mjh's blog

Seed: The Other I.D. — incompetent design

My friend, Lisa T, sent me the link to this short, amusing article.

class="sig">mjh

Seed: The Other I.D.

An interview with Don Wise, creator of “incompetent design”

class="mine">[mjh: I'll quote just one; read the article for more...]

All of our pelvises slope forward for convenient knuckle-

dragging, like all the other great apes. And the only reason you stand erect is because of this incredible sharp bend at the base of your

spine, which is either evolution’s way of modifying something or else it’s just a design that would flunk a first-year

engineering student.
—–
[mjh: See the following, longer article, as well.]

href="http://www.livescience.com/humanbiology/050922_ID_main.html">Intelligent Design: An Ambiguous Assault on Evolution By Ker Than,

LiveScience Staff Writer

Can we talk? Or not?

A majority of Americans distrust Duhbya and

dislike Cheney (even fear/hate/loathe him). A majority believes we were ‘manipulated’ into war. A majority gives at least lip service

to freedom of speech and dissent. Yet, a majority believes talking about the war hurts troop morale. So, are we to just shut up or is

lowered morale the price we must pay to get at the truth? mjh

href="http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/ny-uspoll284531105nov28,0,6222628.story?coll=ny-uspolitics-headlines">Newsday.com:

Poll: Dems’ barbs hurt troops THE WASHINGTON POST

[A] new poll conducted Nov. 17-20 indicates most Americans are sympathetic

to Cheney’s point. Seventy percent of people said that criticism of the war by Democratic senators hurts troop morale – with 44 percent

saying morale is hurt “a lot,” according to a poll taken by RT Strategies.

Even self-identified Democrats agree: 55 percent

believe criticism hurts morale, while 21 percent say it helps morale.
—–

href="http://159.54.227.3/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051128/NEWS/51128011">As VP goes on attack, poll numbers fall off CHICAGO

TRIBUNE

The vice president’s hard-line language fires up the conservative base that remains fond of Cheney, it does not appear to

impress much of the rest of the country. Polls show Cheney is less popular than Bush, who himself is suffering from the lowest ratings of

his presidency.

Cheney’s image has not been helped by such moves as his decision to attend an upcoming fundraiser for Rep. Tom

DeLay, R-Texas, the in-dicted former House majority leader. A cartoon in The Washington Post recently showed a glowering Cheney, angry

that Bush pardoned the Thanksgiving turkey.

Among Republicans, 80 percent in a Nov. 11-13 Gallup survey said they approved of

Bush’s job performance, while 68 percent ap-proved of Cheney’s.

A majority of all 1,006 voters surveyed rated Cheney’s

advice to the president as “bad.” [mjh: amen.]
—–

href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/24/AR2005112400477.html">The Phony War Against the Critics By

Michael Kinsley

“One might also argue,” Vice President Cheney said in a speech on Monday, “that untruthful charges against the

commander in chief have an insidious effect on the war effort.” That would certainly be an ugly and demagogic argument, were one to make

it. …

Lest one fear that he might be saying that, Cheney immediately added, “I’m unwilling to say that” —

“that” being what he had just said. He generously granted critics the right to criticize (as did the president this

week). Then he resumed hurling adjectives like an ape hurling coconuts at unwanted visitors. “Dishonest.” “Reprehensible.” “Corrupt.”

“Shameless.” President Bush and others joined in, all morally outraged that anyone would accuse the administration of misleading us into

war by faking a belief that Saddam Hussein possessed nuclear and/or chemical and biological weapons.

photos of petroglyphs

src="http://mjhinton.net/slides/2005/rinconada/thumbs/rincon%20111.jpg" alt="abstract petroglyph" align="left" hspace="5" />

href="http://mjhinton.net/slides/2005/rinconada/">

alt="dancer petroglyph" align="right" hspace="5" />A week ago, I went hiking on the Rinconada Canyon trail in Petroglyphs National

Monument. Here are some photos of the petroglyphs.

