The Christian Right and the Courts
Re: “The Christian Right’s Destructive Courthouse Moment Has Arrived,” by Robyn E. Blumner (FI, August/September 2020). As Robyn Blumner wrote, Republicans’ packing of federal courts is undoubtedly bad news for secularists. But instead of clenching our teeth and “keeping the faith,” secularists must remember that a progressive Congress and progressive state legislatures can often circumvent SCOTUS’s rulings favoring religion.
Consider federal and state funding for education. By mandating that schools receive funding only if they accept all students—even those with learning and behavioral disabilities—legislators can effectively block funding to most private and religious schools, which lack the facilities and staff (never mind the inclination) to serve this population. At one large Chicago suburban Catholic high school, a principal once told me his high school would never accept “school vouchers” for this reason or because of other “strings” likely attached to the money, such as requiring all teachers and administrators to be state certified or use state approved textbooks. Smaller “Christian” schools would have even more difficulty meeting those funding requirements. I should add that when it comes to “conditions” tied to government funding, SCOTUS has historically ruled them legal so long as these “conditions” are applied to all potential recipients.
Or consider the Hobby Lobby ruling, which can be negated by replacing Obamacare and employer-based insurance with a single payer federal insurance system that offers basic services to everyone, including contraception to all women. It’d be harder to effect than school funding restrictions, but a sizable portion of American citizens—and many progressive legislators—already support this concept.
Again: these types of “circumventions” require that we elect progressive legislative bodies. To ensure their existence beyond November, secularists must not only vote, and work, for progressive candidates but must also work to dismantle the gerrymandering of state and Congressional districts done by Republicans during the past decade (see Salon.com, December 30, 2019) Just as voters did in three states (Utah, Michigan, and Colorado) in 2018, secularists should promote state referenda or constitutional amendments mandating that state and Congressional districts be redrawn by independent nonpartisan commissions after the 2020 census.
Mark Kolsen
Chicago, Illinois
The Supreme Court’s Ruling
Re: “New Supreme Court Ruling Decimates Church-State Separation,” by Paul Fidalgo (FI, August/September 2020). The title of the piece uses the word decimates. To decimate is to reduce by 10 percent (from the Latin). I believe the word he is searching for is devastates (destroy or ruin).
Reed Dallman
Via email
In the August/September 2020 issue of Free Inquiry, Paul Fidalgo has a piece titled “New Supreme Court Ruling Decimates Church-State Separation.” The attack on our secular Constitution, that never mentions God, has been going on for many years by those who believe our country is meant to be a sectarian (Christian) country.
On January 2, 2003, the New York Times published my letter to the editor that briefly stated why tax money should never be given to a church of any denomination. I wrote:
To the Editor:
Your Dec. 30 editorial urging that the courts declare the faith-based initiative unconstitutional says, “The White House claims money will not be used to directly support religious activities.”
Because money is fungible, every federal tax dollar given to a religious group makes a dollar available for that group to proselytize its dogma and to support those politicians who seek to infringe on my civil liberties.
Now that the Supreme Court is willing and able to overturn the Constitutional separation of church and state, we citizens may be paying to have our own beliefs or faiths ignored or superseded. Our only recourse is the ballot box.
Iris Kaufman
Peabody, Massachusetts
Vote, Dammit
I got a bit upset reading Gregory S. Paul’s article “Vote, Dammit!” (FI, August/September 2020). I think that the historical perspective needs to be given and a criticism of the article. What raised my hackles is: “It is part of the culture of the Left, in which voting is often seen as the nerdy, boring, establishment thing to do—compared to, say, street demonstrations that come across as dramatic and hip. (Never mind that if you have demonstrations, it means you do not have actual political power!).”
Let me take these in reverse order. Yes, if you need to demonstrate, you do not have political power. That power lies with the ruling class. That is what political power means. It does not mean that the people are powerless. Demonstrations are a means of demonstrating to that ruling class that there is power in the people, or ruled-over class.
Mr. Paul mentioned the 1960s and the sexual revolution. That did not happen because of the vote. It happened because the masses of people put it to the politicians that it was something to which they had to yield. He did not mention what was to me the bigger demonstrations of the 1960s: the protests against the Vietnam War and the struggle for racial justice and equality. These far overshadowed to sexual movement in size, power, and number of people in the streets. Those in political power yielded on these in the face of revolution. It was people in the streets demonstrating that got their attention and not the vote. McCarthy, a “peace candidate” did not win the election; Richard Nixon did. And it was Nixon who finally knuckled under and got us out of Vietnam.
