It is simply not true that society needs religion. Countries with high rates of atheism tend to have high rates of happiness and social functioning. This doesn’t prove that atheism makes a society work better, but it does show that we don’t need religion to be happy or good.

Pass it on: if we say it enough times to enough people, it may get across.

“You can’t absolutely prove that it isn’t true” is a terrible argument for God. Just like it’s a terrible argument for unicorns, fairies, Zeus, and the three- inch- tall pink pony behind my sofa who teleports to Guam the moment anyone looks back there.

Pass it on: if we say it enough times to enough people, it may get across.

(It starts looking like a video all about youth obesity, but keep watching — that’s just setup for the real discussion. He also spends a minute perpetuating the myth that high fructose corn syrup is somehow magically worse than sugar despite their being nutritionally and chemically the same and broken down and used by the body in the same way, but that’s also not the focus of this video.)

(Update: Quick addendum. I previously mentioned that high fructose corn syrup was chemically identical and metabolized identically to sugar. I was wrong. They are indeed different.
However, as this recent science blog points out in its refutation of the highly biased, inappropriate, and premature suggestion made in a study regarding HFCSs and possible pancreatic cancer connection, the end result between HFCS and table sugar is negligible at best.
Also, this science blog also points out the chemical and metabolic differences between HFCS and refined sugar, but likewise establishes that HFCS is not a significant factor (no more than table sugar) in obesity. It’s an easy to blame scapegoat that distracts from the fact that obesity and diabetes come from too many calories and too little exercise. Period.)

Ebert makes the analogy:

“A big tree blew over over on our property. That was an act of God. Parts of it landed on my neighbor’s property. Another act of God. It was my responsibility to pay for its removal. If I’m going to go around growing trees, I have to pay if they get blown over. You can be sure my neighbor will pay if one of his trees blows this way. And if my neighbor could prove that I was trying to cut the tree down (for fuel, let’s say) and it fell the wrong way, he’d have grounds for a lawsuit. Especially if it fell on his house and he could no longer live there.
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BP had a very big tree that blew down in the Gulf. It was not looking after it properly. It ignored or evaded safety regulations. It possibly bore criminal responsibility. The tree fell on my property. BP should have to pay to remove that tree, right? What if it enlisted cops to prevent me from even walking over and taking photos of what they were doing on my property? What if they issued statements saying it wasn’t such a large tree, and my property would soon recover? What if it landed on my house, and BP said it wasn’t much of a house in the first place?”

If BP were a neighbor, their expectation to pay for damages would be obvious. Their avoiding responsibility would be criminal. But in the corporatocracy we have now, we have lawmakers apologizing to BP and equating the demand for damage-repair funds from them as a “shakedown,” and those with a veneer of ethics making some grumblings about responsibility but doing nothing to hold BP accountable in any real sense.

Ebert remarks:

“What I don’t understand is how corporations were granted their immunity. How it is axiomatically understood that their interests come before those of people or even their governments? Why must they be defended against reform?”

Isn’t that the kicker? Somehow, as modern capitalism in the U.S. grew as the robber-barons began buying laws and politicians in the late 1800s, the culture was crafted for us in a way that made us forgive corporations of their crimes, their sociopathology, their activities that would put individuals found guilty of equivalent behavior behind bars for life. Corporations have become the heart and soul of America, the beacons of freedom and democracy, sacrosanct symbols of good ol’ God-fearin’ American capitalism. We have come to value the idea of the corporation as more valuable than the ideas of civic duty and responsibility, of civic service, of representative government and the ideas of democracy that used to stand for being American.

Ebert observes:

“Corporations know no patriotism. They are multi-national. They deal with all markets. It is hard to say just where a big corporation is actually centered. They may have a corporate edifice, but it can be anywhere. Halliburton is in Houston, in theory, but it opened an major office in Dubai, and that is where its chairman, president and CEO lives and works. BP, the fourth largest company in the world, is in London and Houston. Enron seemed to be in Houston, but it turned out not to be a company at all. The largest company in the world is Wal-Mart, which has had great success in China, where its profits will eventually outstrip those in the U.S. It effectively decides the minimum wage in the United States.”

There was a time, during early modern capitalism, when corporate identity and nationalism were interchangeable. When company names like US Steel and American Oil Company weren’t ironic. But the entire point of the corporation, the entire purpose of capitalism, is greatest profit at the lowest cost. So the second national boundaries became elastic enough for countries to locate factories in other countries, place tax shelters in others, relocate service elsewhere, the nationalism of corporate identity evaporated faster than wages and benefits as corporations fell over themselves to become multi-nationals.

