweitzer, who said that good religion is always “life affirming.” So we come to yet another curious appeal to believe that religion is good because good religion is life affirming, rather than to consider the question of why religion is not bad because bad religion is not life affirming.

Fortunately we need not rely on Thomas to refute his arguments. Paleontologists now widely accept the idea that our ancestors believed in an afterlife as long as 300,000 years ago. Ritualistic burial, which first appeared among Neanderthals somewhere in that time frame, is a hallmark of early religion. Burial ceremonies indicate a sophisticated concept of mortality, or at least an attempt to understand the implications of death. A real possibility exists that religion, that is, some concept of an afterlife, predates true language as one of humanity’s earliest inventions.

The rise of some belief in an afterlife early in human history is not at all surprising. As a matter of survival, we are programmed to fear death, but perhaps unlike other animals, we have the cruel burden of contemplating this fear. Religion is one way we cope with our knowledge that death is inevitable. Religion diminishes the hurt of death’s certainty and permanence, and the pain of losing a loved one with the promise of reuniting in another life. Death is unavoidable; death raises obvious and disturbing questions. Even a primitive mind would demand some answers: What happens to my mate when she dies? Where does she go? What will happen to me? Will I see her again when I die?

Death is not, however, the only disturbing unknown. What is that big fireball in the sky? Why does the sky fire leave us to the cold dark, only to return again and again? What are those bright dots in the sky that I see when the fireball abandons me? Why does water sometimes fall from the sky? The world is one big mystery, desperately crying out for answers.

We can reasonably conjecture that religion was born from fear of these unknowns so incomprehensible to a primitive mind, of the drive to control the uncontrollable, of the need to have mastery over one’s fate in the face of an uncertain world. If so, the first ideas of religion arose not from any awe of nature’s wonder and order that would imply an invisible intelligent designer, but rather from concerns for the events and hardships of everyday life and how the vastness of nature affected daily existence. To cope with disease, death, starvation, cold, injury and pain, our early ancestors must have fervently worked to solicit the aid of greater powers, hoping deeply that they could somehow control their destiny with divine aid. As they still do today, hope and fear combined powerfully in a frightening world of mysteries to stimulate comforting fantasies and myths about nature’s cruel plans.

The human brain is extraordinarily adept at posing questions, but simply abhors the concept of leaving any unanswered. We are unable to accept “I don’t know,” because we cannot turn off our instinct to see patterns and to discern a cause for every effect. We demand that there be a pattern, that there be cause and effect, even when none exists. So we make up answers when we don’t know. We develop elaborate creation myths, sun gods, rain gods, war gods, and gods of the ocean. We believe we can communicate with our gods and influence their behavior, because by doing so we gain some control, impose some order, on the chaotic mysteries of the world. By making up answers to dull the sting of ignorance, we fool ourselves into thinking we explain the world. Religion was our first attempt at physics and astronomy.

But fear of the unknown, fear of mortality, and hopes for controlling and understanding nature’s course do not represent the only foundation on which religion stands. Another is social cohesion. We are social animals, gregarious by nature. Cooperation is what makes the human animal — a weak, slow and vulnerable creature — a powerful force on earth. But cooperation becomes more difficult with increasing numbers. Some means of maintaining social order is necessary. Early societies soon learned that rules of behavior imposed in the form of rituals enabled large groups of people to live in close proximity. Rituals create norms against which people can readily judge the behavior of others in diverse social settings. Any deviation from the norm is easily spotted and can be quickly addressed. In this way, order can be maintained. Notice that modern-day teenagers express their rugged individualism by dressing identically. Any non-conforming outlier would be easy to spot. Religion offered, and offers still, an obvious means of enforcing societal rules by promising a joyous afterlife for conformers, or eternal punishment for those who misbehave. Religion is used as a bribe to induce good manners. Finally, religion was eventually transformed into an important source of raw political power, divorced from any role more benign. If religion is used as a tool to control individual behavior, someone needs to develop those rules and ensure their enforcement. Who better to act as behavior police than religious elders, shamans, or high priests? What better way is there to manipulate and bend people to your will than by making up the rules by which they must live? With that influence over the daily lives of every citizen comes power traditionally reserved for city-states and empires, with all the normal trappings, including armies, treasuries and palaces.

So, why religion? Human weakness and gullibility. The master of all major faiths is the compelling quintet of fear of death, the need to explain away the unknowns of nature’s mystery, hopes for controlling one’s destiny, a desire for social cohesion, and the corrupting allure of power. Nowhere in that equation is the assumption that life has purpose and meaning. Instead, the religion we created demands that life have purpose, one that can be found only through faith, as a means of self-justification, and since we believe in our own creation we do not question the conclusion.

We thankfully have another way to see the world. While often overlooked, the most important and fundamental consequence of evolution is that life can have no design, purpose or inherent meaning. The uncaring mechanism of natural selection precludes any possibility of design, and with no design the idea of purpose becomes redundant. The notion is unfortunately not yet widely accepted outside of academia, but any questions concerning the meaning of life become inconsequential in light of the compelling lessons from evolution. In a world with no design and no purpose, there can be no questions about meaning. The question “why” simply is not valid when the answer sought involves higher purpose. One can ask why the Earth rotates counterclockwise when viewed from above, looking down at the North Pole. The answer involves the history of rotating gases that eventually coalesced to form the planet. That explanation provides an answer to ‘why’ as a matter of history rather than as one implying purpose. Asking ‘why’ in search of something beyond history, as in what purpose did god have in making the earth rotate west to east, is meaningless in a world with no design. Just the act of posing the question “why” implies the presence of purpose, so in the absence of purpose the question vanishes.

While authors such as Richard Dawkins and Stephen J. Gould have written elegantly and convincingly about lessons from life’s history, contemplating the lack of meaning is too dangerous and fearful for most people in the context of today’s religious teachings. But Dawkins’s “blind pitiless indifference” need not be frightening when viewed as an opportunity to understand the wonder of life in all of its diverse glory shed of any pretense. Embracing pitiless indifference removes the blinding shackles of false hope and empty promises of religion, and creates in its place an opportunity to see the world with clear eyes and to define ourselves meaningfully on the solid ground of natural history. Only when we can define ourselves honestly can we develop and adopt a legitimate and meaningful code of ethics for our species. Only when free from fables and fallacies can we create our own meaning and purpose as a rightful consequence of our humanness. This answer to “how should we live” is neither a gift from above nor an immutable law of nature waiting to be discovered, but one derived from and informed by our natural place in the biosphere.

Embracing blind pitiless indifference does not mean accepting an uncaring mechanistic world devoid of warmth and fellowship. By releasing our tenacious white-knuckled grip on the futile hope for design, purpose and meaning we become free to move beyond the cold reality of a random world. We can create a new and deeper sense of self and community based on our biology and our evolution as rational social creatures. A newly trained skydiver cannot feel the pleasure of free flying if he clings stubbornly to the airplane. Similarly, we must first let go of false hopes and myths about divine purpose before we can enjoy the fruits of our freedom from myth.

Asking why we are here (implying purpose and not history) has no more validity than asking why a pair of dice rolled eight the first time and six the next. There is no why. The dice rolled those numbers as a consequence of probability with no guiding hand pushing toward a particular outcome. We are those dice, as is every living thing on Earth. Our existence, like that of bacteria, wasps and roses, is a consequence of probability, with no need to invoke anything other than genetics, probability, and natural selection.

Religion is like our appendix, a vestigial remnant from a primitive past. Perhaps in a few millennia the god of Abraham will invoke the same curious amusement as rain and sun gods do today. Or perhaps our god will simply be shelved along with Zeus and Jupiter. If so we will no longer bother searching for meaning and purpose as a divine mandate but will work to define our own by appealing to our inherent good derived from our sociality and evolutionary history. Some day.

In fact, predictions of the Apocalypse or its personal equivalent of a direct path to heaven have been a common theme throughout human history. These views are not benign, because believers often try to precipitate the event, often with tragic results. A few are chronicled in The Ghost Dance by Weston La Barre, a professor of anthropology at Duke University famous for his best-selling studies in the 1950s of god and culture seen through the lens of psychoanalysis.

