ARE MEMBERS OF THE TEA PARTY INTELLIGENT?

Tea Party people are very conservative. They also claim to be very religious. The question I have is whether they are very intelligent. It seems from all the studies that have been 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, 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 uneducated. 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, Bill Maher, and Rachel Maddow. Whereas Limbaugh, Beck, and Hannity never graduated from college (Limbaugh flunked-out), Anderson Cooper graduated from Yale, Bill Maher 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. Look at the educational credentials of Sarah Palin, the Right-Wing’s poster girl for dimwittedness. She thought that being able to see Russia from her home in Alaska gave her credibility in foreign affairs. 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. 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.”

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 repugnance toward the less fortunate.

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 Party people.

CREATIONISM

           It has been reported that the Springboro Ohio school board is considering including the theory of Creationism in the teaching of controversial issues to public school students. They would attempt to get around the court's ban on such teaching by saying they were merely including it in the discussion of controversial ideas, and not promulgating it as accepted science. It is an underhanded way to try to introduce religious teaching into the schools. Creationism is a purely religious theory. It has nothing to do with science.

           Creationism, and its offshoot, "Intelligent Design" (ID), are theories that attempt to refute Darwin’s doctrine of evolution by natural selection. Natural selection is a scientific fact that has been proven and accepted by established science. It has become the central organizing principle of modern biology. ID advocates claim that modern species, including humans, did not result from evolution as described in Darwin’s theory. Rather,they were created from the design of an “intelligent” designer (namely God).

ID proponents claim that Darwin’s theory of evolution is atheistic. However, Pope John Paul II declared that the theory was compatible with faith. On Darwin’s birthday, ministers at several hundred churches around the country preached against recent efforts to undermine the theory of evolution, asserting that the opposition many Christians say exists between science and faith is false.

Some Creationist proponents have tried to introduce a “Critical Analysis” template for teaching evolution in Ohio schools. This alerted scientists that evangelical and fundamentalist Christians were still trying to sneak “Intelligent Design” into the schools. Because the courts have forbidden the teaching of Creationism, a purely religious theory, Creationist advocates have come up with the tactic called “teach the controversy.” The idea is to get teachers and students to debate and challenge Darwinian Evolution and thereby slip Creationism in the back door. 

The first problem with Creationism and ID is that they are not scientific doctrines. They are not backed-up by any serious scientific research. They do not publish credible scientific papers or submit to the kind of scientific verification employed for every legitimate branch of science. Creationism is a religious theory promoted by Christian evangelicals and fundamentalists.

            The second problem, one that does not get much attention, is that ID and Creationism are blatantly, obviously, palpably false. They are so self-evidently absurd that one wonders how even uneducated Christians can believe them to be true. They are obviously the product of a culture that embraces ignorance..

            Proponents of Creationism cannot accept the idea that human beings evolved from “lower” animals. They insist that humans must have been designed by God. But I ask, if God designed human beings, how does one explain the mistakes of nature? Why do the bones of our back and the musculature of our bellies display the vestiges of quadrupedal life? Why do we have a vermiform appendix which we do not need or use? Why do men have nipples? Why do humans have a shortened tail called the “coccyx”? Why is the human throat designed with the windpipe (trachea) coming off the food pipe (esophagus) so that swallowing impedes breathing (and vice versa) with a constant risk of choking? Why do we have wisdom teeth?

There are thousands of mistakes in nature. These are just a few examples of oddities that can easily be explained by Darwin’s theory of evolution but cannot be explained if God was the designer. All of these peculiarities are vestiges of our earlier existence as and development from “lower” species of animals (they are not really lower, just different).

The structure of all living things is defined by the DNA molecule and the genes. According to ID proponents, the intelligent designer designed those molecules and genes. One has to ask, therefore, whether God designed the genes which cause the genetic diseases and defects with which so many babies are born. Does God design the genetic infirmities of children born deaf, dumb, blind, mentally deficient, or horribly deformed? Does God design babies born without arms and legs and babies born with conjoined heads or bodies? What about the many babies born with spina bifida or congenital heart defects?

