Indirect talks between Israeli and Palestinian negotiators will begin again this week, coordinated by the US representative, former Senator George Mitchell.

Skeptics are probably correct that not much will come of these indirect talks. The primary obstacle to resumption of negotiations has been continued building of settlements in occupied territory, and particularly in East Jerusalem. Israel has agreed to only a temporary freeze on building in occupied East Jerusalem and has asserted regularly that Jerusalem, all of it, is its “undivided capital” and that the status of Jerusalem is not subject to negotiation. The Arab nations have agreed reluctantly to indirect talks and for good reason: they want Israel to stop building settlements in the occupied territory because that territory is the heart of the proposed Palestinian state. Their condition for direct talks is that Israel stop building more Jewish settlements on Palestinian land.

The fact of the matter is that the current Israeli government’s actions have made peace less likely through a series of draconian measures imposed on the occupied territories [restricted movement, building of new settlements, constant taking of Palestinian lands and dispossessing its inhabitants, repressive military and police actions, restrictions on food, medical supplies, fuel and food into the territories, blocking of trade and goods out of the territories, etc.] using the excuse that they need these repressive and unwarranted actions as part of their “defensive” strategy. That has provoked the desired response from the Palestinians by aggravating them and giving more influence to advocates of resistance among the Palestinians. Consequently neither side is much interested in serious discussions of peace. The Israelis do not want serious negotiations because they prefer the status quo with Palestinians under subjugation and Israelis constantly enlarging their de facto control. The Palestinians are uninterested because they do not trust the motives of the Israelis, do not believe the Israelis will negotiate in good faith, and believe the Israelis will continue to stall any final peace while they continue to enlarge settlements for Israelis.

The real problem with peace at the moment is the current Israeli government under Netanyahu, which is controlled by extremists who believe that Israel has some inherent historical and biblical right to much of the occupied territories. It appears that the Israeli tactic is to continue to stall any final settlement while settling increasing numbers of Jews in the occupied territories, thus making it increasingly difficult to abandon in any “peace for land” swap necessary for a Palestinian state.

In an earlier day there were more reasonable people in control in Israel who seriously wanted peace and were willing to compromise, and until the current government is replaced and there is room for moderates in the government, and until the current government stops its attempts to silence its critics and stops attacking those Israelis and other Jews around the world and in the US who support peace as somehow not Jewish enough, we will not make much progress toward peace. The Israeli leadership continues to shoot itself in the foot by its extremism, which not only makes dealing with its enemies even harder, but also aggravates and disappoints its friends and potential allies.

See this article on resolving the current tensions between the extremists and those who support peace between Israel and its neighbors: http://thechristianhumanist.blogspot.com/2010/04/liberal-disenchantment-with-israeli.html 

http://www.christianhumanist.net

The AP is reporting this morning, in a story carried by the Boston Globe, that Hezbollah has indicated that it now has the capacity to strike deep into Israeli territory in the event of another overt conflict with Israel. The story reported that Hezbollah may have as many as 30,000 missiles provided by Syria. 

There is something that does not ring true about that story just on common sense basis. Think about 30,000 missiles. That takes up a lot of space. It is a huge transport problem. Missiles would be very visible to planes, to satellites, etc., so I am disinclined to believe it. 

Then, another common sense issue. Israel has planes, rockets, missiles. Most of them are supplied to Israel by a foreign power, the U.S. So if Hezbollah, or the Palestinians, have rockets and missiles, and if they are supplied by a foreign power that supports their cause [Syria], what precisely is the difference between that and Israel’s possession and use of rockets?

In a war between two parties, what sense does it make for the side with the most weapons to complain about the other side getting weapons?  

Israel claims the right to exist, and I will support that right insofar as that right applies to the land that was given to Israel [unfairly I believe] by the UN, but that is a done deal of 60 years ago and we can’t put the that genie back in the bottle. BUT THAT RIGHT ONLY APPLIES TO THE LAND GIVEN TO ISRAEL BY INTERNATIONAL AGREEMENT. The lands taken in war are “occupied territory,” [the Palestinian land and East Jerusalem], by international law they cannot be incorporated into Israeli territory, and their status is subject to negotiation in a peace treaty, which for different reasons both sides have been resisting and blaming the other side’s actions and intransigence. 

Israel continues to violate international law, yet complains about Hezbollah violating international law. Isn’t that hypocritical? 

Terrorism is not acceptable, when it means going after civilian targets. But bombs and rockets have always been legitimate weapons against another party in war despite the fact they kill civilians as collateral damage, but the US in every recent war has used them. Israel uses rockets and kills civilians with them and Israel cannot reasonably condemn Hezbollah for using them also. 

Israel is waging economic warfare in the occupied territories. It is depriving citizens of Palestine of food, fuel, medicine, water and building supplies. It is playing the role of military occupier. It is denying Palestinians access to and from their own lands. Israel is acting unreasonably, arbitrarily and tyrannically. 