Fast forward a few years to recent history. I recall recently there was something called “the Arab Spring.” Many politically established Arab governments were overthrown, and not by their often disenfranchised population but by huge demonstrations. In Korea, not too long after that, millions of people ousted the politically elected president of that country. They did not vote her out. They demonstrated her out. Even more recently, in Puerto Rico, a government was turned out—and not by vote. It was by mass demonstrations of people.
I think that I would like Mr. Paul to provide one example of when those in political power changed for something progressive by voting it into place without there being masses of people demanding that progressive change.
And, yes, the Left fairly disparages voting, but not because it is nerdy, boring, or the establishment thing to do. They don’t vote because of that same history. Our elected politicians got out of Vietnam and then got into a series of skirmishes until we got a real war, then two. And we are now working to get into two more (Iran and North Korea). Blacks won some rights and equality. Now any cop can strangle or shoot one in public and get off scot free. That is unless there are huge demonstrations, and I mean huge nationwide demonstrations. Ditto the sexual revolution; we are now faced with a battering ram on the wall of separation of church and state, with women’s bodies in the front of that battering ram.
The lesson here is that voting alone will not change political power. Political power will resist giving up power until they can crush it, as Trump is trying to do in Portland, Washington, and threatening in Detroit and Chicago. Ameliorate it and then chisel it back over time, or until it is completely overthrown and replaced.
Yes, vote and vote often. I would not discourage voting, especially in this election, but Trump has made enough statements that he will not accept the election results if he loses and that he may postpone (or, as some fear, cancel, the elections). But let us not delude ourselves that casting a ballot vote will change political power.
W. C. “Rusty” Lyon
Katy, Texas
I want to agree with Gregory S. Paul that we must vote! It can be hard because for maybe fifty-plus years the Republicans have been fielding horrible candidates and the Democratic candidates were often not much better.
The big shots in the parties seem to see it as the goal to elect them. But I want goals like liberty and justice for all. From this should flow everything good: economic justice, environmental protection, low prison populations, no laissez-faire capitalism, standard of integrity to include corporations, including churches, police, government.
Also—presidents! Trump is not the only bad; he just seems to be the summary of horribles! Most have done some good but some bad. The office probably magnifies both. But I am unaware of Mr. Unmentionable having done any good. Tell me if you can.
Karen J. Littlejohn
Santa Barbara, California
Formal Complaint
Re: “Republicans Are Hazardous to Your Health,” by S. T. Joshi (FI, August/September 2020). I wish to register a formal complaint concerning S. T. Joshi’s articles appearing in the Op-Eds section of Free Inquiry, such as the one that appeared in the August/September 2020 issue. He should be required to have an Op-Ed article in every issue of Free Inquiry. I still miss the days of the American Rationalist.
Larry E. Farr
Via email
Woman’s Suffrage
In “What Can Historic Sites Tell Us about the Movement for Woman Suffrage in New York State?”(FI, August/September 2020), Judith Wellman quotes the motto of the nineteenth-century antislavery newspaper the North Star:”Right is of no sex. Truth is of no color.” (Actually the full slogan was ”Right is of no Sex—Truth is of no Color—God is the Father of us all, and all we are Brethren,” but three out of four ain’t bad). Would any progressive American publication dare to put “Truth is of no color” on its masthead in 2020? Given the reaction to those who, for whatever reason, have the temerity to suggest that all lives matter, I doubt it. I do know of one magazine that affirms “We attempt to transcend the divisive parochial loyalties based on race, religion, gender, nationality, creed, class, sexual orientation, or ethnicity,” but it wisely keeps these radical ideas tucked away inside the back cover.
Martin Stubbs
London, United Kingdom
Having just finished reading the series of articles inspired by the 100th anniversary of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment giving White women the right to vote (FI, August/September 2020), I was struck by the fact that there was no article about the fact that by this time, most western states had already endorsed women’s right to vote, Wyoming being the first. Most of the articles focused on the importance of the movement in New York and New England, one noting that “New York State became the first state east of the Mississippi to approve votes for women.” It raises the obvious question regarding this geographic pattern. At the time that western states approved women’s right to vote, men outnumbered women by a ratio of about 2 to 1. It was clearly not the result of having a majority of women; it had to be credited to men. Why were western men so much more willing to support women’s suffrage than eastern men? There are many books about western women being a very strong bunch, but they alone could not have achieved this goal without the votes of the men. So why don’t I do an article on this subject? I am an eighty-seven-year-old retired economist who grew up in the west, but I just fell and broke my hip so I am spending most of my time just staying alive. I hope this might inspire some younger person to take on this task.