Does God design Lesch-Nyhan Syndrome? It is a genetic disease in which children are born with the compulsion to bite their lips, tongues, cheeks, fingers, and any body parts they can eat. They bite off everything in their oral cavities and assume gruesome corpse-like appearances.  They die while very young of kidney failure.

Does God design Tay-Sachs, a genetic disease in which babies gradually lose their abilities to see, hear, and move?  They develop seizures, become completely immobile, and die by age 5. 

These genetic defects can be explained by evolution, but cannot be explained by the design of an “infinitely loving,” “omnipotent,” “omniscient” God.

Creationist advocates argue that certain things are too irreducibly complex to have developed by natural selection. They claim that the human eye could not have developed by pure accident. It had to be designed by God. But if God designed the human eye, how do we explain its opacity, its want of symmetry, its color blindness to parts of the spectrum, its need for glasses and optical instruments? Why are there so many eye defects such as macular degeneration? Scientists know that the inefficient eyes we now have evolved from eyes that were even less efficient. A number of animals, including eagles, falcons, buzzards and octopuses have better eyes than we do.

It would be a strange theory indeed to claim that the creator of the universe designed human beings but made a lot of mistakes. Do Creationist and ID proponents expect us to believe that their “designer” is not an omnipotent, infinitely loving God, but some sloppy, incompetent bumbler, or worse, some cruel and evil demon? Give me a break!

            

RAND PAUL AND LIBERTARIANISM

       In this season when Republicans are looking for some alternative to the traditional Republican candidates for president, the name of Senator Rand Paul, (R. Ky.), has arisen. He describes himself as a “Libertarian,” but examination of his positions makes him sound more like a classic conservative. As the son of Ron Paul, you have to be aware that he has been subjected to a great deal of Libertarian influence. Ron Paul was a candidate for president on the Libertarian Party ticket in 1988.

In spite of fact that some libertarians oppose drug laws and other laws, one should not confuse libertarianism with liberalism or with the ideology of the American Civil Liberties Union. Libertarians also oppose gun control, social programs, and most regulation of business. Rand Paul opposes same-sex marriage and the right to choose abortion.

It is difficult to describe the philosophy of Libertarianism because there are a number of different types of libertarians. Most libertarians believe that any restraint of liberty by government is improper, illegal, and unconstitutional. Libertarians believe in an absolute right to private property and that the owner of private property cannot be forced by government to in any way relinquish total control over that property.

That idea of economic liberty is reflected in the Libertarian Party Platform which states: “We oppose all controls on wages, prices, rents, profits, production, and interest rates. We advocate the repeal of all laws banning or restricting the advertising of prices, products, or services. We oppose all violations of the right to private property, liberty of contract, and freedom of trade.”

Unlike conservative Republicans who would reduce taxes, the Libertarian Party Platform says: “We call for the repeal of the income tax, the abolishment (Sic) of the Internal Revenue Service and all federal programs and services not required under the U.S. Constitution.”

Although Ronald Reagan made libertarian noises when he declared that “Government is the problem, not the solution,” he did nothing to dismantle the elaborate structure of the federal government that had grown-up over the decades. Conservative Republicans like to proclaim the virtues of smaller government, but during the eight years of Bush rule they did nothing to advance that idea.

One source of libertarian ideas is the philosophy of the late novelist, playwright, and screen-writer, Ayn Rand (pronounced ‘ain ‘raend), born in Russia under the name Alisa Rosenbaum. She wrote several novels, including “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead.” Rand Paul’s original name was Randal, but his wife changed it to Rand, no doubt in memory of the Ayn Rand. I read Ayn Rand's books many years ago and found them to be mediocre literature and sophomoric philosophy--a judgment shared by most literary critics. Unfortunately for Libertarians, Ayn Rand was not a very profound thinker. I found her to be shallow and, at times, silly.