To a military power, every problem looks as if it has a military solution. This particular problem does not have a military solution and all sides will be better off when they realize they cannot solve this problem by force of arms. Both parties need to come back to the table. Israel needs to give up the Palestinian lands seized by force in exchange for peace. The Palestinians need to give up their claim (legitimate as it is) for lands taken from them and given to Israel after World War 2, and need to be compensated for that land. 

I was glad to see (NYT) that Palestinians are beginning to use peaceful methods and passive resistance as a tactic. The current aggressive Israeli government under Netanyahu is an embarrassment to Israel and an obstacle to peace.  A more civil government is Israel is likely to make better strides toward peace and might gain some sympathy from the rest of the world. 

Israel is an embarrassment to its friends and allies, including its Jewish supporters in the US. For more on this issue, see http://thechristianhumanist.blogspot.com/2010/04/liberal-disenchantment-with-israeli.html

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues his game-playing on the Palestinian question by trying to have his cake and eat it too. It is patently obvious that Israel, under its present government anyway, has no intention of seriously negotiating any of the outstanding issues that stand in the way of peace including the Jerusalem question.

Last month the Obama Administration attempted to jump start peace negotiations by obtaining a concession from Israel that might get the Palestinians back to the negotiating table, and with that in mind, Vice President Biden went to Israel to meet with Mr. Netanyahu over the settlements issue in East Jerusalem. While Mr. Biden was in Israel the Israeli government gave him the finger by announcing additional settlements in East Jerusalem. Mr. Netanyahu has repeatedly stated in the style of Ariel Sharon before him that he has no intention of giving up any part of Jerusalem and continues to insist that all of Jerusalem is now and shall remain Israel’s undivided capital city. That is one of the issues in contention that is to be the subject of negotiations between the parties, so the announcement by Israel of continuing the controversial settlements policy had to have been calculated to upset the Palestinians and discourage them from coming back to the negotiating table, and the snub to Mr. Biden also had to be a calculated attempt to see if Israel could continue to push back on the U.S. and get President Obama to back off his criticism of the settlements.

So after the public humiliation of the Vice President and a refusal to apologize for the affront, the U.S. made light of the public insult [either through weakness and fear of the Jewish lobby, or by a decision to take the high road] and proposed sending George Mitchell, the special envoy on Mid-East peace, back to Israel and Palestine to hold separate talks with the parties. Enter now Mr. Netanyahu, with a proposal for a Palestinian state with “temporary borders”–an approach already rejected by the Palestinians, once again making Mr. Netanyahu appear to be giving up something that he knows the other side will reject. [See April 23 Reuters article carried in the Washington Post.  Just today as I was writing this paragraph [April 25] Mr. Netanyahu announced that he was “temporarily” suspending new construction in East Jerusalem, despite opposition by his party and the threat by some in his coalition to bring down the government.

For those having trouble keeping up with the machinations on this 50-year old unsettled conflict, every few years there are negotiations followed by a calculated breakdown in the talks because neither side really wants to give up anything their side believes is important because it tends to weaken the political standing of the negotiators who do not get more than they give. Each side then pressures the other, the Israelis by closing down trade, limiting travel, and general harassment of the Palestinians, and the Palestinians respond with rock-throwing at Israeli troops and occasional Katusha rockets launched from within the Palestinian territory, some of which actually reach Israel and cause minor damage. The attacks serve each side as an excuse to escalate and so it goes.

After the last intifada, the Israelis launched a brutal, indiscriminate and devastating attack into the Palestinian territories that clearly went beyond reasonable retaliation. Israel’s friends were embarrassed and appalled at the attack, the UN launched an investigation under Justice Richard Goldstone, an eminent jurist, a supporter of Israel and a Zionist. The Goldstone Report  was lengthy, exhaustive and detailed, despite the fact that Israel refused to cooperate in the investigation, and questioned the motives of anyone who questioned Israel’s honorable actions.

We now learn, through an extensive article by Chris Hedges in Truthdig [Israel Crackdown Puts Liberal Jews on the Spot] that, in the words of Mr. Hedges,

“The Israeli government … has implemented a series of draconian measures to silence and discredit dissidents, leading intellectuals and human rights organizations inside and outside Israel that are accused—often falsely—of assisting Goldstone’s U.N. investigators. The government of Benjamin Netanyahu is attempting to shut down Israel’s premier human rights organizations, including B’Tselem, the New Israel Fund (NIF) and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel. It is busy expelling or excluding peace activists and foreign nationals from the Palestinian territories….”

 “The campaign against Israeli dissidents has taken the form of venomous denunciations of activists and jurists, including Justice Goldstone. It includes a bill before the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, which will make it possible to imprison the leaders of Israeli human rights groups if they fail to comply with crippling new registration conditions. Human rights activists from outside Israel who work in the Palestinian territories are being rounded up and deported. The government is refusing to issue work visas to employees of 150 NGOs operating in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, including Oxfam, Save the Children and Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders). The new tourist visas effectively bar these employees from Palestinian territory under Israeli occupation…. Im Tirzu, the front organization behind many of the attacks, includes among its financial backers the John Hagee Ministries and the New York Central Fund, which also support extremist settler organizations….

