Submitted by Elaine Magliaro, Guest Blogger
In August, Todd Akin—Republican candidate for the US Senate from Missouri—got into hot water with his party and became the “laughing stock of the planet” for remarks that he made about how women who are “legitimately raped” rarely get pregnant. Akin said the following during an interview on KTVI-TV:
First of all, from what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. . . But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something. You know I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be on the rapist and not attacking the child.
Writing for Wired, Brandon Kleim said of Akin:
Aside from the sheer biological ludicrousness of Todd Akin’s ideas on female physiology, one unsettling subplot to the debacle is his presence on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology.
That’s right: A man who, to put it gently, ignores what science tells us about how babies are made, helps shape the future of science in America. It would be shocking, but for the fact that many of the committee’s GOP members have spent the last several years displaying comparable contempt for climate science.
Kleim also wrote about other Republicans on the committee who seem to show a contempt for science and scientists:
The committee’s chair, Ralph Hall (R-Texas), lumps “global freezing” together with global warming, which he doesn’t believe humans can significantly impact because “I don’t think we can control what God controls.” Dana Rohrbacher (R-CA) thinks cutting down trees reduces levels of greenhouse gases they absorb. Mo Brooks (R-Alabama) still trots out the debunked notion that a scientific consensus existed in the 1970s on “global cooling,” which he portrays as a scare concocted by scientists “in order to generate funds for their pet projects.”
‘We ought to have some believable science.’
Dan Benishek (R-Michigan) strikes that climate-scientists-as-charlatans note, dismissing contemporary research as “all baloney. I think it’s just some scheme.” Paul Broun (R-Georgia) says that “Scientists all over this world say that the idea of human-induced global climate change is one of the greatest hoaxes perpetrated out of the scientific community.”
For the rest of this post, I’ll focus on Rep. Paul Broun, the chairman of the House Science Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight. Broun doesn’t just think that the “scientific community” has perpetrated a hoax about climate change—he also thinks scientists have made up lies about evolution, the age of planet Earth, the Big Bang Theory, and embryology…and that those lies come “straight from the pit of Hell.”
During a speech that Broun gave at the 2012 Sportsman’s Banquet at Liberty Baptist Church in Hartwell, Georgia on September 27th, he said this:
God’s word is true. I’ve come to understand that. All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the big bang theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell. It’s lies to try to keep me and all the folks who were taught that from understanding that they need a savior. You see, there are a lot of scientific data that I’ve found out as a scientist that actually show that this is really a young Earth. I don’t believe that the earth’s but about 9,000 years old. I believe it was created in six days as we know them. That’s what the Bible says.
In his speech, Broun claimed that as a legislator he takes direction from the Bible:
And what I’ve come to learn is that it’s the manufacturer’s handbook, is what I call it. It teaches us how to run our lives individually, how to run our families, how to run our churches. But it teaches us how to run all of public policy and everything in society. And that’s the reason as your congressman I hold the Holy Bible as being the major directions to me of how I vote in Washington, D.C., and I’ll continue to do that.
He continued:
Our Constitution was written by men that believed that! And in fact, the Constitution’s written on Biblical principles — in fact, the three branches of government come right from Isaiah, Isaiah 33:22, go look it up!
From Wonkette:
In an inexorable speech that is available in full on YouTube (but which we will mercifully summarize), Broun attributes his 2007 election to the direct intervention of the Lord Jesus Christ, shows slides of a Kodiak bear and a lion that he heroically shot, and tells a story about heroically shooting another lion in the face, explaining that “God directed that bullet, because if I’d missed, that lion would have been in the back of the truck with me and I’d have been clawed to death.” He even tells a story about his heroic deployment to Afghanistan for 31 days earlier this year as a member of the Naval Reserve, where he saw an Afghan soldier who’d been seriously injured by an IED but survived somehow. And what those awful injuries reminded him of, said Broun, was that the Bible tells us that human beings are “fearfully and wonderfully made.” Broun knows this “as a physician,” and this line from Psalm 139:14 somehow proves that evolution is fake.
But did he learn that in college, or in med school? No. He was taught that
we all came from a ‘Big Bang,’ and we were trained in all this stuff about evolution…what I was taught in college and medical school and even high school that we went ‘from Goo to Zoo to You.’ And I believed that.
Phil Plait of Discover Magazine’s Bad Astronomy blog wrote in his post The US Congress Anti-Science Committee that Broun sits on the committee with other anti-science legislators—including Akin—whom “the Republican majority placed on that committee. Men who think global warming is a fantasy. Men who think women have magic vaginas. Men who think the Earth is thousands, not billions, of years old.”
Kind of scary, don’t you think, that we have legislators like Broun who have little respect for science serving on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology?
NOTE: One might think that a man who is so anti-science may not be an educated person—but that is far from the truth. Braun graduated from the University of Georgia in 1967 with a B.S. in Chemistry—and in, 1971, he received his Medical Doctor degree from the Medical College of Georgia.