One poignant example excised from La Barre’s book tells a sad story all too familiar in the saga of religion. In South Africa, in 1856, a young Xosa girl went to fetch water at a local stream. There, she claimed to meet strangers from the spirit world. Excited, she returned with her uncle, Umhlakaza, who spoke with the same spirit world reps. From this encounter, Uncle Umhlakaza came back with an important message. At the time of this ghostly meeting, the Xosa tribe was battling the English. The spirits told Umhlakaza that to succeed in driving out the foreigners, his tribesman must kill every animal in their herds, and destroy every kernel of corn so carefully stored in their granaries. The spirits promised him that if his tribesman followed these instructions, heaven on earth would be theirs. Dead loved ones would return, fat cattle would rise from the earth, corn would sprout in abundance, sickness and troubles would be banished and the old would become young and beautiful again. With such great promise, backed by the authority of the spirit world, Umhlakaza’s orders were carried out, resulting in the slaughter of two thousand cattle and destruction of all grains. Instead of earthly paradise, the Xosa experienced a famine so deadly that the tribe nearly ceased to exist.

The Xosa are not unique. Tragedies resulting from such beliefs have wide geographic and temporal distribution, having visited the Maori in New Zealand, the Altai Turk of mid-Siberia, the Tuka in Fiji, the village of Gabagabuna in New Guinea, and the Kekesi of Papua New Guinea.

Nor are these sad and pathetic tales restricted to far-away or long-ago places. Today, we have Islamic suicide bombers lining up to be next in the fight against morally corrupt infidels in hopes of a free ride to heaven. While the Koran explicitly forbids suicide, several passages also state that a martyr can expect an afterlife in paradise. That creates a loophole wide enough to accommodate a bomb-laden truck, as amply demonstrated by the twisted carcasses, burnt cars and collapsed buildings now such a common sight in the Middle East. If a trip to paradise is not sufficiently attractive to convince a potential martyr to strap on some TNT, further incentive to make the ultimate sacrifice is provided by a number of virgins as promised in the Hadith, often cited as 72 but really of uncertain quantity. The prize awaiting a female-variety bomber is less clear, but a stable of male virgins would not likely hold the same appeal.

In 1978, the Reverend Jim Jones, charismatic leader of the People’s Temple, convinced 913 of his followers in Guyana to commit suicide by drinking cyanide-laced fruit punch, forever altering public perception of Kool-Aid. Jones claimed, and his followers believed, that he was the divine reincarnation of Jesus and Buddha. Citizens of Jonestown followed their divine leader’s command to suffer a “revolutionary death.”

In 1990, a Houston teenager by the name of Vernon Wayne Howell moved to the sleepy wind-swept town of Waco after dropping out of high school. There he changed his name to David Koresh, explaining blandly that he was the reincarnation of both King David and King Cyrus of Persia. David did not stop there, further claiming he was in fact the Messiah, appointed by god to rebuild the Temple and destroy Babylon. At least 131 of Howell’s Branch Davidians were convinced enough to ensconce themselves in his compound, yielding to him their daughters as young as 12 to be impregnated by the Messiah. That episode ended badly, as we all know.

In 1997, 39 members of the Heaven’s Gate cult took their own lives, dying in shifts over a few days in late March. Some members helped others take a deadly mix of Phenobarbital and vodka before consuming their own poisonous cocktail. Why did these people die? Members of the cult believed the prophecy of Marshall Applewhite, who claimed that the comet Hale-Bopp was the long-awaited sign to shed their earthly bodies, which they called “containers.” By leaving their containers behind, followers would be able to join a spacecraft traveling and hiding behind the comet, which would take them to a higher plane of existence.

In Uganda, in March 2000, somewhere between 200 and 500 members of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments committed suicide by setting fire to their church. The congregation apparently forgot about the commandment concerning “thou shall not kill.” These people died because the sect anticipated the end of the world, expecting a visit by the Virgin Mary on the Friday they self-immolated. She never showed up. The prophet in this case was Credonia Mwerinde, a former lady of the evening.

In 1966, the Jehovah’s Witnesses predicted in Life Everlasting in the Freedom of the Sons of God, a book by the society’s vice president Frederick Franz, that the world “six thousand years from man’s creation will end in 1975…” That prognostication must have caused some chagrin in 1976 when Armageddon was again delayed, particularly because leadership had encouraged members to sell their homes and property in 1974. The failed prophecy of 1975 continued a long tradition started by Charles T. Russell, who founded the Jehovah’s Witnesses. In 1879, he claimed that 1914 was the big year in which the world would be destroyed. When the year ended quietly, Russell changed the date to 1915. He died in 1916, when Joseph Franklin Rutherford took control of the organization. Upon taking the reins, Rutherford prophesized that in 1918 god would destroy churches and their members, and that by 1920 every “kingdom would be swallowed up in anarchy.” As December 31 rolled around, he reset the date to 1925. We are still here last I looked.

The consistent failure of such end-of-day predictions never seems to diminish their appeal. I suspect that same inability to process feedback from reality is why people still play the Lotto. Each generation has the hubris to believe that they, among all the humans ever born, are special such that god will decide to smite the earth during their brief stay on our small blue dot. Here we clearly witness first-hand and up close the “hopes and fears” that philosopher David Hume cited as the driving forces of religion.

If you think Miller, Smith and Applewhite were unbalanced, how about the ridiculous apocalyptical predictions of doom in 1999 in the approach of the 21st century, when computer glitches were supposed to throw mankind into chaos? Did you harbor such fears, but with some embarrassment quickly shelve and soon forget them when nothing happened? And now we suffer the same silly predictions of chaos in 2012. We seem determined to keep ourselves in a constant state of preparation for the end of time, ever hopeful we’ll be here to witness the destruction. How very odd. When 2012 passes with nothing but time, we’ll soon forget the predictions and move on to the next fad of gloom and destruction.

One could easily dismiss the examples given here of reincarnation or mass suicides in anticipation of the Apocalypse as the result of delusional ravings by a few nut bags. That would be a dangerous mistake. Prophets of doom and redemption, whom we find consistently across cultures and time, tell an important story.

The flocks of those many prophets predicting the Apocalypse had true faith, so strong that they were willing to die for their religion. The evidence on which they based their faith was no more or less legitimate than the myths on which any religion is based. The people of Jonestown or the congregation of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments made the ultimate sacrifice for their religion and faith just as soldiers of the Crusades did 900 years earlier, with the same conviction that such acts would lead to an eternal place in heaven.

Let’s take another a look at that bug-eyed lunatic, Marshall Applewhite, who commanded his followers to shed their “containers.” Everybody outside of that cult would agree that the guy had a screw loose. But in fact, Applewhite had good precedent in broadly accepted religious lore. Perhaps he was not crazy after all. Gnostic Christians believed that Jesus not only knew about, but encouraged, Judas to betray him so that Judas “could sacrifice the man that clothes me.” Jesus apparently wanted to shed his container. Perhaps the Gospel of Judas has the story correct after all. Even if not, traditional Christians today, though offering multiple interpretations of what happened between Judas and Jesus, widely accept the idea that Jesus at least had knowledge of the betrayal before the fateful evening. That conclusion would be hard to deny, with passages from the Bible such as, “For Jesus knew from the first who those were that did not believe, and who it was that would betray Him.” (John 6:64 in the Revised Standard Version, RSV). If that is too ambiguous, we have, “Did I not choose you, the twelve, and one of you is a devil?” The bible speaks of “Judas the son of Simon Iscariot, for he, one of the twelve, was to betray Him.” (John 6:70-71 RSV). If John is right, Jesus knew that he and his container would soon part ways, and took no action to avoid the separation. Crazy like Applewhite. Or crazy like anybody who believes the End Times are near - for the hundredth time.

