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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
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RELIGION
IN AMERICA: SHOP UNTIL YOU DROP
A recent survey by the Pew
Forum on Religion and Public life shows that almost 40% of Americans have
changed their religion since their childhood, with a growing number dropping
any religious affiliation, choosing instead to be classified as agnostic,
atheist or “nothing in particular.” A link
to the article is posted below.
The landscape of American
religion is made of up many different faiths and non-faiths with about 26%
following one of the evangelical Protestant beliefs, 24% the Roman Catholic
faith, 18% belonging to one of the mainline Protestant churches, 16% “agnostic,
atheist or nothing in particular and the remaining 16% being made up of many
different faiths from historically black churches to Mormon, Jewish, Muslim and
Hindu.
A similar change is taking place in political affiliation, with
more Americans declaring themselves political independents than Republican or
Democrat combined. When I started voting in the 1960s you were either
Republican or Democrat and usually voted a straight ticket. Your political affiliation was usually
handed down from your family, along with your religion and socio-economic
status.
.
Historically, throughout
the world, your religion was the function of three accidents of birth: when you were born, where were you born and
to whom you were born too. But things
are beginning to change in many parts of the world, particularity those that
are experiencing political, economic and social changes as the result of
globalization.
In China, the former
nations that made up the Soviet Union, India and Central and South America, the
winds of religious changes are blowing strong, out with the old and in with the
new. Not surprisingly, this change
causes conflict, with the government as in China and within the population as
in India where Hindus converting to Christian faiths has resulted in street riots
and violence. Upsetting or challenging
the status quo is always dangerous. Formal, organized religion in Western
Europe continues to decline in terms of both attendance and belief, with church
attendance below10% in a number of countries.
True individual freedom
requires the freedom to change your beliefs, or non-beliefs, without the fear
of violence or political, economic and social discrimination. Fifty years ago
when I was in high school a Catholic friend, who secretly wanted to change
religions, confided to me that her family would literally disown her if she
did. Today I have a friend who is a
Methodist who is puzzled as to why her oldest son has become an Evangelical
Christian, but she has not rejected or criticized him for his choice. Americans
have certainly become more tolerant of religious diversity in the past five
decades, even when it involves members of their own family.
Some Americans, however,
refuse to accept the concept of religious diversity as a positive indicator of
human freedom. One writer of a letter
to the editor in my local newspaper claimed religious diversity was a
“despicable creation of Satan” and that religion is the “best tool of Satan to
draw people away from Jesus Christ”. A
second letter from another writer states that religions (except for his, of
course) “typically enslave rather than enhance human freedom”
Every nation and human
society develops traditions, such as a common religion, to enhance group
survival and cohesion. Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution a
radical change has taken place in the view of the relationship between the
government and the individual. The concept of human rights is relatively new,
and the view that every person has the right to believe or not believe as she
or he wishes is even newer. In free societies individuals are no longer seen as
disposable cogs on a giant wheel.
Democracy has reconstructed societies from a top down to a bottom up
concept although it doesn’t always work that way it is supposed too. If we were
to draw a graph of the world’s nations grouping them by degree of individual
religious freedom, we would see that those nations with the highest degree of
religious freedom also have the highest levels of economic growth and
stability.
As long as the basic environment
of a society remains stable it works well, but when the environment begins to
change, the society must change or risk falling by the wayside. In every
society there are those that will insist on clinging to old ways of thinking
and behaving even when they are clearly no longer working. Since in most
societies the elders generally have the real power, we simply have to wait for
them to either adapt to the change or die before major changes can be made.
Economics and technology
are now the major driving force in the world, influencing changes in every
aspect of our lives, including politics and religion. The growing religious diversity is a positive sign for human
freedom, but it will also continue to create conflict when a society’s leaders
still believe their nations can experience economic progress without allowing
adaptive changes in other social institutions, including religion.