SOURCES
Paul Broun: Evolution, Big Bang ‘Lies Straight From The Pit Of Hell’ (Huffington Post)
The US Congress Anti-Science Committee (Discover Magazine)
Republican Senate Nominee: Victims Of ‘Legitimate Rape’ Don’t Get Pregnant (TPM 2012)
Todd Akin and the Anti-Science House Science Committee (Wired)
Video shows ‘scientist’ in Congress saying evolution is from ‘pit of Hell’ (NBC News)
Hero Rep. Paul Broun Takes Bible-Based Stand Against Hell-Spawned Lies of ‘Science’ (Wonkette)
Wingnut Watch: Paul Broun Says Progressives Trying to ‘Destroy America’ (Rolling Stone)
Members of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology
“1 in 5 Americans is religiously unaffiliated, survey shows
By Becky Bratu, NBC News
One in five Americans — and one in three of adults under 30 — is religiously unaffiliated, the highest percentage ever, according to a Pew Research Center study released Tuesday.”
Because I regard quotations without context, the essence of proof-texting, to be fraught with possible misunderstandings, I glommed onto a Kindle download of Charles Fuqua’s book, the better to find out what is actually in it, in its full as-published context.
When I engage in the theatrical role of “critical analysis,” I find it useful to pursue accuracy of interpretation to the maximum I can attain.
I find, as a Wisconsin Registered Professional Engineer who successfully earned a B.S. degree (High Honors) in Engineering, Bioengineering Major, from the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle (1970) and a Ph.D. in Bioengineering from the University of Illinois at Chicago (1997), that Fuqua’s interpretation of Christianity, as written in his book, “God’s Law,” is, for me (if also for no one else) traumatizing unintelligible neurological child-abuse gibberish.
Yeah, I glommed a Kindle copy about an hour ago, and have read through it, though I would not claim to have yet fully studied it.
From the “Bio” section of Fuqua/s “Press Kit” web site,I find that Fuqua has described his competency partly as:
“Research Biologist; Chemistry, Physics, and Biology Teacher”
Well, I began studying biology, using college level resources in my parents’ library, near the beginning of third grade. I never took high school biology, for it never occurred to me that I would learn anything useful in such a class. However, had someone with beliefs akin to those I find Fuqua promotes taught a high school biology class that I took, I have a wild guess that I would have been, as a high school student, been readily able to grind his biological notion-absurdities into as-though dissipating-to-oblivion sub-atomic particle dust.
I find that I am an incorrigible believer in proof-texting as being a technique that is near the outermost limit of attainable intellectual dishonesty.
In accord with my understanding of copyright fair use, a quotation out of context, from the Kindle edition of “God’s Law”:
“The central doctrine of the Christian religion is that every member of the human race is born with a sin nature. We are all born self centered, selfish, demanding, and believing that everyone around us has the obligation of satisfying our every desire. If we do not have a sin nature, then there is good in us that can redeem us from our sinful actions. If this is the case, then we do not need a savior, and the death of Jesus on the cross was unnecessary. Anyone that rejects the doctrine of the sin nature of man rejects their need for a savior. Those who desire to conserve our Christian heritage accept this central premise of the Christian faith. Liberals reject it. In fact, the difference between a conservative and a liberal is that a conservative is inherently wicked and totally depraved, and knows it. A liberal, on the other hand, is inherently wicked and totally depraved, but does not know it. People who do not believe that all people have this sin nature accept the premise that man is basically good.”
{Fuqua, Charles (2012-04-23). God’s Law (Kindle Locations 112-119). American Book Publishing. Kindle Edition.}
What a pity, that I do not “believe in” silly lawsuits, or I might ponder suing Fuqua for defamation of character.
Alas, I find that there are definitions-in-use of “liberals” that happen to include me. And I, personally, find his description of “liberals” to be stupidly defamatory.
Let me snatch the two sentences, much more out of context, from the prior Fuqua quotation:
” In fact, the difference between a conservative and a liberal is that a conservative is inherently wicked and totally depraved, and knows it. A liberal, on the other hand, is inherently wicked and totally depraved, but does not know it.”
I am quite content to accept Fuqua’s “definition” of a conservative, as a person who is “inherently wicked and totally depraved.” Does it not take one to know one?
I am comparably content to accept Fuqua’s “definition” of liberals as a definition that truly is “inherently wicked and totally depraved.” Does it not take one to know one?
Is it not to be expected that a person who believes that she,it, or he is (as a psychotic fantasy?) fact, that he, she, or it, is inherently wicked and totally depraved, will diligently promote wickedness and depravity as self-imago projection as a core psychological defense?
Perhaps the problem folks who greatly share Fuqua’s religious perspective may have with me is my having read “The Bible,” and read it in a variety of translations. I regard the bible as a useful record of aspects of the evolution of human society, and, as such, a useful scientific treatise written in profoundly pre-scientific language.