But we are not yet done. The idea of an Apocalypse reveals a tremendous conceit among humans, not only generationally but as a species. Perhaps we will indeed one day cause our own extinction with the use of weapons of mass destruction or by destroying the environment that sustains us. But be clear that such a result is apocalyptic only for our species, and no other. Like the Energizer Bunny, the biosphere will keep on ticking just fine without us. Bacteria will continue to divide, insects will keep munching plants and lions will go on hunting gazelles. Our absence will be little noted. We need to get over ourselves. The universe is just “not that into us.” Talk of the Apocalypse is absurd not only because of the repeated failures over centuries to predict the time, but because the premise is itself absurd, relying on the false idea that humans are special.

More than 99% of all species that have ever walked the earth are now extinct. Extinction is the norm. We are nothing but a biological experiment like every other species, and our presence here has been too short to determine if our particular combination of traits is adaptive. Life’s history reaches back 4 billion years of the earth’s 4.5 billion year history. Yet we’ve been here only about 100,000 years, a blink of an eye. Talk of an apocalypse is simply embarrassing in light of the fact that our species has become the equivalent of the guy in the insane asylum who believes he is Napoleon; like him, we are sadly delusional about our importance based on a fabricated view of our history.

Preachers of doom over the centuries, and today, keep picking a date and hoping for the best. When the date passes uneventfully, the seers quickly push that prediction under the rug and pull out a new one, with no loss of credibility for the failure in the glazed eyes of their followers. Put on a blindfold and randomly start shooting arrows as fast as possible in all directions, and you might hit a bulls eye. That does not make you an archer, or an oracle.

Why do we keep buying the same snake oil when the potion fails time after time? End days predictions persist because of a deep flaw in human nature. As Francis Bacon observed, “The root of all superstition is that men observe when a thing hits, but not when it misses.”

Bacon’s thought is deeply important. You may have dreamt a hundred times that your aging parents have died, only to wake up relieved that the sad end was nothing but your imagination. Then one night you experience the common dream once more, but this time you awake to a telephone call giving you terrible news. You immediately forget the previous hundred dreams unassociated with anything real and now claim based on the one most recent that you “somehow knew” they were going to die. This combination of selective data amnesia and inability to distinguish between causation and correlation make humans terribly vulnerable to false hope and erroneous conclusions. And so Mike Huckabee and Tim LaHaye can continue to preach nonsense about an Apocalypse to large adoring crowds because we all keep forgetting when the thing did not hit.

Jeff Schweitzer is a scientist, former White House senior policy analyst and author of, Beyond Cosmic Dice: Moral Life in a Random World (Jacquie Jordan, Inc)(http://www.tinyurl.com/CosmicDice). Follow Jeff Schweitzer on Facebook.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all people are created equal with no special status of birth, and that all life on Earth began as a contingent event based on standard laws of physics and chemistry involving no magic spark or divine act.

We further hold these truths to be indisputable facts of our biology and a clear demonstration of our humble place in the biosphere, which is a fundamental foundation of our political philosophy: 1) Evolution is an undirected process with no purpose, intelligence, or foresight. Humans, who evolved under the same laws of nature as all other creatures on earth, hold no exalted status in the pantheon of life. 2) All species exploit the environment to the maximum extent possible, until either competition, resource depletion, predation, disease or other constraints limit growth and expansion. Like every other animal, humans have followed this natural path of using all available resources in our struggle to survive. One critical difference, however, is our technological advantage. Our species has successfully co-opted a significant percentage of the planet’s bounty as we fight to pass our genes to the next generation. This unique reliance on technology to exploit the environment, and to threaten each other using weapons of war, has had global effects over a short time period. As a result, while we act no differently than other animals in pursuit of survival, our actions may cause our extinction, either through the degradation of the resources on which we depend, or more directly through the use of weapons of mass destruction. 3) The large brains that gave us technology, prosperity, myths and war also give us the ability to choose, personally and collectively, to be concerned with the fate of distant generations, and to behave for the greater good. Humans are special, not because we are made in god’s image, and told to rule over the Earth, but because people have the amazing ability to choose a future in which we will thrive and develop in a just society while coexisting with a healthy natural world. If humans fail to seize this opportunity to create such a future, we will be no more than bacteria with e-mail accounts.

The Mocha Cappuccino Party is committed to the development and adoption of policies, programs and laws that will help guide humankind toward a just future in which we celebrate our deep connection to all things living as a minor twig on the vast four billion year old ever-branching bush of life.

To secure the inherent rights consistent with our biology and evolutionary history, governments are created as human institutions that derive their just powers solely from the consent of the governed. No government so formed can claim to be favored by gods of their own making. The mythical god of Abraham is not Republican, Democrat, Independent, Progressive or American.

The various powers of the earth are entitled to a decent respect as to the opinions of humankind contingent on a demonstrable fidelity to the rightful laws of nature and ability to secure for all citizens the inalienable rights of liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

A government formed by the people for the people can survive only through open debate, free exchange of ideas and reliance on verifiable facts to arbitrate disputes. The Mocha Cappuccino Party is therefore dedicated to rooting out hypocrisy, myth, appeal to faith and bigotry in political discourse. We vigorously reject pious calls: to balance the budget, but only when a Democrat holds the nation’s highest office; to protect the Constitution while advocating to alter the document for trivial purpose; to end “runaway government spending” when the party making that demand is responsible for the nation’s greatest debts and deficits; to repeal “government-run” health care while reaping the benefits of Medicare; to stop tax hikes that are in fact nothing but repealing temporary cuts that led to record deficits and debts; to promote energy reform that is a cloak to hide continued subsidies for the fossil fuel industry; to agitate to “take back America” without articulating who exactly America is being taken back from; to get “government off the people’s back” while advocating government intrusion into our most personal and intimate choices, including who we marry and a woman’s right to choose her own reproductive destiny; to promote limited government while urging the federal government to “do more” whenever a crisis or natural disaster occurs; to promote education while foisting upon our children superstitions and myths appropriate to the 15th century; to promote the inherent advantages of capitalism while legislating “free market” regulations that subsidize and foster corruption, harm individual investors and squeeze small businesses. This hypocrisy must end.

We call for a government that is as big as necessary, but no bigger. The ideals of small government, balanced budgets and lower taxes are shared by all in theory but diverge in implementation. While conservative agitators attempt to paint of a picture of stark differences in fiscal ideology between the left and right, the facts tell a different story. We call on Congress to debate federal spending on facts rather than ideological fiction. To promote such a debate, we note the following facts about the 2010 federal budget:

National defense ($718 billion), Health and Human Services (including Medicare; $900 billion) and Social Security ($780 billion) combine to a sum of $2.4 trillion out of a total federal budget of $3.8 trillion. The sum all of these government programs comprise 63% of the entire spending package. The National Science Foundation ($ 6 billion) and law enforcement, including border patrol ($60 billion) add $66 billion more. Farm subsidies, which mainly go to red states, add another $17 billion. Those total $83 billion. The government is also paying $200 billion annually in interest on debt created under President Bush.

This package of federal spending has widespread and deep backing from conservatives. That brings total government spending that has Republican backing to $3.2 trillion, out of a total budget of $3.8 trillion. We note therefore that Republicans actively support and defend 84 percent of the big government they so thoroughly disdain. We conclude that opponents of liberalism believe a budget of $3.2 trillion is virtuous but are outraged by a budget of $3.7 trillion. Even if liberals supported 100 percent of the federal budget (they do not), gathering up righteous indignation about the remaining 14 percent hardly constitutes an ideological divide between big and small government. Let us lose this false debate and focus on the issues of greatest importance to our future well-being.

National Security

The Mocha Cappuccino Party believes that we can and must protect American citizens against terrorism without sacrificing the very rights we are fighting to protect. We have faith in the strength of our Constitution, and believe that we can work within the constraints of our founding document to protect the Republic and secure a prosperous future.

