Tea Party people are very conservative. They also claim to be very religious. The question I have is whether they are very intelligent. Several of the Republican candidates for president, including Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann, reject the Darwinian theory of evolution. They do this primarily on religious grounds. They tend toward the creationist theory that God created all living things just as they are. Also, despite the overwehlming weight of scientific evidence, they reject the current theory of global warming. It is kind of scary to think that one of these ignoramuses could become president of the United States.
The distinguished British biologist and author, Richard Dawkins, wrote about the ignorance of Rick Perry as follows:
"There is nothing unusual about Governor Rick Perry. Uneducated fools can be found in every country and every period of history, and they are not unknown
in high office. What is unusual about today’s Republican party (I disavow
the ridiculous ‘GOP’ nickname, because the party of Lincoln and Theodore
Roosevelt has lately forfeited all claim to be considered ‘grand’) is this:
In any other party and in any other country, an individual may occasionally
rise to the top in spite of being an uneducated ignoramus. In today’s
Republican Party ‘in spite of’ is not the phrase we need. Ignorance and lack
of education are positive qualifications, bordering on obligatory.
Intellect, knowledge and linguistic mastery are mistrusted by Republican
voters, who, when choosing a president, would apparently prefer someone like
themselves over someone actually qualified for the job."
The advent of "Uneducated fools" in the ranks of the Republican Party is explained by the general level of ignorance to be found in its Tea Party base. The people who make up the Tea Party fanatics are, for the most part, a highly uneducated group who resent the high education of President Obama and those around him. The fact is that Liberals and athiests are better educated and brighter than conservatives and religious believers.
It seems from all the studies done of the relative intelligence of conservatives and liberals, and of religious believers and atheists, that on the average liberals are more intelligent than conservatives, (George Will may or may not be an exception to the rule), and atheists are more intelligent than religious believers. Aside from the overwhelming weight of intelligence studies, the difference in intelligence between these groups is encountered on a daily basis. Have you ever noticed that the most educated people you know and meet are usually liberal and non-religious? The corollary of this is that the most conservative and religious people you know and meet are usually less well educated. One need only look at the high percentage of liberals and atheists among scientists, collage professors, and members of other educated professions.
I will not waste a lot of time defining the terms liberal, conservative, and atheist. But when I speak of somebody being “religious,” I am not talking about being spiritual, holy, or pious. By the term “religious” I mean the Tea Party type of people such as “Born-Again” Christians, Evangelicals, Pentecostals, and outspoken bible-thumping members of the so-called Religious Right who claim to be religious.
There have been a number of studies looking at whether liberals and atheists are more intelligent than conservatives and religious types. One is the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (or Add Health). The other is the General Social Survey (GSS). Both studies demonstrated that liberals are more intelligent than conservatives. The Add Health study shows that the mean IQ of adolescents who identify themselves as "very liberal" is 106, compared with a mean IQ of 95 for those calling themselves "very conservative." The Add Health study also found that there was a correlation between religion and intelligence. Non-religious people tended to be more intelligent than religious believers. The Add Health study is statistically significant because more than 20,000 young people were surveyed.
Researcher, Satoshi Kanazawa, of the London School of Economics and Political Science, has written a paper in which he quotes from the Add Health Survey along with other sources. He finds that more-intelligent people are more likely to describe themselves as liberal and non-religious. In another study, a British team found that young people with higher intelligence scores were more likely to grow into adults who vote for Liberal Democrats.
In 2008, intelligence researcher Helmuth Nyborg examined whether IQ relates to religion, using representative data from the Add Health and other studies. His results, published in the scientific journal "Intelligence," demonstrated that on average, Atheists scored 5.89 IQ points higher than religious types. These findings are supported by many other studies including the study by Lazar Stankova of the National Institute of Education in Singapore, the 1975 study by Norman Poythress, using SAT scores as a measure of intelligence, and others.
You need only look at the levels of education for media conservatives like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Sean Hannity, and compare them with those for liberals like Anderson Cooper, Keith Olberman, Bill Maher, and Rachel Maddow. Whereas Limbaugh, Beck, and Hannity never graduated from college (Limbaugh flunked-out), Anderson Cooper graduated from Yale, Keith Olberman and Bill Maher both graduated from Cornell, and Rachel Maddow obtained a doctoral degree from Oxford University in England.