And now the Supreme Court has decreed that corporations are people, and may spend as much as they want to influence elections. Glenn Smith in that linked article said:

“Ask yourself this question. If you had to persuade your community about political opinion X, but corporations opposed your view, would you stand a chance knowing that their “political speech” was worth much more than your political speech? The answer is obvious. Mere people have been thrown on the scrap heap. The U.S. Supreme Court is lifting corporations to the top of the evolutionary ladder.
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Teabaggers, do you get it now? You are outraged by your powerlessness. Can you now see the real source of that powerlessness? It is not government. Government has been turned into the handmaiden of the corporate oligarchs.
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I’m compelled to repeat something else: I’m a fan of entrepreneurship and responsible capitalism. But it’s not the so-called heavy hand of government that is the enemy. It’s the corporate monopolists.”

Blanket hating of government is ridiculous. A government can take any of many, many forms. And the U.S. is designed, originally, to be of, by, and for the people. That means that in essence, hating the government is hating the people — hating yourself and your fellow citizens.

Of course, that would have made more sense before modern capitalism. Over the last 100 years or so, there’s been a massive shift going on under our very noses. The government is not the problem, not if it were of, by, and for the people. If that were the case, it wouldn’t matter how big or powerful it is, it’d still be in service and beholden to us. But that’s not who the government represents or serves anymore. It is now the legislative and enforcement arm of multi-national corporations. Like BP. Politicians are so bought and paid for by corporations that they should be wearing NASCAR race outfits.

And this foundational shift in our government coincides with a cultural shift that serves to protect the corporation no less. We the people have been trained over a few generations to give corporations a pass. Value their interests over our own.

Unions? Why, their goal of aiding and protecting the worker is evil because it harms the poor maligned CEO and shareholders and we don’t want that because one day we’ll no longer be a worker and we’ll be CEOs!

Regulations? Why, trying to protect the consumer from fraud and exploitation and safety hazards is evil interference in the Holy Free Market which harms the CEO and the shareholders, and we don’t want that because one day we’ll no longer be consumers, we’ll be CEOs!

The economy collapses and the middle-class crumbles and corporations get giant bail-outs with our money. But that’s not the corporations’ fault, that’s the fault of the government — government is inherently evil. This is a no-lose position for the corporatocracy: so long as government has power, buy it so that it serves the corporate interest and not the peoples’. And if the people wise up, make government the enemy. If government loses power and becomes ineffectual, “small enough to drown in a bathtub,” who’s there to fill the power vacuum? The monopolies and the megacorps and transnationals — and the oligarchy that owns them, that have held the real power in this country for the last 40 years.

What’s the solution? That’s the question that’s always on my mind, nearly constantly for the last 5 years or so, since I really started paying attention to where we are and especially how we got here. Pfft, don’t ask me; I’m just an armchair amateur cultural critic wannabe. The fantasy solution is for the workers to rise up, revolt against the 5% who own 90% of the wealth, the corporate owners and the CEOs, abolish private ownership of large corporations, redistribute that inherited and stolen wealth back to we the 95% it was stolen from, and return the government to the people and not corporate-owned career politicians. But to be honest? I think we’re on a one-way track of corporate despotism, two-class society (the working poverty and the rich), and nothing can be done except feel at home in our chains.

I imagine that may be how the French peasant class felt by the 1780s. Before the utterly unthinkable happened and they rose up and changed the entire course of history, in a blink of an eye, and abolished royalty, wrested power from the wealthy elite and put it back into the hands of the masses.

Imagine! Before the French Revolution, royalty was a divine right, God-given and decreed! To contemplate revolting against royalty was blasphemy. Was for most people not even comprehensible. People can change the foundations of everything most take for granted as immutable, permanent, always-has-been-and-always-will-be. But we know from history that every great advancement in society has come from the abused class revolting against the abusers.

Government isn’t our enemy. It’s a tool that serves whoever controls it. Right now, the oligarchy controls it to serve them. And they’re laughing themselves into pants-wetting as we fight amongst ourselves over race and immigration and religion and the distractions of Republicrat and Demopublican differences, completely oblivious to the real problems. We’re fighting over the positioning of deck chairs on the Titanic.