Jim Murray
Green Valley, Arizona
Human Exceptionalism
John Prittie’s “Life Exceptionalism vs. the Chemical Machine” (FI, August/September 2020) states the difficulty facing evolution acceptance. The idea of chemistry going on “all by itself” for billions of years producing all of life’s variety is challenging. He states his worry that even the “godless” might have difficulty with the idea. I’ll attempt to address his concern based on my experience teaching about evolution to nonscience students. I cannot say if my approach helped them accept evolution, but they became more receptive to thinking about “godless” explanations.
Briefly: initial information was based on similarities between science and religion. Increased non-emotional discussion then became possible the further our examination went into the ever-diverging explanations for “life” between science and religion. Science was defined as a way of knowing (“SAWOK”: John A. Moore)—for comparison to religion’s “way of knowing.” The initial declaration that both ways of knowing told “stories” produced a unanimous class “Yes.” This approach had my answer, “because it can,” become more acceptable for science’s findings—such as spontaneous production of membrane-enclosed liquids even as divergence increased between evidence versus faith-based explanations (comparable to Prittie’s “all by itself”). This was most significant when reaching the level of the cell.
This basic unit of matter defines life as an emergent property due only to increased cellular complexity and nothing else. Student denial of such processes was greatly reduced using similar but everyday examples: the individual soldier placed into units of increasing numbers (squad, company, division, army). Properties not present in the soldier, e.g., specialized division of labor, etc., just emerge. Prittie’s salt example is an excellent case of an object having totally different properties emerging not present in its component parts.
My compliments to Prittie for his article. It would have proved useful had it been available when I was teaching.
Ted Lopushinsky
Haslett, Michigan
John Prittie is certainly correct when he argues that life is a system of chemical reactions and that there is no supernatural “life force” that keeps it going. But I think his argument would be more persuasive if he explained that life is a complex system of self-perpetuating chemical reactions that produce self-replicating biological structures such as DNA. His argument would be somewhat weakened, however, if he added that science does not yet understand how these self-perpetuating reactions and self-replicating structures got started. Admitting that would open the way for those Christian apologists who invoke the “god of the gaps” to claim that supernatural intervention was what got life started.
In addition, I think Prittie’s argument would be more plausible if he explained that neurologically complex animals are to some extent self-directed, even though neurological processes are themselves essentially chemical reactions.
Homer E. Price
Sylva, North Carolina
In his article “Life Exceptionalism vs. the Chemical Machine,” John L. Prittie seems unable to decide whether life is exceptional or not.
At one point he writes that “all things bright and beautiful are nothing more than a complicated, ongoing chemical reaction,” and a few paragraphs later he says that “life is, inarguably, an essence that transcends the chemicals from which it is made.” You can’t have it both ways.
Life exceptionalism is not particularly a supernatural view of life. In one sense, supernaturalism makes everything exceptional, living and nonliving. God made them all, as the creationists like to say. In the supernatural point of view, rabbits are no more exceptional than rocks.
And that’s the problem with supernaturalism. It doesn’t distinguish between living and nonliving things. In Christianity and some other religions, only human life is exceptional. Humans have a soul; animals do not. That means you can go to heaven, but you can’t take your dog with you.
The word exceptional is a fine word, and it shouldn’t be vulgarized by mixing it with supernaturalism. Life can be both a marvelously exceptional phenomenon and a complicated chemical reaction.
Too often other forms of life are not given their due because they are not recognized as being exceptional. Descartes saw them as mere machines incapable of even feeling pain, and even today we still treat animals as if they were little more than machines.
How can we look out on this immense lifeless universe and not see life on our little planet as being exceptional? How can we think the life on this planet is not worth saving? How can we keep pushing it into extinction?
Seeing life as exceptional predisposes us to value other forms of life. It may not save our souls, but it may help us save the planet.
Richard Weber
Ellis, Kansas
Camus and COVID-19
Re: “The Pandemic and Camus’s Plague,” by Lou Matz (FI, August/September 2020). The Camus novel describes and evaluates causative theories of a (hypothetical) plague and the virtues and follies of the psychological and behavioral reactions to it—governed by the points of view of individual characters in the novel, notably a Catholic priest and an atheist. The narrator, who is a physician, struggles to apply his Hippocratic ethics to this public health scourge.