class="sig">mjh

My Thanks to You

Thank you for

stopping by to read my blog.
peace,
mjh

src='http://mjhinton.net/mjh/graphics/turkey.jpg' alt='roasted turkey' />

Nothing Like a Good Lie

class="mine">A friend sent me a link to the following column by Jonah Goldberg of the Los Angeles Times. I read the LA Times

occasionally. I had the impression that it was a serious newspaper until a month or two ago, when they announced they were going to focus

more on Hollywood and less on anything that matters more. Let’s listen to Goldberg for a moment:

href="http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-goldberg17nov17,0,1707729.column?coll=la-news-comment-opinions">A lie for a

just cause by Jonah Goldberg

Roosevelt got Pearl Harbor instead, which was a surprise but nonetheless “rescued” the president,

in Hofstadter’s words, from the “dilemma” of needing to start a war the American people opposed.

Does this make

FDR a bad president? No. While I have my problems with FDR, most historians are right to be forgiving of deceit in a just

cause. World War II needed to be fought, and FDR saw this sooner than others.

Even the most cursory reading of any

presidential biography will tell you that statesmanship requires occasional duplicity. If great foreign policy could be

conducted Boy Scout-style — “I will never tell a lie” — foreign policy would be easy (and Jimmy Carter would be hailed as the American

Bismarck). This isn’t to say that the public’s trust should be breached lightly, but there are other competing goods involved

in any complex situation.

Now, you might say that Iraq was no WWII, Saddam was no Hitler, and 9/11 was no Pearl Harbor. Those are

all fair arguments with varying degrees of merit. But WWII wasn’t “the good war” in our hearts until after Pearl Harbor and even until

after the Holocaust, and a lot of Hollywood burnishing.

Big-money conservatives will never get over their

rage at FDR, even if they dismantle every trace of progressive government and globally search and replace Raygun for FDR. It’s like the

Civil War — the hate and anger is passed down the generations.

Still, Goldberg speaks for me when he says Iraq is no WWII, etc.,

though he doesn’t recognize Duhbya’s no FDR — that would undermine his rather stretched point.

The Bush Doctrine

is not chiefly about WMD and never was. Like FDR’s vision, it balances democracy, security and

morality. Still, the media and anti-Bush partisans have been bizarrely unmoved by the revelations of Hussein’s killing fields, his

torture chambers for tots and democracy’s tangible progress in the Middle East.

Now, talk about

rewriting history! The big push to invading Iraq was entirely about WMD — how else did WMD become a universally recognized abbreviation?

BushCo tried desperately to convince us that the UN weapons inspectors — remember them? — were inept or corrupt. Duhbya, Cheney and

Rice all invoked the mushroom cloud, in spite of evidence to the contrary. I don’t recall once hearing anything about bringing democracy

to Iraqis until the WMD vanished after the invasion.

Just to reassure Goldberg, I am not unmoved about what a despot Hussein was

or how, one day, Iraqis will be better off without him. However, some make the same argument about Cuba, which would be much easier to

invade and overwhelm. Some make the same argument about North Korea, which would bring about the joyous Armageddon. I’m sure more than a

few say the same about invading the US and freeing us. Noble causes abound — they aren’t all equally good ideas to pursue. It is quite

possible that BushCo spoke in-house about the democratic dominoes they would push over. Chalk this up to another consequence of their

obsessive secrecy — they didn’t tell us until it was so late it looked like an after-thought.

Perhaps Americans aren’t

adequately worked up over Hussein’s evil. Or secret CIA prisons, prisons held at the whim of a dubious President who simultaneously

declares there will be no torture while demanding the right to torture. Am I calling Bush Hussein’s moral equal? No. But let’s not

presume all we can do is good.

Let’s turn the tables on Goldberg and say that Duhbya has never, ever lied. Now what? No matter

how just the cause, hasn’t everyone at BushCo made countless errors? Why does the Radical Right support Duhbya in never once admitting a

mistake? Why is incompetence better than duplicity?

Just in case you missed it, Jonah Goldberg, who sees the wisdom in lying for

the good of others, has moved up at the LAT at exactly the same time as one of LAT’s most progressive long-time writers and fierce

anti-war critics got canned. Should be great for business in AmeriCo.