To perhaps better illustrate the foibles of proof-texting, and to clarify why I categorically reject using it as though proof-texting can ever be a reliable way of making viable sense of anything, perhaps a different proof-text illustration from the longest of the quotations I have use from Fuqua may illumine:
Proof text 1, from Fuqua:
“A liberal, on the other hand, is inherently wicked and totally depraved, but does not know it. People who do not believe that all people have this sin nature accept the premise that man is basically good.:
Contradictory proof text from the King James Version, from the “Sermon on the Mount,” Matthew 7:1, to wit:
“Judge not, that ye be not judged.”
Fuqua is not the only person who claims to be Christian.
I have read many “religious texts,” among which is Matthew Fox, “Original Blessing,” Fox is, so I understand, verifiably Christian, as he is an Episcopal priest.
If Fuqua were to be a Christian other than through vacuous dogmatic espousal, would he be able to judge “liberals” as being “inherently wicked and totally depraved”?
Matthew Fox, on his web site, reviewed Rupert Sheldrake’s book, “Science Set Free” (titled, in England, “The Science Delusion?), an excerpt (a quotation with incomplete context) from which is:
“Meister Eckhart offers the following prayer: “I pray God to rid me of God,” a challenge that deserves to be flung before every churchgoer and theist whether by a mystic like Eckhart or an atheist of conscience (of which there are plenty). Sheldrake is not arguing for theism; he is just making clear that an entire world view of materialistic science is reductionistic and rests on unproven assumptions. Why believe the unbelievable and/or at least the unproven? Why teach that the mind is limited to what goes on in the cranium? Why make that the basis of education and the basis of grant-giving and the basis of culture itself? Especially when that culture is so often revealing a less than dignified direction and preaches despair and pessimism so readily? For the record, I do not consider myself a theist but a panentheist. They are not the same thing. All mystics are panentheists.”
For book review purposes, an excerpt, in two sections, from “Science Set Free”:
“The facts of science are real enough; so are the techniques that scientists use, and the technologies based on them. But the belief system that governs conventional scientific thinking is an act of faith, grounded in a nineteenth-century ideology. This book is pro-science. I want the sciences to be less dogmatic and more scientific. I believe that the sciences will be regenerated when they are liberated from the dogmas that constrict them. The scientific creed Here are the ten core beliefs that most scientists take for granted. 1. Everything is essentially mechanical. Dogs, for example, are complex mechanisms, rather than living organisms with goals of their own. Even people are machines, “lumbering robots,” in Richard Dawkins’s vivid phrase, with brains that are like genetically programmed computers. 2. All matter is unconscious. It has no inner life or subjectivity or point of view. Even human consciousness is an illusion produced by the material activities of brains. 3. The total amount of matter and energy is always the same (with the exception of the Big Bang, when all the matter and energy of the universe suddenly appeared).”
Sheldrake, Rupert (2012-09-04). Science Set Free: 10 Paths to New Discovery (p. 7). Random House, Inc.. Kindle Edition.
“4. The laws of nature are fixed. They are the same today as they were at the beginning, and they will stay the same forever. 5. Nature is purposeless, and evolution has no goal or direction. 6. All biological inheritance is material, carried in the genetic material, DNA, and in other material structures. 7. Minds are inside heads and are nothing but the activities of brains. When you look at a tree, the image of the tree you are seeing is not “out there,” where it seems to be, but inside your brain. 8. Memories are stored as material traces in brains and are wiped out at death. 9. Unexplained phenomena such as telepathy are illusory. 10. Mechanistic medicine is the only kind that really works.”
Sheldrake, Rupert (2012-09-04). Science Set Free: 10 Paths to New Discovery (pp. 7-8). Random House, Inc.. Kindle Edition.
No theoretical biologist I find to be even remotely competent accepts analytical reductionism as a viable way to accurately understand biology. Among those, alive and deceased theoretical biologists whose understanding is relational-holistic, are Walter Elsasser, Robert Rosen, Franscisco Varela, and A. H. Louie, and for a starter listing.
Care for an prototype of a relational holistic theory of biology? How about,
“Existence is comprised of two observable biological aspects, organisms and their substrates. Absent needed substrates, organisms do not exist. For any given, specific organism, all else that exists is the given organism’s substrate. Thus, the totality of existence is not only life itself, it is necessarily more than life itself, being so because the existence of the evolution of existence requires that all that exists necessarily contains itself as a proper subset. Existence, to exist at all, is necessarily accurately modeled only as an open system which may itself be of the overall form of a singularity.”
Being a conservatively liberal member of the panenthiest community, I reject with formidable skeptcism any and every dogma and doctrine which cannot be demonstrated to be “scientifically true.” However, being demonstrated to be “scientifically true” necessarily and sufficiently extracts whatever is demonstrated to be “scientifically true’ from the realm of dogma and doctrine.
Dogmatically doctrinaire analytical materialism is, as I observe, not one whit less superstitious than is any other belief system not grounded in accurately verifiable demonstration of its actual reality.
In my study of the history of science, superstitions are the basis for the development of testable, refutable-if-false, hypotheses. Thus, in my bioengineering work superstition is an essential aspect of the process of scientific “discovery.”
