WIP

Salon has a good piece on the Senate hearings cross-examination of John Brennan: How do you explain drone killings? With post-Orwellian newspeak. The excuse that warhawks in the Obama Administration and Republican Neocon defenders give to justify assassination-by-robot is that America is a t war, and engaged in a war with no borders....therefore, drone bombing and any other killings are justified as killing enemy on the battlefield. A constitutional legal scholar....like Barack Obama, before he sold out for the purposes of personal glory and aggrandizement would have made is that this is all war with absolutely no rules of engagement! Since the battlefield can be anywhere and everywhere; there is no end game to the war....it's permanent unless all of the "terrorists" are defeated; it's undeclared war....something earlier U.S. Congresses would have refused funding; and the "enemy" now includes U.S. citizens as well as foreign nationals, who have never had charges against them presented before grand juries -- this can be done whether those charged are in custody or not! They can be charged in abstentia....but it would at least be nice to know what the secret rules are now that can make Americans targets for assassination, since they are now admitting to assassinating Anwar al-Awlaki without showing any evidence that he was directly connected in the operations of Al Qaeda groups...as claimed by Brennan using dodgy double-speak in his testimony. And none of the Senators brought up the issue of Awlaki's 16 year old son, who months before left home to go to Yemen to see his father....who apparently refused because he was already marked for assassination and told to wait with family in the southern part of the country. The son was assassinated along with a number of others in an apparent drone strike that has never been acknowledged by any officials in the U.S. Government! And yet none of the Senators asked about the son or the reasons why he was killed. Previously, Chris Hedges - former N.Y. Times foreign correspondent challenged NDAA legislation in court (google Hedges vs. Obama for some details if needed) asking the simple question:'what in the NDAA language would prevent him...a sharp critic of much of U.S. foreign policy and someone who has met with many organizations in the Middle East and Africa that are now listed as terrorist groups....from being scooped up and indefinitely detained somewhere as an enemy of the state! So, a portion of the NDAA was struck down in a N.Y. court, but is likely to resurface under another disguise. What's sad is that, except for a handful of critics who have to turn to foreign media or fringe media in the U.S., there is no interest in mainstream media or mainstream politics in the U.S. to alert the public as to how far there civil rights have been compromised under the Bush and Obama Administrations. They have almost all their ducks in a row now to use legal authority and military force if needed, to shred any constitutional guarantees for private citizens and throw them in a jail cell (anywhere in the world) without trial for as long as they feel like.

That's a pretty sad way of trying to shift responsibility here! Translation in modern real life would be 'accept your 2nd class or 3rd class status and do not anger your foreign overlords or the dictator they've installed to rule over you. Any resistance will be met with robot bombers from the sky.'

So is walking your girlfriend on a leash degrading them? Yes! Next question please.

And how are you going to set a standard that sentencing and awards to the victim depends on the degree that the victim is traumatized? Did it occur to you that the different reactions of rape victims may be due to personality or cultural issues - especially "slut-shaming" where a lot of young women even today may have internalized the message that they are to blame if they are raped or sexually assaulted. No! That's right. Someone falsely accused, convicted and incarcerated on any charge...it doesn't have to be a false allegation of rape....is going to be traumatized. I'm not questioning that! What I am questioning is this claim that the false accusation of rape is just as damaging as being raped. And what bothers me most about this line of thinking is that making penalties for false accusation more extreme is going to take us back to the good old days when girls who were raped said nothing afterword, because of fear of how their families would react and how their personal lives would be put under the microscope in court. If we add the risk of a long prison sentence if the charges can't be proven, then it's back to the days when girls were mostly paranoid and most guys thought with a few drinks, they could get away with anything because there were no consequences to face afterwards. And that military officer wasn't physically damaged by his false incarceration, as happens to many women during a violent sexual assault. Nor did he become pregnant or contract an STD from that false accusation. So, let's get real here! Loss of honour due to false accusation is serious enough to cause someone to lose hope and commit suicide; but I'm still not going to take your leap of logic that this means a man being falsely accused of rape is equal to a woman being raped! I think this is where a lot of guys have to think a little bit harder and try to put themselves in someone else's shoes and try to understand how the world may look from that pov.....it's usually called empathy, and that's what I'm asking for here, because I usually hear from guys who have little if any concern for these sorts of harassment and public safety issues that women may see as personally threatening or at least limiting their freedom of movement in public.