In all of this, I continue to feel manipulated. I feel that

the citizenry is being set at each other’s throats because it benefits those who work in secret. While conservatives and liberals rage

at each other, thieves are at work, stealing our heritage and rights, changing everything they can before they get caught.

Democracy Now! | LA Times Fires Longtime Progressive

Columnist Robert Scheer

The only other fact here that I would throw in, the paper is concerned about what the Bush

administration thinks, because the Tribune Company bought the Times Mirror Corporation and now owns a television station, a very

profitable one, in the same market in Los Angeles as the newspaper. And next year they have asked — they have to get a waiver in order

to be able to do that, because that violates the law right now. They expected Congress — when they bought the property, they thought

Congress would pass that law allowing them to have those two major outlets in the same market. It is now illegal, and in 2006 they are

coming up for a waiver, and the Bush administration’s F.C.C. could easily deny that waiver to them. …

The Los Angeles Times

publisher, Jeffrey Johnson, said, “You’ve got a new editorial page editor and a new publisher. We sat down and talked about the pages and

decided to make changes.” …

These people are just going to suck what they can out of the property. So this guy, Jeff Johnson,

who is an accountant who cares nothing at all about a free press and cares nothing about journalism, he’s a right winger who supported

the war, you know, who two years ago told people he couldn’t stand a word that I wrote. Why? Because I exposed how the whole Jessica

Lynch thing was a fraud ….

AMY GOODMAN: The author Jonah Goldberg will now be an L.A. Times op-ed columnist, the author of

Liberal Fascism. Your response, Robert.

ROBERT SCHEER: Yeah, well, that gives the – I think it shows what they’re really all

about. The publisher has told – you know, if these editors, Andres Martinez and Nick Goldberg, were the least bit honest about this, they

would tell you the publisher has told them he wants the editorial page to be conservative. He has specifically told them that. And so why

don’t they tell their readers that? Why doesn’t the editor of the editorial page tell the readers our publisher, my publisher, my boss,

the guy who owns this press — remember A.J. Liebling’s thing: Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one. The owner of this paper

has taken direct control over the editorial page. Jeff Johnson is an accountant. He’s not a journalist. He has said, “I am going to run

the editorial page. I’m going to run the columns and the editorials,” very clearly, and he’s told both of those individuals very

clearly in those meetings he referred to that “I’m in charge and I want this page to be more conservative.” … And here he

picks Jonah Goldberg, one of the most conservative columnists, to do his bidding for him.

By

the way, The LA Times also fired Michael Ramirez, a Pulitzer-Prize winning conservative staff cartoonist. Now, I despised Ramirez’s

messages. Still, he is a great artist and very effective at what he does. I assume he jabs me the way Oliphant jabs the Radical Right. As

long as Oliphant is published, I want to see Ramirez’s work, too. mjh

Do Unto Others As You Would Have Them Do Unto You

I leave it to the Catholics to

judge their own. At least they aren’t stoning her or beheading her. At the same time, it seems beyond irony to cast onto the streets

someone who is pregnant. Will this force her to an abortion? Will her child be poor and malnourished? Truth is, nobody really cares, not

even the sanctimonious. mjh

Fired pregnant teacher sues N.Y. diocese
Michelle McCusker,

26, said she was fired from her $30,000-a-year preschool job at St. Rose of Lima School two days after she told her principal she was

pregnant for “violating the tenets of Catholic morality.” …

“I don’t understand how a religion that prides itself on being

forgiving and on valuing life could terminate me because I’m pregnant and am choosing to have this baby,” a sobbing McCusker said.

A diocese spokesman said the school had to follow its policy handbook.