Many college students are impressed by Ayn Rand’s political views which emphasize independence (from parents?), individual rights, limited government, and laissez-faire capitalism. One biographer recently dubbed her books: “part of the underground curriculum of American adolescence.” In her novels, the heroes, such as John Galt and Howard Roark, are independent-minded capitalists fighting against insipid, weak-kneed do-gooders. Nevertheless, western civilization has long recognized altruism, selflessness, and charity as noble qualities that enrich society and separate us from the animals.

On the theory that government is the problem and not the solution, Libertarians would abolish many of the programs that define American civilization. Although Rand Paul does not propose all of the steps supported by Libertarians, it is worthwhile knowing what they are. Libertarians would eradicate Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. They would block our current efforts to reduce global warming, reform health care, and regulate the food, pharmaceutical, energy, and other industries. They seem to be saying that government has no role in the advancement of human welfare or the alleviation of human suffering.

They oppose laws regulating the usury of payday loan and credit card companies. They oppose laws against false advertising. They oppose antitrust laws and laws controlling the prices that may be charged by public utilities. They oppose federal regulation of commerce, agriculture, labor, energy, housing, urban development, the environment, trade, health, transportation, and the airways.

They would, no doubt, abolish the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Reserve Bank, the Federal Trade Commission, and all other governmental agencies that control the marketplace. They believe, as Michael Douglas said in the movie “Wall Street,” that “Greed is good.” They think that by doing away with all governmental regulatory agencies, they would free superior men to act creatively in the marketplace. Perhaps so, but they would also free the likes of Bernard Madoff, Michael Milkin, Ivan Boesky, Kenneth Kozlowski, Charles Keating, Bernard Ebbers, and R. Allen Stanford to engage in massive fraud, Ponzi schemes, pyramid schemes, and insider trading. To the Libertarian laissez faire capitalists, it is buyer beware no matter how crooked the seller.

There is an essential and dangerous error at the core of Libertarian philosophy.

They assume that if brilliant men are left alone to pursue their goals, they will accomplish great things and, in the process, benefit mankind. I recognize that great men have produced great advances in industry, and that they have often produced great wealth and jobs. However, there is a downside to the strivings of powerful men. Such men have often used their power to aggrandize themselves at the expense of their fellow men. They have promoted their commerce at the expense of slave labor, exploitation of workers, devastation of the environment, destruction of competition, and the promotion of dangerous, unsafe, and poisonous products.

            I suppose that if you do not believe in altruism, you would have had no problem operating the IG Farben plant at Auschwitz concentration camp. IG Farben built a factory (named Buna Chemical Plant) for producing synthetic oil and rubber (from coal) in Auschwitz during the Nazi Holocaust. At its peak in 1944, this factory made use of 83,000 slave laborers. Many thousands of those laborers were annihilated in the gas chambers and ovens of Auschwitz. Someone with altruism, like Oskar Schindler, might have tried to ameliorate the conditions of those murdered masses, but not some laissez faire capitalist seeking only profit.

There are two sides to mankind. We are capable of great goodness and generosity as well as great evil. Government exists to promote civilization. Without government, we would have no civilization. Life would be as it was before civilization, when the condition of man was, as Thomas Hobbs described it: “A condition of war of everyone against everyone” and life was “Nasty, brutish, and short.”

           

           

Easter and Human Sacrifice

Today we celebrate the return of Jesus from a death ordered by God as a human sacrifice.

The holiday was named “Easter” after Eostre, the Saxon goddess whose feast was celebrated at the Spring equinox.

Ancient people would not be surprised at our celebration of the resurrection of a living god at this time of year. The death and resurrection of gods was a well known scenario in ancient myth. The death and resurrection of the Roman god Attis was celebrated on March 25^th. Attis was the son of Cyble, known as “The Great Mother,” whose worship was introduced into Rome from the Phrygia (in today’s Turkey) around 204 BC.