“The Knesset bill, if passed, will force human rights groups to register as political bodies and turn over identification numbers and addresses of all members to the government. These groups will lose their tax-exempt status. Most governmental organizations, such as the European Union, which is a large donor to Israeli human rights organizations, cannot legally pay taxes to another government, and the new law will effectively end European Union and other outside funding. The groups will be mandated to provide the government with the records of all foreign donations and account for how these donations were spent. Any public statement, event or speech, even if it lasts half a minute, by these groups must include a declaration that they are being supported and funded by a foreign power. Those who fail to follow these guidelines, including local volunteers, can face a year in jail….”

These extreme measures show how serious the Israelis are about criticism and the extent to which they will go to silence those who speak for values of freedom and truth. The article is powerfully written and readers are encouraged to read for themselves the trouble and second guessing these actions are among those who would have been inclined to be sympathetic to Israel. It is often true that we become the enemy, and Israel surely must begin to take a look at itself and see what it is becoming. More important for the U.S, we must begin to see the situation in the harsh glare of reality and begin to ease ourselves away from uncritical support of whatever Israel does. It is long past the days when it can continue to gain support by merely mentioning the Holocaust. American policy cannot afford to be held captive to the interests of Israel.

It is apparent that many Americans do not understand the Palestinian issue. There are many reasons for this. The events that started this conflict occurred at the end of World War 2 and most Americans were not yet alive or not old enough to remember the early history, and that includes most reporters who cover the continuing story. Religious Israelis argue that the land of Israel is the same as biblical Israel and that god has given them this land, an argument that resonates with Christian fundamentalists but fails to acknowledge the Muslim interest in Jerusalem as sacred to its past just as it is to Jews and Christians. The frustration of the Palestinians at their treatment by Israel and their inability to be taken seriously by the rest of the world, the failure to understand the root issues of Palestinian anger, the attacks on the Palestinians by Israel that are characterized without challenge as “defensive strategies,” and the unwillingness of the U.S. to criticize Israel and end massive military and social services funding for Israel, are the root causes of the Palestinian acts of terrorism against Israel and hatred of the U.S. by Muslims throughout the world.

A quick refresher on what happened–Palestinians who owned homes and businesses in Palestine were forcibly uprooted into refugee camps to make a place for the Jews of Europe. They were supposed to be compensated, but they weren’t. A series of wars occurred between Israel and displaced Palestinians supported by the neighboring Muslim states. The Israelis won the war and decided to keep the land they took from their neighbors. Israel controlled land surrounding their country and began to put their settlers there forcing more Palestinians to lose their homes. In Jerusalem the Israelis keep forcing more and more Muslims from their homes ALTHOUGH THIS IS ILLEGAL UNDER UN RESOLUTIONS that are officially recognized by the US. Israel ignores the rest of the world. The Palestinians are trying to get their lands and homes back and they are doing it in the only way they can–by fighting the Israelis. They see themselves as freedom fighters. But Israel is very vicious in its offensives against Palestinians and thinks they can get away with revenge attacks by calling what they are doing defending Israel.

Without recognizing the root cause of Palestinian and Muslim anger and frustration and finding a way to resolve those underlying issues it will not be possible to resolve the Arab-Palestinian problem. This is NOT an anti-Israel or pro-Arab statement; it is merely a statement of the underlying issues that seem to have become lost in the Israeli attempts to characterize the standoff as Israel’s right to defend itself against terrorism. There is a reason for the terrorism that the current discussions ignore.

Because humanists do not have a religious bias that is for or against the parties on underlying religious grounds, they may be able to see the issues more clearly. Unfortunately given the political realities and the intransigence of the parties that may not help resolve the problem.

The Christian Humanist 

For some reason that must be deep in the psyche of our contemporaries there seems to be a lot of interest in the debate about god—is he or isn’t he?  Advocates on either side of the issue from the well-known outspoken advocates of atheism to the defenders of the reality of god are on the airways and the bookstands defending their views.  The sudden recent interest in this issue puzzles me because it seems like a regression backward to an earlier generation of lively debate on the topic.  I had thought the issue had been placed in the “no point of arguing” bucket because there was no way to resolve the issue by discussion.  Some seemed inclined, regardless of evidence, to take that “leap of faith” into the world of gods and spirits, apparently believing that it could do no harm to decide for god, whereas believing the contrary might put them uncomfortably in harm’s way if god were real and vindictive.