Peter Schiff wrote an article titled, “Why Not Another World War.” It’s actually an interesting article in which he explains how we all agree that World War II ended The Great Depression and sparked the greatest American economic trend, so why not have another? This Gulf War is too small to do the same thing again. Except, war sucks and has this annoying tendency to be deadly and break things — so let’s make it a great World Water Balloon War!

Go ahead and read the article; it’s short and entertaining. But, then at the end of it he takes a sharp turn into La-La Land.

After laying a good case for describing the World War as the biggest socialized employment program, evah, (major props to Schiff on this — most right-leaners usually berate the New Deal as being evil socialism and shout that it was the war that saved the country… and then conveniently ignore the fact that how the war saved the country was by creating government jobs for millions and spending truckloads of taxes on government programs known as weapons manufacturing), he explains how his proposed Fun War of the same scope of government spending wouldn’t work because the government couldn’t afford such a project like it did 70 years ago: We’re already too taxed and there’s no savings.

“Current tax burdens are now much higher than they were before the War, so raising taxes today would be much more difficult.”

(Keep that in mind for a moment.)

And again, I give Schiff a hand for observing:

“If all of this seems absurd, that’s because it is. War is a great way to destroy things, but it’s a terrible way to grow an economy.

What is often overlooked is that war creates hardship, and not just for those who endure the violence. Yes, US production increased during the Second World War, but very little of that was of use to anyone but soldiers. Consumers can’t use a bomber to take a family vacation.”

It amuses me when libertarians like Schiff and Marxists share the same opinion. The base of our modern capitalist economy has been the military industrial complex. Nearly half our taxes go to the Pentagon to help create metric craptonnes of ammunition and rockets and equipment that gets spent out in some foreign land, and in support of politics which makes sure we continue to have a reason to spend massive amount of natural resources and labor in sending stuff overseas to help kill people and get left there.

OK, so, war is bad. Got it. We’re on the same page. But what suggestion does Schiff have to revitalize the economy? Well, after spending paragraphs outlining a doomed-from-the-start Global Liquid-ular War, and then more to explain how we can’t afford it, his plan is explained in his final paragraph:

“What we need is more savings, more free enterprise, more production, and a return of American competitiveness in the global economy. Yes, we need Rosie the Riveter – but this time she has to work in the private sector making things that don’t explode. To do this, we need less government spending, not more.”

Why, of course! Let’s just do that! Here we go– oh, wait… How? See, I left my magic wand at the dry cleaners, and my Genie isn’t returning my calls.

Look, first of all, you, Schiff, already agreed that it was government spending that pulled us out of the Depression, so already we can establish that theoretically, yes, government spending can be an answer. What it gets spent on is important, and it’s better that it gets spent on infrastructure, for example, and not eternal war. But where is this magic savings, production, and private sector making-of-things going to come from? If it were as simple as saying, “Hey, let’s do that now,” it’d be done. But the problem of why Schiff’s hand-waving solution can’t work is the very reason we’re stuck in this economic melt-down in the first place:

High unemployment means less people with jobs to have money to spend on consumer goods, and lowering wages means less money for people to spend on consumer goods. The excuse of “We’re overtaxed!” is utter nonsense and here’s why:

U.S. citizens are already one of the lowest tax payers in the developed world.

(http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/background/numbers/international.cfm)

And yet, some of the most taxed countries have higher rates of general “happiness,” and higher standards of living on many criteria. Based on other examples around the world, there’s no reason why we in the U.S. couldn’t pay a little more in taxes. Most modern nations do pay more and are getting their money’s worth.

In fact, the current average tax rate for the average middle-income wage-earner is between 25% and 28%. During World War II, the lowest tax rate for anyone was 39% with middle-income tax rate in the 50% region. So where Schiff gets this idea that our current tax burden is already greater than it was for WWII and we couldn’t stand any more, I have no idea. Convenient since he provides no numbers or sources and just seems to pull “facts” out of his… hat.

But you know what, it’s not even necessary to raise taxes on the middle-class. There’s another group is not only not at any kind of breaking-point, but is so far away from the tax rate they were paying in the 40s and 50s that they can’t even see it from where they are: The top 1 to 5% of the wealthiest in the country. Back during WWII, the 5% of the nation who owned 80 to 90% of the nation’s wealth, were paying 80, 90, even 95% in taxes! Can you imagine? Now, guess what they’re paying today? 60%? 50%? Try around 35%. Mr. Schiff claims we’re already taxed to death, beyond WWII levels, and yet the people who own nearly all of the nation’s wealth are paying a third in taxes from what they were paying during WWII and throughout even the 50s!