Says who? When Dawkins was doing the circuit promoting The God Delusion, he was tossing up this line: “Everybody is an atheist in saying that there is a god - from Ra to Shiva - in which he does not believe. All that the serious and objective atheist does is to take the next step and to say that there is just one more god to disbelieve in.”

I consider it to be fraudulent when academics like Pinker use their credentials to mislead the public. Just because you worship this weirdo changes nothing. He is calling these tribes hunter/gatherers, when they do not even fit the modern description, let alone being comparable to true paleolithic hunter/gatherers. And, since rational discussion with you is impossible, I'll just go with my main objection to Pinker's claim of a better and brighter future - the past is not the guide for the future. Especially in our case, since our world is overpopulated, resource-depleted and facing an environmental emergency also. Pinker's books are getting so much attention because they tell so many people a story that they want to hear! Because it tells them that basically what they have been doing so far is good, and with a few bumps along the road, it will lead to a better world. Atheist/humanists who buy this are not a whole lot different than any fundamentalists who've wrapped themselves around The Rapture and similar end time ideologies promising a better life. I prefer to live in the real world, over unfounded optimism that is crumbling all around right now. The future is either a gradual decline or a rapid collapse; not libertarian techno-nirvana.

Are they doing enough? Or are atheists as generous as churches or any religiously-motivated communities? The anecdotes of my own experience certainly didn't convince me. I can agree that there is overwhelming evidence that evidence-based systems are less likely to go to fanatical extremes that can happen with faith-based systems, but I'm not so sure about the generosity question. It seems more likely to me that there are no perfect belief systems, and being religious/non-religious will both have advantages as well as disadvantages. And new atheism ma be putting so much at stake with claims that religions and religious beliefs are harmful on balance.....while living free of religion will make people act better and be happier with their lives.....that the possibility that there may be a down side to atheism is not given consideration. I was wondering about this when I read a blog post last week by Tom Rees at Epiphenomena: Atheists lack empathy and understanding He was examining a study that was trying to delve a little deeper into the findings that autistics are more likely to be atheists, which posited that the autistic's lack of development of a theory of other minds leads towards atheism, whereas most people's hyper ability to see minds in random forces and inanimate objects likely lead to a quick conclusion of minds or gods acting in the natural world. The researchers also noted that autistics have a reduced capacity for empathy because of their problem understanding other minds, and noted that their lack of empathy correlated with lack of belief in God. And if the reverse is true for religious believers, are normal functioning, non-autistic atheists also motivated to some degree by less consideration of other minds and therefore less empathy for others also? Just asking the question seemed to have caused a bit of shit storm in his comments section! So, I have to wonder about how defensive some of his atheist readers are about these sorts of questions. In his TED Talk lecture, Harris is very critical of David Hume for proposing that there is an is/ought problem for anyone trying to facts alone as the basis for determining the best moral choices. And when Harris is proposing using scientific evidence and neuroscience in particular to determine "which values lead to the greatest human wellbeing" he is clearly setting up a moral system based on utilitarianism. And I doubt that there is a scientific way to decide whether utilitarianism is better than virtue ethics or some deontological rule-based system. That's more a matter of esthetics. And even though utilitarian or consequentialist systems are very popular, there are weaknesses. First would be that there is no firm definition for what constitutes wellbeing. There are a lot of people who aren't interested in universal wellbeing in the first place....but just want to work for their own interests or at most the nation or race that they happen to belong to. And, how would we maximize wellbeing? Is maximizing wellbeing just about accumulating as much pleasure and as little pain for the greatest number of people possible? That gets to the question of whether maximizing wellbeing would be the best goal for morality. A few people at least may have noticed that western society is overdosing on pleasure already. Maximizing pleasure....or at least perceived pleasure, seems to play a big role in modern consumer culture that is using up the last of the planet's readily available resources to provide more products to maximize pleasure. That doesn't seem to be the best moral system to maximize long term viability for the human race.