I fall on the side of the non-believer in that I do not think that the arguments for god have much persuasive ability or much attraction.  I used to “believe” in god as a child and young man, but over time and education, the belief in god seemed uninteresting and irrelevant.  There was never an “ah-ha” moment when the light bulb went off and I changed my mind on the subject.  It was like many childish ideas in that as I got older and knew more about the world and had more experiences, the inherent problems with religious belief just became insurmountable and the concept disappeared from my consciousness and my belief system.

I have never felt a need to become militantly atheistic.  I think you have to take the concept seriously in order to debate it seriously, and I do not have much interest in the topic.  However since I have been writing on the subject of Christian Humanism I have had numerous people write to me to show me the error of my thinking, asserting that if I just understood more, or listened to their arguments carefully, or gave god a chance, or did not close my mind to religious thinking and opened my heart to the Holy Spirit, or even if I prayed with them about my unbelief, that they could get me back on the path of right thinking on the subject of religion and restore my belief.  One of the usual tactics is to tell me that it is my education that destroyed my belief and that education is the work of the devil, subtly taking away belief when I bit into the attractive apple of knowledge.  I must admit to being annoyed by the arrogance of belief that dismisses unbelief as a churlish refusal to believe what to them is so obvious.  

In graduate school I did a lot of reading in philosophy of religion.  Back in the 1950s (when I was in grad school) some of the most interesting philosophers were in England.  One writer in particular made a significant impact on my early thinking in the philosophy of religion, Antony Flew, an Oxford professor who was a prolific writer and speaker who regularly took the negative side in frequent debates about the meaningfulness of religious language in general and talk about god in particular.  One passage in particular struck me as stating in very simple language the essence of the argument, a short article in his book Logic and Language, entitled “Theology and Falsification,” (Blackwell, 1953).  I still have that book in my library.

He says:

Let us begin with a parable. It is a parable developed from a tale told by John Wisdom in his haunting and revolutionary article “Gods.”  Once upon a time two explorers came upon a clearing in the jungle. In the clearing were growing many flowers and many weeds. One explorer says, “Some gardener must tend this plot.” The other disagrees, “There is no gardener.” So they pitch their tents and set a watch. No gardener is ever seen. “But perhaps he is an invisible gardener.” So they set up a barbed-wire fence. They electrify it. They patrol with bloodhounds. (For they remember how H. G. Well’s The Invisible Man could be both smelt and touched though he could not be seen.) But no shrieks ever suggest that some intruder has received a shock. No movements of the wire ever betray an invisible climber. The bloodhounds never give cry. Yet still the Believer is not convinced. “But there is a gardener, invisible, intangible, insensible, to electric shocks, a gardener who has no scent and makes no sound, a gardener who comes secretly to look after the garden which he loves.” At last the Sceptic despairs, “But what remains of your original assertion? Just how does what you call an invisible, intangible, eternally elusive gardener differ from an imaginary gardener or even from no gardener at all?”

In this parable we can see how what starts as an assertion, that something exist or that there is some analogy between certain complexes of phenomena, may be reduced step by step to an altogether different status, to an expression perhaps of a “picture preference.”  The Sceptic says there is no gardener. The Believer says there is a gardener (but invisible, etc.). One man talks about sexual behavior. Another man prefers to talk of Aphrodite (but knows that there is not really a superhuman person additional to, and somehow responsible for, all sexual phenomena). The process of qualification may be checked at any point before the original assertion is completely withdrawn and something of that first assertion will remain (Tautology). Mr. Wells’ invisible man could not, admittedly, be seen, but in all other respects he was a man like the rest of us. But though the process of qualification may be and of course usually is, checked in time, it is not always judicially so halted. Someone may dissipate his assertion completely without noticing that he has done so.  A fine brash hypothesis may thus be killed by inches, the death by a thousand qualifications.

And in this, it seems to me, lies the peculiar danger, the endemic evil, of theological utterance. Take such utterances as “God has a plan,” “God created the world,” “God loves us as a father loves his children.” They look at first sight very much like assertions, vast cosmological assertions. Of course, this is no sure sign that they either are, or are intended to be, assertions. But let us confine ourselves to the cases where those who utter such sentences intended them to express assertions. (Merely remarking parenthetically that those who intend or interpret such utterances as crypto-commands, expressions of wishes, disguised ejaculations, concealed ethics, or as anything else but assertions, are unlikely to succeed in making them either properly orthodox or practically effective).

Now to assert that such and such is the case is necessarily equivalent to denying that such and such is not the case. Suppose then that we are in doubt as to what someone who gives vent to an utterance is asserting, or suppose that, more radically, we are sceptical as to whether he is really asserting anything at all, one way of trying to understand (or perhaps to expose) his utterance is to attempt to find what he would regard as counting against, or as being incompatible with, its truth.  For if the utterance is indeed an assertion, it will necessarily be equivalent to a denial of the negation of the assertion. [emphasis mine].  And anything which would count against the assertion, or which would induce the speaker to withdraw it and to admit that it had been mistaken, must be part of (or the whole of) the meaning of the negation of that assertion. And to know the meaning of the negation of an assertion, is as near as makes no matter, to know the meaning of that assertion.  And if there is nothing which a putative assertion denies then there is nothing which it asserts either: and so it is not really an assertion. When the Sceptic in the parable asked the Believer, “Just how does what you call an invisible, intangible, eternally elusive gardener differ from an imaginary gardener or even from no gardener at all?” he was suggesting that the Believer’s earlier statement had been so eroded by qualification that it was no longer an assertion at all.