Now, one might protest the idea of taxing the rich more. I mean, why should they have to pay more taxes? Just because they have more? Well, actually, yes. It’s as simple as that.

Take yourself, your family, everyone you know. It’s a safe bet that you and everyone you know earns less than $1 million a year or so, yes? If you’re earning a middle-class income of $50,000 a year, and 25% is going toward taxes, that’s $12,500. What if that increased by 10%? You’d be paying another $5,000 a year. In your budget, what would that mean? That’s your car payment, or mortgage payment. That’s eating out money for a year. Maybe have to take a part-time job. You would be immediately impacted.

If the top 1% wealthiest had to pay a measly 10% more on their $750,000 income, their 10% would be more than your entire annual income. Honestly, do you think a person making half, a quarter, a million dollars a year has to stick to a grocery budget really close? Has to consider whether they can afford daycare or not? Has to decide whether they can afford to go to Applebee’s this Friday? Yeah, the rich have more they can afford to lose, it is right that they should have a higher burden supporting the social services and infrastructure and military apparatus that they take advantage of to maintain and increase their wealth. As I already pointed out recently, the wealthy already aren’t even paying a fair share of burden off their wealth, much less are they burdened by taxes.

And let’s not forget, this is all assuming they’re paying the percent for their bracket — which they’re not! The wealthiest have tax loopholes, breaks, shelters, and strategies available to them to pay even less-to-no taxes than you or I have available to us. When we have to pay our 25 percent, we’re actually paying our 25%. When the wealthy are told to pay their 35% (remember, as opposed to the 91% they used to pay), their accountants and lawyers are getting them out of paying even that. (Tax law that, by the way, often get voted in by the poor and middle class who will never ever come close to being in the top even 20%, because the conservative mindset is deluded into thinking they will one day earn a quarter of a million a year, if they just work hard enough! So they vote against their own interests.)

There’s that other pesky problem to Schiff’s magic buy-stuff-so-stuff-can-be-made solution: unemployment and lowering wages. Despite what Republicans are spouting, that the unemployed are lazy and not looking for work (yeah, that $250 a week unemployment check is a king’s ransom!), there are more people looking for work than there are jobs. Do the math. But the more significant problem with the economy is even deeper and more entrenched. Labor wages are at best holding steady over the last 30 years while cost of living, cost of education, cost of debt, continues to increase. The value of the dollar for the average household is actually less every decade since the mid-60s (coincidently, the same period in which tax on the wealthy dropped precipitously and GOP-led deregulations and New Deal dismantling began. Odd timing, that.) Meanwhile, capital gains have increased, corporate profits increase, CEO compensations increase… In case you’re just now joining us, what’s going on here the last few decades, and fast and heavy since Reagan, is a destruction of the middle class and elevation of the rich back into a new Gilded Age.

“One of the major trends in income inequality that began in the 1980s was dramatic increases in executive compensation. From the 1980s on, compensation for the average American worker has barely kept pace with inflation, yet compensation for executives running the same companies at which worker’s pay has barely kept pace with inflation have seen their compensation levels increase by orders of magnitude.”
~ R.G. Price; source coming up…

(notice that Schiff wants more productivity, yet, GDP and other indicators of productivity in the U.S. show a constant increase already. Hmm, maybe something to do with labor getting less and less of the pie they are baking, maybe?)

Ever wonder why it was that after WWII, during the 50s, into the mid-60s, the average middle class family had only one working adult and still bought a car and a house and went of yearly vacations, sent their kids off to college, and did so without significant debt? What really has happened since then?

R.G. Price has an extensive, extensive, article explaining the beginning of the end of the middle class in the 60s, and the hammer-fisted pillaging of the middle class and Jaws of Life widening of the class divisions Reagan facilitated, in “How Reagan Sowed the Seeds of America’s Demise“. And his arguments are held together by copious (but easy to understand) charts and graphs and numbers and actual data, as opposed to the fantasy-land wishes of Invisible Market Hand libertarians like Schiff.

“In the 1980s Reagan talked about restoring America, yet his policies were designed to do the exact opposite economically, they were designed to undo the America that middle-class Americans had come to think of as the “good ole days” to which America would be restored. The America of the 1940s and 50s was an America of a strong central government, with a highly regulated economy, built through the extensive use of federal programs and massive federal subsidization of the white middle-class. And that is what it was really all about. “Restoring America” always meant “restoring white dominance”, yet it could never really be admitted that the white dominance of the 1940s-1960s was itself a product of government programs.”
~ Price

Atheists often get called disrespectful, intolerant, or extremist for saying things like, “I don’t agree with you,” “There are flaws in your argument,” or, “What evidence do you have to support that?” If it’s not intolerant to say these things about politics, science, art, or any other topic, why should religion get special respect?