The question is: Does this make any difference? I say yes. We obviously want our political leaders to be highly intelligent and well-educated. We have a president who graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School. He is surrounded by some of the most brilliant and highly educated people ever to work in the White House. Some of his Republican Tea Party opponents, however, seem to occupy the opposite end of the educational spectrum. Rick Perry of Texas, who graduated from Texas A&M with a 2.22 GPA in Animal Science, has been described as “intellectually challenged.” One Republican strategist says that Perry “benefits from an uncluttered mind.” Look at the educational credentials of Sarah Palin, the Right-Wing’s poster girl for dimwittedness. Michele Bachmann, who graduated from that distinguished center of learning, Winona State University, and got a Law degree at Oral Roberts University, displays her lack of knowledge with repeated and sometimes hilarious gaffs.
Liberals tend to be far more accepting of the findings of science than Tea Party types. Liberals accept the firmly established Darwinian theory of evolution, the science of global warming, and the burgeoning developments of stem cell research. Tea Party people embrace the pseudo-science of Creationism, deny the overwhelming evidence of global warming, and would stop stem-cell research in its tracks.
But even if liberals and atheists are smarter, are they any better people than Tea Party conservatives and religious believers? I say yes. Despite their claim for patriotism, piety, and purity, Tea Party types are often narrow, bigoted, hypocritical, and mean-spirited. They tend to despise minorities, poor people, gays, immigrants, non-Christians, and others. Liberals and Atheists tend to be more open-minded about the differences between people, and more accepting.
Theoretically, religion is supposed to make people better, kinder toward their fellow man, full of love and generosity. This is just not the case with Tea Party types. They tend to be small-minded, envious, and angry. While Christ spoke of charity toward the poor, Tea Party people deeply resent the aid that government gives poor and minority people. They are very judgmental toward poor people, asserting that such people are lazy parasites on the state. Instead of Christian charity, they seem to have a coldness if not repugnance toward the less fortunate.
The following by Paul Krugman is also very pertinent to this issue:
"Within the G.O.P., willful ignorance has become a litmus test for candidates...So it’s now highly likely that the presidential candidate of one of our two major political parties will either be a man who believes what he wants to believe, even in the teeth of scientific evidence, or a man who pretends to believe whatever he thinks the party’s base wants him to believe. And the deepening anti-intellectualism of the political right, both within and beyond the G.O.P., extends far beyond the issue of climate change."
I believe that when all things are added up, liberals and atheists are not only smarter than Tea Party types, but also better, more decent people. In many ways, they follow the teachings of Jesus better than the Tea Partiers.
Saturday, August 27, 2011
Friday, August 5, 2011
TEA PARTY PEOPLE ARE NOT TERRORISTS
Tea Party people are not terrorists, they are something else. The terrorist charge has been leveled at them because so many were willing to vote against raising the debt limit. While it is true that failure to raise the debt limit would have caused a default on our national obligations, the Tea Party people didn’t fully realize the catastrophe that would ensue. No, their motivation was not to bring-on another giant recession. It was simply to cut future spending.
In a recent poll, three-quarters of Tea Party supporters said that they opposed any rise in the debt limit because they were more concerned that raising the debt ceiling would “lead to higher government spending and make the national debt bigger.” It didn’t matter to them that in return for a rise in the debt limit the Republican leadership would be able to get trillions of dollars of spending cuts.
What those Tea Party supporters didn’t seem to know was that a rise in the debt limit was needed not to pay for future spending, but to pay for obligations already incurred by the United States government. Those Tea Partiers were not worried about a default on our nation’s debt, or the economic catastrophe predicted by leading economists, because they thought that failure to raise the debt limit would simply make the President cut-back on future spending. They had no understanding how the economics of government works, and they didn’t want to hear the facts.
The problem with the Tea Party is not terrorism. It is ignorance. Those people in the Tea Party who opposed any rise in the debt limit, even if it was matched by spending cuts, were acting out of ignorance. They didn’t understand why it was necessary to raise the debt ceiling.
In addition, I believe that they were acting out of bigotry toward a president who presents a combination that they hate—he is biracial and highly educated. In an interview on Fox News, Bill O’Reilly asked the President why so many people hated him. Obama politely answered that people don’t know him, and that if they did they would not necessarily feel so much hostility. I think that we should face the real truth. Right-wing people hate President Obama because he is an educated black man and he makes them feel inferior. Most of the white Tea Party supporters have spent their lives holding strong feelings of bigotry toward African Americans and other people of color. Even though they may themselves have been poorly educated, they have always assumed that Blacks are mentally inferior to whites. While most of them would not admit to such bigotry, and would not only deny their racial hate but point to all the nice Black people who are their friends, underneath it all they are repelled by Blacks.