Now it often seems to people who are not religious as if there was no conceivable event or series of events the occurrence of which would be admitted by sophisticated religious people to be a sufficient reason for conceding “there wasn’t a God after all” or “God does not really love us then.” Someone tells us that God loves us as a father loves his children. We are reassured. But then we see a child dying of inoperable cancer of the throat. His earthly father is driven frantic in his efforts to help, but his Heavenly Father reveals no obvious sign of concern. Some qualification is made — God’s love is “not merely human love” or it is “an inscrutable love,” perhaps — and we realize that such suffering are quite compatible with the truth of the assertion that “God loves us as a father (but of course…).” We are reassured again. But then perhaps we ask: what is this assurance of God’s (appropriately qualified) love worth, what is this apparent guarantee really a guarantee against? Just what would have to happen not merely (morally and wrongly) to tempt but also (logically and rightly) to entitle us to say “God does not love us” or even “God does not exist”?  I therefore put to the succeeding symposiasts the simple central questions, “What would have to occur or to have occurred to constitute for you a disproof of the love of, or the existence of, God?”

The issue here is so obvious that it does not need any further exposition.  It is known in philosophy as the “principle of falsification.”  If there is no fact, experience or observation that would lead one to conclude that a statement was not true, then there is nothing that the statement asserts.  In other words, if a statement cannot be falsified the statement is meaningless.  That is the fundamental issue that must be faced by those who assert the meaningfulness of language about god.

_________________

Note:  I am not unaware of the controversy surrounding some statements made by Antony Flew prior to his death in which he is alleged to have conceded that modern science may not be inconsistent with deism to which we respond that [a] if true, it is not relevant to the logic of the statement above; and [b] he was in his 80’s, admittedly senile and may have been mis-quoted or quoted out of context.

http://www.christianhumanist.net

There is a troublesome news article on MSNBC about a Pakistani terrorist who had planned to use a 14-year old boy as a suicide bomber, the boy not knowing that he was to be killed in the attack.

There are three sentences in this story that raise issues that are instructive in understanding the mind of the terrorists and in instructing ourselves on issues that we as westerners need to consider.

[1] “I was happy to be in place where I could kill unbelievers,” he said. “I thank God that we all returned safely and had a successful mission.”   He wanted to kill “unbelievers” not because of anything they had done to him, but they were not believers in his god and his religion.  His religious faith was so distorted and fanatical that he believed that killing was an appropriate response to unbelief.  There is something very wrong in the heart of a religious faith that sees the world in such “us versus them” terms, yet it seems to be endemic to the nature of fundamentalist interpretations of religion—muslim, Jewish or Christian. I have studied this issue and discuss it in an essay on “Fanatic Fundamentalists”  at http://christianhumanist.net/fanatic.aspx

[2] “Baseer worked as a mosque preacher in the Khyber region, not far from the northwestern capital, Peshawar.”  He was an uneducated peasant with no school other than study of the Quran at fanatical schools that taught nothing other than the Quran.  Unfortunately this is all too true in countries like Pakistan, where religious schools provide little by way of education and certainly no study of science, history, the humanities, or even practical subjects like engineering or accounting,  which could not only prove enlightening, but might provide some job skills that would get these people out of poverty.  A nation that does not educate its people is doomed to poverty and second class standing, and that is the very ground from which terrorists with nothing to live for are created.

[3] Did he feel any guilt about what lay in store for his traveling companion? No, he said. “I was feeling good because he was going to be used against Americans.”  The end justifies the means.  There is no value to another life even when that life was being sacrificed in a cause not understood by the person being sacrificed.  This is pretty much child sacrifice of the sort practiced by primitive peoples.  Human life has little value in this context, although we note with disgust that Baseer was not sacrificing himself, he was sacrificing another.  A religion so primitive does not warrant being called a serious religion, certainly not on a par with Christianity and Judaism. 

The politically correct and the advocates for Islam will say that is not a fair statement, that these attitudes are an aberration and a misunderstanding of Islam, that there are fundamentalists in all  religions that distort the values of the religion for political or personal purposes, and it is not fair to judge a religious faith by its outliers.  Maybe.  So here are some basic questions that advocates of Islam must deal with:

[a] Why are there no academic and educational requirements for being a “preacher” or an Imam among Muslims, as there are for Christians priests and ministers, and Jewish rabbis?  How can a person with no education be put in a role of educational and religious leadership? Sadly we must note here that even in our country it is possible to become a “preacher” of fundamentalist churches and religious sects by just saying one is a minister and having the local church agree—with no education required.   