According to Code Pink's website, they had 8 demonstrators at the hearing who were removed and arrested for their protest interrupting the soft ball cross examination of Obama's assassin-in-chief. The audio edition of Democracy Now is one of my podcast subscriptions. After the interview with Medea Benjamin, this segment that included an analysis by Jeremy Scahill focused on so many questions about the Obama Administration's drone assassination strategy that you would think the mainstream media would be all over, you have to conclude that they are avoiding the issue and providing little if no coverage of the hearing with John Brennan, that the unmistakeable conclusion is that their interests are tied to money and power, not informing the public! Aside from the Washington Post, there are no other online news articles from MSM sources I could find! It's mostly fringe and foreign press that have been covering the hearings and the use of drones for targeted assassinations....that include secret rules of engagement that the public isn't allowed to see

Your side is the one with all the money....dirty money from my pov, since if we are able and determined to exploit all of the carbon locked up in the Earth, that will be the end of civilization and likely the extinction of the human race in a couple of centuries. I'm too old to be an Occupier, but I am sympathetic with their cause and Idle No More, so if it seems to you like the entire left is ganging up against you, it's because unless there is more working together by all sides on the left, we are no match for the money and ruthless power on the right.

I didn't want to take up half a page by reposting the image, but I want to say that this is a weak argument against belief in God because it's based on an assumption that the various believers have chosen their God from the menu and are atheists about all other Gods......therefore they are atheists just like atheists who believe in no Gods! I don't see how this argument is going to convince anyone who is not already an atheist (a real atheist) because the theist is not basing that belief on some rational process of examining evidence. On the contrary, it's coming more from an intuitive feeling about the world and feeling that the world must have a purpose and a plan.....and that plan would mean that there must be a super mind or grand architect who built it. So, the believer may argue with some of the believers in other Gods on that list, but they are going to share varying degrees of cameraderie with them and not us because the other believers are going by their gut instincts too, while those snotty, arrogant atheists smirk at them and call them all idiots.....so I would say that the "we're all atheists about most gods" argument isn't going to win them over!

My theory is that it is another projection of authoritarians thinking that liberals are also authoritarian thinkers. Otherwise this gibberish is hard to explain:" What frightens me is that someone (Suzuki, Harper, Savile, Obama) could cultivate such adulation that they could get away with murder. It seems to me that the Left is more inclined to adulate."

Claiming you have evidence that since recorded history violence is on general declining trend IS an extraordinary claim! What else would you call it? Point is that if you claim to have proof for a new theory, you better have overwhelming proof or go home. And Pinker seems to have enough proof to convince some, but as time goes on and the claim is given greater scrutiny, there seem to be many critics who can poke a lot of holes in that theory. Yeah, I got all the time in the world to read every goddamned book with 800 pages! I've heard interviews and read articles that Pinker has written before and after this book, so I have some exposure to his thinking on the subject of human behaviour. Again, you are asking others to prove a negative. Many of the critics of Pinker's book are critics of evolutionary psychology in general....considering it's approach to be a soft science because of the tendency to take present day facts of human behaviour and jump to conclusions that the way things are now are the way things ought to be. But, if Pinker or other evolutionary psychologists have the goods, they should be able to convince others outside of their circle of likeminded humanists. I heard Christopher Ryan doing an interview promoting his book: Sex At Dawn, referring to the anthropology fieldwork he did earlier in his career, make the point that he did not feel that the research he was involved with in the study of the few remaining hunter/gatherer tribes could give him or any other anthropologist a complete understanding of how the ancient hunter/gatherer societies of Pleistocene Era functioned; because they were living under much different conditions than modern tribes who were exposed to "civilization" and facing encroachment on their territories for many centuries from growing agricultural communities cutting off their land and forcing them deeper into forests and uninhabited spaces. Overcrowding, changes in climate, food shortages and droughts, are all conditions that could cause violence to spike and decline when circumstances change; but Pinker's presentation of the hunter/gatherer is too superficial to note these differences. And Ryan also focused specifically on the claims Pinker made about 7 claimed hunter/gatherer tribes, wondering aloud if Pinker was guilty of fraud and using misleading evidence in a review on his TED Talk lecture: Steven Pinker's Stinker on the Origins of War Did Steven Pinker knowingly mislead his audience at TED? But hold on. Take a closer look at that chart. It lists seven "hunter-gatherer" cultures as representative of prehistoric war-related male death............................................ Are these groups representative of our hunter-gatherer ancestors? Not even close. Only one of the seven societies cited by Pinker (the Murngin) even approaches being an immediate-return foraging society (the way Russia is sort of Asian, if you ignore most of its population and history). The Murngin had been living with missionaries, guns, and aluminum powerboats for decades by the time the data Pinker cites were collected in 1975—not exactly prehistoric conditions.* None of the other societies cited by Pinker are immediate-return hunter-gatherers, like our ancestors were.** They cultivate yams, bananas, or sugarcane in village gardens, while raising domesticated pigs, llamas, or chickens.................... When Bible thumpers asked the frequent leading question:where are the missing links? Fossil hunters were quick to point out that finding fossils is like finding a needle in a haystack.....a fossil does not provide a representative sample of an ancient group because they are not a random sample, but fossilized remains preserved by chance while others have decayed and been devoured by predators......so NO, going through an ancient bone collection and looking for evidence of how they died (also difficult to prove) is likely of little use to prove or disprove such a case. No, Gray is making a valid point by questioning how Pinker and other writers seem to be creating a modern day secular myth in their conception of what the Enlightenment was and who its leaders were.