Rather than lambast people whose weltanschauung is, to me, profoundly, psychotically, superstitious, I am grateful to them for their lives, and their beliefs, and the sharing of their beliefs.
To me, ignorance is absolutely identical in every aspect and detail with opportunity for learning. Thus, I do not decry ignorance or stupidity or any other purported human foible.
Why? Because I may actually, for real, be pro-life to such an extent as to be an affirming advocate for the whole of life, all of it, with nothing of the whole of life wisely to be despised or rejected.
What better way to demonstrate the tragedy of divisiveness as the core organizing principle of human society than through the views overtly espoused in Fuqua’s “God’s Law”?
The mathematics of relational holism is, as I name it, “high-dimension-space, complex-variable, relational tensor calculus.”
Relational, as described by Walter Elsasser, means that it is not amenable to analytical number-crunched solutions, this being because what happens in a single living cell for a mere one second is so complex as to be unfathomably transcomputational, even using a binary digital computer mechanism comprised of every particle in the observable universe.
However, high-dimensional space, complex-variable relational tensor calculus is an ordinary aspect of the everyday life of every living person; it is the form of procedural brain innately-intuitive mathematics a baseball player uses when catching a baseball that, if not caught, would have bounced off the top edge of the outfield fence and given the win to the other team.
Divisiveness as the human society central organizing principle appears to me to be tragically and profoundly demonstrating its unbounded destructiveness, as it divides people internally, and as internally divided people divide humanity into nihilistic nihilism.
Child abuse, the social phenomenon that has inspired my efforts directed toward unriddling the processes of child abuse well enough that child abuse will be removed from the human condition, is the problem that is the focus of my bioengineering research work.
I have a simple view of what a problem is. A problem is a solution striving to find itself. If it is a problem, a solution to the problem is a future event. If no future event, in the form of a solution is possible, there is no problem.
Because I experienced terrible abuse in pubic schools, from teachers, administrators, and other students, I cannot elude understanding child abuse as being a problem.
I experienced terrible abuse in public schools? Marshall School, Eureka California, second grade, the principal often paddled me as punishment for not lying, stopping the paddling only when I broke into a form of agitated catatonia. Sturgeon Bay High School, physical education class, the gym teacher ridiculed me so severely that another student sexually molested me; as I deemed that student to be no less an object of child abuse than I was, I never reported the molestation to anyone other than my parents, who decided to move to another state, halfway through my sophomore year, where there was a gym teacher who would not ridicule me.
What is the basis of my regarding “The Bible” as a useful scientific treatise, written in pre-scientific language, about the evolution of human society?
When people treated me abusively, no matter what the abuse, no matter how intense the abuse, I have always forgiven them instantly, because of being fully consciously aware that people who treated me abusively as a child were only informing me,to the best of their practicable ability, of the child abuse they had experienced which they had been unable to resolve into events already actually fully completed.
It has never occurred to me that my retaliating for any abuse directed toward me would accomplish anything other than tragic perpetuation of child abuse. All that remains for me to do is to tell of my life experiences as best I am able to tell of them.
How to effectively not-retaliate in response to child abuse experiences, regardless of their form or intensity, and thereby, how to actually avoid perpetuation of child abuse, may yet become the essence of my life story.
The future is of what has not yet happened.
Finding fault with child abusers for telling of their own child abuse in the most effective way actually achievable, which has historically been predominantly through acting it out toward innocent children, so that innocent children become abused children who grow into child abusing adults, is a catastrophically contagious and atrociously addictive social-neurological child-abuse perpetuating mechanism.
With all due apologies, I am unable to distinguish, in terms of abusiveness, between the irrational beliefs espoused by Charles Fuqua and the irrational beliefs of those who decry the overt results of his childhood abuse as brought forth in the “scientific gibberish” that I find he espouses as what may be his final recourse for averting his personal failure to survive the abuse he experienced as a child.
Perhaps the most social-convention-despicable findings of my bioengineering research is, among the people with whom I have interacted in my field work research, a population that meets well the common research criteria for being a random sample, 98 percent of those people are functionally profoundly psychotic with regard to an accurate temporal understanding of procedural learning experiences.
That profound psychosis takes the form of believing that some event which actually happened, having actually happened as it actually happened, could actually have happened other than as it actually happened.
In Erik H.Erikson’s epigenetric chart of psychosocial developmental crises, that is of the first stage, the resolution of trust versus mistrust, such that trust, especially self-trust, is the result of, and results in, a valid temporal sense; where as mistrust, and especially self-mistrust, is the result of time-confusion which results in mistrust that is the direct consequence of unresolved, severely dissociation generating, child abuse, of form and function traditionally (and, in my view, utterly. tragically, and erroneously) deemed essential to the safety of human society.
I do not accept, and have never accepted, Fuqua’s stated belief to the effect that people are actually “inherently wicked and totally depraved,” because I never internalized self-mistrust, and therefore, never developed time confusion.
My having never developed time confusion is, methinks, what led me to be so severely abused as a child as to “inspire” me to investigate time-confusion, and its effects, in other people, doing so recently as a Wisconsin-licensed bioengineer.