[b]Why do Muslim countries almost universally have no educational system worth noting? Education in the Quran, without general and vocational education, is almost certainly guaranteed to keep a country in poverty, and most Muslim countries are very poor. Poor people become desperate and are the recruiting ground for troublemakers and terrorists.  In our own country the “haves”– who are so concerned about taxes for schools, or are against extending unemployment benefits, or oppose helping  the needy, or who advocate state money for religious schools as an escape from modern ideas that they oppose on religious grounds—can learn a useful lesson  here about what happens to countries when there is a very small middle class, and a vast underclass of the poor who are uneducated religious fundamentalists equipped with constitutionally-protected guns, who set up church schools to teach distortions of history and deny the validity of science, and teach their students to live in the world of the last century.

[c] If Muslims believe that they are unfairly portrayed, why don’t they actively criticize their fundamentalist preachers and drive them out of positions of leadership?  Where is the active and constant criticism of terrorist practices and terrorists that we have a right to expect from those who say they espouse Western culture? Why do Muslims move to Western countries, but then fail to assimilate by learning the language and culture of the country where they choose to live? Why do they so often insist that they have a right to their traditional and cultural practices that go against the norms of western cultures?

[d] Historically, going back centuries, Muslim countries were educated and leaders in science and technology.  In recent times that has not been true.  Where is the demand from the leadership in Muslim countries, from Arabia to Pakistan, to dissolve the religious schools and bring about serious education, so that the peoples of their countries can participate in the modern world, where educational skills are important to financial success?  Isn’t it because the leadership of Muslim countries, as now constituted, are tyrannies of one sort or another [monarchies, kingdoms, military dictatorships] where the leadership believes they can only remain in power if they keep the people uneducated? Are they afraid of democracy, which seems to be the dream of an educated and literate populace?

 http://www.christianhumanist.net

OK, we get it. The Tea Party and its sympathizers are feeling frustration and rage at government, at economic conditions, at a sense of unfairness at others getting help at what they believe is their expense and they have lost a belief in shared values and common interests.  That’s too bad.  However they seem to overlook some inconvenient facts—the amount of Federal tax any of us pays is a lot less than it used to be just a few short years ago, and the Obama administration has not increased taxes on anyone, at least not yet.

READ FULL POST

The New York Times, in an article April 13 by David Leonhardt, reports that 47% of households owe no Federal income tax for 2009 but concludes that figure is highly misleading because it does not tell the whole story.  Cable television and talk radio are using that number ahead of the Tax Day Tea Party protests to suggest that “the wealthy face a much higher tax burden than they once did while growing numbers of Americans are effectively on the dole.”

Leonhardt makes three important observations on why that conclusion is misleading:

[a] Over the last 30 years, rates have fallen more for the wealthy, and especially for the very wealthy, than for any other group. At the same time, their incomes have soared, and the incomes of most workers have grown only moderately faster than inflation. So a much greater share of income is now concentrated at the top of distribution, while each dollar there is taxed less than it once was.

[b] Taking into account both taxes and tax credits, the average household in this group paid a total income tax rate of just 3 percent…. But the picture starts to change when you look not just at income taxes but at all taxes. This average household would have paid 0.8 percent of its income in corporate taxes (through the stocks it owned), 0.9 percent in gas and other federal excise taxes, and 9.5 percent in payroll taxes. Add these up, and the family’s total federal tax rate was 14.2 percent.

[c] State and local taxes … may actually be regressive. That is, middle-class and poor families may face higher tax rates than the wealthy.  As Kim Rueben of the Tax Policy Center notes, state and local income taxes and property taxes are less progressive than federal taxes, while sales taxes end up being regressive. The typical family pays a lot of state and local taxes, too — almost half as much as in federal taxes.

A week ago I wrote an article entitled Paying Taxes is a Privilege in which I noted that the stated objective of the tax cutting movement is to lower the “marginal” Federal income tax rates to benefit the wealthiest Americans. The essence of the argument is “fairness” and the tactic is a proposal to eliminate differential income tax rates in favor of a “flat tax” that everyone would pay at the same rate.  The question of tax “fairness” is a complicated one that could be answered in different ways depending on what values and assumptions are considered in the discussion but, regardless, the practical effect of lowering taxes on the wealthy inevitably involves shifting more of the burden onto the middle class and the poor. That is not an opinion—it is just a mathematical fact. 

It is reasonable to argue that “fairness” of the tax burden means fairness in terms of ability to pay and that those who are wealthy have profited more from society and should pay more for its support. It is also obvious that requiring a wage earner with a middle class income to pay 10% of his income as tax, which cuts into the amounts required for food, clothing and shelter, creates a much greater burden on the middle class than a 10% tax on the income of a millionaire creates on the lifestyle of the wealthy. Arguing otherwise involves an “Alice in Wonderland” view of reality.