Republicans scoff at the idea that “Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both” (multiple variations, usually attributed to Ben Franklin). Instead, conservatives believe that our safety can only be secured by sacrificing our rights; the same ones our founders thought were inalienable. In the name of national security, conservatives advocate that the government (which they distrust in all other arenas) be given the extraordinary power to detain any American citizen and that the suspect be denied the right to petition for a writ of habeas corpus, denied access by families and denied legal representation. In condoning torture, disdaining Miranda rights, and dismissing the right of the accused to meet his accuser, conservative ideology has become one of the greatest threats to liberty.

Fiscal Responsibility and Economic Recovery

Faced with the choice of a catastrophic depression or federal debt, President Obama prudently even if reluctantly chose the latter. We applaud his precipitous actions to prevent an economic calamity with emergency stimulus money. As with health care, we acknowledge as well his leadership in getting the Congress to pass meaningful if imperfect Wall Street reform.

Eight years of conservative rule left the economy of the United States in shambles with double-digit unemployment festering in a deep recession, on the verge of a great depression, with record annual deficits and a ballooning national debt. Eight years of an almost religious zeal for deregulation left Wall Street drowning in a sea of massive corruption, failed banks, and collapsing brokerage houses. Conservatives have exhausted all credibility on the subject of fiscal responsibility. Whenever a Republican is president, the party quietly buries the mantra that we are “living off the backs of our grandchildren” to rail against government spending, but brings the phrase back into use when a Democrat occupies the Oval Office. Enough. The time has come, finally, to kill once and for all Republican hypocrisy on this subject.

Unemployment remains persistently high, a personal tragedy for millions of Americans. The real daily suffering this causes for families across the land can never be minimized. But we also call on the American people to exercise some realistic if painful patience as the economy walks back from the brink of collapse. Unemployment continues to decline, even if too slowly. We note that President Bush inherited from President Clinton an unemployment rate of 4 percent, but left office bequeathing to Obama an unemployment rate of 8.1 percent and growing monthly. Bush was losing 700,000 jobs per month, a number that has declined consistently under Obama, hitting 125,000 in June. Blaming Obama for reversing the economic nightmare caused by Republican incompetence because the momentum of the recovery is too slow feels good but makes little sense.

Education

Our educational system is in shambles, and our children lag far behind by every international standard. But we dither, focusing on “vouchers” instead of underlying problems. In the meantime 75% of our kids do not know that George Washington was our first president or that the east coast of our country borders the Atlantic Ocean. Rather than face the real issues, conservatives simply attack the Department of Education as a favorite foil. We are dooming entire generations to second class status in the world. While the rest of the world eagerly provides children with a sophisticated curriculum of science and technology, the United States lags behind under the weight of antiquated debates forced upon us by the religious right.

Health Care

We fully endorse the current health care reform bill. In doing so we acknowledge that the president of the United States is not a dictator, and must work with a divided Congress, and therefore any legislation will be less than perfect. We applaud President Obama for his success. He acted in the face of a growing crisis: Our health care system is an embarrassment, but is defended through gross ignorance as “the best in the world.” We spend twice as much per capita as any other wealthy democracy but get a poor return on that investment. The United States is the only developed country in the world that does not offer universal health care. In the industrial world we are ranked 26th in infant mortality. We are 24th in healthy life expectancy. Overall our health care system is ranked 37th globally, behind third-world countries like Oman. Only the United States has the embarrassment of medical bankruptcies. The health care reform recently implemented is an important step in bringing the United States back up to the standards of a developed country.

Clean Energy

Now is the time to create the renewable energy equivalent of the Manhattan Project or the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways. We need to push our transition to green energy technologies quickly, massively, with unwavering commitment. This is our opportunity.

Drill baby drill is not a national energy policy. We must invest heavily in research, implementation and infrastructure development: research to discover new technologies; implementation to ensure wide adoption of the technologies in play now; and a restructuring of tax incentives to promote clean growth, discourage waste and accelerate the development of the extensive infrastructure changes necessary to widely adopt clean energy technologies. While the predominant emphasis must be on the private sector, we will also need direct government investment in certain areas beyond research, such as modernizing the grid. This is how our national interests will be secured. This is where jobs will be created. The United States should rightfully lead this charge.

Climate Change

Climate change is real, exceeding natural background rates, and caused by human activity. We have run out of time for debate, and need to act quickly now. Cap and trade is a flawed mechanism to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, but better than doing nothing and certainly a reasonable intermediate step. We call on the Congress to overcome conservative resistance and re-introduce this legislation.

Conservative denials of climate change are tragic on many levels. We are condemning millions to an unfortunate future of coastal flooding, mass migrations, agricultural disruptions, exposure to the northward march of tropical diseases, and inevitable wars over shifting and scarce resources. When these tragic events unfold, we will face of millions of unnecessary deaths and the preventable disruption of hundreds of millions of lives.

Environment

The world every year is losing 40 million acres of tropical forests, which now cover only 6% of the globe’s surface, down from 14%. More than half of all coral reefs are dead, dying or endangered. Humans have depleted 90 percent of all large fish from the world’s oceans. We are losing up to 50,000 species each year to extinction, a rate 1000 times natural background levels.

We have no luxury in time as we ponder a response. The false dichotomy between growth and the environment is an anachronism born from the failures of conservative thought. Conservatives believe that growth is only possible at the expense of the environment, and that any and all efforts to protect our resources impede growth and cost jobs. That philosophy is wrong on every count and has proven so by history repeatedly. Environmentalism is not the ideology of socialists, but instead the true engine of all future economic growth.

We need to protect our forests and biodiversity, reinvest in clean air and clean water, sustainably manage our marine resources and improve efficiencies at all levels of production and consumption. We accomplish these goals with strict enforcement of existing regulations, improved laws to accommodate advances in our knowledge of ecosystem function and the development of a truly level playing field in which green technologies can compete fairly with traditional industries. Economic incentives, tax laws, enforcement of environmental legislation, implementation of international treaties, and government support for sustainable resource use are necessary to create the milieu in which individuals can rationally act to promote the greater good.

We, therefore, the representatives of the rational electorate of United States of America, appealing to natural law and reason, do by authority of the good people here gathered, solemnly publish and declare that the Mocha Cappuccino Party is hereby established. For the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of human dignity, we mutually pledge to each other our fortunes and sacred honor.

The Case for Marriage

Statistics on the subject vary widely, but we can say that something like half of all marriages in America end in divorce. Calling an institution that suffers a 50% failure rate “sacred” is a bit of a stretch. So if the practical implementation of the ideal is insufficient to label marriage sacred, to what else can we appeal? The bible, of course. One could note that if god sanctions each marriage he is not doing too well by guessing wrong half the time. Nevertheless, the bible mentions marriage in at least 90 different passages, starting in Genesis and continuing sporadically throughout the remaining 65 books. The most obvious reference giving marriage the patina of sacredness is found in the creation story in Genesis (2:24), and later in Matthew 19:5 and Ephesians 5:31, all of which state in various ways that Adam and Eve “shall be one flesh.” Since Eve was formed from Adam’s rib, Adam sees Eve as “the bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh.” The union of man and women through marriage is said to symbolize this physical union between Adam and Eve from the creation story. From this perspective marriage symbolizes and honors god’s gift of life, before anybody was tempted by forbidden fruit.

The story, and claim to sacredness, has credibility if you believe that god put Adam to sleep, stole a rib, and formed Eve from the purloined bone. For those of us who question this medical procedure, and see the creation story as nothing but evidence that god was the first to traffic in stolen organs, the claim that marriage is sacred holds no sway. I have been happily married to the same woman for 26 years, and I am a better person as a consequence of my wife’s guidance and wisdom; but the success of the relationship is borne from the hard work of communicating well with a loved one, and has nothing to do with marriage being sacred. Marriage is simply a convention of civil law, and any appeal to the divine is arbitrary.