AFGHANI
OPIUM CHILD BRIDES
Our opium poppy eradication
program in Afghanistan is an excellent example of the law of unintended
consequences. While the goal of
substituting other crops for opium poppy production in Afghanistan will benefit
the entire world since it now supplies the vast majority of opium for the
illegal heroin drug trade, the way in which it is being implemented is causing
thousands of young girls to be forced in marriages that will essentially
consign them to a life of slavery. A
link to the full Newsweek article is posted below.
Here is the way it
works. A poor Afghani farmer decides
that his only choice to make enough money to feed his family is to grow opium
poppies for the drug trade. He receives
a loan from a drug dealer to buy the seed and care for his family until the
crop is ready for harvesting. He will
pay the loan back with part of the harvest and is paid for the remainder of the
harvest. However, the US has installed
a poppy eradication program where the military goes into poppy growing areas
and destroys the crop prior to harvesting.
The farmer still has the debt, but no harvest to pay off the loan or
money to support his family. The farmer
has two choices; pay back the debt or face death. In many cases he is forced to give up one of his daughters to an
unwanted marriage as payment for the loan.
Here is how our drug
eradication program should work. First
of all, the eradication should only take places in areas where the Afghan
government and we have total control on the ground to protect the population.
As of now that is only in the capital city, Kabul. An Afghani farmer would
agree to stop raising opium poppies and accept a substitute crop to support him
and his family. The crop substitution
program is financed by USAID and has already resulted in the planting of 1.3 million
nut and fruit trees in just one province.
New crops like these take a number of years to reach maturity and start
producing income. The farmers should
receive income or work opportunities to produce the income their families need
until their new crops start producing a steady income for their families. No opium poppies should be destroyed without
the farmer receiving just and adequate compensation for the loss.
We always seem to forget
that people eat in the short term and, in the absence of a living income, will
take any chance to stave off starvation.
The Taliban, which prohibited the cultivation of opium poppies when they
were in control of Afghanistan, have now joined with the drug smugglers and
take a percentage of the income to finance their terrorist’s activities. Every
time we destroy the only source of income for a poor Afghani family and force
them to give up one of their daughters we make another enemy. In spite of all
our efforts, the vast majority of opium produced in for the international
illegal heroin trade being gown in Afghanistan, and seems to increase every
year.
I am sure that the same
type of errors are being made, with similar negative outcomes for the poor, in
South America where we are trying to eradicate the coca crops that feeds the
illegal trade in cocaine. The other poor areas of the world it is not uncommon
for poor families to sell their daughters into prostitution to survive. The young girls of many countries are paying
the price for the gross income inequality that is common in the Third
World. It’s time for American drug
eradication program, a necessary program for the future for Afghanis, to be
modified to recognize the harsh realities of life in Afghanistan and install a
program that works to provide the needs of the people while they are switching
to crops that will provide a living income in the future and prevent the need
to for them to sacrifice the lives of their daughters to survive.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/129577?from=rss
OBAMA
AND WHITE GUILT
Barak Obama delivered a
speech focusing on race relations in America after the firestorm of controversy
surrounding the wide viewing of the videos of his Pastor, Jeremiah Wright,
delivering sermons that upset and angered many. Wright’s sermons condemned the
historic maltreatment of African-American by the institution of slavery and one
hundred years of legal and de facto segregation in terms that angered many
Americans. A link to the full text of the speech is posted below.
David Broder, the
Washington Post columnist, feels the speech did a service to the nation in that
it could result in a more positive, healthier debate about our dark history of
slavery, segregation, lynching and institutional discrimination at every level
of our society. And, more importantly, it asks the question as to how do we
complete the task of making our nation “a more perfect union” where every
person has a real opportunity to achieve whatever they define as success
without barriers based on race, sex, sexual orientation, religion or any other
artificial constructions.
Conservative columnist
Charles Krauthammer, on the other hand, saw the speech as a cynical attempt to
appeal to ”white guilt”. His column
accuses Obama, by his refusal to leave Wright’s church, of actually continuing
to “infect” the young African-American generations with negative racial
attitudes.
Two of the most important
emotions for humans to learn and experience in order to become properly
socialized are empathy and guilt. The
absence of these two emotions often foretells a troubled childhood and adult
life. Empathy means the ability to feel
and understand the emotions and situations of others. Guilt is the feeling we get when we have, either by commission or
omission, violated a moral, ethical or legal standard.