Yes, and I can't recall seeing a media assault intent on discrediting first nations until very recently. Even the Sun newspapers didn't go as far as they are right now. Everything....including the future, will be sacrificed in the interests of expanding tar sands development.

Or they will often do nothing! For all of the problems of religion, it also has be recognized that religions have also developed ways of motivating people to show concern for things other than their own personal interests. One thing that secular humanism seems to have a lot of trouble doing is to motivate people to contribute either time or money to the group. I believe in using facts as a guide too, but Harris is saying something more than using facts as a guide, he is claiming that moral judgments are scientific facts. And if we accept the scientific facts of what we are and how we got here - the long, slow process of natural selection - that process does not have any built in moral values....except in the mind of Christian evolutionists like Francis Collins or Teihard de Chardin. The general consensus is that evolution is emergent and unguided, so that leaves us with a state of metaphysical nihilism. So, how do we make the jump that Harris and Daniel Dennett does in Darwin's Dangerous Idea, that the facts of human evolution can provide some objective moral values for us now? Ultimately that nihilism means that we just have to make choices that are generally accepted as the best choices, and those choices can change depending on cultural circumstances.

I would agree, since small cohesive societies don't provide much of a model to judge how a larger, more fractious society will function under similar circumstances. If I recall, the Swiss are practicing something closer to that 2nd Amendment principle of "a well regulated militia" than the Americans do today, where every nut with no training and no idea how to fire a gun can go out and buy one. Recent Supreme Court decisions (thanks to the new rightwingers on the Court) have interpreted the 2nd Amendment as an individual right (for the first time apparently) and are even challenging individual cities like New York and Washington D.C. who want to restrict handguns within their municipalities. Any U.S. rightwingers and supporters of this sort of freewheeling access to guns may want to google "The Whiskey Rebellion" and observe how George Washington called up a "well regulated militia" to put down a tax revolt in western Pennsylvania.....just a little factoid that Alex Jones fans should know about before they get carried away thinking they are going to use their guns to fight against federal forces! The situation in the U.S. is getting worse all the time. Free and easy access to guns may be a luxury that the U.S. can't afford anymore. Yep. Leaving Detroit might be an easier option! I have to wonder though...how safe is it having a gun when everyone around you is also carrying a gun?