To Tea Party bigots, President Obama is the worst possible kind of president. He is not only a liberal, but he is black. He graduated from Harvard Law School magna cum laude. He taught constitutional law in Chicago. He speaks with the assurance of a highly intelligent and cultivated person. The Tea Party whites look at him on television and realize that this Black man is far more educated, far more sophisticated, far more articulate then they are. They assume that he will want not only to help poor people, but also that he will do everything he can to spend tax dollars helping Black people.
I believe that a major motivation of Tea Partiers is anger, resentment, and jealousy at liberals who are more educated than they are. One Tea Party congressman who had never been to collage made that clear when he complained that a rise in the debt limit would simply mean more money for Pell Grants so that people like the Barack Obama could go to college and get educated by liberals. Tea Party types hate white liberals because they believe that liberals want to spend governmental money to help improve the status of poor people, particularly African Americans. They look upon Blacks as inferior people who are lazy and dishonest. They resent the idea of spending their tax money to support African Americans. They hate paying taxes, and the use of tax money to support people they despise is intolerable.
When Tea Party people look at liberal spokesmen on television, they realize that those liberals are almost always better educated and better informed than they are. They also realize that those liberals are better educated and informed than the conservative spokesmen found on radio talk shows and Fox News. They call the liberal media the “elite” media because of the greater level of education of liberal media journalists. I once wrote a column for the newspaper in which I pointed out the difference in education between conservatives like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Sean Hannity, and liberals like Anderson Cooper, Keith Olberman, Bill Maher, and Rachel Maddow. Whereas Limbaugh, Beck, and Hannity never graduated from college, Anderson Cooper graduated from Yale, Keith Olberman and Bill Maher both graduated from Cornell, and Rachel Maddow obtained a doctoral degree from Oxford University in England. When one compares the educational accomplishments of Tea Party Congressmen with those of liberal Democrats in Congress, the difference is astounding. Liberals, on average, are far more educated than Tea Partiers.
I am convinced that much of the evil in American politics is due to the ignorance of far-right-wing Tea Party types. A good example was presented in a recent newspaper article in Dayton, Ohio, where a local school board member, who is also the head of the local Tea Party cell, called for the teaching of creationism in schools. It is frightening that someone in a position to influence the teaching of children is so fundamentally stupid. This woman demonstrated ignorance on several levels. First, she showed that she was unaware of the law in America. Creationism (and its ugly sister “Intelligent Design”) has been declared by the courts to be a religious and not scientific theory and has been banned in every case. In Edwards v. Aguillard (1987), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a Louisiana law requiring that creationism be taught in public schools, along with evolution, was unconstitutional because the law was specifically intended to advance a particular religion.
In addition, the board member demonstrated the kind of ignorance about science common among Tea Party people. Evolution is an established scientific fact, not just a theory. It has been proven in thousands of scientific studies published in thousands of scientific papers in hundreds of prestigious scientific publications. Creationism is a wacky non-scientific theory that has religion as its base and no legitimate science to support it. The simple-minded people who believe in it are religious zealots who have no real understanding of science.
So the main characteristic of people in the Tea Party is not terrorism. They do not want to blow-up federal buildings. They want only to stop all social programs that give tax money to poor and minority people. Their main characteristic is not terror, it is ignorance combined with bigotry.
In a recent poll, three-quarters of Tea Party supporters said that they opposed any rise in the debt limit because they were more concerned that raising the debt ceiling would “lead to higher government spending and make the national debt bigger.” It didn’t matter to them that in return for a rise in the debt limit the Republican leadership would be able to get trillions of dollars of spending cuts.
What those Tea Party supporters didn’t seem to know was that a rise in the debt limit was needed not to pay for future spending, but to pay for obligations already incurred by the United States government. Those Tea Partiers were not worried about a default on our nation’s debt, or the economic catastrophe predicted by leading economists, because they thought that failure to raise the debt limit would simply make the President cut-back on future spending. They had no understanding how the economics of government works, and they didn’t want to hear the facts.
The problem with the Tea Party is not terrorism. It is ignorance. Those people in the Tea Party who opposed any rise in the debt limit, even if it was matched by spending cuts, were acting out of ignorance. They didn’t understand why it was necessary to raise the debt ceiling.
In addition, I believe that they were acting out of bigotry toward a president who presents a combination that they hate—he is biracial and highly educated. In an interview on Fox News, Bill O’Reilly asked the President why so many people hated him. Obama politely answered that people don’t know him, and that if they did they would not necessarily feel so much hostility. I think that we should face the real truth. Right-wing people hate President Obama because he is an educated black man and he makes them feel inferior. Most of the white Tea Party supporters have spent their lives holding strong feelings of bigotry toward African Americans and other people of color. Even though they may themselves have been poorly educated, they have always assumed that Blacks are mentally inferior to whites. While most of them would not admit to such bigotry, and would not only deny their racial hate but point to all the nice Black people who are their friends, underneath it all they are repelled by Blacks.