I believe the term “white
guilt” means the collective guilt that that white Americans supposedly feel
when confronted with the historical reality, and its continuing impacts, of our
treatment of African-Americans through slavery and segregation. Krauthammer and others invoke this claim
because they believe that Americans cannot vote for an African-American like
Obama based on his qualifications alone, there must certainly be some element
of white guilt, conscious of unconscious, in their decision. This is, of course, nonsense, but political
agitators like Krauthammer are not deterred by the actions of millions of white
Americans who support Obama with their dollars and votes.
All the Americans who
created, maintained and exploited our “peculiar institution” of racial slavery
are long dead, but millions of African-American who were victims of the
century-long legal and de facto segregation that began to end with the Civil
Rights acts of the 1960s, and the whites that passively or actively supported
it, are still alive. While progress has been made in providing equal
opportunity in education, jobs and every other aspect of our society, much
remains to be done. African-Americans
as a group still lag their white counterparts in every important indicator of
social and economic achievement. We
have to give up the illusion that our nation’s long-term health and wealth can
be secured by discrimination of any kind against any group.
To paraphrase Gordon Gecko
in the movie “Wall Street”, guilt is good.
A feeling of guilt, combined with the desire to make amends for your
action or inaction that caused it, can be transformed into the motivation to
change the way you think, feel and behave about the issue of race in
America. To recognize a feeling of
guilt in yourself and not make an effort to confront and resolve it is
self-destructive. Warning: you are only responsible for your own
behaviors. When I was working as a
therapist I had patients who were wrestling with guilty feelings over things
that were either created by dysfunctional parents or other authority figures in
their lives or by circumstances over which they had no control.
I do not feel any white
guilt, but I do feel a heavy load of responsibility to recognize and do what I
can to repair the damage done by our ancestor’s conscious decision to refuse to
enforce the Fourteenth Amendment that allowed legal and de facto segregation to
exist. In 1952, when I was 12 years
old, I quit the Boy Scouts when they would not allow an African-American friend
of mine to join our Troop. I was told
that the Boy Scouts had separate Troops for “them”. Even at the age of twelve I knew that the racism practiced by the
Boy Scouts was wrong. Knowing what is right and wrong in any situation is
usually easy. Issues like race,
religion, social status and money sometimes make choosing the right action
complicated and difficult. We often trade short-term gains without fully
understanding the long-term implications of our decisions.
In 1970 when I was helping manage a Chicago firm my employer had
recently acquired I refused to terminate a competent and effective
African-American employee simply because he was a Black Muslim as requested by
another, Christian, African-American manager.
I transferred the Black Muslim employee to my direct supervision and he
continued to be a valued employee.
In my personal and
professional life I have always strived to live the letter and spirit of the
Fourteenth Amendment and the other individual rights included in the Bill of
Rights. I cannot claim those rights for myself without insisting on the same
rights for every other person, regardless of the color of their skin, religion,
age, gender or ethnicity. The
Constitution is not some piece of old parchment on display in Washington D.C.,
it is a living guide to how we should value, respect and treat each other at
the individual and at all levels of our society.
Don’t vote for, or
against, candidates because they are black, white, male, female, young, old,
Christian, Jewish or whatever. Make
your choice on the basis of their positions on the very important issues facing
our nation and the world. This, and
every, election is important to our, and because of our key economic position,
the world’s stability and future.
"All that is required for evil to
prevail is for good men to do nothing." Edmund Burke
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/03/18/obama-race-speech-read-_n_92077.html
CALENDAR
April 27th Monthly Meeting: 5:00PM at
the home of Lee Dietz, 21 Walnut, Greenville.
Call Lee at 233-0905 for directions and to coordinate your
contribution. As usual the host will
provide the main dish.
May 10th May Brunch: Place and time to be announced.
June 14th Brunch and Monthly
Meeting: The June brunch will be
combined with the May monthly meeting.
This will be our last meeting until the August brunch.