You would think that birth defects this serious would make third trimester abortion a literal no-brainer, but the clueless will continue to march on talking about preserving life. Much of it likely comes out of an inability for most people to deal with death, so life must be preserved at all costs, even if it's not a life worth living.....so, it's the same issue at the other end of life. Anyway, I came across this awhile back - seems Georgetown University has a bioethics high school curriculum guide....it sure would be nice if this was in every high school! On the anencephaly topic, they have two case studies for analysis: 1. In 1992, for example, the parents of an anencephalic baby named Baby Theresa wanted to donate her organs. But the courts?all the way to the Florida Supreme Court?would not declare her dead. She lived for ten days. When she died, her organs could no longer be transplanted. On the day of her death, Baby Theresa's parents and a surgeon appeared on the Phil Donahue Show to talk about the need to change the law, so that organs from infants like Baby Theresa could be made available to others. and 2. Not all parents who have an anencephalic fetus choose abortion. Not all those whose babies are born alive want to donate the organs. Some do not even choose a strategy for caring for the infant that focuses strictly on keeping the baby comfortable while s/he dies. One such parent was the mother of Baby K. She fought the hospital, the doctors, and even the baby's father (to whom she was never married) to continue aggressive treatment for Baby K, despite the futility of the treatment. The fight went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Baby K was born on October 13, 1992, at Fairfax Hospital in Virginia. Her mother knew from the 16th week of her pregnancy that her baby's brain had not developed. But she was adamant that Baby K be kept alive, motivated by a strong religious conviction that "all life is precious" and that God, rather than herself or the doctors or the law, should decide how long the baby would live. Baby K left the hospital when she was seven weeks old. From there, she went to a nursing home (no neonatal intensive care unit?NICU?would accept her). Every time Baby K stopped breathing, her mother would rush her back to Fairfax Hospital to be resuscitated and put on a respirator. Baby K's medical bills ran up to $500,000. She lived longer than most anencephalic babies, but she died of a heart attack when she was 2.5 years old. I read a more detailed article on the Baby K case several years ago. As I recall, the mother was a teenage mom from a devout Catholic family who would not accept any advice to terminate the pregnancy. And even afterwards, when it was obvious that the baby would not live more than a few months, the state of Florida was forced to take on the costs of keeping a deformed baby with no conscious awareness alive as long as possible. No doubt that half a million could have been better spent on other medical cases! And that's why I would even go so far as to say that there may be a few examples where the wishes of the family have to be overruled for the greater good of society.

I saw this article yesterday. I wish it was around 65 pages ago....although that would make no difference to some people. I had already suspected that this funding issue was complicated and convoluted from some other articles I read, but one thing seems clear: if all you know of this issue is one or two factoids offered up by Sun Media, shut the hell up! As for the Sun, National Post, a few other conservative pundits, and I suspect - some powerful business interests intent on creating public hostility to natives for the purpose of making resource extraction easier and quicker.....hope you end up getting the worst of any possible blowback for your evil intentions!

Zero evidence??? First, I would have thought that before we accept a grandiose claim, the person presenting it has to offer overwhelming evidence......extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence....catch the drift? Facts is a pretty loose term when it is taken from historical analysis and meta-analysis of violence statistics from the dawn of our species to the modern era. Gray's point is that Pinker has been selective in who gets included, and who's not on the guest list of his enlightenment club, and I think he has a good point there! I used to take this stuff as a given until I was reading more from Christopher Hitchens and starting to wonder about his ethnocentric use of "enlightenment values" and wondering if these guys are trying to create the secular equivalent to a religion with their reverence for the enlightenment of their imaginations. I've listed reasons why I'm dubious about evolutionary psychology in general, and if guys like Pinker and Shermer....I lumped him in with Pinker because he shares the same libertarian ideology. Maybe it's the comfortable bubble these guys live in in academia, otherwise they would might have reconsidered their "faith" in the market. Shermer also used to be a climate change denier until a few years ago, but he doesn't seem able to reassess the stuff he wrote about the wonders of the market, even as market forces have put civilization at the edge of a cliff today! And that's my main critique of Pinker's hopeful vision -- at best, it's looking in the rearview mirror of history because our future is going to be dystopian whichever way you slice it.

I'm not buying! Evolutionary psychology is more of a pseudoscience than a real science to begin with....mostly they are taking facts of modern day culture and claiming that our evolution makes it inevitable. And Pinker's book has been challenged from a number of sources as poor scholarship, both in building his case of how violent and primal we used to be, and how civilized and peaceful we are now.