The Case for Divorce

Marriage, even in the bible, is not so sacred that divorce is prohibited. If marriage was truly sacred the option for divorce would not exist. But ending a marriage is discussed throughout the bible, even if with less frequency than marriage. Divorce is mentioned in about 20 different passages, including the one primary reference in the Old Testament in Deuteronomy (24:1-4). The difference between the new and the old is significant. Deuteronomy tells us that a man can divorce his wife simply because “he hath found some uncleanness in her,” a rather broad loophole. According to Jesus, as related by Matthew (5:32 and 19:9), “I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, and marries another woman commits adultery.” The other possibility for a divorce beyond “martial unfaithfulness” arises in Corinthians (7:15) when an unbelieving spouse divorces a believer. The other point to remember, often easily forgotten in modern times, is that when the bible discusses marriage, the woman is chattel, actual real property like a house. Unless you believe that a wife-to-be has value no greater than a plot of land, biblical authority on the subject of marriage is suspect from the start.

The Case Against Gay Marriage

If marriage is not sacred, on what basis then would someone oppose gay unions? The only remaining argument against gay marriage would have to be some specific biblical prohibition against that particular “abomination.” For without religion telling us gay marriage is wrong, would anybody resist the idea? On what basis?

In fact the bible finds gay sex offensive, so opponents of gay marriage can cite Leviticus, which makes clear that a man shall not lie with a man as he lies with a woman. Note though that the original language before being cleansed in modern bibles has no specific prohibition against lesbian sex. Some people claim weakly that the bible condemns lesbians with Romans 1, in which Paul objects to women engaging in “unnatural” sex. But we know Paul was almost certainly referring to sex during menstruation given the biblical obsession with vaginal bleeding. Anyway, Leviticus also tells us to stone to death adulterous women. Why choose to follow one passage and ignore the other?

Note too that for a subject garnering so much attention in modern politics, references to gay sex are sparse in the bible. Sodom and Gomorrah were smote because of a host of sins relating to arrogance, sexual excess and perversions, gay and straight alike. Lot, after all, offered up his two daughters for heterosexual gang rape. Lot himself had sex with each daughter, producing two sons, Moab and Benammi, one from each daughter; none of which is condemned in the bible. Family values. In any case, in spite of the divine destruction of the two sinning cities as punishment for living a little too large, homosexuality was not an issue of burning importance given the little amount of real estate devoted to the subject in both the Old and New Testaments.

Given the dismal job heterosexuals have done with marriage, the idea that allowing gays to marry would destroy the institution is nothing less than absurd. What, the divorce rate would soar to sixty percent? Straight men would abandon their wives in droves for gay partners in tights? Opponents routinely bring up this threat to marriage without ever explaining exactly how legalizing same-sex marriage would result in such ruin. Even sillier is the notion that allowing gay marriage is a slippery slope leading eventually to sanctioned bestiality. I am not making this up: Pat Robertson said that legalizing same-sex marriage would lead to the “legalization of polygamy, bestiality, child molestation and pedophilia.” The leap of logic is so great that refutation is self-evident to any thinking or reasonably sane person. How about if I claim electing a female president is a slippery slope that will lead eventually to mass castrations of all American men? That idea is no more or less absurd than the one concerning bestiality or pedophilia.

Immoral Animals

Religious zealots tend to get particularly exercised about homosexuality even with slim pickings in the bible. This aversion has no basis in reason or biology; in fact the behavior is found commonly enough in the animal kingdom. If god was so upset about the idea, one would think he would have created birds and mammals without the urge to do the naughty with the same sex. Bighorn sheep, giraffes, Bonobos, dolphins, West Indian Manatees, Japanese macaques, multiple species of birds, fruit bats and 450 other different species all engage in homosexual sex.

Nor, for that matter, are humans the only animals that enjoy sex recreationally, outside the purpose of procreation. Two of the most prominent examples are dolphins and Bonobo monkeys. In dolphins, what we call recreational sex may have other social consequences unrelated to sex, such as establishing dominance or solidifying alliances. We’ll probably never know for sure, and it sure looks like sex for fun. We know for a fact that dolphins have multiple sexual partners over their lifetime.

Bonobos, primates like us, engage in sex in every imaginable partner combination outside of immediate family members. Sex is a normal and integral part of daily social interactions. Bonobos are easily sexually aroused and express excitement in a variety of positions and genital contacts that would do the Kama Sutra proud. Sex for these primates is casual, usually quick, and looks like any other normal social interaction once you get used to it. Yet despite the high frequency of sex, Bonobo reproduction rates are about the same as in other primates. We are not the only ones who enjoy a little nookie with absolutely no connection to reproduction.

On the other hand, as a consequence of religious brainwashing, we view sex not as a natural biological function to be appreciated as part of our heritage but as a sin unless done in the pursuit of procreation. Christianity, Judaism and Islam all remove sex from our lives as a natural biological function and create mythical taboos that serve no purpose other than to perpetuate religious hierarchy and mystique. Instead of celebrating sex, religion creates stigmas and social constraints that falsely equate sex with immorality. Paranoia about homosexuality is simply another example of this confusion.

Whether gay or straight, sex is natural, a normal function of biology, no more a moral issue than breathing or eating. The issue of morality and sex needs to be divorced from religion completely. But that does not mean that the issue of morality can be ignored; just viewed from a completely different perspective. Morality and adult responsibility apply to sex only as they apply to everything we do. Nothing about sex warrants additional moral restrictions; we should behave morally and responsibly in all aspects of our lives. We have no reason to single out sex for special moral treatment.

America’s Peculiar Obsession

So we know the claim that marriage is sacred is weak at best, with little in the bible to support the notion. Specific religious prohibition against homosexuality is suspect, originally confined to male homosexuality, and limited too in scope in the bible, coming alongside passages advocating animal sacrifices to appease a wrathful god, killing disobedient children and stoning women to death. Nothing about homosexuality in the bible stands out in a way that would justify increased scrutiny relative to the hundreds of other passages we now ignore. You do not see, after all, many dead goats on Sunday these days. We know as well that homosexuality is relatively common in the animal kingdom as noted above. Yet in spite of these realities countering bigoted conservative notions about homosexuality, we will take “the gay issue” away from the religious right like we would pry a rifle from Charlton Heston’s cold dead hands. Among many other sad consequences, this right-wing death grip on the issue of gay sex, gay marriage and gays in the military puts American at odds with the rest of the world.

In terms of prohibiting gay marriage, for example, the United States is an outlier. Argentina just passed legislation allowing for gay marriage. They join a club consisting of Canada, South Africa, Belgium, Iceland, Norway, Portugal, Spain and Sweden. Same sex civil unions are recognized in Andorra, Austria, Columbia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Ecuador, Finland, France, Germany, Greenland, Hungary, Ireland, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Slovenia, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and Uruguay. Note that most of these countries are not bastions of liberalism.

We are equally at odds with the world in allowing gays to serve openly in the military. Almost all NATO countries allow gays to serve openly (22 of 26 countries), as do Russia, France, and the United Kingdom. Israel does as well, and few would argue that the IDF is weakened by the policy.

Opposing gay marriage and gays in the military just makes no sense, as many of the world’s developed and developing nations alike have already concluded. Unlike us, much of the rest of the world recognizes the societal value of two people committed to a loving, stable relationship regardless of the couple’s gender composition. That the issue remains a political football in the United States is tragic evidence that the religious right has hijacked our political system and taken us back to a darker time in human history. Faith has triumphed over reason once again. Conservatives seem to view Iran and Saudi Arabia as good role models for governance and public policy, looking to god to help make law and impose a moral code handed down by divine edict. We move toward theocracy as the rest of the world embraces the future. The religious right is strangling us in a chokehold of ignorance and intolerance, arbitrarily imposing on us superstitions dating back 2000 years. This is no way to run a modern country.

Jeff Schweitzer is a scientist, former White House senior policy analyst and author of, “Beyond Cosmic Dice: Moral Life in a Random World“(Jacquie Jordan, Inc). Follow Jeff Schweitzer on Facebook.

While certainly more visible, celebrities are really not much worse than the average Joe on this score. We all have within us a little John and Barbra, proudly promoting conservation while sneaking a solo ride in our gas-guzzling SUV to buy an organic tomato from Whole Foods.