The Greek god Dionysus was killed by his enemies and died. He descended into Hades and arose again from the dead. He ascended into heaven and sits at the right hand of Zeus.  His festival was celebrated in the Spring around the time that we now celebrate Easter. Other gods and goddesses who died and arose again from the dead before the birth of Jesus are Adonis, Mithras, Persephone, Semele, Heracles (or Herakles), Osirus, Tammuz, Ishtar, and Melqart.

            Christians today believe that Jesus is the omnipotent and everlasting god who created the universe. The Catholic Church and others believe that as the “Son of God,” Jesus is a manifestation of God himself through the Holy Trinity. The idea of a holy trinity did not originate with the Christians. Hundreds of years before the birth of Jesus, the Egyptian goddess Isis was worshiped along with her consort, Sarapis, and their child Harpocrates (Horus), as members of a Holy Trinity.

            The central belief of Christianity is that Jesus was a human sacrifice for mankind. Somehow, Christians have accepted this teaching from an ancient, barbaric time, and still believe it today. They believe that Man committed something called “Original Sin” and that the only way he could achieve salvation from original and other sins was by means of a human sacrifice. They believe that the almighty and eternal God, who is a merciful, loving, and forgiving God, could be appeased only by this hideous and grisly torture and lynching of a human being. Because an ordinary human sacrifice would not be sufficient, the Son of God had to come down to Earth to be the sacrificial victim. He had to be scourged, driven to Golgotha under the weight of the cross, nailed to the cross, pierced with a spear, and slowly suffocated in terrible pain until he bled to death. Crucifixion was one of the most horrible forms of execution ever devised.

            Human sacrifice was an integral part of much early worship of the gods. Today many religions still use an altar, but the first altars were used to sacrifice human and animal victims. References in literature to the sacrifice of human individuals harks back to the days when this was a routine and deeply reverent practice. In the story of the Trojan War, Agamemnon tells his wife to prepare his daughter for her marriage. He then takes her to the shore and sacrifices her to the gods in order to obtain favorable winds for his trip to Troy. You can be sure that the story is not pure whimsy. Human sacrifice was well known in ancient Greece, as it was in Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, Canaan, and Israel. At the time of Jesus, human sacrifice was a recent memory.

It is clear that back in the early history of the Israelites, human sacrifice was customary. Consider the stories of Abraham and Isaac in Genesis 22:1-19,  Japhthah and his daughter in Judges 11:30-31, King Ahaz and his son in 2 Chronicles 28:3, and King Manasseh and his son in 2 Chronicles 33:6. Later in their history, the Israelites turned away from human sacrifice and declared it an abomination.

Nevertheless, the New Testament repeatedly refers to the idea that Jesus was a sacrifice for Mankind. For example, John 1:29, “Behold the Lamb of God who taketh away the sins of the World;” John 2:2, “He is propitiation for the sins of the world;” Matthew 20, “Á ransom for many;” Matthew 26:28, “This is my blood of the New Testament which is shed for many for the remission of sins;” Hebrews 9:23-28, “Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many;” (See also Philippians 2:17, 4:18; Romans 12:1, 15:16; 1Peter 1:18-19, 2:5; Ephesians 1:7; and Titus 2:14).  

            The dogma that Jesus was crucified as a form of atonement for Man’s sins did not become established as a doctrine of the very early Church until the fourth century AD. Saint Augustine (354-430), who laid down many of the Church doctrines, including the doctrine of atonement, said that man was doomed to Hell until Jesus redeemed him. He regarded Jesus’ sacrifice “Not as payment of a debt due to God, but as an act of justice to the Devil in discharge of his fair and lawful claims.”

            Like many other aspects of Christianity, the idea of propitiating god with a human sacrifice, and even having the god himself be the sacrificial victim, was not new when the Church dreamed up this explanation of Jesus’ crucifixion. It was borrowed from old pagan myths. I have mentioned the human sacrifices carried out by early Israelites. The Canaanites sacrificed to the gods, and the prophets inveighed against the sacrificing of Canaanite children to Moloch (See Samuel 17:17; Jeremiah 7:31; Ezekiel 16:20, 20:26).   