If my work turns out to be of scientific validity, a testable hypothesis to me, my best guess for now is that it may usefully help bring about the end of human warfare.
For myself, though Dr. Abraham Low may have been correct in in observing that people have, or appear to have, dual personalities and divided wills,intensive and extensive psychodynamic psychoanalytic work over many years has yet to reveal any division of will in my life or inner life experiences.
The final stage of Erikson’s epigenetic chart is,”Integrity versus despair.” Never having deemed despair a worthy outcome for my life, despair being the result of sufficient, sufficiently long, mistrust, I have never deemed mistrust welcome within my actual inner life.
Authoritarianism is, to me, the epitome of child abuse. Authoritarianism, as a parenting style, denies the integrity of the child.
At the limit I have found to describe with words the nature of authoritarian parenting as I have been able to understand it, the final step of authoritarianism is the person in the parent role given as the ultimate reason, one or another form of, “Because I said so!”
I have talked with many children in psychiatric hospital settings, some years ago, I did volunteer work in a state hospital children’s unit. As a composite what abused children have shared with me, the internal experience of authoritarian-parent-abused children is equivalent to being commanded, enhanced-interrogation-style, “Don’t do what I tell you do do, or else; and if you disobey me, I will make you suffer until you learn to do as you were told.”
The effects of authoritarian parenting, in terms of physical brain trauma in authoritarian-abused children, have been well-described in the published work of psychologist Peter A. Levine and the published work of neurologist Robert C. Scare, among others.
In my work Charles Fuqua might be a reasonable candidate for being “poster-adult” regarding the effects in adulthood of devastatingly mandated authoritarianism-based child abuse.
Whereas, I can find no fault with Charles Fuqua, Esq, as a person; with respect to the results of his childhood abuse on his adult public-espoused belief system; were I to find fault with anything whatsoever, I cannot imagine ever getting to the bottom of the immensity of fault I would find with his espoused religious beliefs.
The late psychologist Alice Miller,in “Thou Shalt Not Be Aware: Society’s Betrayal of The Child,” Hildegarde and Hunter Hannum,tr., New American Library, 1984, has a list of Twenty-one Points, on pages 314-315. The first point stated is,”The child is always innocent.”
At the time of my writing this comment, the list all Twenty-one Points may be found on the Internet, at:
http://www.naturalchild.org/alice_miller/twenty-one.html
I needed to read, “Thou Shalt Not Be Aware,” to understand how Alice Miller arrived at the view that the child is always innocent.
In terms of my understanding of “Christianity,” every person is a child of God, and, as a such a child, is always innocent, regardless of chronological age.
I will seriously consider adopting Fuqua’s notions of “real” Christianity, upon being given a scientifically credible demonstration of one, or more, actually avoidable mistake(s) that were actually avoidable.
The personally expressed belief that an actually avoidable mistake actually happened is about the strongest evidence I have ever yet found to identify a person who has been met with serious-to-severe child abuse which has not yet been adequately resolved as a past experience that is fully completed, such that it exists only as a memory of something wisely avoided in the future, would constitute a convincing-to-me demonstration.
I do make mistakes, and apologize for any overlooked typographical finger blunders…
Raucous Caucus: Rep. Forbes’ Seeks To Spread ‘Prayer’ Affiliates To All 50 States
Jun 16, 2010
by Sandhya Bathija in Wall of Separation
http://www.au.org/blogs/wall-of-separation/raucous-caucus-rep-forbes%E2%80%99-seeks-to-spread-%E2%80%98prayer%E2%80%99-affiliates-to-all-50
U.S. Rep. J. Randy Forbes (R-Va.) is on a crusade against church-state separation.
Forbes founded and co-chairs the Congressional Prayer Caucus – a group of 64 members of Congress who recognize “prayer as a fundamental and enduring feature of American life” and want to “use the legislative process – both through sponsorship of affirmative legislation and through opposition to detrimental legislation – to assist the nation and its people in continuing to draw upon and benefit from this essential source of our strength and well-being.”
When you cut through the pious rhetoric, that means Forbes and Co. want to pass laws to promote their theocratic vision of America. That’s directly counter to the vision of our nation’s Founders who gave us the First Amendment and forbade Congress to make any law “respecting an establishment of religion.”
For example, Forbes has introduced two resolutions in the House in defense of the congressionally mandated National Day of Prayer, after a federal district court rightfully struck down the government-sponsored religious day as unconstitutional.
Now Forbes has set up a nonprofit Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation to raise money to franchise the prayer-caucus concept to state legislatures. These affiliates will exist to monitor and oppose legislation, agency rulings and court opinions that uphold church-state separation. Mississippi has already signed on, and Virginia and Florida are working on it.
Forbes discussed his plans with James Dobson on Friday’s Family Talk broadcast, Dobson’s radio show. (Dobson founded the Religious Right powerhouse Focus on the Family, but now seems to be building a new broadcasting empire.)