We act this way because we confuse the moral mandate with other more mundane incentives. Yes, we unambiguously have a moral obligation to bequeath to our children a world at least as good as the one we inherited from our parents. But that clear directive offers no guidance on how to accomplish the goal. Problems arise in the details of implementation.

The hypocrisy often associated with going green can be understood best by looking at the early history of the environmental movement. Early activists focused almost exclusively on the moral component while ignoring economic realities. The moral outrage was completely understandable. We were fouling our own nest and as a society indifferent to our plight. Who can forget the searing images of smokestacks spewing poison into the air or mountains of trash spoiling our lands or dead fish floating in the cesspool of rivers so polluted they caught fire? With this undeniable evidence of our wanton disregard for the environment, we were made to feel guilty for our consumption, shamed into caring about our natural resources. We viewed conservation as a sacrifice, a burden to be tolerated, something difficult and inconvenient that had to be done.

That approach can be effective initially, and in fact was, but guilt has no staying power. We eventually run into guilt fatigue. We cannot be “scared straight” into environmentalism. The conservation movement will ultimately be successful when we dissociate moral virtue and environmental protection. The moral component is real, and compelling, but is not enough to sustain progress long into the future.

Going green is today often a mixed affair of hope and idealism confronting the realities of daily living. In the end, conservation will be effective only if properly integrated into the real world needs of family life, work and play. Only a few hearty souls will sacrifice long-term for the sake of others; all the rest of us mortals will become true conservationists when we can do so without serious disruption to our routine. We need to create effective economic incentives that recognize this reality of the human condition.

We in fact know how to create a political and economic environment conducive to conservation, but we lack the political will to change. Something as simple as taxing consumption rather than income would transform society, and fundamentally alter humankind’s relationship with the environment. Taxing carbon would be the most effective means of trapping the true costs of production and consumption. But not in my lifetime will we ever implement such a tax. Rather than throw our hands up in despair, we should instead take smaller, less dramatic steps in the right direction.

We can certainly eliminate subsidies for the fossil fuel industry; perhaps the BP disaster in the Gulf will give some incentive in this direction. Well, probably not since the conservative response to the spill is to accelerate more deep drilling even before the technology to prevent future disasters is available. Sigh. We can give more substantial tax breaks and grants to develop alternative green energy sources. We can dedicate greater resources to fund research in energy storage, new battery technology and more efficient transmission systems.

We have a long ways to go. Going green now is often an exercise in frustration because we are forced into making the false choice between doing good and doing well. Until we arrive at the point where individuals acting in their own self interest are at the same time helping to conserve the environment, we will continue to act in ways that seem hypocritical. We can see the possibility of a world in which our behavior might not necessarily change but is compatible nevertheless with true environmentalism. Perhaps in the future we can still drive alone to Whole Foods to pick up a green pepper, but in an all-electric vehicle that we recharge with energy from a local wind farm.

The very fact of our hypocrisy, so common to so many, indicates that our current approach to environmentalism is fundamentally flawed. We are not bad people, just humans struggling to get by, wanting to do good but not always able or strong enough to do so. We need to operate in a political and economic environment that promotes conservation while accommodating our human weaknesses instead of pretending a false virtue. This can be done, and is within our grasp if we have the political will. Until then we will all be guilty of hypocrisy at some level.

Jeff Schweitzer is a scientist, former White House senior policy analyst and author of, “Beyond Cosmic Dice: Moral Life in a Random World“(Jacquie Jordan, Inc). Follow Jeff Schweitzer on Facebook.

Senator Orinn Hatch (R-UT) used his opening statement to question Kagan’s intellectual qualifications and experience, but the tone was reasonably respectful. But like Sessions, Hatch had other axes to grind, and therein lies the more interesting narrative. Sessions and Hatch revealed unintentionally, but clearly in their questioning of Kagan a GOP agenda driven by spite rather than principle a wanton disregard for truth in pursuit of short-term political advantage, and the shameless ability to twist, squeeze and distort reality to maintain a position unsupported by fact or history. While none of those characteristics is shocking, rarely are they revealed so starkly in the light of public debate.

Hatch was more interested in quarreling with President Obama than in evaluating Kagan. Gnawing at Hatch like a poppy seed caught stubbornly between his teeth was Obama’s response to the now infamous Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission case. As a reminder in that case, the Supreme Court threw out the prohibition on corporate spending on political campaigns, gutting existing campaign financing laws. The opinion authored by Justice Anthony Kennedy and joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas drew the incredible conclusion that, “No sufficient governmental interest justifies limits on the political speech of nonprofit or for-profit corporations.”

In his State of the Union address, Obama disparaged the Supreme Court ruling, saying that:

With all due deference to separation of powers, last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that, I believe, will open the floodgates for special interests, including foreign corporations, to spend without limit in our elections. I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests or, worse, by foreign entities. They should be decided by the American people. And I urge Democrats and Republicans to pass a bill that helps correct some of these problems.

Well, I never! How could he? Hatch just could not stand such impertinence and simply needed to set the record straight, using Kagan as a prop for his theatrics. Worthy of note is that Hatch’s strict sense of protocol was apparently not offended when Representative Joe Wilson (R-SC) yelled out “You lie!” during that same presidential speech. Anyway, moving beyond that obvious hypocrisy, Hatch had something else stuck in his craw: the liberal complaint that Citizens United was another example of conservative judicial activism. Such an accusation is particularly hurtful because the right’s primary complaint about liberal justices is their alleged propensity to make law from the bench. Hatch repeatedly disparaged Thurgood Marshall, Kagan’s mentor, for just such activism.

Hatch’s position on activism conveniently and with a heavy dose of intellectual dishonesty ignores Bush v. Gore in which a 5-4 majority of the Supreme Court usurped Florida’s election law and overturned a decision by the Florida Supreme Court, all actions that undermine the “states’ rights” doctrine. You see deference to states’ rights was, until then, touted by conservatives as a fundamental principle of judicial restraint, and any violation of that principle was seen as liberal judicial activism. Until Bush v. Gore that is. Hatch then goes on with contorted logic to defend the Citizens United ruling as nothing but conservative judicial philosophy that could be ruled upon no other way based on years of precedent. On the strength of such precedents Hatch huffed that any accusation of conservative judicial activism was absurd, stating hopefully that “the rulings in question were firmly grounded in the law.” He finally said, “I get a little tired of people on the left saying it was a terrible case that was wrongly decided.” Hatch is terribly wrong.

Remember from civics class that the First Amendment states: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Based on the original text, many mainstream legal scholars dismiss Hatch’s apologia outright by noting simply that corporations do not enjoy equal rights as individuals to vote or campaign for elected office. Labeling corporate contributions “speech” is itself a subject of great debate. And certainly other senators disagree with Hatch. Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) said, “Ignoring important principles of judicial restraint and respect for precedent, the Court has given corporate money a breathtaking new role in federal campaigns.”

But Hatch is so committed to the idea that only liberal judges are activists he is blind to the obvious interventions from the bench when conservative judges rule. Hatch selectively chooses examples that support his idea and rejects all others. Such selective data mining is one reason he is able to cite “precedent” to support the Citizens United ruling; he just ignored or dismissed opposing precedents.

In response to Hatch’s repeated questions on the subject, Kagan said that while she believes the case was wrongly decided, the ruling made it “settled law, entitled to all the weight precedent usually gets” no matter her personal views, thereby reintroducing some maturity into the proceedings.