            In Egypt, the priests performed human sacrifice when the Pharaoh died. The Pharaoh was believed to be a god. His family and servants were buried alive with him. Eventually the priests started substituting animals, dolls and other forms of art for living victims. In ancient Mesopotamia archaeologists have found the tombs of kings with entire households that were buried alive when the king was interred.

            In India, it was the custom to perform human sacrifice in order to guarantee a good harvest and appease the gods. The victim was believed to be the god sacrificing himself, in the form of a man, to himself as a god. The ancient Khonds of India believed that their sacrificial victim died for all mankind and became a god.

            The ancient Greeks sacrificed a criminal at Rhodes after putting him in royal robes. They did this in memory of the sacrifice by Kronos of his “Only begotten Son.” Themistocles sacrificed Persian youths to Dionysus.

            The feast we celebrate at Easter is nothing more than repetition of barbaric ancient mythological practices that should have died-out with the ancient religions. 

           

Media and Myth

Today’s media are bursting with the latest developments in politics, economics, culture, technology, and science, but in one area they remain stagnated in the Middle Ages. No matter how hard you look, you will rarely find a word in any newspaper, magazine, television, or internet source contesting the widely prevailing and erroneous belief that somehow, out there, there exists an invisible, all-powerful being called “God.” Nobody, from the President on down, dares challenge the taboo against seriously discussing this widespread myth. Even the most sophisticated media outlets dare not expose the fact that the emperor, called “religion,” has no clothes.

I am a retired attorney who practiced in New York and Connecticut for 37 years. My entire life was devoted to the consideration of rational evidence. Every court in America adheres to the proposition that the assertion of any claim requires evidence. There is no place in the legal world where you can claim that someone exists who is invisible. You cannot go before any jury and claim that it ought to accept your argument on faith. You have to come up with the cold, hard, empirical facts or you and your client will be tossed out of court on your collective duffs.

For some reason, when it comes to discussing God, this is not the case in the media and popular culture. It is not only de rigueur today to fully accept the claim that there is an omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good and loving being who tools around in the sky and controls our lives, but it is a violent sin against political correctness and good manners to suggest that this absurd belief is without any foundation.

Every city, town, and village in this land is peppered with churches. A thousand meetings a day are commenced with invocation of a remote deity. Every funeral serves up the comforting pabulum that the deceased is not really dead but has gone to a “better place” (Paris?). We are incessantly assured that despite the conflicting raw evidence of the Holocaust, earthquakes in Haiti, tsunamis in Asia, deadly diseases, the slaughter of 9/11, and the terrible suffering of children everywhere, “God loves us.” We are perpetually advised to pray to this aloof and detached spirit despite the fact that in thousands of years there has never been a scintilla of solid evidence that the divinity has ever answered a single prayer.

Much of organized religion today surrounds itself with medieval rites and trappings calculated to inspire awe and mystery. Many less ostentatious groups, such as Protestants, practice ancient rites of healing, speaking in tongues, and the singing of sacred hymns. Connected to all of this there is a considerable amount of baloney and angling for money. The faithful seem numb to the fraud and deceit inherent in these activities.

Why are the media unable to confront this subject with rational discourse? Why do they shun it like the Swine Flu? Is it because they are afraid of losing customers and advertisers? Is it because they are afraid of offending the hierarchy of the various organized sects and denominations? Do they fear retaliation from conservative politicians? Are they afraid of the millions of ordinary citizens who have invested so much emotional capital in these fairy tales?

Perhaps it would not be a good thing to open up these sources of comfort and consolation to critical examination. Perhaps people should be left alone with their delusions about God, saints, angels, devils, and a moral law based on the word of the Almighty. But I ask, is it moral and proper to go on promulgating a false myth just because it is widely accepted?