You're welcome! But, I should add that the fundamentalist writers rarely criticize the humanist faith in progress because they share that faith....at least when it comes to the advantages offered by technological progress. They are trying to separate the parts they want from science (mostly the technological applications), from the parts that challenge their religious beliefs. In reality, the only aspect of materialism that most Christian fundamentalists reject is the denial of God and a supernatural world. The typical Christian fundamentalist (in North America at least) has become every bit as materialistic, and likely just as hedonistic, as any atheist or lapsed believer is today.

Clown here!.....since you invited a response elsewhere I thought I'd check in and see how things are going with spinning your way out of self-created mess. If I said 'I would rather spend 10 to 15 years in jail rather than be raped' would that be wrong? Not only would "a woman may think differently" a hell of a lot of men would think differently also if that was the choice presented.

Let's set aside violence in modern times for a moment, because I want to focus on that link you provided from the Guardian, because you are not likely going to hear this from any other atheist/humanists....at least here on this forum! First, John Gray points out something that almost all new atheist writers do: using the 'Enlightenment' as their example of the pivotal moment in human history when reason overtook superstition and paved the way forward for potentially unending human progress and improvement. As Gray notes, Pinker, just like Dawkins, Hitchens, A.C. Grayling etc., are very selective in how they cherry-pick their way through the list of so called enlightenment thinkers, in order to create the myth of the birth of humanism: "These are highly disparate thinkers," says Gray, "and it is far from clear that any coherent philosophy could have 'coalesced' from their often incompatible ideas. The difficulty would be magnified if Pinker included Marx, Bakunin and Lenin, who undeniably belong within the extended family of intellectual movements that comprised the Enlightenment, but are left off the list. Like other latter-day partisans of 'Enlightenment values', Pinker prefers to ignore the fact that many Enlightenment thinkers have been doctrinally anti-liberal, while quite a few have favoured the large-scale use of political violence, from the Jacobins who insisted on the necessity of terror during the French revolution, to Engels who welcomed a world war in which the Slavs — 'aborigines in the heart of Europe' — would be wiped out." Gray makes the point that some of these, like the Jacobins, Marx and Bukunin were "illiberal" but I would add that a large part of the reason for their exclusion from Pinker's list is because they are also radical leftists, while today's modern secular humanist movement is tightly constrained between liberalism and libertarianism....so their scorn for the development of capitalism was another reason why Pinker would ignore their contributions. Pinker himself is a libertarian, and being an evolutionary psychologist, he is as prone as the rest in that stream of thought to claim to have evidence for an arc of human progress. We hear the same from Jared Diamond and Michael Shermer (founder of Skeptic Magazine) has also chimed in with his own book "Believing Brains" that includes the claim that the scientific and technological progress of the human race is leading us towards moral perfection. Second point would be: this whole argument is constructed on a flimsy foundation right from the start. The Guardian doesn't go back beyond the Enlightenment, but the claims of Pinker, Diamond, Shermer and others who make this argument, are building it in large part of Jared Dimond's work in New Guinea and the Amazon, where he pretty much claims that primitive hunter/gatherers are all savages, who frequently engage in murder, infanticide, rape etc. Somehow Diamond could work and gather data in the western half of the island of New Guinea - administered by Indonesia, and disregard the impact of genocide and forced colonization by the Indonesians on the natives, which is estimated to have killed 100,000 on that half of the Island. And in the Amazon, a lot of his data was taken from a long discredited anthropologist - Napolean Chagnon, who identified one tribe - the Yanomami as "the fierce people" ....bloodthirsty savages, so to speak, but did not include in his field notes the impact he and his assistants had in creating tensions and rivalries among groups by giving metal knives and axes to those they favoured. In a critical review of Pinker's book in Huffop, psychologist Christopher Ryan, who has a background in anthropology, notes that only one of Pinker's chosen example of hunter/gatherer tribes would really fit the description of true hunter/gatherers, because early accounts on hunter/gatherers are so biased and prejudicial, while more modern accounts fail to acknowledge the cultural contamination from outside influences. It's pretty much impossible for a group of people today to live as prehistoric hunter/gatherers would have thousands of years ago, because the world today is just too crowded, with no open, uninhabited (but inhabitable) territories for people to live out their lives undisturbed by others. And Ryan notes in that review, what a few others have - that Pinker misrepresents the modern age as well, by ignoring most of the genocides that have occurred away from the developed world....from the rape of Nanking during WWII to the genocides that have occurred in Africa over the last century. And I would add that, since Shermer is chiming in now with his own vision of a Star Trek Future; that this libertarian-to-liberal capitalism model of scientific and technological progress is indeed like the observations of someone falling off a building being asked how things are going for them....as someone else noted somewhere in this thread. The cold hard facts are that this world is facing a number of converging threats and many of them have been created by the scientific and technological progress that these humanist writers hold dear! Thanks to using up half of the stored carbon fuels in the Earth, our world is getting hotter and the climate is changing rapidly to a new and still undetermined equilibrium, while the use of that carbon as fertilizers has enabled the human population to expand above 7 billion....a population that cannot be sustained for more than a few more decades regardless of what technological rabbits the wizards think they can pull out of the hat! I've seen many religious fundamentalist writers sift through the work of Dawkins, Pinker and so many others, looking for evidence of an atheist/humanist religion, when it has been staring them in the face all along! It is right in the modern humanist's worship of technology as the means to solve all of our problems. In the past, we thought that technology was about making the material aspects of our lives better, but the new atheists are adding to the faith with claims that technology makes us more peaceful and moral as well. The ultimate absurdity is found in the vision of techno-nirvana of the future - The Singularity - which I think is the level that the more pragmatic humanists aren't willing to accept yet. It is the techno version of a 2nd coming! But if they become more anxious and desperate when contemplating the future, they just might start making that leap into the absurd!