It’s time to play hardball

Notice in the following

that Cal Thomas is belittling the notion of a “uniter versus a divider,” rejecting the concept of “why can’t everyone just get along”

and cheering Duhbya, et. al., for becoming more aggressive in attacking any who dare to disagree. Saint Thomas the Uniter, nice guy of

the year. Republicans are spoiling for a fight anywhere they can find it; their blood-lust is intense.

class="sig">mjh

Bush and Rove find offense

matters by Cal Thomas

Democrats reacted immediately, accusing the president of using Veterans Day to politicize the war. What

have they been doing the other 364 days of the year, if not trying to undermine the war effort by playing politics and

contributing to disunity, thus encouraging the enemy? …

What these two speeches have in common is their aggressive tone. Before

demagoguery became the primary product of contemporary politics, we once saw more politicians battling it out with the opposition instead

of the namby-pamby, feel-good, kumbayah, can’t-we-all-get-along approach that is as palatable as cold oatmeal. Why haven’t we

heard more of this rhetoric from the administration instead of the unattainable objective of “changing the tone in Washington”?

The Bush and Rove speeches should signal a new battle strategy for the administration. … It’s time to play hardball with the

left and this would be a good first pitch. Offense wins football games and wars. It also shapes public opinion. Stack this political

offense with more of the type of rhetoric used last week by President Bush and Karl Rove.

Another Set of Scare Tactics

New Mexico’s Steve

Pearce got some mention in the national press on the matter of Iraq — as yet another bullying demagogue.

class="sig">mjh

Another Set of Scare Tactics By E. J. Dionne Jr.

There is a great missing

element in the argument over whether the administration manipulated the facts. Neither side wants to talk about the context in which Bush

won a blank check from Congress to invade Iraq. He doesn’t want us to remember that he injected the war debate into the 2002 midterm

election campaign for partisan purposes, and he doesn’t want to acknowledge that he used the post-Sept. 11 mood to do all he

could to intimidate Democrats from raising questions more of them should have raised. …

He pressured Congress for a

vote before the 2002 election, and the war resolution passed in October. …

Grand talk about liberating Iraq gave way to cheap

partisan attacks. In New Mexico, Republican Steve Pearce ran an advertisement against Democrat John Arthur Smith

declaring: “While Smith ‘reflects’ on the situation, the possibility of a mushroom cloud hovering over a U.S. city still remains.” Note

that Smith wasn’t being attacked for opposing the war, only for reflecting on it. God forbid that any Democrat dare even think

before going to war. …

The bad faith of Bush’s current argument is staggering. He wants to

say that the “more than a hundred Democrats in the House and Senate” who “voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power” thereby

gave up their right to question his use of intelligence forever after. But he does not want to acknowledge that he forced the war

vote to take place under circumstances that guaranteed the minimum amount of reflection and debate, and that opened anyone who

dared question his policies to charges, right before an election, that they were soft on Hussein.

By linking the war on terrorism

to a partisan war against Democrats, Bush undercut his capacity to lead the nation in this fight. And by resorting to partisan attacks

again last week, Bush only reminded us of the shameful circumstances in which the whole thing started.

Republicans Against Demagoguery

Hagel Defends Criticisms of Iraq Policy
Administration Calls Statements by

Democrats Harmful to War Effort, Troops
By Glenn Kessler, Washington Post Staff Writer

href="http://www.cfr.org/publication/9220/?jsessionid=8f2543e14c37cef37b0ce75859519855">A Conversation with Senator Chuck Hagel on The

Middle East and U.S. Foreign Policy [Prepared Remarks] – Council on Foreign Relations Chuck Hagel, Member, U.S. Senate

(R-NE)

We must avoid the traps of hubris and imperial temptation that come with great power. Our

foreign policy should reflect the hope and promise of America tempered with a mature wisdom that is the mark of our national character.

In this new era of possibilities and responsibilities, America will require a wider lens view of how the world sees us, so that we can

better understand the world, and our role in it. …

The Iraq war should not be debated in the United States on a partisan

political platform. This debases our country, trivializes the seriousness of war and cheapens the service and sacrifices of our men and

women in uniform. War is not a Republican or Democrat issue. The casualties of war are from both parties. The Bush

Administration must understand that each American has a right to question our policies in Iraq and should not be demonized for

disagreeing with them. Suggesting that to challenge or criticize policy is undermining and hurting our troops is not democracy nor what

this country has stood for, for over 200 years. The Democrats have an obligation to challenge in a serious and responsible manner,

offering solutions and alternatives to the Administration’s policies.

