Abortion Arguments

Shadia Drury (“A Pagan Approach to the Abortion Debacle,” FI, December 2021/January 2022) seems to think that the U.S. Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade based on some abstract “right to choose” and that Ruth Bader Ginsburg objected to Roe v. Wade “because no one can claim a right to choose what so many fellow citizens believe is iniquitous.” Instead—according to Drury—Ginsburg thought that Roe should have been grounded in the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. If the Fourteenth Amendment had been used, “The court could have gradually undermined abortion laws in concert with the evolving sentiments of society, instead of imposing a new order by legal fiat.”

Drury is totally confused about Roe, as well as Ginsburg’s objection to it. First, since 1973—and as Ginsburg undoubtedly knew—American public opinion has consistently approved of abortion in some circumstances (approximately 55 percent) or all circumstances (about 25 percent). Only 20 percent of Americans—not the majority implied by Drury—have believed abortion is “iniquitous.” Second, the court’s Roe v. Wade decision was based on the Fourteenth Amendment and the court’s (tortured) logic that the amendment’s due process clause grants women a “right to privacy” (a right that includes a right to choose an abortion). Ginsburg had no problem with this rationale (she signed the opinion!) and in fact intended to use it in the Susan Struck (Struck v. Secretary of Defense) case, which would have preempted Roe had the government not decided to drop its case against Struck. Ginsburg merely wished that the court’s decision had given more emphasis to the “equal protection,” which the Fourteenth Amendment offered both men and women.

Ginsburg’s real objection to Roe was that the court had overreached and should merely have overturned Texas’s antiabortion statute; instead, the court ignited public conflict by establishing a national standard. She thought that the court’s far-reaching decision would backfire and slowly erode the American public’s acceptance of abortion. Since 1973, public-opinion polls have instead shown that the court’s “legal fiat” solidified American approval of abortion and that Ginsburg’s prediction was incorrect.

Mark Kolsen

Chicago, Illinois

Shadia Drury’s op-ed on abortion  (“A Pagan Approach to the Abortion Debacle,” FI, December 2021/January 2022) is a model of clarity and passion, as her columns usually are. But I have to disagree with her on one point. The prohibitions on abortion and contraception are not divinely ordained; they are not to be found anywhere in the Bible. They were chosen as political issues by the Christian nationalists because of their consequences. One is that they are ideally suited to create moral fervor among a religious constituency; another is that they would restore patriarchy, which is the overarching goal of conservative Christians today. Making abortion and contraception inaccessible would confine women to the home again, preferably as wives, each raising a passel of children for her husband and rendering her dependent on him and reinforcing his role as head of the household.

Homer Price

Sylva, North Carolina

Our Future

Ophelia Benson’s heartbreaking op-ed (“Is There a Future?,” FI, December 2021/January 2022) on what appears to be a bleak future concluded with her hope for a technological solution to climate change. There is one, and it’s rather potent.

Benson had earlier listed industries that would not allow government action to curtail pollution, listing the automobile industry as one. This industry actually has a near-perfect technological fix. Electric cars, trucks, and SUVs powered with clean electricity eliminate all the CO₂ that contributes to climate change as well as criteria pollutants that contribute to the deaths of over seven million people every year. Batteries are already getting five hundred thousand miles, and million-mile batteries are almost here. Battery recycling has begun with over 95 percent recovery rates reported. It’s been estimated that after thirty to forty years of mining elements for batteries, all subsequent batteries will be made from recycled elements.

We will eliminate virtually all harmful effects of ground transportation when all internal combustion engines (ICE) cease production. The billion and a half existing ICE vehicles will age out over the subsequent ten to fifteen years, essentially as fast as battery factories can be built and elements sourced. To that end, Benchmark Minerals reports over two hundred battery factories are approved or under construction with a combined capacity of some 4.1 TWh. That’s enough batteries to build fifty million electric vehicles per year. Total global production pre-pandemic was ninety million. These factories can be online and ramped to full production by 2030. More factories will follow these.

Governments representing over 60 percent of global vehicle sales have stated they will no longer allow the sale of new ICE vehicles after 2035. Many are stating 2030, and, in the case of Norway, 2025. By the way, Norway reports ICE sales falling off a cliff with only 20 percent of all recent vehicle sales being ICE. They expect the last gas-burning vehicle to be sold this coming April. It seems no one wants to be the last person to buy an obsolete technology.