To Tea Party bigots, President Obama is the worst possible kind of president. He is not only a liberal, but he is black. He graduated from Harvard Law School magna cum laude. He taught constitutional law in Chicago. He speaks with the assurance of a highly intelligent and cultivated person. The Tea Party whites look at him on television and realize that this Black man is far more educated, far more sophisticated, far more articulate then they are. They assume that he will want not only to help poor people, but also that he will do everything he can to spend tax dollars helping Black people.
I believe that a major motivation of Tea Partiers is anger, resentment, and jealousy at liberals who are more educated than they are. One Tea Party congressman who had never been to collage made that clear when he complained that a rise in the debt limit would simply mean more money for Pell Grants so that people like the Barack Obama could go to college and get educated by liberals. Tea Party types hate white liberals because they believe that liberals want to spend governmental money to help improve the status of poor people, particularly African Americans. They look upon Blacks as inferior people who are lazy and dishonest. They resent the idea of spending their tax money to support African Americans. They hate paying taxes, and the use of tax money to support people they despise is intolerable.
When Tea Party people look at liberal spokesmen on television, they realize that those liberals are almost always better educated and better informed than they are. They also realize that those liberals are better educated and informed than the conservative spokesmen found on radio talk shows and Fox News. They call the liberal media the “elite” media because of the greater level of education of liberal media journalists. I once wrote a column for the newspaper in which I pointed out the difference in education between conservatives like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Sean Hannity, and liberals like Anderson Cooper, Keith Olberman, Bill Maher, and Rachel Maddow. Whereas Limbaugh, Beck, and Hannity never graduated from college, Anderson Cooper graduated from Yale, Keith Olberman and Bill Maher both graduated from Cornell, and Rachel Maddow obtained a doctoral degree from Oxford University in England. When one compares the educational accomplishments of Tea Party Congressmen with those of liberal Democrats in Congress, the difference is astounding. Liberals, on average, are far more educated than Tea Partiers.
I am convinced that much of the evil in American politics is due to the ignorance of far-right-wing Tea Party types. A good example was presented in a recent newspaper article in Dayton, Ohio, where a local school board member, who is also the head of the local Tea Party cell, called for the teaching of creationism in schools. It is frightening that someone in a position to influence the teaching of children is so fundamentally stupid. This woman demonstrated ignorance on several levels. First, she showed that she was unaware of the law in America. Creationism (and its ugly sister “Intelligent Design”) has been declared by the courts to be a religious and not scientific theory and has been banned in every case. In Edwards v. Aguillard (1987), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a Louisiana law requiring that creationism be taught in public schools, along with evolution, was unconstitutional because the law was specifically intended to advance a particular religion.
In addition, the board member demonstrated the kind of ignorance about science common among Tea Party people. Evolution is an established scientific fact, not just a theory. It has been proven in thousands of scientific studies published in thousands of scientific papers in hundreds of prestigious scientific publications. Creationism is a wacky non-scientific theory that has religion as its base and no legitimate science to support it. The simple-minded people who believe in it are religious zealots who have no real understanding of science.
So the main characteristic of people in the Tea Party is not terrorism. They do not want to blow-up federal buildings. They want only to stop all social programs that give tax money to poor and minority people. Their main characteristic is not terror, it is ignorance combined with bigotry.
Thursday, August 4, 2011
Warren Jeffs Rapist
A court in Texas has convicted Warren Jeffs of sexual molestation of two young girls. One was age 12 when she was married to Jeffs. The other was 14. Apparently the evidence against Jeffs included a tape recording of Jeffs talking to the young girl during the rape. I am told that the jury cried when it heard the slender tiny voice of this girl. When Jeffs asked during the sex act her how she was, she said she was okay. Jeffs said the pain would mean that she was going to heaven. The jury will now have the option of sending this miserable scoundrel to Hell. Now the law enforcement officials in Texas should prosecute every man and woman in that cult who had anything to do with the rape of young girls.
If the many witnesses who have spoken about the cult are to be believed, these child-brides become part of harems for church elders who eject young men from the sect so that they will not have any competition for the young girls’ attention. The wives and children of these men are raised and brainwashed to believe that it is God’s commandment that they surrender their virginity and freedom to older men in order to propagate the sect.