Vietnam was a national tragedy partly because Members of

Congress failed their country, remained silent and lacked the courage to challenge the Administrations in power until it was too late.

Some of us who went through that nightmare have an obligation to the 58,000 Americans who died in Vietnam to not let that happen again.

To question your government is not unpatriotic—to not question your government is unpatriotic. America owes its men and women in uniform

a policy worthy of their sacrifices. …

Terrorism is a real threat and a present danger that we must confront and defeat. But we

must not sacrifice the strengths and ideals of America that the world has come to respect and trust, and that define us. That is why I

co-sponsored Senator McCain’s amendment to prohibit cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment or treatment of any detainee under the custody

of any branch of the U.S. Government. I strongly oppose any exception to this prohibition. …

The recent media reports of a

worldwide American system of secret, black-hole jails, run by the Central Intelligence Agency, and developed explicitly to circumvent our

obligations under the Geneva Convention, sullies everything that America represents. It further erodes the world’s confidence in

America’s word and our purpose. …

The Constitution also establishes Congress’ authority and responsibility regarding decisions

to go to war. The course of events in Iraq has laid bare the failure to prepare for, plan for, and understand the broad consequences and

implications of the decision to overthrow Saddam Hussein and occupy Iraq. Where is the accountability?

ABC News: The Note: All the Vice

President’s Men

During the question and answer period that followed his speech, Hagel warned that “there will be

consequences” if the Bush Administration continues to demonize critics of the Iraq war.

“The American people will not put

up with that,” he said.

the greatest strategic disaster in U.S. history

“The invasion of Iraq I believe will turn out to be the greatest strategic disaster in U.S. history,”

href="http://www.lowellsun.com/portlet/article/html/fragments/print_article.jsp?article=3072005">said Retired Army Lt. Gen. William

Odom, a Vietnam veteran.

Nieman

Watchdog > Ask This > What’s wrong with cutting and running?

The US invasion of Iraq only serves the interest of:

1)

Osama bin Laden (it made Iraq safe for al Qaeda, positioned US military personnel in places where al Qaeda operatives can kill them

occasionally, helps radicalize youth throughout the Arab and Muslim world, alienates America’s most important and strongest allies – the

Europeans – and squanders US military resources that otherwise might be finishing off al Qaeda in Pakistan.);

2) The Iranians

(who were invaded by Saddam and who suffered massive casualties in an eight year war with Iraq.);

3) And the extremists in both

Palestinian and Israeli political circles (who don’t really want a peace settlement without the utter destruction of the other side, and

probably believe that bogging the United States down in a war in Iraq that will surely become a war between the United States and most of

the rest of Arab world gives them the time and cover to wipe out the other side.) …

The first step, of course, is to establish

as conventional wisdom the fact that the war was never in the US interest and has not become so. It is such an obvious case to make that

I find it difficult to believe many pundits and political leaders have not already made it repeatedly.

Lieutenant General

William E. Odom, U.S. Army (Ret.), is a Senior Fellow with Hudson Institute and a professor at Yale University. He was Director of the

National Security Agency from 1985 to 1988 [mjh: under Raygun]
—–

BTC News »

Worst national security administration ever

The Bush administration and Republicans in general have made national security

their defining theme since 911, but as is so often the case, the record belies the rhetoric. On almost every front — foreign policy, the

military, intelligence, even security related domestic issues such as the deficit — the administration have damaged the country’s

security, sometimes in ways that may take a generation to repair.

Since 911, the administration have corrupted our intelligence

agencies; led the country into a ruinous war on false pretenses; added nearly $2 trillion to the national debt (and counting); increased

the trade deficit; increased the poverty rate; emasculated critically important federal agencies (such as FEMA); slighted our allies

abroad; broken a variety of international laws; and, on at least two occasions, compromised our own and other countries’ security by

leaking the identities of secret intelligence assets for purely political reasons.