This is important because auto factories rely on scale to be profitable. There is no room for a small ICE car company when all of Europe, China, and the United States disallow the sale of your product. The entire ICE industry will end no later than 2035, but with effort we can get that date closer to 2030. It’s physically impossible to build enough battery factories and source the elements any earlier than that, but we should push hard to end ICE as soon as is practical.

Many carmakers have already announced they will cease production of ICE no later than 2035. They are not doing this out of love for the environment or a concern about climate change; they are doing it because Tesla is eating their lunch. (Disclosure: I own some shares of TSLA.) In every market Tesla has entered, they dominate. Last month, the Model 3 was the best-selling car of any kind in all of Europe, and all those were imported. Tesla has a massive factory opening in Berlin this month that will saturate Europe with Model 3s and Model Ys. This has spurred Volkswagen, Mercedes, BMW, and Audi to offer electric vehicle selections. The transition is under way and gaining speed, but there are still holdouts, Toyota and Honda being the worst two.

On the political front, the reason we have never been able to pass a carbon tax is because of money from oil, coal, and gas industries supporting conservative members of Congress. As more people go electric, the income of the oil industry will drop. Ground transport is close to 50 percent of the industry’s income, so electrifying transportation will result in a marginalized industry with a diminished ability to throw its weight around Washington and elsewhere. As we decarbonize the grid, the same will happen to coal and gas. With fewer dollars going into their campaigns, these conservatives will lose some elections potentially allowing our side to get control of the government for a long time. That’s when we pass a carbon tax.

Keep in mind that once we end this ICE age, it will never come back. It’s gone forever. And think how satisfying it will be to see all those Trump supporters driving electric vehicles.

Paul Scott

Santa Monica, California

Tributes to Tom Flynn

As an atheist and subscriber to Free Inquiry, I was somewhat familiar with the work of Tom Flynn, though not with all his extraordinary accomplishments in so many fields. But in reading the December 2021/January 2022 issue with a sense of loss about his recent death at an early age, I didn’t know what to make of the parallels in his life and mine—except to find them curious—namely that “In 1980, while living in Milwaukee and researching atheism in the public library, Flynn came upon The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll.” These “bolstered his commitment to atheism and inspired him to activism.” It happens that as a young boy first questioning religion, I turned naturally to the same Milwaukee library and rode home on the bus happily devouring a copy of Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason. As it turned out, there was no Ingersoll listed in the card catalog at the time, though I found other relevant leads in the rather scanty selections on atheism. It wasn’t until I studied at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee that I came upon the complete works of Ingersoll that Flynn, born much later than I, discovered. At any rate, it had the same effect on even my modest efforts as a reporter and editor—and later internet contributor—to advance atheism when I could. But perhaps I can conclude that Milwaukee, with its Germanic Freethinker roots and ongoing tradition of such discussion groups, in which I joined, is a hospitable breeding ground for skepticism.

Mike Zetteler

Milwaukee, Wisconsin

In his 1993 book on Christmas (FI, December 2021/January 2022), Tom Flynn argues that secular humanists shouldn’t need holiday celebrations anymore. But even atheists need breaks from humdrum work that is often less satisfying than Flynn’s own endeavors. And the main social function of holiday celebrations is the reinforcement of family and community ties, on which we are still dependent, regardless of our religion or lack of it.

Alternatively, Flynn suggests elsewhere in the book, in the winter secular humanists should celebrate the modern technological achievements that keep us warm and comfortable instead of ancient holidays that symbolized human powerlessness in the face of gods and nature. Of course, what keeps us warm is mostly the burning of fossil fuels—coal, propane, natural gas, oil, etc.—either in our own homes or on the power plants that generate our electricity. I have the perfect emblem for that secular winter celebration: not a Christmas tree in our living rooms but a miniature oil derrick!

We now know that the fossil fuels that are the source of all that warmth—and our ease of transportation and the cheapness of our industrially produced food—are ruining our climate and our future, as Flynn was well aware when he wrote his last editorial. We are too clever for our own good.

Homer Price

Sylva, North Carolina

Convincing, or Not?

Daniel Bastian provides a series of evidence-based arguments for the nonexistence of God (“What Would Convince You?,” FI, December 2021/January 2022). But by presenting the arguments in the form of “if these were true, they would imply the existence of God,” the question is raised whether the existence of any of these twenty things would actually provide evidence for a god. I claim they don’t—that they are god-of-the-gaps arguments.

