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

CNN REPORT: GOD’S WARRIORS

CNN presented a three part series entitled God’s Warriors researched and reported by their award-winning Chief Foreign Correspondent Christiane Amanpour. This series deals with the Jewish, Christian and Muslim fundamentalists that believe that their religion owns the eternal truths for all humans. Each religion has its Holy Book, the Torah, The Koran and the Bible, that they claim holds the pathway to God and a blueprint for living.

As of this date, about 2 billion of the world’s total population of 6.6 billion is Christian, 1 billion followers of Islam; 800 million are Hindus and about 400 million Buddhists. The total world population of Jews totals approximately 14 million, only .02% of the world population, with about 6 million living in the US and an equal number living in Israel. About 20% of the world population, or 1.3 billion, are non-believers, leaving about 1.1 billion persons for the literally thousands of other religions. New religions, many of them blends of existing religions, are being created every year.

Amanpour interviews with leading theologians of each faith reveal the sincere and passionate beliefs that underpin each religion and explores their reasons for claiming that their faith is the source of salvation for the entire world. As expected, the strength of their faith comes from their fervent belief in their Holy Book. I found the interview with a Jewish theologian the most interesting because of his insistence that the solution for creating a peaceful world is for the entire human population is to accept a Jewish Messiah.

Each of the world’s religions, major or minor, increase their populations by conversion and reproduction. The last religion to reply strictly on conversions to build their flock, the Shakers, after which the suburb of Shaker Heights Ohio is named, disappeared into history because of their refusal to marry and reproduce. To the vast majority of the world, your religion, or lack of it, is primarily based on when you are born, where you are born and to whom you are born. It is basically an accident of birth.

The two major religions that are evangelical, that is, that actively seek converts, are Christianity and Islam. Within Christianity there is a wide variation in the level of energy devoted to seeking converts, with the more fundamental sects, like the Baptists, at the active end of the scale and the Unitarians at the inactive scale. Mormons also place a great deal of emphasis on evangelical outreach with many male Mormons completing a two-year mission to convert others to their religion. In reality, there are relatively few conversions, percentage wise, from one major religion to another if we disregard the many changes in Christian denominations such as from Methodist to Baptist and similar “conversions”.

The American sociologist Vance Packard documented how American Protestants in particular “upgrade” from one denomination to another as they move up the socioeconomic scale in his book The Status Seekers, published in 1961, starting out as Baptists and ending up as Anglicans or Episcopals as their social position, income and wealth increase.

The current religious geography of the world reflects the ages of conquest and expansion by Christianity and Islam with Christianity dominating Europe, the Americans, and Southern Africa and Islam dominating North Africa, the Middle East, spreading eastward to South Asia. Some modern nations ended up as a blend between various religions like Nigeria, which has sizable populations of Muslims, Christians and some animists. Pre-conquest India, which was partitioned into India, Pakistan and Bangladesh in 1948, now has about 154 million Muslims, almost as many as Pakistan and slightly more than Bangladesh, with Hindus making up 80% of its population.

Amanpour’s skillful interviews of the leaders of the three religions establishes their absolute belief of the rightness of their position as the only “true” religion and we begin to see the dangers of civil authority based on the written messages contained in a Holy Book considered to be the word of a Supreme Being when many other religions make the same claim of truth and authority. Even more dangerous is the claim of religious leaders of any faith their assertion that they communicate directly with God and are mandated to implement His directives and laws.

The series clearly demonstrates why Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and the other members of the Constitutional Convention consciously excluded any religious authority or connection in the final version of our Constitution. It protects individual religious belief and practice, forbidding any religious test for public office, but avoids granting any religion Constitutional authority or influence over our governmental processes.

The drafters of the Constitution had to deal with King George III, a king that ruled by divine right, to secure their rights. To disagree with a King that rules by divine authority is to disobey God, a dangerous action. Since the King rules by divine right he defines your rights, or lack of them, backed by the authority of God. When there is the rule by divine authority through human agency there are no individual or human rights except at the whim of the self-proclaimed human agent of God.

Allowing any religious authority to gain a controlling influence over government when nuclear weapons are spreading throughout the world is dangerous to all of us. If religious extremists gain control over a nation that has, or can acquire, nuclear weapons, especially if they believe their religion is under attack, they will be tempted to use them because they sincerely believe their authority comes directly from God. The ends will justify the means.

HEALTH CARE COSTS CONTINUE TO ESCALATE

Greenville County South Carolina, my place of residence since 1980, has grown from a population of 288,000, the year we moved here, to a current population o 400,000, an almost forty percent increase. The economy has made a transition from a textile based industrial base in the forties and fifties to a technological base that includes a BMW plant, the tire maker Michelin, an international automotive research center and many foreign companies that produce a variety of products. We have a countywide school system with over 67,000 students, a top rated community college and a number of good colleges and universities.

Our economy is strong and growing and is served by two major hospital systems, the public Greenville Hospital System (GHS) and the private Bon Scours St. Francis Hospital. Greenville Hospital System has just announced it will raise it rates by 6.5% in 2008. The rates were raised by 6% in 2007 and 7.5% in 2006, a cumulative increase for the three years of 20%. The 2008 funding plan includes the hiring of 565 new employees to take care of the growing population. Both hospitals are engaged in a building program to expand the number of beds, services and facilities.

The press release on the rate increase also states that GHS expects to incur $100 million in loses in 2008 as the result if providing medical care to indigents and bad debts, an increase of $18 million over 2006. This loss must be, and will be, paid by someone, some how, usually patients with insurance. This $100 million loss represents a cost of $250 for every man, woman and child in our county. Extrapolated to the current US population of 300 million, this $250 per capita cost of indigent care and bad debts would total $75 billion on an annual basis, but we claim we cannot afford prevention based health care system that would reduce our costs in the long run and improve our health at the same time. I say that we cannot afford to not make a major change in how we, as individuals, and as a society, think and behave about our health and health care.