Carter had quite a list of grievances against Bush

href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/02/AR2005110201607_pf.html">Changing the Subject — Back

Jimmy Carter Speaks

The former president is on a book tour, and visited with Matt Lauer on NBC’s Today Show this morning.

“In the last five years, there has been a profound and radical change in the basic policies or moral values of our

country,” Carter said. The existence of secret CIA prisons, as exposed by The Post, “is just one indication of what has been

done in this administration to change policies that have persisted all the way through our history,” he said. …

Carter had quite

a list of grievances against Bush. The “insistence by our government that the CIA or others have the right to torture prisoners,” the

doctrine of pre-emptive war, “the abandonment of basic human rights, the derogation of American civil liberties and personal privacy, the

vast rewarding in a time of war of extremely rich Americans at the expense of working class people, the abandonment of protecting the

American environment — all of these things, are massive and radical departures from what our country has seen under every

president in the past 100 or more years. . . .

“It’s this administration vs. every administration that has

preceded it.”

Another Thunderbolt from Wilkerson

href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2005/11/04/BL2005110401072_pf.html">Another Thunderbolt from Wilkerson

“Mr. WILKERSON: What happened was that the secretary of Defense, under the cover of the vice president’s office, began to

create an environment — and this started from the very beginning when David Addington, the vice president’s lawyer [Addington,

incidentally, was promoted this week to the position of vice presidential chief of staff, replacing his indicted former boss, Scooter

Libby], was a staunch advocate of allowing the president in his capacity as commander in chief to deviate from the Geneva Conventions.

Regardless of the president having put out this memo, they began to authorize procedures within the armed forces that led to, in my view,

what we’ve seen.

“INSKEEP: We have to get more detail about that because the military will say, the Pentagon will say they’ve

investigated this repeatedly and that all the investigations have found that the abuses were committed by a relatively small number of

people at relatively low levels. What hard evidence takes those abuses up the chain of command and lands them in the vice president’s

office, which is where you’re placing it?

“Mr. WILKERSON: I’m privy to the paperwork, both classified and unclassified, that the

secretary of State asked me to assemble on how this all got started, what the audit trail was, and when I began to assemble this

paperwork, which I no longer have access to, it was clear to me that there was a visible audit trail from the vice president’s

office through the secretary of Defense down to the commanders in the field that in carefully couched terms — I’ll give you

that — that to a soldier in the field meant two things: We’re not getting enough good intelligence and you need to get that evidence,

and, oh, by the way, here’s some ways you probably can get it. And even some of the ways that they detailed were not in accordance with

the spirit of the Geneva Conventions and the law of war.

“You just — if you’re a military man, you know that you just don’t do

these sorts of things because once you give just the slightest bit of leeway, there are those in the armed forces who will take advantage

of that. There are those in the leadership who will feel so pressured that they have to produce intelligence that it doesn’t matter

whether it’s actionable or not as long as they can get the volume in. They have to do what they have to do to get it, and so you’ve

just given in essence, though you may not know it, carte blanche for a lot of problems to occur.”
—–

href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2005/10/20/BL2005102001131_pf.html">Former Insider Lashes Out
By Dan

Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Thursday, October 20, 2005; 1:12 PM

It didn’t make the front page this morning, but

it seems to me that it’s a big deal when a former top administration official declares that a secret cabal led by the vice

respond to emergencies.

Lawrence Wilkerson, who was chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell until both men

resigned in January, unleashed his blistering attack on the Bush White House yesterday at a luncheon at a Washington think tank. …

“The comments, made at the New America Foundation, a Washington think-tank, were the harshest attack on the administration by a

former senior official since criticisms by Richard Clarke, former White House terrorism czar, and Paul O’Neill, former Treasury

secretary, early last year.”
—–

The White House Stonewall

It seems that Addington is who Libby turned to,

after his breakfast with New York Times reporter Judy Miller, when he needed more information about Plame. …

Addington was one

of the authors of the White House memo that critics said justified the use of torture on terrorism suspects. And he formally requested

that a website making fun of Lynne Cheney, the vice president’s wife, take down its material.

About MJH

Who Does This Guy Think He Is?