Remember, as pointed out above, the current real Federal tax rate paid by most of that 47% taxpayer group is 14.2% inclusive of payroll taxes of 7.65% for Social Security and Medicare taxes, so it is important that the implications of the Flat Tax proposal be compared on an “apples to apples” basis.  In other words, does the Flat Tax include all Federal taxes, or does it intend to exclude the 7.65% FICA tax paid now by all wage earners, because if the FICA tax is in addition to the flat tax rate, then to get the actual rate paid by lower and middle income taxpayers you need to add the two rates together for a real Federal tax rate of 17.65%.

To clarify the fuzzy math of the flat tax advocates, as I argued in more detail in an earlier essay, [It’s Time To End Entitlements For The Wealthy] here is a fact, from the IRS, about the super wealthy–they paid an effective tax rate of 16.6% on their average income of $344.8 MILLION, a tax rate slightly lower than my tax rate, because of loopholes, capital gains and other tax gimmicks that favor the wealthy.

Here’s another fun fact about how the tax system transfers wealth from lower income people to the wealthy—Social Security tax is paid on wage income up to $106,000 at a rate of 7.65%. An individual making $50,000 per year has $3825 taken out of his wages. An individual making $2.5 million has $8109 taken out of his wages, for a net tax rate of .325%. The lower paid person pays a rate 23.54 times HIGHER than the millionaire.

For the doubters out there, here are the actual calculations:

$50,000 x 7.65% = $3825 total social security tax on the individual.

$2,500,000 income is taxed only on the first $106,000.  $106,000 x 7.65% = $8109 total tax on the individual.

$8109 divided by $2,500,000 is a rate of 0.32436%.

The person making $50,000 pays 7.65% of their income ($3825) to social security.

The person making $2,500,000 pays 0.32436% ($8109) of their income to social security.

7.65% (the rate paid by the lower income) divided by 0.32436% (the rate paid by high income) is 23.58 times higher.

Contrary to the argument made by the wealthy, lowering taxes on the wealthy and shifting the burden onto the middle class involves a wealth transfer (redistribution of wealth, anathema to the right) from the lower and middle class to the wealthy, and that cannot be fair in any reasonable sense of what “fairness” means.  This is a message that needs to be constantly repeated to the Flat Tax advocates.  It sounds on the surface like a good idea, but it will not pay the bills without transferring the burden away from the wealthy to the middle class, and that is the primary objective of the flat taxers.

http://www.christianhumanist.net

The Boston Globe published a terrific feature article on Sunday April 11 entitled “The Unbelievers: What happens when a minister decides there’s no God.”   The article is based on a study conducted by Professor Daniel Dennett of Tufts University that summarizes the content of interviews he conducted in depth with a number of ministers who over the years found that they have lost their faith in god and yet who continue to serve as ministers of churches because they are “trapped” in a profession that they do not know how to gracefully remove themselves from, and in many cases are also caught in a situation in which they do not know how to break the news to family, friends and parishioners.  Someone described the situation as similar to being a closeted gay, unsure how they will be accepted once they come out of the church closet, unsure how they will support themselves if they have to give up their vocation as a result of their belief.

This study resonates with me because it is my story also, a story that I have been telling in some detail on my own Christian Humanist website.  Professor Dennett calls himself an atheist, but I prefer the term non-theist, because it is less confrontational and softer.  I do not oppose the concept of god and do not see any particular reason to be combative about my beliefs or to provoke believers, I have just lost interest in god and do not find that term helpful, necessary or meaningful.

On the other hand, I believe that an ethical system is necessary, and I find there is a great deal of value in Christian ethical beliefs and in the teachings of Jesus, and I choose to base my ethical choices and priorities on those teachings.  Therefore while I am a Humanist in that I value humanity and the humanities (and like many humanists, I do not believe in gods), I am a Christian in that I choose to be a follower of the teachings of Jesus.

Professor Dennett is right, however, when he observes the difficulty that a minister or priest encounters when they realize that faith has quietly left them and they must figure out how to navigate their way through some treacherous waters as they try to work out the implications for them, for their family and friends, for their church.  Over the past two years since I set up my website I have been contacted by a number of ministers who are struggling with the issue of faith, belief and vocation and it is sometimes so difficult that it results in the breakup of marriages, conflicts with families and private despair for those who want desperately to believe, feel a great loss in their life, but know that they cannot go back again.

Dennett summarizes his study this way:

“What emerges is a portrait of men (the one woman interviewed backed out at the last minute) grappling earnestly and incisively with the sort of theological quandaries familiar to anyone who has studied and doubted Christian doctrine. Just as strong, though, is the sense of secrecy and evasion that pervades their lives: having to hide their lack of belief from parishioners, friends, even family members. Some spoke of feeling trapped: questioning their fitness for the pulpit but unable to leave because of a mix of personal, cultural, and even financial reasons.”

