Subscription: $15 / year Membership: $15/year All correspondence to: Editor: Duane Bates All correspondence to: P. O. Box 1744 Greenville, SC 29602 August, 2007

The Voice of Sanity THE NEWSLETTER OF THE UPSTATE S.C. SECULAR HUMANISTS Visit our web-site for current and back-issues at: www.uscsh.org e-mail: secularhmnst@aol.com

POPE: CATHOLICISM IS ONLY TRUE CHURCH

Pope Benedict XVI, reasserting the primacy of the Roman Catholic Church, has approved the release of an document that states that all other Christian denomination are either defective or not true churches. He left to our imagination what he thinks about all the other non-Christian religions in the world. Last week the Pope also approved the revival of the old Latin Mass, a move that attracted concern and criticism because it includes a prayer calling for the conversion of the Jews.

As an agnostic living in Greenville, the home of Bob Jones University and a strongly religiously and socially conservative area, I am continually amazed that at the criticism and accusations leveled by one religion against another. As a person who wants respect and tolerance for my views, I know that I can only get that by freely and consistently giving the same to every other person, by judging their behaviors, not their beliefs.

My wife and I are close friends with a family of evangelical Christians who we have known for twenty-five years. The husband has a degree in Bible from Bob Jones and the wife graduated from a Christian college in Florida, but we get along just fine by respecting each other’s beliefs. We have concentrated on how we can help and support each other and what we can agree on as opposed to what we disagree on. The subject of religion rarely comes us between us; we have no need or interest in converting each other to each other’s way of thinking on the subject of religion or belief. As Thomas Jefferson said “ An honest man can feel no pleasure in the exercise of power over his fellow citizen”. This is what is great deal of religious conflict is over, the control and domination of another’s religious beliefs, thereby proving the inherent rightness and superiority of your beliefs.

Our two families are fortunate to live near each other and this physical closeness makes it easier to maintain a close relationship is most aspects of our daily lives. Although we do not have a close social life, most of their social activities occur within their church, we see each other on a regular basis. They are younger than us, our two girls are successful adults, and they always seem to need some kind of help with their five kids. Recently we loaned their two older boys money to buy their first cars so they could get some jobs and the parents would not have to drive them everywhere. I have tutored one of the younger boys who is home-schooled. The wife has a cleaning business, she cleans our house, and I have helped her organize she business. Most of the help has flowed from us to them, but that the way it should be; the older generation should try to help the younger generation whether they are family or not.

We have to ask ourselves why this kind of mutual support and respect cannot operate on larger scale. Many of the world’s religion have excellent records of extending a helping hand to the less fortunate of the world. Religious charities operate everywhere in the world where there is need, but the need to assert that your religion is the only right one always lurks in the background. Right now the Christian and Islamic world seem to be in conflict over this issue. Some followers of Islam, which reveres Jesus as a Prophet, assert that their goal is a world where Islam is the only religion. Some Christians believe their goals should be to convert the world to their particular view of Christianity. Currently, both Islam and Christianity are dealing with religious conflicts and differences within their own ranks, Shiites against Sunni, Catholic against Protestants, and with some Protestants denomination, splits over theology, acceptance of homosexuals, gay marriage, female ordination and the relationship between religion and government.

Even though we understand that it is natural for a leader of a religion to assert that his church is the only path to truth and salvation, it is not helpful, given the massive social and economic changes that are occurring in the world, for any religion to further roil the waters by being perceived to move toward a less tolerant view of the thousands of other world religions. Of course, none of the religions of the world have any conclusive proof or evidence of the rightness of their beliefs, but all try to convert beliefs into facts by their claims of primacy. Just because you have a right to do something, that doesn’t mean it is wise to exercise that right. Sometimes silence is truly golden.

It is time for all humans, believers and non-believers, to recognize that tolerance and respect are vital survival skills in a world full of weapons of mass destruction. The need to dominate, on a personal or any other level, can be deadly. These religious disagreements and conflicts present a disturbing parallel between the civil wars and other conflicts that are caused by the need for domination and control by men that have a vision for their part of the world, regardless of the cost in human lives and suffering.

Thomas Jefferson also said “But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say that there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket or breaks my leg.” It is time for all of us, believers, and non-believers, to understand that making tolerance and respect for other belief systems an important part of the way we think and behave on a daily basis if we are to improve the quality all of our lives.

INNOCENT MAN EXECUTED IN 1995?

The chief prosecutor of St Louis is preparing to release a report that took two years to develop that may show that convicted murderer Larry Griffin, executed in 1995, was innocent of the crime. Griffin always maintained his innocence, filing appeals and asking the Governor for assistance, until he was executed by lethal injection in 1995.

None of the almost 1,100 persons have executed since 1977 when Gary Gilmore was executed by firing squad in Utah has been found to have been innocent, but the Innocence Project has developed DNA evidence that resulted in the exonerations of 204 current inmates, including 15 who had served time on death row. There are currently about 3,600 persons on death row in the US. Even a one percent error rate means that 36 innocent persons are going to be eventually executed.