Pass it on: if we say it enough times to enough people, it may get across.

It makes no sense for religious believers to insist that they know what atheism means better than atheists do. If you’re saying “Atheism means X,” and every atheist you talk to says, “No, that isn’t what it means at all,” perhaps you ought to listen to what we’re saying instead of to your own preconceptions.

Pass it on: if we say it enough times to enough people, it may get across.

“If you knew God was real, would you actually worship him?”

It’s an interesting question, though not exactly a fair one. A fair question would be, “Is there anything that could convince you (a) (G)od was real?” I could unequivocally answer that with a “yes, of course.” I’m a skeptic, not a bull-headed cynic. But as for worship this deity? Oh so many equivocations!

The real question is: What version of God are we talking about? Are we talking about Morgan Freeman God from Bruce Almighty and Evan Almighty? Because that version of God seems almost worship-able. Though, ironically, that version of God seems like someone who doesn’t really need people to worship him, and would most certainly not send people to eternal torment for the crime of not worshiping him.

The more someone does not demand and require you to love and adore them on threat of pain and punishment, the more worthy they are of being loved and adored.

But if the question must be limited to the Biblical god, the question becomes nearly impossible to answer because the Biblical god itself is impossible. The El/Elohim/Adonai/Yahweh character is so fractured and schizophrenic as to be self-contradictory. He’s presented as being omniscient, and also having human-like limitations of knowledge and upcoming events. Omnipotent, and also woefully impotent. Any incontrovertible proof of the Biblical god’s existence would necessarily have to show God to be only one version of the many that is contained in the Bible.

But, in general and predominately, the god depicted in the Christian Bible is a vile, bloodthirsty, capricious, psychopathic, cruel, deceptive thug. He’s no more worthy of worship than a tyrannical dictator would be. Or a stalking psycho, who demands your love else he’ll kill you, is worthy of love. This is a character that delights in psalms that praise bashing infant skulls against rocks, that subjugates women as property and condones slavery, that commits genocide and orders others to commit genocide for entirely immoral reasons, that lies and deceives.

If God, in any version that adheres in any significant way to the Biblical god, were proven without doubt to exist, I would not worship this evil creature. It wouldn’t be worthy of it any more than Stalin, Kim Jong Il, Pol Pot, or a psycho stalker would be worthy of worship.

And the fact that this Biblical god would, presumedly, have the power and ability to smite me doesn’t make the tyrant worthy. Having created me and having the power to kill me does not inherently make a creature worthy of love and adoration if their ethics and behavior is schizoid and their love is dependent upon threats of torture. They’re worthy of fear and loathing.

If this god was not omniscient, as some Biblical passages (and pure logic) suggests, then, like a subject under Stalin’s USSR or the East German Stasi, I might pretend worship in order to save my skin. Although, I’d like to think I’d have the integrity to refuse. If he is omniscient, well, he’d know I’d think he was an evil thug, wouldn’t he, and there’d be no sense in pretending.

Fortunately, the Biblical god is simply impossible. At least, any creature that contains even half of the qualities as described by the Bible. Might a deist god, an uninvolved and non-personal creator god, exist? Maybe. But the universe looks and acts exactly as it would if this god did only set things in motion and was nothing like the god of scripture. In which case, it wouldn’t seem that kind of god cares about worship anyway.

There’s a hilarious video I can no longer find of a British comedy show sketch. Four stereotypical young anarchists come into a messy flat, and one of them passes out copies of Marx and Engles’ Capital. He says something like “OK, if we’re going to proper revolutionaries, we need to actually read this book, yeah?” “Yeah!” And with great, revolutionary gusto, they all open their copies and the leader starts reading: “The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as ‘an immense accumulation of commodities,’ its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity….” As he reads he starts getting more despondent and the others start looking distracted. After a few weighty sentences, he finally slams the book and says, “Ah bugger this. Let’s go kill someone!” “Yeah!” And off they go.