“The country is in a great deal of trouble and I just felt like we needed to do something about it,” said Dobson, who suggested that there is a growing assault on Christianity in America. Forbes, of course, agreed, claiming these state prayer caucuses will be a way to deal with these “attacks.”
It’s the same sad song the Religious Right always sings.
But we all know better. Forbes and Dobson aren’t concerned with threats to religion; they’re concerned with finding ways to impose their faith on others.
And we at Americans United are just as determined to see that they don’t succeed. Keep an eye on your state legislature. Forbes and his Religious Right forces are on the move.
Gene,
Congressional Prayer Caucus asks for ‘correction’ to ‘E pluribus unum’
By David Edwards
January 3, 2011
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/01/03/congressional-prayer-caucus-asks-correction-e-pluribus-unum/
Excerpt:
Members of the Congressional Prayer Caucus wrote to President Barack Obama last month to ask that he correct speeches they say disregard the nation’s religious heritage.
The members took specific exception to a speech the president gave in Jakarta, Indonesia on Nov. 10, 2010, where he referred to the US motto as E pluribus unum.
The words are Latin, meaning “Out of many, one.”
“E pluribus unum is not our national motto,” the letter (.pdf) said. “In 1956, Congress passed and President Eisenhower approved the law establishing ‘In God We Trust’ as the official national motto of the United States.”
Obama used the term E pluribus unum in his speech to illustrate that in America, like other nations, “hundreds of millions who hold different beliefs can be united in freedom under one flag.”
Wikipedia lists E pluribus unum as one of the mottoes of the United States and notes that it was the de facto motto until 1956, when “In God We Trust” was officially adopted.
“Additionally, during three separate events this fall, when quoting from the Declaration of Independence, you mentioned that we have inalienable rights, but consistently failed to mention the source of the rights. The Declaration of Independence definitively recognizes God, our Creator, as the source of our rights. Omitting the word ‘Creator’ once was a mistake; but twice establishes a pattern,” the group complained.
“As members of the Congressional Prayer Caucus, a bi-partisan group of 68 Members of the United States House of Representatives, we are dedicated to preserving America’s religious heritage and protecting our religious liberty,” they continued. “We respectively request that you issue a correction to the speech you gave, as it does not accurately reflect America and serves to undercut an important part of our history.”
Writing for conservative opinion outlet World Net Daily in late November, Chuck Norris also complained that Obama had dissed the almighty. “I discovered actually seven presidential ‘Creator’ omissions in just the past few months!” he wrote.
AS refers to Ankylosing Spondylitis (“bone-forming inflammation of the spine”). It is a rare autoimmune disorder, a form of rheumatoid arthritis, in which the spine eventually fuses. It is an illness that is essentially made of pain and the damage it does is irreversible, so there is treatment or management available, but not “cure” per se.
The combination of treatments my son used are his own discoveries/invention put together from the expertise of more than 11 professionals and dozens of lay-persons and his own guesswork and imagination and his careful experimentation. Half of it is “naturopathic” or “holistic.” Some of it is just plain indescribable. But it works. I personally believe that my late, beloved grandwhippet was part of the formula that helped him restore his health. But is a dog “naturopathic”? 😕
Gene,
Thanks for the link to that Huff Po article.
Well, I tried to go to sleep but technical difficulties intervened. I thought, “Maybe I’ll read a little news and Internet waiting for my OTC sleep aid to kick in.” This? This is what I read first:
“Knowing that both Akin and Broun are Prayer Caucus members as well as being members of the House Science Committee, I decided to look at the make-up of the Science Committee, and here’s what I found:
Eleven members of the Science Committee are also members of Randy Forbes’s Prayer Caucus. This is disturbing since we’re talking about people who reject science being on a Science Committee, but the number is not out of proportion. Nearly a quarter of the members of our House of Representatives now belong to the Prayer Caucus (OK, that’s disturbing enough in itself), but the House Science Committee has forty members, making eleven Prayer Caucus members about a quarter of that committee.
But then I looked at the subcommittees of the Science Committee, and that’s where things get really disturbing. Five of the twelve members of the Subcommittee on Research and Science Education are Prayer Caucus members. This is the subcommittee that has “legislative jurisdiction and general oversight and investigative authority on all matters relating to science policy and science education.” It also has jurisdiction over research and development relating to health and biomedical programs. So, what we’ve got here is a subcommittee with jurisdiction over the very issues and programs where religious beliefs are most likely to clash with science being disproportionately packed with the people most likely to go with religion over science.
The biggest disproportion of all? Of the 105 members of the Congressional Prayer Caucus, only four are Democrats (3.8%), but two of the four Democrats (50%) on the Subcommittee on Research and Science Education are Prayer Caucus members.”
From an editorial by Chris Rodda at Huff Po.
Yep. My reaction was certainly at the intersection of “WTF!” and “We’re doomed.” Looks like its going to be one of those long nights.
I sure hope those pills work as advertised.