My name is Mark Justice Hinton. I am a life-long old school liberal who believes America has been

hijacked by the Radical Right, a consortium of corporate money-launderers, inflexible ideologues and evangelical fanatics, a group

trending towards fascism.

I regret that America is fracturing into warring camps while I recognize my role in that. I will not be

the first to turn the other check or to forgive them their trespasses. The party of Lush Limbaugh and Pat Robertson uses corporate money

to set the citizenry at each other’s throats while passing money under the table to buy what they want from those with power. We are at

the edge of dark times with the dawning of The Christian Nation of AmeriCo, the NADA (New American Dark Ages), where ignorance isn’t

just bliss, it’s good for business.

Still, I am a cynical optimist and a fool for our system of checks and balances. I have

little faith in the electorate but I believe the system tends towards self-correction. Duhbya and Company will go the way of

Nixon; we’ve seen it all before.

peace, mjh

title="let me know what you think">write me

www.edgewiseblog.com
www.mjhinton.net/revolt/
www.bush2mars.com

meet an atheist

It seems that most people don’t really know any atheists, so it isn’t

surprising that there is misconception about atheism.

I can’t speak for anyone but myself, but I do want to respond to Kaitlyn

Rice’s letter-to-the-editor.

ABQjournal: Letters to the Editor

‘Under God’ Supplies Purpose

RECENTLY IN one of my classes, we had a

discussion about taking “under God” out of the pledge of allegiance. The majority of the class agreed that God should be left in, but

there were a few who disagreed. One believed that by saying “under God,” students who did not believe in God were being

ostracized.

I think it is sad that people believe we were randomly put here for no reason at

all, that we have no purpose and it doesn’t matter what we do with our lives because after we die that is just the end.

It doesn’t make sense to me that some people believe that what is right and wrong is a standard made by man. … I guess if

you believe that there are no eternal consequences for your actions, you wouldn’t think that there is anything wrong with teen

pregnancies or drug abuse. I find it depressing that people have so much pride that they believe they have accomplished everything on

their own, and that God has had no hand in their life. …
KAITLYN RICE
Albuquerque

I

understand that you attribute much that is good in human beings to god. Your mistake is in assuming that without god, I can’t recognize

good and evil in human beings. Worse, you insult me by assuming you know what I must believe if I don’t believe in god — a condition

you can’t grasp.

After I am dead, I will not enter heaven or hell. My energy and molecules will gradually move out into the

surroundings, in a sense returning to the beginning. It really doesn’t matter to me, because Mark Justice Hinton will no longer exist.

However, that doesn’t mean I don’t care about how I live or how I affect my world. I care because I am a part of it NOW. Hereafter

means nothing to me.

Much of what you attribute to god, I attribute to good fortune and chance. Indeed, a lot in life is random.

But some of it is cumulative — we end up where we are after many steps involving lots of influences, good and bad. I’m pretty certain

I’m a decent human being. I’m confident that much of what has lead me to this point has not been solely my own doing. I don’t believe

in self-made people — we’re all connected and interdependent. But our connection is life itself — which connects us to everything

else, as well. It is our humanity, our capacity for empathy and sympathy, that connect us to other human beings. We don’t need a god for

that.

Specifically on the matter of the pledge, I think we should stop saying it altogether (as I did many years ago). America is

a great nation; one should not need to be programmed to see that; one should not ever be coerced into group-think. But, if we need a

pledge to hold the nation together, so be it. “Under god” is a small part of what’s wrong. Schools (and churches) full of impressionable

children conditioned to see no evil and only good in their country — and to equate one administration and one party with all that is

good — that’s the problem. Invoking god helps glorify the state.

I would advise your classmates who dislike “under god” to stop

saying it — and ask themselves why they say any of the other words. Part of what makes this a free nation is a willingness to refuse to

join the majority and the majority’s tolerance of those who so refuse. At this very moment, some prayerful faithful rage that I am

corrupt and ‘the real problem’; their anger and hate is as obvious as their bibles or prayer rugs; some of them are willing to kill for

their god. How is that good?

peace, mjh