The mathematician, William K. Clifford, put it well when he said: “It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.” To Clifford, the life of the man who suppresses doubts and avoids inquiry about questions which might disturb belief is “one long sin against mankind.”

Muslim Rage

Although I realize that there was more to the Muslim protests of a trashy American Film than mere humiliation over religious blasphemy, I think that commentators may have missed one important element in the violent demonstrations which have engulfed the Middle East. That element is ignorance. I believe that the vast majority of the people demonstrating out on the streets were too ignorant to understand that this film was the work of a small group of anti-Muslims living in the U.S. and that the United States Government and the American People had nothing to do with it. Moreover, they are too ignorant to understand the American dedication to free speech and the inability of our government, under the First Amendment, to punish the makers of this garbage.

I have no doubt that the people who are stoking this conflagration are not so stupid. They recognize that the majority of the people on the streets do not have the intelligence to make the fine distinctions necessary to see the film as the work of a tiny group of outsiders. They see it as an opportunity to heighten the level of anti-Americanism and anti-western hatred. The head of Hezbollah called on all Muslims to protest the film and demonstrate against America. While he may be feeding into a lot of other issues that motivate Islamic mobs to hate America, he is also feeding into profound mob ignorance.

Let’s face it. Although there is plenty of ignorance among the ordinary citizens of America and most western countries, and although any mob is almost by definition ignorant, the ignorance of western mobs is nothing to compare with the ignorance of the Muslim mobs. Centuries ago the West began to outpace the Middle East in industry, education, arts, sciences and civilization. It is one of the things that rankles the Muslims. They envy and resent that fact that in almost every field of endeavor the western countries have vastly outdone them. They see the prosperity of the western world and its adherence to Christianity and secular thinking as a rebuke to and humiliation of the Muslim religion. They feel that this superiority of western civilization is a new type of Crusade, and they call the western nations “Crusaders.”

This backwardness and lower civilization is not shared by the Middle East country of Israel. Israel is populated by people, or their descendents, who came from northern civilized countries. With the exception of a minority of ultra orthodox Jews, their religion, Judaism, does not have the same kind of anger and paranoia found with the Muslims.

Because Muslims resent the great advantages western countries have over the Middle East, they turn to their religion as a consolation. They believe not only that theirs is the true religion, but also that adherence to this religion makes them superior to western believers in other religions. Thus, their religion makes-up for their feelings of inferiority when confronting the West. Their religion gives them a special place that more than compensates for their backwardness in most other areas. Any western attack on their religion, particularly by means of comedy or satire, is an attack against their whole system of self-respect.

This is not an uncommon phenomenon. People all over the world use religion to overcome the many disadvantages that would otherwise give them feelings of inferiority. Even in the United States you will find that people of the lowest income groups and social class cling to religion as the one thing that compensates for their low status.

I do not know the whole reason why the West outpaced the Middle East in all aspects of civilization, but I have no doubt that the Muslim religion bears a large part of the blame. In its more orthodox aspects it is a highly restricting religion. As practiced by Muslims all over the world, particularly the Taliban when they controlled Afghanistan and by the people in Saudi Arabia today, it is a deadening religion that does nothing to encourage innovation and freedom of thought. It is a religion that teaches men to treat women as lesser beings, that makes women wear unattractive clothing, that forbids women to do many things allowed in the West, and that punishes them severely for infractions of these many restraints.

What is it that makes Muslim mobs so ignorant? Why are they incapable of the kind of peaceful demonstrations found in western countries? I believe that it is accounted for by the lower level of civilization found in the Middle East. I have come to believe that the critical moral element in the world is civilization. I believe that the ethical and moral content of most human actions is largely governed by the amount of civilization achieved by the actor, his group, his society, and his nation. Although most people in the world share certain moral values, the extent to which those values are practiced depends largely on the level of civilization present in the actor and his fellow actors.