The sketch pointed out what most people, especially people who live in the U.S., have no clue about:

Karl Marx’s greatest work is not a revolutionary propaganda, it’s an political/economics theory book. There’s a reason why it’s called Capital and not Socialism or Communism. It’s a very, very detailed examination of capitalism as a basis of socio-economy. I can be tough to get through but it’s the best examination of capitalism there has been. Because it was written during early capitalism and Marx and Engles couldn’t have predicted global market capitalism, they did get some things wrong — but the basic explanation is sound as much today as it was 150 years ago.

To help the average person understand the tome, SF author Steven Brust has followed up his fascinating blog series on Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (arguably the father of capitalist economics) with a series presenting and discussing Capital. In his latest posting, he highlights a passage in which Marx quotes Benjamin Franklin!

“…It is the expression of equivalence between different sorts of commodities that alone brings into relief the specific character of value-creating labour, and that it does by actually reducing the different varieties of labour embodied in the different kinds of commodities to their common quality of human labour in the abstract.”

Here we have a footnote, in which Marx cites Ben Franklin, quoting him as saying, “Trade in general being nothing else but the exchange of labour for labour, the value of all things is…most justly measured by labour.” The point, here, is that, just as we are able to reduce the linen and the coat to values because they embody human in labor, so, too, the labor of producing them is, economically, reduced to abstract human labor.

(Emphasis mine.) I was quite intrigued by this inclusion, and I can’t help wondering what the American founding fathers might have thought about modern capitalism and Karl Marx’s assessment of it. I do know Thomas Paine would be turning in his grave if he knew what Glenn Beck and the Tea Party were doing with him. Check out some of these Paine quotes:

“Pay as a remission of taxes to every poor family, out of the surplus taxes, and in room of poor-rates, four pounds a year for every child under fourteen years of age.” Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man

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“It is painful to see old age working itself to death, in what are called civilised countries, for daily bread… pay to every such person of the age of fifty years … the sum of six pounds per annum out of the surplus taxes, and ten pounds per annum during life after the age of sixty… This support, as already remarked, is not of the nature of a charity but of a right.” Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man

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“Create a national fund, out of which there shall be paid to every person, when arrived at the age of twenty-one years, the sum of fifteen pounds sterling, as a compensation in part, for the loss of his or her natural inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed property.” Thomas Paine, Agrarian Justice.

Yeesh! Sounds like a socialist, don’t he.

Speaking of Glenn Beck, back to Ben Franklin, in that same paragraph in that same essay Franklin wrote that Marx quotes from, Franklin wrote, “Now Silver and Gold being of no permanent Value….” That must be very awkward for Beck and his “BUY GOLD NOW before the inevitable  mass economic collapse occurs!” advertisers.

Anyway, with the intent of blogging a comment on just this Franklin quote used by Marx, I started searching for an image of Marx and Franklin together with absolutely no anticipation of actually finding something I didn’t have to Photoshop together. But then I found one: a still from a short video advertising Glenn Beck’s How to Argue With an Idiot. (Ugh! I feel dirty linking to that. But don’t let is be said I’m not fair in providing info.) It’s a short that is essentially a blatant ad hominem attack in which animated Marx and Franklin provide no info specific to the real people and serve only as mouthpieces in an extremely juvenile screed.

So this video makes Marx sound like an idiot in suggesting a progressive tax (which I’m not even sure Marx ever advocated) and then Beck-Ben “counters” not-Marx’s progressive tax by illustrating that the current tax situation is unfair. So…what’s Beck’s stance? Is the progressive tax Marx-level stupid? If so, why point out we don’t have a progressive tax situation? And why present the current unfair tax situation as if promoting a progressive tax as a solution while mocking it? It makes no sense. (Not surprising from the guy who professes churches who advocate Christianity, er, social justice I mean, are preaching Naziism and Communism; and warns that government “czars” is the Obama’s way to endorse socialism. 1. Nixon started the whole czar thing and Reagan made it famous with his “Drug Czar,” and 2. the Russian czar was the king that the communists rebelled against and expelled. Idiot.)

That aside, Beck-Ben presents the evil unfair tax numbers:

The top 1% are responsible for 40% of income tax,
the top 10% are responsible for 71% of income tax, and
the top 50% are responsible for 97% of the income tax.

OMG! Doesn’t that look evilly unfair!? You know what? Le’s just assume these numbers are correct. I’ll give him that. But any fact can look however you want it to look with divorced from any context. Of course, that’s what Beck’s best at: taking spurious and unconnected information and making false conclusions. Let’s add some more facts.