To illustrate, let’s start with some logical arguments. First, anything that affects the physical world—provides a measurable and observable effect—is necessarily physical. There isn’t room for the arguments, but all the “omnis” (omnipotent, omniscient, etc.) lead to logical inconsistencies. Any being that is physical and not all-anything doesn’t look much like a god, so that even an entity with extraordinary abilities standing in front of me would not meet the criteria.

Quite a few of Bastian’s examples are essentially miracles that are beyond known physics. It follows, from the physicality of all things, that their existence would imply a lack of completeness of our understanding of physics rather than the existence of a god.

Bastian’s example of divine messages embedded within our mathematical or physical laws is an interesting one. But I, at least, can imagine this being the result of our being in a simulation written by a programmer with a sense of humor. (Our being a simulation wouldn’t negate our existence, and there would still be a physical substrate for the simulation.)

Bastian’s suggestion that holy texts containing scientific truths would be evidence doesn’t acknowledge the possibility of early civilizations or alien influence.

My point is that there are conceivable alternatives to God for all of Bastian’s examples, and they could be gaps in current knowledge rather than evidence of a god.

Charles H. Jones, PhD

Eugene, Oregon

‘Blind’ Faith

Glade Ross’s thoughtful piece on faith (FI, December 2021/January 2022) reminded me of Hebrews 11:1 (attributed to the Apostle Paul but thought by many experts to come from someone else). Having been reared on the King James version, I memorized that as a young boy: “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

Just for the heck of it, I Googled the passage and found a comprehensive list of the wordings from all known translations. Sixty-one of them! Four were the same as the King James version. Others substitute “reality” for “assurance” and/or “proof” for “evidence.” A sampling of the rest include:

Now faith is the assurance (title deed, confirmation) of things hoped for (divinely guaranteed), and the evidence of things not seen [the conviction of their reality—faith comprehends as fact what cannot be experienced by the physical senses].

Now faith is the assurance (the confirmation, the title deed) of the things [we] hope for, being the proof of things [we] do not see and the conviction of their reality [faith perceiving as real fact what is not revealed to the senses].  (Written by lawyers?!)

Trusting is being confident of what we hope for, convinced about things we do not see.

Faith makes us sure of what we hope for and gives us proof of what we cannot see.

Faith is what makes real the things we hope for. It is proof of what we cannot see.

Faith means being sure [the assurance; or the tangible reality; or the sure foundation] of the things we hope for and knowing that something is real even if we do not see it [the conviction/assurance/evidence about things not seen].

Faith means being sure of the things we hope for. And faith means knowing that something is real even if we do not see it.

R. P. Joe Smith

Portland, Oregon

The Eden Two

In R. F. Ilson’s article from the December 2021/January 2022 issue, “The Eden Two Were Innocent” makes the same error that so many Christians do: he takes the Bible too literally. If we accept the fact that the Bible and other scriptures are mythology, that the writers are trying to convey psychological truths and explain in story form events that they were not able to explain scientifically, we cannot be so literal. If we look at the Garden of Eden story, one possible interpretation is that it is telling the story of humanity’s transition from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to a more settled, agricultural lifestyle. Think about it: a sparsely populated Earth with abundant plants and animals for everyone where people didn’t have to work very hard, men and women were fairly equal, and people were less monogamous than today. It has been called “The original affluent society.” Sounds like Paradise!

However, once Eve ate the apple, God told Adam,

“Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and eaten of the tree, of which I commanded you, ‘you shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth to you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of which you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

To Eve he said, “Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you,” plus he made childbirth more painful, which seems less relevant, but still requires an explanation. So in one fell swoop we have agriculture, which is more work and less leisure, weeds, death, monogamy, and sexism. Agriculture entails ownership of land and produces surpluses, which must be guarded, and while before hunting, done mostly by the men, and gathering, mostly by women, were equally valuable, a plow is heavy, and men’s superior strength gives them more power over the process.

There are of course other interpretations, but the main point is that less literal, more mythological interpretations of religious texts defangs and demystifies them, and makes them less dangerous, as we can easily see when we contrast liberal mainstream Christians with more fundamentalist Christians and Islamists. Is that not our project, to make the world less dangerous?

Dan Marshall

Silverdale, Washington