How much have U.S. taxpayers paid to bail out Wall Street? Here are many of the details, but note that $2.02 trillion remains outstanding. Also keep in mind that the TARP payments were only 10% of the total U.S. aid given to Wall Street. Be wary, then, when you hear Wall Street crowing that it has paid back much of the TARP money. Dylan Ratigan puts the topic in perspective.
This is the third installment of a series of postings I've titled "Mending Fences." You'll find the first installment here. It’s time to call a truce. Until recently, I didn’t think of atheism as a political movement; it didn’t occur to me that I was being systematically victimized. Rather, I commonly thought of a long personal history of rude, arrogant, and exclusionary behavior directed at individual atheists by individual theists. More recently, though, it has become apparent that atheists are victims of rampant bigotry. How else could you describe a situation where 15% of American adults are atheists, yet only one member of Congress (Pete Stark of California) has ever admitted to being an atheist? Thanks to the new atheists, atheists are now part of something that is akin to a civil rights movement. Based on historical precedent, though, civil rights movements don’t become successful when they encourage their members to be angry and to call the the aggressors “stupid,” at least not in the long run. Nor is it productive to frame what we want to accomplish as a “war” on ignorance, or any other type of war, because “wars” (on drugs, terrorism) usually polarize opposing camps indefinitely. To stop discrimination against non-believers, we should borrow the successful methods used by women, blacks, gays and other oppressed minorities. In short, we need to add a strong educational component to our movement. Most of the people who make derogatory comments do so without examining the roots of their aggressive impulses. I agree with Hannah Arendt who, in Eichmann in Jerusalem, argued that most damage is not done by people trying to cause damage, but by normal people who fail to think things through—that is the nature of what Arendt termed “the banality of evil.” How do we counteract deep unexamined prejudices against atheists? We need to be savvy about our PR. We should patiently show others who we are. We need to show believers that we don’t threaten their way of life except to the extent that they must stop slandering non-believers. I doubt that theists lay awake at night worrying about happy atheists; rather, in my experience, theists are far more haunted by images of snarly know-it-all in-your-face atheists. We need to promulgate images of friendly faces of real atheist Americans. After all, functional atheists have lives the stretch far beyond sitting around fretting about people who believe in "God." We must also become visible. If all of the atheist Americans glowed as dots on a national map, everyone flying overhead would see tens of millions of law-abiding atheists from coast to coast. We are taxpayers. We fight in the military. We are actors, housewives, musicians, business people, parents, police officers, scientists and teachers. We are inextricably socially connected to believers. We are their brothers, daughters, co-workers and neighbors. We give to charity too, including prominent atheists who give billions to help the poor (e.g., Bill Gates and Warren Buffett). We spend disproportionately less time in prison than those who believe in God.
Summary: A chilling portrait of everyday life in the world's most fanatically totalitarian state. When the Cold War ended, communism came tumbling down worldwide. The Soviet Union disintegrated, the Warsaw Pact nations joined the West, and though China's authoritarian government still stands, its economy has become capitalist in all but name. But one true communist state still exists, defiant in its isolation, sealed off from the outside world by almost impenetrable barriers. That state is North Korea, the topic of Barbara Demick's superb book Nothing to Envy. By interviewing some of the few who've successfully escaped, Demick weaves a frighteningly compelling narrative of what everyday life is like in the world's most brutal and reclusive dictatorship. Isolated from the outside world, North Korea has developed into a cult of personality rivaling anything found in the most fanatical religion. Its first president, Kim Il-sung, and his son and successor Kim Jong-il aren't just the absolute rulers of the country, they're hailed as divine saviors, literally able to perform miracles:
[Note: This is Part II of a series of posts being the title "Mending Fences"] When Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and the other “new atheists†first launched their attacks on religion a few years ago, I was delighted. After decades of relative silence, the mass media was finally giving some atheists a chance to present my view that virgins don’t have babies and that dead people don’t regain consciousness. Harris, Dawkins and other new atheists dared to argue in public that there is no sentient version of God; they reminded believers that all believers were atheists regarding Zeus, as well as all of the purported gods other than their own God. The writings of the new atheists energized considerable discussion, much of it thoughtful. Even a cursory review of the many websites and YouTube videos considering religion makes it clear that many teenagers and young adults have actively joined discussions triggered by the new atheists. In the wake of this energized discussion, many of us became proficient at pointing out the hundreds of contradictions and absurdities in the Bible. We repeatedly called foul whenever we spotted theists cherry-picking the Bible (none of you are wearing clothes made of linen and wool, I hope!). We repeatedly reminded believers of Carl Sagan’s caveat that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Many of us dug even deeper, studying the philosophy of science, so that we could clearly explain to believers that to be meaningful, claims had to be falsifiable. Not that these arguments actually convinced believers (at least, not in my personal experience), but they did serve to announce our view that religious claims must no longer be privileged—they shouldn’t be assumed to be true and that they must be put under the microscope (as Daniel Dennett urged in Breaking the Spell) like every other natural phenomenon. We made it clear that we weren’t convinced when believers attempted to explain their beliefs by reference to ancient apocryphal supposedly-sacred writings strewn with ambiguity and self-contradictions. Thanks to the arrival of the new atheists, all of these important issues started receiving unflinching media attention. These past few years have been emotionally and intellectually exhilarating for skeptics of all stripes. Those of us who have maintained skeptical websites have become further energized and intellectually sharpened by reading each others’ posts and by carefully re-reading the Bible and the Koran armed with scalpels rather than intellectual queasiness. The books and media appearances of the new atheists, as well as the many websites by hundreds of newly awakened atheists, have created a community where there had previously been only isolated individuals. The work of the new atheists thus revealed to each of us that none of us was alone in scrutinizing and criticizing the supernatural claims of religions. Many energized atheists have boldly stepped out of their closets and started becoming vocal as a group, especially when believers callously asserted that all atheists are ipso facto immoral and hell-bound. [More . . .]
At Daylight Atheism, Ebonmuse takes on yet another attempt by "Intelligent Design" advocates to redefine science as . . . not science. The claims of ID have been devastated repeatedly by scientists and others who self-critically and rigorously explore the natural world. Yet ID advocates plod on, undeterred by the numerous sensationally successful predictions made by natural selection (Ebonmuse lists and links to six such predictions), the failure of ID to make any predictions, and the incapability of DI to make any predictions. ID advocates don't get it that once you step out of the well-knit causal framework that allows us to navigate the real world there is no basis for making predictions. Once we make a foundational conclusion willy-nilly (e.g., defining the age of the earth by an ancient "holy book" rather than by reference to the numerous reliable methods for dating the planet), on what basis could one possibly make any further conclusions or predictions, other than by further reference to the same "holy book?" As all skeptics know from frustrating experience, these debates quickly hit the same impasse. The next logical step at this point is to ask why we should believe that the holy book is holy. But the only answer given given by ID advocates is simply that it is holy and that we must have faith in it. Consider further that the Bible doesn't even mention atoms or galaxies. Nor does it propose any method for investigating the world. Those who use the bible as a "science" book do bible science by repeating the verses within whenever they conflict with real-world observations. That is the faux "science" proposed by ID. Yet the debate somehow continues . . .