In 2007:

The top 1% owned 43% of the nation’s financial wealth,
the next 19% owned 50% of the nation’s financial wealth.
(The bottom 80% of the population owned 7% of the nation’s wealth.)
(source)

So, according to Beck, the top 50% paid 97% of the income tax; yet, the top 20% owned  93% of the wealth. Catch that? Even though half the nation paid 97% of the tax, only 1/5th owned 93% of the wealth.

Yeah, those tax numbers are unfair…in the direction opposite what Beck suggests!

Finally, Beck reveals the sociopathic outlook of the conservative when his pseudo-Franklin dumps on the poor for having the audacity of getting a tax refund. Oh no! The people in our society that struggle to even afford food and shelter aren’t having to pay income tax, when those who have problems deciding between the 3rd multi-million-dollar house or the 2nd private jet have to pay less than their fair share based on the grotesque percentage of wealth they own?

Why, that’s eeeviiil! Those slackers who work two jobs just to make ends meet and are still below the poverty line, need to belly up and give up their daycare money so that the 1% who own nearly half the nation’s wealth can feel better about using lawyers and accountants to take advantage of tax shelters and loopholes that no one in the lower 80% of the population have available to them.

We are only beginning to understand consciousness. But an overwhelming body of evidence strongly suggests that, whatever it is, it’s a biological product of the brain, with no supernatural component, and no way of surviving death. We therefore should make the most of life while we’re alive.
Pass it on: if we say it enough times to enough people, it may get across.

According to the site:

Iron Chariots is intended to provide information on apologetics and counter-apologetics. We’ll be collecting common arguments and providing responses, information and resources to help counter the glut of misinformation and poor arguments which masquerade as “evidence” for religious claims.

The complexity of issues surrounding religion ensures that any proper assessment requires us to delve into a number of philosophical, historical and sociological topics…

They got the name for their site from this verse:

“And the LORD was with Judah; and he drave out the inhabitants of the mountain; but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron - Judges 1:19″

(Kinda makes you wonder, eh?)

Anyway, I came across this comprehensive analysis of the Sermon on the Mount. As a Christian, like most Christians, I had always thought of it as the greatest example of divine wisdom possible. And, like most Christians, I never really gave it much more thought than that. Since losing my religion, I’ve done more Biblical study than I ever did as a believer, but this part of the NT has escaped my attention up to now.

This Iron Chariots investigation really makes a person question how anyone could really hold the Sermon up as an example of inspired wisdom, much less divine. At least, anyone who’s really read it. The Wiki uncovers a mess of contradictions and bad advice just from a superficial reading — and they don’t stop at just a superficial reading.

Today’s Atheist Meme of the Day. Pass this on; or don’t; or edit it as you see fit; or make up your own. Enjoy!

Atheists do see life as having meaning. We simply see that meaning as something we create for ourselves — not something handed to us by an invisible god who supposedly created us.

Pass it on: if we say it enough times to enough people, it may get across.

Note that this bill was passed in both the state’s House and Senate when she says:

“It would be a mistake to allow a decision of this magnitude be made by one individual or a small group of elected officials.”

This person obviously has now idea how a representative government works. The entire role of the legislature is to represent the people.

Although, her hypocrisy isn’t surprising, as a Republican: they’re more than happy to use the power of government when it serves their desires, then turn around and pose as populists and claim government is evil when it’s tasked to actually serve the people and protect liberty and civil rights.

I wonder how much of a populist she would be about putting decisions of such magnitude as war and war funding to a popular vote. Think she’d whistle the same tune?

It’s one thing to put issues of taxes and such to popular vote, but you do not have a popular vote in regards to civil rights and liberties! It’s the role of government, the single governors and the small groups of elected officials, to protect the rights of the minority against the tyranny of the majority!

Again, not surprising. She stated herself that she always has and always will fight against gay marriage. She, like most ideologues, can’t see the irony that her very act of intentionally vetoing the bill that the congress passed is itself putting a single person in charge of making a monumental decision that affects many.

This is amusing: Earlier today I posted a short blog called “Getting Your Attention” in which I mention John Loftus’ observation that it looks like only believers are really interested in converting people and not any omnipotent or omniscient deity, and a quip from another on what would convince him God exists… I just discover that Greta Christina, (the writer and blogger who I take my Atheist Meme of the Days from), has a new essay: “6 (Unlikely) Developments That Could Convince This Atheist To Believe in God”

It’s also amusing that in the fantastic article she mentions how when asked what would convince her, she used to cheat and just refer to “The Theist’s Guide to Converting Atheists“, by Daylight Atheism blogger Ebonmuse — I’m likely to do the same and just point to Greta’s essay.