The Congressional Prayer Caucus. The scary thing is if someone or an organization could find a nexus for standing and sued to break up the group as an impermissible endorsement and promotion of excessive entanglement in religion with government? You know these zealots would just move under ground.
Somewhere, in the distance, there is a sound of bone against wood. Pay no attention. It’s just Jefferson and Madison rolling over. Rapidly and repeatedly.
Elaine,
Those two gents can’t help this disgusting human being.
Rafflaw,
Calling Sigmund Freud…calling Carl Jung!
Elaine,
The hits just keep on coming. Where in his Bible does it state that prisoners only get two years or death? This guy needs some serious psychiatric help.
http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/nra-endorses-todd-akin
Looks as if Pol Pot lives again in Georgia.
Mike S, Didn’t you the meme of many of the bloggers here? There is no difference between the r’s and the d’s. I have had that said to me over and over again on this blog. By the way Romney is ahead in the reputable Pew Poll. I am hearing people talking about leaving the country again. Even Chomsky has said to vote for Obama in swing states.
rafflaw,
Here’s more on Fuqua:
God according to Charlie Fuqua
Posted by Max Brantley on Fri, Oct 5, 2012
http://www.arktimes.com/ArkansasBlog/archives/2012/10/05/god-according-to-charlie-fuqua
Excerpt:
STARVE ‘EM
The minimum wage should be set at zero. It is simply a lie that raising the minimum wage helps people at the low end of the pay scale.
KILL ‘EM
We cannot continue to sustain the percentage of our population that is in prison. No prison term should be longer than two years. Prison should be unpleasant and rehabilitative. Anyone that cannot be rehabilitated in two years should be executed.
PRAY
Education is inherently religious activity. Some religion will be taught in schools. Because God has been banned from public schools by our court system, the religion taught in public schools is secularism. If we decide to continue to fund education with public funds, the only way to have an educational system that gives parents the freedom to have their children taught the religion they desire is to have a voucher system that enables the parents to select the school the parents desire.
THROW THE MUSLIMS OUT
I see no solution to the Muslim problem short of expelling all followers of the religion from the United States.
“STARVE ‘EM The minimum wage should be set at zero. It is simply a lie that raising the minimum wage helps people at the low end of the pay scale. KILL ‘EM We cannot continue to sustain the percentage of our population that is in prison. No prison term should be longer than two years. Prison should be unpleasant and rehabilitative. Anyone that cannot be rehabilitated in two years should be executed.”
So what exactly are the differences between this man and Hitler? Perhaps it was that Hitler was born a Catholic and became a Theosophist. Whereas this guy is probably just “born again”.
Elaine,
I am almost speechless after reading about this lunatic running for office in Arkansas. This guy is certifiable. If I was the authorities in Arkansas, I would look very closely at this nutjob to see if any kids around him have gone missing. So Christ like to kill kids, isn’t it??
Add this fellow to the list of batsh*t crazy Republicans:
Charlie Fuqua, Arkansas Legislative Candidate, Endorses Death Penalty For Rebellious Children In Book
The Huffington Post
By John Celock
10/8/12
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/08/charlie-fuqua-arkansas-candidate-death-penalty-rebellious-children_n_1948490.html
Excerpt:
Charlie Fuqua, the Republican candidate for the Arkansas House of Representatives who called for expelling Muslims from the United States in his book, also wrote in support for instituting the death penalty for “rebellious children.”
In “God’s Law,” Fuqua’s 2012 book, the candidate wrote that while parents love their children, a process could be set up to allow for the institution of the death penalty for “rebellious children,” according to the Arkansas Times. Fuqua, who is anti-abortion, points out that the course of action involved in sentencing a child to death is described in the Bible and would involve judicial approval. While it is unlikely that many parents would seek to have their children killed by the government, Fuqua wrote, such power would serve as a way to stop rebellious children.
According to the Arkansas Times, Fuqua wrote:
“The maintenance of civil order in society rests on the foundation of family discipline. Therefore, a child who disrespects his parents must be permanently removed from society in a way that gives an example to all other children of the importance of respect for parents. The death penalty for rebellious children is not something to be taken lightly. The guidelines for administering the death penalty to rebellious children are given in Deut 21:18-21:
“This passage does not give parents blanket authority to kill their children. They must follow the proper procedure in order to have the death penalty executed against their children. I cannot think of one instance in the Scripture where parents had their child put to death. Why is this so? Other than the love Christ has for us, there is no greater love then [sic] that of a parent for their child. The last people who would want to see a child put to death would be the parents of the child. Even so, the Scrpture provides a safe guard to protect children from parents who would wrongly exercise the death penalty against them. Parents are required to bring their children to the gate of the city. The gate of the city was the place where the elders of the city met and made judicial pronouncements. In other words, the parents were required to take their children to a court of law and lay out their case before the proper judicial authority, and let the judicial authority determine if the child should be put to death. I know of many cases of rebellious children, however, I cannot think of one case where I believe that a parent had given up on their child to the point that they would have taken their child to a court of law and asked the court to rule that the child be put to death. Even though this procedure would rarely be used, if it were the law of land, it would give parents authority. Children would know that their parents had authority and it would be a tremendous incentive for children to give proper respect to their parents.”