To give one example: During the protests in Egypt that unseated President Mubarak, Lara Logan, an attractive newswoman for CBS, was covering the protests in Tharir Square, Cairo. Somehow she got surrounded by men. These men proceeded to attack and sexually assault her. She was saved only when a group of Moslem women came to her aid. Thus, Moslem men, whose religion is very strict about sex, had no problem with gang-rape of a female reporter in a public place.

Now try to imagine this happening during a demonstration in New York, or Washington, or London, or Paris. It couldn’t. The reason that it could happen in Egypt, and not in a western country is simply that the people of Egypt are less civilized than the people of those western nations. It is not difficult to imagine such an attack taking place in other cities of the Middle East or Africa, but it is impossible to imagine it happening in America, or Canada, or any western European country.

Why do Muslims in the Middle East resort to violence when confronted by blasphemy of their religion? Why were there no such demonstrations in the United States when an artist exhibited a piece called “Piss Christ” in which he had a crucifix standing in what he claimed to be his own urine? Why have there not been violent demonstrations against many other blasphemous works of art, literature, and film in the West? The answer is that the West is simply far more civilized than the Middle East.

To a large extent, civilization is and has always been geographical. The most religious, backward, uncivilized countries are in the southern parts of the world. Africa, the Middle East, India, Southeastern Asia, and South America are all far less civilized than Northern Europe, Japan, Canada, and the United States. Even within countries, the geographical distribution of the population helps explain different levels of civilization.

The southern states in America, where slavery prevailed until eliminated by the Civil War, are less civilized than the northern states. This kind of dichotomy is found in large countries throughout the world. One of the factors indicating lower civilization is religion. The people of the Middle East are more attached to their religion than are the people of the more secular West. When you look at the countries of Scandinavia, you notice a far higher percentage of the people are atheists. Those countries have the highest levels of civilization. People demonstrating on their streets are far less likely to be violent than the people in the Middle East. I do not know the full explanation for this difference, but I am certain that the lower civilization, the religion, and the ignorance of the people of the Middle East helps explain the stupidity of their demonstrations against a low budget, anti-Islamic movie.

Romney and Jobs

Jobs, jobs, jobs--the Republicans have made jobs the central issue in this campaign. Their claim is that President Obama has not done the things needed to improve the economy and create more jobs. In their effort to make Mitt Romney appear to be the businessman capable of bringing real expertise to the economy and creating job growth, they deliberately obscure the facts

The first obscured fact is that when President Obama took office the country was in a terrible recession and millions of jobs had been lost. That recession continued after he was inaugurated, but the recession eventually ended and the economy began to turn around. Through stimulus and bailouts the President has helped add over 4.5 million jobs to the economy. His actions have saved the American automobile industry and the millions of jobs connected to that industry. It is an industry that Romney would have allowed to expire in bankruptcy. The President’s actions have also saved many US banks from going under. Many people criticize the bank bailout, but without it we would probably have gone into a deep depression.

Most people fail to realize what effect the President’s stimulus and bailouts had upon the economy. The Republicans point to the fact that the stimulus did not create the millions of jobs necessary to make-up for the huge loss of jobs during the recession. That is because those programs represented a finger in the dyke that prevented a nightmare collapse of our entire economy. Matt Bai of The New York Times put it this way: “Obama’s first remedy of choice, the stimulus package worth more than $800 billion, remains unpopular. This is partly because three years later the stimulus doesn’t really seem to have stimulated much real growth. But it’s also because a lot of the short-term assistance that came to states during that time wasn’t really visible to the public; it was used to maintain existing commitments to social programs and capital projects, the kinds of things that would have been noticed only had they suddenly disappeared — which could well have happened without federal intervention. According to figures kept by the administration, Ohio received some $3.5 billion in additional Medicaid payments, and more than 860,000 residents received expanded unemployment benefits. In addition, Ohio claimed about $8.8 billion for other projects, including public school systems, roadwork and police departments. It stands to reason that Ohioans, who make up about 4 percent of the country, received about that proportion of nearly $540 billion in tax breaks and income subsidies. If the Recovery Act didn’t turn things around in Ohio, it surely kept things from getting markedly worse.”