Spoiler alert: here’s part of her final summary of her list of developments:

Now, some believers will probably argue that my standards set the bar too high. They’ll argue that I’ve created standards of evidence that are obviously not being met: that I’ve created a counter-factual world in which God might exist, but that clearly is not the world we live in.

To which I reply: Yes. That’s my whole freaking point. The whole reason I don’t believe in God is that there is not one scrap of good, solid evidence supporting the God hypothesis. The whole reason I don’t believe in God is that every piece of evidence anyone has ever shown me in support of the God hypothesis has completely sucked. The whole reason I don’t believe in God is that these criteria — criteria that would be completely reasonable for any other hypothesis — are not being met.

As many atheists point out: If God were real, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. If God were real, it would be freaking obvious. If God were real, nobody would be an atheist. Nobody would even disagree about religion. The most obvious explanation for God’s existence not being ridiculously self-evident is that God does not exist. As Julia Sweeney says in her brilliant performance piece Letting Go of God, “The world behaves exactly as you expect it would, if there were no Supreme Being, no Supreme Consciousness, and no supernatural.”

It reminds me of Matt Delehany (sp) of the Austin TV/Internet show “The Atheist Experience” who often responds to the question by believers “What would it take to convince you God exists,” with something like “If there is an omniscient god, he knows exactly what it would take to convince me, even better than I know myself.”

Today’s Atheist Meme of the Day. Pass this on; or don’t; or edit it as you see fit; or make up your own. Enjoy!

People have a right to our beliefs. But we do not have the right to have our beliefs never be questioned, criticized, or made fun of. And that includes religion. Religion is a hypothesis about the world — and if you think it’s valid to question, criticize, or make fun of other hypotheses, you shouldn’t expect religion to get special respect.
Pass it on: if we say it enough times to enough people, it may get across.

(A two-fer today as they’re related…)
Today’s Atheist Meme of the Day. Pass this on; or don’t; or edit it as you see fit; or make up your own. Enjoy!

Religion has no right to special respect. It is entirely fair to criticize religion, question it, point out its flaws, ask it to support itself with evidence, and mock it when it’s being ridiculous — just like we do with political opinions, scientific positions, artistic expressions, and any other ideas being expressed in the public forum.

Atheists often get accused of intolerance and disrespect for saying things like, “I don’t agree with you,” “I think you’re mistaken,” “What evidence do you have to support that?”, “I think your reasoning is flawed, and here’s why.” Criticizing ideas is not the same as attacking people — and religious ideas are no exception.

Pass it on: if we say it enough times to enough people, it may get across.

Greta Christina has a fascinating article over on AlterNet:
“Why Being Liberal Really Is Better Than Being Conservative
(Liberals and conservatives don’t just disagree about specific issues — we disagree about core ethical values. Can a case be made that liberal values really are better?)”

“When asked a series of questions about different ethical situations, self-described liberals strongly tend to prioritize fairness and harm as the most important of these core values — while self-described conservatives are more likely to prioritize authority, loyalty and purity.”…

In the past (mostly on Facebook) I’ve proclaimed that the conservative value-system is inherently a selfish, xenophobic, authoritarian one that has tried to stop all historic efforts to better humanity with social justice and equality. Greta is a lot nicer than I am and makes a case for the necessity for standard conservative values.

However, I think her arguments that liberal (I prefer “progressive”) values (that’s values, not people) are inherently better to be the best argument I’ve heard made.

Today’s Atheist Meme of the Day. Pass this on; or don’t; or edit it as you see fit; or make up your own. Enjoy!

“Life and the Universe are extraordinarily unlikely” is a terrible argument for God. Lots of wildly unlikely things happen that are not intentionally caused or designed. If you roll a die ten times and get 3241154645, the odds against that particular sequence are over 60 million to one. Does that mean this sequence was designed to come up?

Pass it on: if we say it enough times to enough people, it may get across.

Oh my! It’s hard to argue with that cartoon! Look how evil and scary unions are.
Are you an American who believes unions are organized extortion, protecting the lazy and demanding luxuries like Bon-Bons for workers?
Please take 30 minutes of your day to listen to the 1st half of this Small World podcast for the interview with Cory Doctorow. They mainly discuss his new YA novel, but they also talk about unions and workers organizing. I think it’s well worth the listen!

Then, after you listen, give this and this a read for some of the evils of organized labor.