 

Jim Wallis, founder of Sojourners, wrote an article A Christian Covenant For Civility that was published on the Huffington Post.  It is worth reading.  It says in part:

“Just a few months ago, a deeply concerned, veteran member of Congress called me to express real despair about the alarming level of disrespect, personal attacks, and even hateful rhetoric that was occurring among her colleagues — reflecting a degeneration of public debate in our national culture. This month, another member of Congress called to express real fear about threats of violence he and other elected officials had experienced against themselves and their family members. Political debate, even vigorous debate, is a healthy thing for a democracy; but to question the integrity, patriotism, and even faith of those with whom we disagree is destructive to democratic discourse, and to threaten or even imply the possibility of violence toward those whose politics or worldview differs from ours is a sign of moral danger, and indeed, a sign of democracy’s unraveling.”

I have a website and a blog [ http://www.christianhumanist.net ]. I encourage/permit comments by readers.  Most are positive and encouraging, but occasionally I get a nasty note from someone who says in ignorance that Christian Humanist is an oxymoron, they will pray for me, I must be confused, etc.  One comment this past week went way over the line – in an email he described himself as in his second year of bible college, he was on a mission, he was giving me a warning that if I didn’t stop “confusing people” with my non-theistic Christian beliefs that he would “stop” me.  He kept up his threats, despite my soft non-confrontation replies, so I finally sent him a “cease communicating” email or I would report him to the FBI for felony threat.  It is too bad that we have gotten to that point.

More worrying than the occasional whacko comment is the almost daily vitriolic commenting on the online blog commentary of my local newspaper, where the extremists are very verbally abuse anyone who expresses even a moderate view. Most of the comments are angry, mean-spirited, contemptuous, insulting, and hateful by the ignorant and uneducated, who seem to be repeating Glenn Beck views of the world and politics.  I wrote a commentary on guns and gun violence and commented on the Constitutional provision for gun ownership–to which one person (with the avatar “sixgun”) replied that it would be interesting when the revolution comes because the liberals and lefties won’t have guns, and the right will, so it will be a very short battle.  It is very disconcerting to see that much anger, intolerance of views and simmering hostility. It leads me to suspect that it would take very little for armed conflict and violence to occur.

Even a cursory reading about the life and teachings of Jesus suggests that if our nation were to become a Christian nation, with Christian values playing out in our public policy, it would be a very different country than it is today, a country that Christian conservatives and their Tea Party allies would not like.

Our domestic policy priority would be to care for all of our citizens without regard to power or influence.  We would feed the hungry, clothe the naked, house the homeless, care for the sick, provide for the widows and the elderly, heal the veterans, teach and protect the children.  We would be a caring nation, which means that we would see that all in our society were cared for.  We do this now, grudgingly, stingily and with much complaining by ideological Republicans that people must be responsible for themselves and that government should have no role in caring for individuals who cannot make it on their own.  The selfish in our society want all their money for themselves as an entitlement and do not want to part with it in taxes levied for the common welfare of all—but this attitude reflects just the opposite of Christian values. [Oddly, those who are most likely to argue that the U.S. is a Christian nation are the same people most likely to complain that the government should not tax “hard working Americans” to provide benefits to others under some theory of individual responsibility.]

Our foreign policy would be less arrogant, more humble, not so quick to take offense, not as bellicose and belligerent, less inclined to resort to force, less inclined to see every problem in the world as requiring a military solution, more interested in making and keeping peace.  Our Peace Corps would be larger than our military.  When Air Force planes or Navy ships headed to another country their holds would be filled with food, water, tents and medical supplies rather than bombs, and the primary mission would be to provide aid in response to famine, flood or earthquake, with sufficient strength for robust defense if and when necessary.

Our government and our citizens would demand justice and equal treatment for all: economic crimes and white collar criminals would be treated as any other crimes and criminals; our officials would throw the money changers, money managers and lobbyists out of the temples of power in the state and national legislatures; corporations and business interests would have no more power and influence than the least among us; we would value integrity and honesty in our public and private dealings and we would not tolerate hypocrisy and self-dealing in our public officials.

We would speak truth to power. As a people we would stand with the victims among us against their oppressors. Our people would not be so quick to condemn others for their actions while ignoring their own foibles. We would not stone adulterers or lesbians or throw rocks at gays or condemn those whose values and priorities are different than ours but no less legitimate.  We would not attempt to compel others to live by our values while disrespecting their values and beliefs.  We would not condemn so easily those who believe in a woman’s right to choose, and we would not support violence against those who support the right to abortion.  We would not pretend to support a culture of life while building bombs, promoting war and supporting the death penalty.

Critics say that these Christian values are impractical, idealistic and unworkable as national policy.  Maybe so.  But then don’t tell me this is a Christian country.  That’s not realistic either.

[This is the last of three articles on the subject of the United States as a Christian Nation.  The complete article can be read on my website or on my electronic newsletter Perspectives.]