But it is not God’s commandment. It has nothing to do with God. It has nothing to do with religion. It is the raw exercise of power and lust by dirty old men who want to enjoy sex with young virgins. It is rape. History shows that people have always used religion to cloak their nefarious designs. Just as Moslem fanatics use religion to justify their insane attacks against innocent people, men have always used religion to justify the rape of young girls.
I have nothing against these rapists practicing polygamy with adult women if that is what they want to do. My problem is with elders and parents compelling their children to take part in such a sick culture. Most states in the union forbid sex between adults and children under the age of consent. In Texas the age of consent is 17. In most states it is 16. There is a good reason for treating children under 16 or 17 as being unable to consent. Most children under 16 or 17 do not have the fortitude to resist the impositions of adults and do not have sufficient understanding to assent to such impositions. The twisted individuals who prey upon young girls on the internet deserve to have the book simultaneously thrown at them and shoved down their throats.
It does not matter that this form of child-abuse is institutionalized as a religion. They can call it anything they want, but it is nothing more than child molestation. It has been going on for ages and has always been common in primitive societies. In parts of Africa and Asia it has proceeded hand-in-glove with the genital mutilation of young girls. The freedom of women from mistreatment and exploitation is an important part of the story of civilization. We in America may have a long way to go to be thoroughly civilized, but we do not have to tolerate this kind of beastly behavior.
You need only look at the women from this cult to see what damage can be done by brainwashing. They come on television in their grotesque hairdos and pioneer dresses and speak in robotic voices. You could say that they should not be punished because they have obviously been hammered by the abuses of the men of the cult, but they are adults, and however brain-damaged they may be, they are answerable to the law for their transgressions. Any adult that would let her 12-year-old daughter marry a 55-year-old man is a pimp and deserves no sympathy.
It seems apparent that despite denials, the practice of forcing underage girls into polygamous marriages is widespread in the cult. For this reason, the proper thing to do is not only to prosecute all of the men and women in the cult, but also to permanently take all of the children in the sect away from their biological parents. These people look upon the cult as one large “family.” They live communally. The children call all of the women their “mothers” and all of the men their “uncles.” As in any abusive family, when some of the children are being abused the government must take all of the children out of the household.
If the many witnesses who have spoken about the cult are to be believed, these child-brides become part of harems for church elders who eject young men from the sect so that they will not have any competition for the young girls’ attention. The wives and children of these men are raised and brainwashed to believe that it is God’s commandment that they surrender their virginity and freedom to older men in order to propagate the sect.
But it is not God’s commandment. It has nothing to do with God. It has nothing to do with religion. It is the raw exercise of power and lust by dirty old men who want to enjoy sex with young virgins. It is rape. History shows that people have always used religion to cloak their nefarious designs. Just as Moslem fanatics use religion to justify their insane attacks against innocent people, men have always used religion to justify the rape of young girls.
I have nothing against these rapists practicing polygamy with adult women if that is what they want to do. My problem is with elders and parents compelling their children to take part in such a sick culture. Most states in the union forbid sex between adults and children under the age of consent. In Texas the age of consent is 17. In most states it is 16. There is a good reason for treating children under 16 or 17 as being unable to consent. Most children under 16 or 17 do not have the fortitude to resist the impositions of adults and do not have sufficient understanding to assent to such impositions. The twisted individuals who prey upon young girls on the internet deserve to have the book simultaneously thrown at them and shoved down their throats.
It does not matter that this form of child-abuse is institutionalized as a religion. They can call it anything they want, but it is nothing more than child molestation. It has been going on for ages and has always been common in primitive societies. In parts of Africa and Asia it has proceeded hand-in-glove with the genital mutilation of young girls. The freedom of women from mistreatment and exploitation is an important part of the story of civilization. We in America may have a long way to go to be thoroughly civilized, but we do not have to tolerate this kind of beastly behavior.
You need only look at the women from this cult to see what damage can be done by brainwashing. They come on television in their grotesque hairdos and pioneer dresses and speak in robotic voices. You could say that they should not be punished because they have obviously been hammered by the abuses of the men of the cult, but they are adults, and however brain-damaged they may be, they are answerable to the law for their transgressions. Any adult that would let her 12-year-old daughter marry a 55-year-old man is a pimp and deserves no sympathy.
It seems apparent that despite denials, the practice of forcing underage girls into polygamous marriages is widespread in the cult. For this reason, the proper thing to do is not only to prosecute all of the men and women in the cult, but also to permanently take all of the children in the sect away from their biological parents. These people look upon the cult as one large “family.” They live communally. The children call all of the women their “mothers” and all of the men their “uncles.” As in any abusive family, when some of the children are being abused the government must take all of the children out of the household.
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