A careful review of the criminal justice system clearly shows possible human and factual errors at every stage including witness identification errors, false confessions by mentally or emotionally disturbed persons, poor police work, inaccurate or false positive lab work and the withholding of key evidence from the defense. Even fingerprint evidence has been called into question because no scientific study that supports the claim that no two persons have the same fingerprints has ever been done. Fingerprint experts have widely differing standards for analyzing fingerprints, making the testimony very subjective. Several lab technicians had been arrested for perjury, effecting hundreds of cases, where they falsely testified that evidence linked the accused to the crime.

Sooner of later it will be proven that an innocent person has been executed, it is just a mater of time. What will be our reaction to the news that our criminal justice system has killed an innocent person? My concern is that we will be willing to accept a one percent error rate in the execution of innocent persons in order to execute the ninety nine percent that are guilty. The need for vengeance and revenge is still strong in our society, the only developed nation that still has the death penalty. Commuting all existing death penalties to life without the possibility of parole and making that sentence our most severe punishment would allow the opportunity for inmates to prove their innocence and be released from jail.

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERT’S TAUTOLOGY IN RACE CASE

A tautology is a redundant use of language that adds no information because it is, by definition, necessarily true. An example is the phase: bachelors are unmarried. An unmarried man is the definition of the word bachelor, so the additional words in the phase are unnecessary and redundant.

In last weeks ruling on Parents involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No.1, the Supreme Court ruled that race cannot be used to determine what school a student is assigned to attend. In the majority opinion Chief Justice Roberts stated: “The best way to stop discrimination based on race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race”. Who can argue with the statement? If we do not currently, or had not discriminated in the past, discriminated based on race, there would be no discrimination based on race.

This is obviously true statement, but it is at odds with historical reality; we did, and to a lesser degree still do, discriminate on the basis of race in our society. By every social measure, years of education, job opportunities home ownership, earnings and wealth accumulation, African-Americans still trail American whites in spite of almost fifty years of efforts. The resegregation of our schools has not resulted from any action or lack of action on the part of the school systems, but as the result of the difficulty of eradicating the effects of generations of systemic, entrenched religious, social, political and economic discrimination.

In my opinion, the use of tautological statements or arguments in discussions or legal decisions indicates an underlying weakness in the logic of the position using them or a conscious attempt to confuse the discussion or advance a hidden agenda. The hidden agenda that is being advanced using this tautology is that the wish of certain segments of our society to assert that the Civil Rights Acts of the 1950s and 1960s that legally ended discrimination based on race have accomplished their goals and that we now live in a truly “color blind” society, therefore no additional legal action is required. This is either a totally disingenuous belief or an attempt to substitute form for substance; we have passed the laws and made some progress and that is all that is required.

There has been a definite movement in the Federal Court to narrow the scope and focus of interpretation of the law to achieve more “conservative” decisions. For example, a recent decision of the Supreme Court on a pay discrimination case brought by a woman who discovered after two decades that she had been paid less than men doing the same job. The Court ruled that she could not be compensated for the long-term pay discrimination because she failed to file a suit within 180 days of the time the discrimination occurred. They expected the woman to file a suit when, because pay rates in private firms are not available to other employees, she had no knowledge of the discrimination.

Contrast this to the opposite trend in sexual molestation cases at the state level where the time for bringing charges for past-alleged sexual molestation has been extended not just to the date when the victim reached his or her majority, but for years after. In a recent case in my area a thirty-nine year old man filed criminal charges of sexual molestation against an older man that occurred when he was nine years old. Evidently it took him twenty years after he reached his eighteenth birthday to summon up the courage to file the charges.

Critics of the Seattle school case, rightly I think, view the decision as a de facto reversal of the Brown v. Board of Educations decision in 1954. The resegregation of American schools has been well documented, and this decision will speed up the process in some areas of our country. While good progress has been made in reversing some the effects of one hundred years of racial discrimination and segregation, public support has waned over the years as we realize that the full implementation of civil rights means that some members of the white majority population will lose the favorable treatment in education and jobs that a level playing field has generated. The negative economic effects of globalization and uncontrolled immigration may also be playing a role in the American public’s view of the need for full social, educational and economic equality for all. It’s much easier to support the values and goals of the American dream for everyone when your paycheck is secure than when you are unsure of how long you will be employed at a good paying job with benefits.

This is really the bottom line; economic insecurity for the majority breeds insecurity for all. In the important Supreme Court case of 1896, Plessy v. Ferguson, Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote a sole dissent to the majority decision legalizing segregation, “Our Constitution is color blind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens”. He warned that the decision to allow segregation would be ranked, along with the Dred Scott case, as one of the most infamous Supreme Court cases in out history and would be the basis of great societal problems. Unfortunately, Justice Harlan was correct.

THE PRESIDENT'S COLUMN

BY

Lee Dietz

Jacques and Dorrace Benbassat are planning a trip to Greenville on July 25th and we plan a "get together" with them. Details will be sent to you via email or hard copy. Please plan to keep the evening of the 25th open to meet with us.

Our August brunch will be on Saturday, August 11th at 10:30 a.m. at the Denny's Restaurant on Wade Hampton Blvd in Greenville. Plan on coming and we will have some tables put together for our group.

The Annual picnic will be held on Saturday, August 26th at a place and time to be announced. The specific time and place will be communicated by an email and posted on the website by August 15^th.