Professor Matz advises us to fight the current worldwide COVID-19 plague with knowledge, diligence, compassion, and humility. Such advice requires awareness of another ethical folly, intellectual smugness. The virus presents many scientific unknowns. Our experts have been more often wrong than right, although we are gaining an emerging understanding of its epidemiology. The severe health and economic consequences of COVID-19 are affecting so many people worldwide. This is no time for petty politics of good guys and bad guys. When public health is wedded to political power and political correctness, government-imposed lock downs and quarantines assure scapegoating and social ostracism (or worse) for “nonbelievers.”
Lee Beecher, MD
Maple Grove, Minnesota
The two items appearing in the August/September 2020 edition of Free Inquiry regarding Bela Bartok were wonderful. Dale DeBakcsy needs to be brought up to speed regarding the use of semi-tones in minor-keyed music. The intervals he described occur between the second and third and fifth and sixth tones of those scales. The harmonic form of minor scales utilizes an augmented second interval between the sixth and seventh scale degrees. That happens to be a very characteristic component of Jewish music. No doubt you’ll have astute readers pointing these details out. The correct title of a piece he cited is Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta. He may have confused Concerto for Orchestra by way of misnomer. My attention to that work occurred when I moved away from home to pursue musical studies and was treated to the wonderful section featuring a brass chorale. As I was just beginning to enjoy the freedom of liberation from enforced church attendance, my response to that section was “Good! I don’t need to go to church this Sunday!” And then there’s the ever-so-entertaining section of the sixth string quartet, which reminds me of music most suited to accompany a chorus line of camels bobbing about.
Alan Maximuk
Ames, Iowa
Though I keenly enjoyed Dale DeBakcsy’s “Singing the Universe Tragic: The Life and Music of Bela Bartok” (FI, August/September 2020), I’m obliged to address a couple of misconceptions. First, “the greatest composers were firmly harnessed to the task of employing the massive machinery of compositional technique to extol the greatness of whatever version of the Judeo-Christian god was in at the moment.” The composers were harnessed to the need to make a living, as the church was one of the few employers of musicians at the time. The magnificat, mass and requiem are genres of music like the string quartet or piano concerto and give no indication of their creators’ belief systems. For instance, I’m as thoroughgoing a nonbeliever as any, yet I’ve written pieces titled “Magnificat” and “Requiem.”
The other misunderstanding assumes a connection between Bartok’s liberation from traditional religion and his expansion of conventional musical practice (both laudable). At least two counterexamples come to mind right away. Sir Charles Parry (1848–1918) was so committed to freethought that he composed six “ethical cantatas” as alternatives to the oratorios of his day, while Olivier Messiaen (1908–1992), a much more radical composer, remained deeply wedded to Catholic dogma.
I do wish to thank Mr. DeBakcsy for the informative and fascinating excerpt from Bartok’s Letters, and to apologize for not answering his “Great Minds” column at the greater length it deserves.
Joseph Alan Laibman
Ann Arbor, Michigan
The God Question
“God? Good Question!” is a four-page book review by Jamieson Spencer in the August/September 2020 issue that describes William Irwin’s book, which sounds like a dud to me. I found the article generally condescending toward atheists and biased in favor of traditional attitudes about God. Apparently, Irwin argues for the “special value of doubt,” where answers to the questions of this God’s existence “are temporary, and questions are forever.” It seems to me that when doubt arises, it means you are a believer but aren’t certain about details. Most atheists I know, including myself, are no longer doubting faith in the details; we have given up the whole story as baseless at best and probably absurd. Our atheism is not temporary, and rarely do we continue to ask those questions, because we have either settled on clear answers or decided that they are impossible to ever answer with certainty. Call me close-minded or lacking “philosophical curiosity,” but besides religion, I am confident in my knowledge of math, business accounting, the fundamental principles of physics, and that magic is really trickery. I am not continually asking questions about the validity of those, either. I have no “temptation to believe” in religions based on translations of ancient writings about extraordinary events simply because ministers and priests with fraudulent motives insist that they have a special God-given understanding. I guess I lack humility and am “too certain.”
Spencer suggests that we “practice tolerance,” but of what? In a country where Christians are aggressively taking over our government, I for one have had enough of tolerating their delusions. It is deceptive to imply that prayer changes “the person for the world,” as though by some act of God. If you need to find “peace, love, pardon, faith, hope, light, and joy,” I suggest you spend more time with friends and family, as well as in solitude meditating on your thoughts—without trying to connect with any supernatural being. Finally, Irwin says that truth lies “somewhere in between the majority and minority views,” but the search for truth is not a democracy.
Ron Herman
Albuquerque, NM