Why is the abortion card the last claim that conservatives have now to show...or at least feign some concern for others? And it is just as false and out of place when it's played by you as that other rightwinger who keeps throwing it down whenever he's called on his total disregard and lack of concern for the welfare of others. It is more likely that the old model of mandatory childbirth produced more abused and emotionally stunted children because of all the women who were forced to have more children than they wanted, and led to that callous disregard for human lives.

You came in agreeing with him; I assumed you read "his other thread."

First, you picked the wrong guy to quote from to win me over! I'm not sure what the point is, since in this example, we are dealing with followers of that "fairy tale" who rise to the occasion and do great work against all opposition and threat of death and injury in some circumstances. Are you saying that people like Martin Luther King or Archbishop Oscar Romero (who was ordered assassinated by the U.S. backed government of El Salvador) should have been required to deconvert from their religions before they should be accepted as leaders in the cause of human rights and freedom? That's true, but the internet builds as many walls, if not more so, than it takes down! If a young Mormon (for example) isn't happy with the Church and is looking to leave; the internet can provide loads of reasons for leaving. But, those who are happy in the Mormon Church are more likely to go to the Mormon sites and Mormon apologist bloggers who provide their flock with handy little rebuttals of challenging and conflicting information they may have been confronted with. As I get older, I am finding myself more inclined to go back to nihilism, after thinking that science was on the road of solving moral and ethical issues through greater understanding of the mind and human society. But it seems like science can only take us so far. Science can give us the facts, but it can't tell us what the best choice should be without committing the naturalistic fallacy. Religions claim to have access to objective or transcendent moral standards, but those standards have changed over time. The difference is that they change relatively slowly, such as the recognition of individual rights and dignity and the repudiation of the institution of slavery. There was a changeover in church attitudes and it was likely motivated by other reasons that selected verses in the Bible. It's more likely that Wilberforce and other abolitionists found reasons to oppose slavery outside of their religious training, but soon incorporated it with Christian dogma. Same thing is happening in more recent times with the shift from left to right in right wing Christianity....which has found a way to blend their love of market ideology and belief that capitalism results in a meritocracy with Christian doctrine. The problem for secularism is that there are no authorities, so there is never going to be a complete consensus and the overall consensus could change overnight as circumstances change.