Bai went on to describe the effect of the auto bailout: “We can’t know how many new jobs would never have existed if not for the auto bailout, but it’s beside the point. What’s more relevant, and all but impossible to calculate, is how many previously existing jobs would have disappeared in Ohio had at least two of the three major American automakers gone under. The Council of Economic Advisers under George W. Bush, who undertook the first federal intervention in the industry back in 2008, estimated (probably conservatively) that a million American jobs would be vulnerable, most of them in the Midwest. Obama’s advisers during the auto crisis privately discussed the possibility of a ‘Lehman risk’ if they stood by while the auto companies tanked — in other words, a sudden collapse of the automakers might cause a catastrophic failure of the entire industrial sector, just as the dissolution of Lehman Brothers sunk the financial markets.”

The economy has continued to grow. The fact that growth has been slower than desired can be attributed to many factors, not least of which is the opposition by congressional Republicans to any bill or program that would stimulate the economy and add jobs. In September 2011, President Obama submitted to Congress his jobs bill, the "American Jobs Act of 2011." It is a bill that economists say would create millions of jobs and stimulate the economy. You would think that the second it was introduced the Republicans in Congress would, out of love of country and concern for the lives of working Americans, have supported and enacted it even if they had doubts as to its effectiveness. But no, they blocked the bill and prevented its enactment.

Perhaps in this political world I am being too dramatic when I describe this opposition to any program for job enhancement as cold-hearted and un-American. But think of the robust hypocrisy of Republicans speaking out of one side of their mouths about the need to create jobs while preventing any progress on the jobs bill. How do the millions of unemployed people out there benefit from the obduracy of the Republicans in Congress? It seems that in their zeal to prevent President Obama from being reelected, they have decided that it is in their interest to prevent the economy from rebounding and to prevent the jobs picture from improving. This is a callous abandonment of those millions of people suffering from lack of jobs.

Mitt Romney has put-out a jobs plan which we must assume he would enact if elected president. The question is whether this plan would bring-about the huge increase in jobs necessary to overcome the current stagnation. Keep in mind that in the American Jobs Act of 2011, the President aims to create jobs now, not somewhere down the road. The Act would invest billions in infrastructure, hire more state and local workers, double the size of the payroll tax cut, and add a new set of tax cuts for small businesses and companies that hire new employees. If the Act had been passed back in September 2011, there would, by now, be many thousands of those jobs in evidence. Instead, because of Republican opposition, there is nothing.

Economists have stated that President Obama’s jobs plan is far better than Romney’s. This is because Obama aims to create jobs now. Romney aims to improve the economy so that jobs will be available somewhere in the future. Romney’s plan calls for negotiating trade agreements with Latin America, confronting China’s trade policies, rewriting a new corporate tax code, expanding domestic energy production, building the Keystone pipeline, and cutting taxes on billionaires. While some of these programs might help create jobs in the future, each would take a long time to have a serious effect on the national jobs situation.

In a recent statement  by Romney, you get a taste of his plan to delay immproving the jobs situation and try to upgrade the economy instead : "My campaign is about helping people take more responsibility and becoming employed again, particularly those who don't have work," he said. "His (Obama's) whole campaign is based on getting people jobs again, putting people back to work. This is ultimately a question about direction for the country. Do you believe in a government-centered society that provides more and more benefits or do you believe instead in a free enterprise society where people are able to pursue their dreams?"


So the real jobs candidate is not Mitt Romney. It is President Obama. All Mitt Romney and his party have to do is pass the American Jobs Act of 2011 and get people back to work. Then, once we have a jobs bill in action, the Republicans can sit down with the Democrats and work to enact some of the ideas put forward by Romney.