I act as the volunteer financial controller at a local free medical clinic that was established about two years ago. There are about four free medical clinics in the county that simply cannot keep up with the growing need for medically underserved persons. Like many areas of the country, our Hispanic population, many of them uninsured, is growing. Our clinic is continually expanding the range of services offered and we, and the other free clinics coordinate our services with each other and the hospitals to increase our level of care.

As a nation we spend more money in total and on a per capita person ($6,000+ per year) than any other country, and we get the worst quality health care of any advanced society. We hear the fear mongering about “rationing health care” if we expand basic health care to every person in the country, but the simple truth is that rational rationing, particularly for elective and non-life threatening conditions, is required for a national health care system in any country.

There is a deal of political talk about solving the health care insurance problem by “getting the private sector involved”; letting the market process provide low cost private insurance to the uninsured. Private firms must make a profit, and no private health insurance company should be required to provide health care policies to chronically ill persons at a cost that will create major losses for them. We need a mix of every existing type of health care insurance and some hybrids that will cover as many people as possible, recognizing that even with this approach we will have millions people that will require some type of government paid health care plan like Medicaid.

Even the best possible health care system will not solve the current problem if we do not start eating more intelligently (and less), exercising more, smoking and drinking less and understanding the long-term implications on our health of how we eat and behave today.

WILL YOUR VOTE BE CORRECTLY COUNTED IN 2008?

The latest issue of Newsweek does not do anything to calm the fears of Americans who fear that, after the voting fiascos of 2000 and 2004, that their 2008 vote will either not be counted or miscounted. Even worse, some Americans will go to their assigned voting location only to find that their voting registration has been “purged” for a variety of reasons based on erroneous or questionable information.

The Newsweek article details the continuing problems with the ease with which the new generation of electronic voting machines can be compromised and the results manipulated either at the individual unit level or at the central vote-counting center. A study carried out by computer scientists at the University of California at the request of Debra Brown, the California Secretary of State, revealed numerous ways in which the votes entered on the electronic systems can be altered. A major flaw in the whole electronic voting approach is that many of the systems have absolutely no paper trail that can be used to verify and re-count the vote if errors occur.

The article poses the right question: why aren’t our elected officials doing more to ensure that our right to vote isn’t as accurate as possible, regardless of the voting system used? To use clichés, we can put a man on the moon, build an electronic, worldwide banking system, and the other twenty-first century wonders we use on a daily basis, but we can’t devise a secure voting system that guarantees the most fundamental right of a democracy.

Perhaps the answer to the question is the simplest one: our elected officials have no interest in doing so because it will diminish or eliminate their control over the voting process. Right now the two major political parties control the voting process through their state and local organizations. While the voting registration process is supposedly a non-partisan issue, I have my doubts as too how much influence the dominant local party has on the whole system. After every state level election that changes the majority party in control of the Legislature, the party now in control works very hard to redraw the voting districts in their favor. Power seeks more power.

It also appears that the political leaders and activists in both parties will go to any length to prevent the American people from having the right to elect the President by popular vote, for the most part refusing to even consider the elimination of the Electoral College. The Electoral College is the Constitutional mechanism established by the Founding Fathers to originally place the power to elect the President totally in the control of the US Senate.

In California a small group of Republican activists are floating a proposal to add a referendum to the next election day that would change the “winner take all” approach of the current Presidential voting to a system that would award Electoral College votes on the basis on the outcome of the Congressional Districts in that state. In the 2006 election this change would have taken 22 of the total of 55 Electoral College votes from Kerry and award them to Bush. A group of North Carolina Democrats is trying the same approach according to the National Public Radio report.

The real culprits in my opinion, in this mess are the tens of millions of Americans who do not even bother to vote in every national election. According to the US Elections Project website, over 120 million citizens eligible to vote in 2006 failed to cast their ballots. In 2004 the number of non-voters was almost 79 million and in 2002 the number was 87 million. The percent of eligible voters actually casting a ballot was 41.3% in 2006, 60.9% in 2004 and 55.3% in 2002.

Compare these stats with the turnout in the recent French election where 86% of French citizens went to the pools and cast their ballots. You may disagree with French political, social and economic polices, but you can’t fault their participation in the process. They care enough about their country to engage in the democratic process, something that cannot be said about tens of millions of Americans.

I believe that this gross lack of interest in our political process encourages and enables the political manipulators and party hacks in both parties to push the envelope of acceptable behavior and it is one part of the process of concentrating political and economic power in few and fewer hands, a very dangerous situation for any nation.

I have spoken to people who think that it is good news that so many Americans don’t vote. They are quick to demand their rights outlined in the Constitution, but are not willing to grant the same rights to “them”; meaning people who do not think, act and look like themselves. I can only reply that they should remember the quote attributed to Thomas Jefferson, “people get the kind of government they deserve”.

MEETING CALENDER

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October Brunch: Our monthly brunch will be held at 10:30AM on Saturday October14th at the home of Lee Deitz, 21Walnut Street, Greenville. As usual, eggs and the basics will be provided by the host. Please call Lee at (864) 233-0905 or email him at leeingvl@aol.com to coordinate your contribution.

October Monthly Meeting: The October meeting will be on Sunday, October 28th at 5 p.m. at the home of Elaine and Joe Norwood. The Norwood’s live at 16 Oakleaf Rd. in Greenville. For directions and a suggestion what to bring to the dinner, please call Elaine or Joe at 268-1889. The Host will furnish the main dish and all eating utensils.