“in his book, also wrote in support for instituting the death penalty for “rebellious children.” In “God’s Law,” Fuqua’s 2012 book, the candidate wrote that while parents love their children, a process could be set up to allow for the institution of the death penalty for “rebellious children,”
Will anyone please tell me again why there is no difference between Republicans and Democrats?
Oops, got distracted by a cat, bumped some keys, and did not notice that…
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I have invested years of as scientific a study as I have been able to make in understanding the role of deception in human society. The biology of deception is quite curious.
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Was intended to be:
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I have invested years of effort as scientific a study…
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Actually unavoidable mistakes simply do not happen.
Not realizing that “effort” had disappeared, I did not make the effort needed for realizing that it had disappeared until after posting the comment.
Sorry.
So I have learned.
From having worked at Cook County Children’s Hospital (now torn down), the University of Illinois Research and Educational Hospital (now replaced), the Hektoen Institute for Medical Research, with a variety of physicians, some of whom were superbly trained scientists, ordinary clinical medicine is a technician-level occupation, in which a physician template-matches clinical signs in the mind of the clinician (not actual patient internal symptoms) onto a dichotomous taxonomic key to obtain the label of a recipe for the palliation of identified-by-the-clinician clinical signs.
The 1973 paper by David Rosenhan, in the American Association for the Adancement of Science journal, “Science,” “On Being Sane in Insane Places” led to tightening the diagnostic criteria for mental illness labels so that various clinicians will tend to give sufficiently similar labels for particular clusters of overt patient conduct as to make labeling patients sufficiently consistent that scientific errors in understanding human behavior become difficult to detect because the diagnostic system has been made statistically reliable regardless of its biological errors.
I observed that it is easy to get an M.D. degree merely by regurgitating medical school course content. Actually demonstrated scientific competence is not a requirement for successful practice of clinical medicine any more than it is required for being elected to the Congress, or, for that matter, to any pubic office.
I have invested years of as scientific a study as I have been able to make in understanding the role of deception in human society. The biology of deception is quite curious.
I observe that any person who has been, and remains, deceived, is necessarily not consciously aware of being deceived, and this is so merely because being consciously aware of being deceived is indistinguishable from being not-deceived. Deception, including self-deception, in order to persist, needs to be unconscious.
So I have learned.
“Deception, including self-deception, in order to persist, needs to be unconscious.”
Brian,
I quite agree with the above, as well as your characterization of much of current physician training. This applies very much to the specialization that has taken place in the field. Many specialists in a given area have little remembrance of their initial training when it comes to areas outside their specialty.
At one point suffering from Cardio-Myopathy I was being treated by a Cardiologist with excellent credentials. Around that time my Internist, during a routine yearly sonogram of my body detected that I had a diseased Gall
Bladder that needed to be removed. I went to a surgeon who concurred with the need to remove it and he scheduled me for a Laporoscopic surgery. As a matter of routine he contacted my Cardiologist who was enraged that I had scheduled the surgery before contacting him. He told me that because of my heart condition such a surgery would kill me. I said to him that I had been told that if my gall bladder wasn’t removed that would kill me too. I told him he needed to speak directly to my surgeon to understand what was at stake and what were the dangers. Two hours later my Cardiologist called back apologetically and began to describe the dangers to me from a diseased gall bladder. His description was in the exact words I had on my PC at the WEB.MD site and I suspected he was reading it from there. He gave his approval, but with the proviso I stay overnight in the Cardiac Intensive Care Ward.
I came through the surgery in less than two hours, had a quick recovery from the sedation and was pain free. My vitals were fine and my EKG was normal. Because of my Cardiologist saving face though, I had to stay overnight in the CIC. The night nurse making rounds came to my bed happy and grinning. When I asked him why he told me: “You’ll be my easiest patient tonight, no one can even understand why they didn’t let you go home after the operation”. When I went home the next day I fired my Cardiologist and found a new one.
That Cardiologist after six months told me that the condition I had was going to deteriorate and not get better. No other Cardiologist that I had, had been that truthful with me. He advised me to get on the Heart Transplant waiting list. four months later I was accepted on the list. My condition deteriorated rapidly after that, with many hospitalizations and me on the verge of death. Four months after being placed on the list I received a heart transplant.
Doctors today are over-specialized to the point of having their vision of the patient before them limited. It is therefore easy to see how someone like Congressman Broun can be an MD and yet be so ignorant. I pity those who were his patients.
It’s amazing to think that this man is not only a member of Congress but has a M.D., but knows so little about science. Not only are scientists wrong, but they are stating lies from the pitt of hell? I would call this the rantings of some homeless guy on a corner, but that wouldn’t be fair to homeless guys.
Perhaps “his views” are more a reflection of his constituents (=alternate reality types, I assume? Ditto for Romney, below), and therefore Broun is just playing a game for votes? Just like Romney is now doing by his recently revamped views on “the issues.”