As weirdly focused as Hatch was on Citizens United, Sessions was obsessively determined to get Kagan to admit to a history that did not comply with the facts concerning her actions while dean at Harvard. She was working to enforce Harvard’s anti-discrimination policies while accommodating the military on campus, a conundrum because of the military’s discriminatory “don’t ask don’t tell” policy for gays and lesbians. The Solomon Amendment, of which Sessions is a co-author, requires universities that receive federal money to give full access to the military. But giving full access as required by the amendment would violate Harvard’s policies. Kagan worked honestly to reconcile those competing interests. Sessions though, simply accused Kagan of lying when she quite clearly explained her rationale and actions, including finding alternative means of allowing military access on campus. He accused her of “punishing the military” without substantiating the accusation. As with Hatch, Sessions drew a conclusion based on selective data mining, ignoring all that does not support his view. He wants to believe that Kagan is anti-military and will twist and contort the facts to support that conclusion. Sessions stoops low enough to call Kagan’s character in question because she acted in ways that oppose his own concepts of the ideal.

Supreme Court nominee hearings clearly bring out the worst in Republicans. The contradictions and hypocrisy seen in their differential treatment of Republican and Democratic candidates for the court are awe-inspiring (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-schweitzer/weeks-funniest-joke-gop-d_b_541572.html). The pious call to end liberal judicial activism in the face of unprecedented conservative judicial activism is stunning. We hear calls for speedy hearings for Republican nominees, drawn out hearings for Democrats so that the “entire record” can be scrutinized. We witness the right touting the principle that “elections matter” when a Republican is in the Oval Office, implying deference to the president’s prerogative to nominate, but dismissing that same principle when a Democrat is in the White House. We see a demand for a “mainstream” judge for Democrats, but gleeful celebration of right-wing conservative credentials when a Republican is being considered. The list goes on extensively.

The questions lobbed at Kagan during her hearing reflect many of these shortcomings in Republican thought and soft support for principles based on expediency rather than conviction. In fulfilling their constitutional role to advise and consent on court nominees, Sessions and Hatch exemplify much that is wrong with our politics today.

Jeff Schweitzer is a scientist, former White House senior policy analyst and author of, Beyond Cosmic Dice: Moral Life in a Random World (Jacquie Jordan, Inc)(http://www.tinyurl.com/CosmicDice). Follow Jeff Schweitzer on Facebook.

The nearly even distribution of votes between conservatives and liberals in the presidential elections of 2000, 2004 and 2008 reveals clearly a lasting and deep chasm in American society. Heated rhetoric, vitriol, excessive passion and closely contested elections expose the existence of two societies with little in common, living side by side but miles apart.

The barrier separating us is defined by the unbridgeable gulf between god and rationalism. This is not a culture war, but a cosmic battle between theism and humanism.

The conflict between these two world views is made apparent in the voting booth. The closest election in American history offers plenty of evidence for the religiosity divide. Of those voters who attend church more than once per week, 68% voted for Bush and 32% for Gore. Of those who never attend church, 35% went for Bush, 65% for Gore. Religiosity alone is the most important, obvious and conclusive factor in determining voter behavior. Simply put, church goers tend to vote Republican. Those who instead go the hardware store on Sunday vote Democrat by wide margins. The divide in our society is not between rich and poor, or Catholic and Protestant, or Christian and Muslim, but between those have faith and those who have reason. Obama’s election does not negate that calculus. Forget not that 50 million Americans voted for the other ticket.

Rationalism and Theism

Those who accept the idea of god tend to divide the world into believers and atheists. Yet that is incorrect. Atheist means “without god” and one cannot be without something that does not exist. Atheism is really a pejorative term that defines one world view as the negative of another, as something not what something else is. The word atheist is analogous to the denigrating word “colored” to describe African Americans, which was meant to say they are colored relative to the “pure standard” of white. Atheism is similarly meant to describe rationalists against the “pure standard” of belief. Both terms are the result of ignorance and bias about what constitutes the baseline for comparison. Just as we thankfully no longer use the world colored, we should abandon the term atheist.

If we insist on defining one group as the negative of the other, then the world would better be divided into rationalists and “arationalists” meaning those with reason and those without. But a more reasonable and neutral description of the two world views would be theists and rationalists (or humanists, take your pick).

The Moral Divide

Perhaps the clearest distinction between theists and rationalists is found in the perception of which group best defines and protects our moral values.

The association between morality and religion has been established so firmly over the past 2000 years that the link largely goes unquestioned. Churchgoers tend to believe that they have a leg up on moral behavior over humanists, or, worse, that rationalists are a threat to morality. In that environment of religious fervor, any attempt to shift to a strictly secular model of morality strikes many as heretical, on par with Galileo’s transgression so long ago.

But cold statistics prove the association between religion and morality wrong. A recent paper published in the journal Evolutionary Psychology concluded that societies with the lowest measures of dysfunction are the most secular. How did the author, Gregory S. Paul, arrive at this conclusion? He analyzed 25 indicators of “social dysfunction” including rates of homicide, abortion, teen pregnancy, STDs, unemployment and poverty. He compared those rates to religiosity as measured by self-professed beliefs and frequency of church attendance within each country studied. The two most religious countries, the United States and Portugal, turn out also to be the most socially dysfunctional measured against those 25 indicators. His conclusions have been challenged by some skeptics who claim the results are a consequence of “selection bias” in what data are collected and analyzed. There is likely some truth to that since social and behavioral studies can only rarely completely eliminate the bias of self reporting. But Paul’s conclusions though are fairly robust in spite of the study’s flaws. Society has the association of morality with religion inverted. Humanism is the guardian of morality.

Secular and Religious Morality

Traits that we view as moral are deeply embedded in the human psyche. Honesty, fidelity, trustworthiness, kindness to others, and reciprocity are primeval characteristics that helped our ancestors survive. In a world of dangerous predators, early man could thrive only in cooperative groups. Good behavior strengthened the tribal bonds that were essential to survival. What we now call morality is really a suite of behaviors favored by natural selection in an animal weak alone but strong in numbers. Morality is a biological necessity and a consequence of human development, not a gift from god.

Our inherent good, however, has been corrupted by the false morality of religion that has manipulated us with divine carrots and sticks. If we misbehave, we are threatened with the hot flames of hell. If we please god, we are promised the comforting embrace of eternal bliss. Under the burden of religion, morality has become nothing but a response to bribery and fear, and a cynical tool of manipulation for ministers and gurus. We have forsaken our biological heritage in exchange for coupons to heaven. That more secular countries suffer less social dysfunction is not only unsurprising but fully expected.

Human Hubris

Religious morality is fundamentally flawed, resting precariously on the false notion of human superiority. For millennia, peoples of nearly all cultures have been taught that humans are special in the eyes of their god or gods, and that the world is made for their benefit and use. This is revealed clearly in Genesis, which gives humankind the mandate to fill, rule over and subdue the earth. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states:

Of all visible creatures only man is “able to know and love his creator.” He is “the only creature on earth that God has willed for its own sake,” and he alone is called to share, by knowledge and love, in God’s own life. It was for this end that he was created, and this is the fundamental reason for his dignity. (CCC #356)

Blinded by this deeply ingrained religious bias, we keep forgetting that our highly developed cerebral cortex does not confer upon us any special status among our living cousins. People easily embrace the idea that humanity is set apart from all other animals. But nothing could be further from the truth. Humans are nothing but a short-lived biological aberration, with no claim to superiority. If evolution had a pinnacle, bacteria would rest on top. When the human species is a distant memory, bacteria will be dividing merrily away, oblivious to the odd bipedal mammal that once roamed the earth for such a brief moment in time. Our self-promotion to the image of god is simply embarrassing in the face of the biological reality on the ground. There is a loss of credibility when you choose yourself for an award.

This hubris and conceit of human superiority as the only creature close to god is not benign, leading to catastrophic consequences for humanity. The species-centric arrogance of religion cultivates a dangerous attitude about our relationship with the environment and the resources that sustain us. Humanists tend to view sustainability as a moral imperative while theists often view environmental concerns as liberal interference with god’s will. Conservative resistance to accepting the reality of climate change is just one example, and another point at which religious and secular morality diverge.

An Uncivil War

The two world views offered by theism and rationalism are fundamentally incompatible. The result is a ceaseless shouting match between opponents trying futilely to convince the other side. That will never happen because the language of faith cannot be translated into the word of reason.

A Chinese speaker can communicate effectively with an Englishman through an interpreter because while the two speak different languages many of the ideas being shared are common to both parties. That allows an interpreter to bridge the gap by finding different words to express the same thought. That is not true in a conversation between a theist and a humanist. Not only are the languages of faith and reason different, but so too are the fundamental ideas. There is no role for an interpreter here because language is not the most significant barrier. Somebody who believes in god cannot possibly comprehend a world in which god does not exist. Somebody who understands god as a myth cannot pretend to grasp a world controlled by some higher power. So we keep shouting incomprehensibly at each other in a growing cycle of incivility. With no common language and incompatible world views the decibels and vitriol of our protests and proclamations are the only measure of success.

Both sides are guilty of shouting, but that reality misses an important point of volume. According to a 2008 survey from Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, more than 78% of Americans identify themselves as Christian. Only 4% are self-proclaimed non-believers (broken into the survey categories of atheists at 1.6% and agnostics at 2.4%). A yelling contest is not exactly equitable. The humanist cry is like a mouse peep measured against the roar of a jet engine.

Yet in spite of these massive, overwhelming, deeply embedded majorities, Christians often speak in the dialect of victimhood. Many feel under attack by secular humanists threatening them with gay marriage, abortion, Darwinism and moral decay. This idea of Christians as modern victims is the perfect example of how the two sides can never communicate. From the perspective of a tiny 4% minority, any claim by a 78% supermajority that the views of a few are a threat to the many is simply surreal. For humanists the idea is too absurd to contemplate, but it is quite real to theists. There is no room for dialogue; the gap is just too wide.

So we will remain a nation deeply divided by theism and rationalism into the distant future. Coming together and singing Kumbaya would be great, but that will not happen in our lifetimes. As time passes political favor will ebb and flow between the two world views, allowing for short-term victories for each. But the fundamental chasm between those of faith and those of reason will never be bridged. We are a nation divided. That is the reality.

NASA grounded the shuttle fleet for nearly three years after the 1986 Challenger disaster. As with commercial aviation, this action came at great cost because during this interval the United States had no means of launching astronauts into space. The fleet was only certified to fly again after intense research unambiguously identified the cause of the accident, a potential fix was identified, and the proposed solution exhaustively tested.

Now we are faced with another national disaster following the explosion of the Deep Horizon platform in the Gulf of Mexico that left 11 workers dead and crude oil pouring uncontrollably into the Gulf of Mexico. Of course all Americans would want to put a moratorium on further deep sea drilling until the cause of the explosion was understood, measures were put in place to prevent further environmental and economic calamities, and methods were available to cap deep water wells should another problem arise. As any responsible leader would, President Obama prudently halted deep water drilling for six months.

As with the shuttle disaster, the oil spill resulted from a combination of technology and systems failures, perverse incentives and a culture that grew complacent in the face of growing risks. As authorities did with the shuttle, Obama grounded the “fleet” of deep sea rigs until we better understand the full extent of the problem, how to minimize the chances for future calamity and how best to respond should the worst occur.

Finally we have a circumstance in which all Americans can come together and agree on a shared set of commonsense principles. Well, no we do not. Mississippi’s Republican governor, Haley Barbour, claims that the temporary moratorium on offshore drilling is worse than the effects of 120 million gallons of oil spilling into the Gulf, and still counting. Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana in a tangle of confusion, contradiction and hypocrisy, vigorously opposes the temporary ban with the explanation that “the last thing we need is to enact public policies that will certainly destroy thousands of existing jobs while preventing the creation of thousands more.” This is the guy who rails against big government while begging the federal government to “do more” to help in the Gulf; he laments BP’s irresponsibility while opposing closer industry oversight.

Opposition to the moratorium and concern about jobs makes little sense with close scrutiny, even if we exclude Jindal’s haze of hypocrisy. Let us first look at jobs. Opponents talk with great angst about oil rig workers losing jobs during the moratorium, but somehow fail to conjure up equivalent concern for the fisherman now out of work or the hotel and restaurant workers who will no longer get a paycheck with the implosion of tourism. Opponents fail to properly weigh the long-term interests of public safety and environmental integrity against short-term economic solutions. Did anybody argue that DC10s should not be grounded because it would cost jobs at the factory in Long Beach? Of course not. Opponents also fail to acknowledge that jobs do not trump all other social and economic concerns. What if the jobs in question were to take oil stored in large tanks on shore and dump raw crude into the water all day long? Would anybody get up and say we must not stop the practice in order to preserve jobs? The fact of employment does not make everything else off limits for discussion. Finally, opponents are blind to alternatives to unemployment for rig workers impacted by the moratorium. For much less than the public cost of cleanup, the government could pay the full salary of every worker who lost a job and retrain them to work in the growing field renewable energy, making wind turbines for example. Invoking job loss to oppose the moratorium might make good TV but certainly not good policy.

Opponents of the moratorium are asking the public to continue flying DC10s before engineers can figure out how to keep the engines from falling off and killing everybody on board. After watching a fiery crash killing hundreds of passengers, would you get on the airplane until the problem was identified and solved? No? Then why would we continue drilling until we understand how to prevent future calamities? Moratorium opponents are willing to risk another explosion just like Deep Horizon’s, willing to risk more deaths and hundreds of millions of gallons of oil pouring anew into the Gulf, all in the name of “jobs” of the oil workers at the expense of every other job in the Gulf. The situation becomes even more bizarre when we consider that the opponents in their own words acknowledge they are incapable of working in 5000 feet of water to solve the problem. Let’s listen in:

“This scares everybody, the fact that we can’t make this well stop flowing, the fact that we haven’t succeeded so far,” BP chief operating officer Doug Suttles.

Anticipating the attempt to use a containment dome to stem the flow, we heard that, “This has never been done in 5,000 feet of water… so we’ll undoubtedly encounter some issues as we go through that process.” BP CEO Tony Hayward

“Almost everything we’re trying here has never been done before at these depths.” BP chief operating officer Doug Suttles

Prior to the attempted “top kill” fix, which ultimately failed, we were told that:

“It has never been done in 5,000 feet of water; if it was on land, we have a high confidence of success. Because it’s in 5,000 feet of water, we need to be realistic about the issues operating in a mile of water. We rate the probability of success between 60% and 70%.” BP CEO Tony Hayward

“This has never been done in these sorts of depths at all before. This is 5000 feet.” BP Spokesman Jon Pak

Yet in the face of this reality, with the clearly acknowledged inability to work in 5000 feet, Jindal, Barbour and their supporters want to keep doing the same thing as if the Deep Horizon explosion never took place. They not only want you to fly the DC10, they want you to do so while admitting they cannot fix the problem. Sure the engines might fall off, but hop on board. I cannot recall in recent times a more irresponsible position taken by public figures. The only explanation for this outrageous behavior is greed. The allure of revenue from oil is simply too great for the Gulf states to jeopardize, no matter the cost in lives, jobs and environmental degradation.

If the moratorium on deep sea drilling is to be opposed, the only rational reason would be to object to the six month time frame. The moratorium should be indefinite until we have the technology to work in 5000 feet of water to contain a blow out or other problems that can arise. Simply stating that “this has never been done before in 5000 feet” does not cut it. That technological barrier should have been considered prior to drilling. Working one mile under water without the capability of fixing problems at those depths like going to a surgeon who can open you up but has not yet learned how to suture you closed.

I have heard only one reasonable argument against the moratorium: that preventing drilling here will simply drive deep drilling to countries and waters over which we have even less control, which would further endanger the environment. In theory the argument is sound, but in practice has little value. Moving a deep water rig, or building a new one, is a gargantuan task itself full of risk and terribly costly. The economics of a temporary ban would hardly warrant such exposure, and in fact the actual reaction to the moratorium proves the point.

The depths of Republican depravity have never ceased to amaze me, but opposition to a six month deep drilling moratorium is a new low. Such opposing is the height of irresponsibility, bordering on criminal negligence. Nothing can justify the position except an appeal to ignorance and greed, which seem to be the new currency of the GOP.