Putting Bill Bennett In His Place

First of all, I want to say I have great respect for Bill Bennett as a person but I think he showing some misguided Beltway Elitism here. That being said, the following is my heartfelt reaction to his completely misguided analysis of Glenn Beck's keynote speech at CPAC over the weekend. Please read the original article from Dr. Bennett HERE and then read my response.

RESPONSE: What Dr. Bennett doesn't understand is, he doesn't understand. Glenn Beck, the man he is decrying as a demonizer of the Republican Establishment, is fueling the tea party movement, he personifies it. Furthermore, Bennett does not get the sarcasm of a 40 something Gen Xer going to an extreme to prove a point when he says that the Republican Party has a hangover. Beck is talking to a different audience. Middle America. Apparently, at least in this article, Bennett is talking to a different audience as well - Inside the Beltway Elites.

I heard Beck's speech. It was phenomenal. It was dead on! He went into the history of the Calvin Coolidge tax cuts, the impact of Teddy Roosevelt's Bull Moose early stage collectivism. He could have gone on to share a few things about the Feds' repeated bank bailouts that have been occuring since Woodrow Wilson put it in place in the early 1900s or even the Chrysler Bailout, Continental National Bank and Trust bailout or the Savings and Loan Crisis (under Reagan and Bush I). But he didn't. He made his point without it.

Behind all of Beck's comedic extravagance, he gets at the particulars of policy implications better than most. He understands our Country is at dangerous risk of losing it's hallowed AAA bond rating and ushering in an age of inflation like we've never seen. If he goes to a bit of an extreme to issue a clarion call, fine by me! Bennett is old hat on this stuff (and several other issues, I might add). Somehow his Old Boss, President Ronald Reagan, ended the Cold War without firing a shot, saw Solidarity as one means to an ultimately peaceful end and colored around the edges to realize a crowning geopolitical achievement. The George H.W. and W. Bush that Bill Bennett spent 12 years defending did several good things. They also led the nation into a misguided war in Iraq that destabilized an entire region, handing undue influence to a militant theocratically driven Iranian regime (IRGC) while placing secondary (at best) emphasis on the real threats that existed in Iran, itself, and the persistent threats that existed in Palestine, Afghanistan and now, Pakistan. For the last time, Bill, are we truly safer long term than we were after 9-11 for diverting our attention from the real threat and pursuing a war in Iraq?

Finally, (back to Beck) drawing an analogous argument between "Morning in America" and a next day hangover may offend Bennett's sensibilities, (though I don't know what he's upset about, he ripped the phrase off of Reagan who ripped it off of Benjamin Franklin) but it is NOT inaccurate. Apparently, the tea party folks and Glenn Beck understand this better than Dr. Bennett. They have watched both parties become virtually indistinguishable for far too long. As Beck said, tea party activists and myself as a conservative would all agree, we are proud of the work of the likes of Sen. Jim DeMint and Reps. Mike Pence, Michelle Bauchmann and Tom Price. But we know they are in the minority today, not only in Washington, but in the Republican Party. And Bill Bennett's regular Friday fill in host, Republican Party Chairman Michael Steele, hasn't yet given conservatives much confidence in the Republican Party's interest in returning to common sense principled conservatism. When We The People win using the Republican Party in November, as I believe we must, it will be in spite of Establishment Republicans who refuse to properly see the real threat for what it is - Socialism and economic diptheria that is standing at the front door with a ram rod in its hand. It will be because the recovering alcoholic self educated talk show hosts and Outside the Beltway middle Americans of the country took the Party by its nose, ousted the RINOs in the surprising shock of the primaries and forcibly drug it across the finish line and back to its roots! And in place of the lethargy of Washington's Establishment Republicans, we will have Conservatives, who, like Reagan before us, will cast the imminent threat of Socialism for what it is with the appropriate level of alarm, taking the Legislative ACTIONS necessary to begin restoring this Shining City on a Hill to its rightful place.

President Obama's "Jobs Saved or Created" Claim Meets Shocking Reality

Conservatives have been wary of “stimulus job creation” claims for quite some time and now it turns out that the rat you’ve been smelling just went for the cheese. The fun is found in trying to understand how to calculate a “job saved” when any job that is not lost qualifies for the category. It’s like trying to play chess with yourself. By my calculations, by Dec 31, 10.2 percent unemployment will mean that 89.8 percent of those eligible for employment will still have jobs; with a civilian labor force participation rate at 65.1 percent of a population around 350 million (according to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics), Congress will have saved nearly 228 million jobs by the time we sing Auld Lang Syne! Considering the infancy of the “jobs saved” category, it’s reasonable to assume that President Barack Obama has saved more American jobs than any President in recorded history (at least since Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner started pawning off statistics studies as economics studies and left F.A. Hayek alone with his Pulitzer). So, have yourself a Merry Little Christmas! What are you tea party goers upset about? We need to start focusing on more important questions like what percentage of the “jobs saved or created” are jobs “saved” and what percentage are jobs “created” and whether a job created is still considered a job if no one has filled the position yet?

This job creation would all be glorious news (wink wink) if so many of the jobs saved or created were not under suspicion now by newspapers around the country (including Georgia’s own Atlanta Journal Constitution). Fortunately for the hucksters, no one reads newspapers these days. Curses if they actually read this online column! According to The Washington Examiner and a list of 11 papers, more than 10% of the jobs claimed in the “created or saved” category are now considered “doubtful or imaginary” results from the $787 billion dollar spending bill. The White House says the plan has successfully created 650,000 new jobs. Of course, it pitched the stimulus claiming that unemployment would level off at 8 percent and that was over 2 percentage points ago (but it was also delivered with phenomenal cadence, sentence structure and rhetorical ability and that has to count for something)!

Here in the Peach State (a.k.a, God’s Country - $10 dollars says we all get to Heaven and the Almighty smells like Cutter Bug Spray) we created a plethora of new jobs. Community Action for Improvement, A Head Start organization, redefined, er, reported job creation with 77 newbies based on salary raises it gave to existing employees. The group also worked its numerical magic with 317 salary increases counted as jobs created for Head Start workers in the Augusta area. Another Augusta agency claimed 68 jobs created before the work became available. East Central Technical College even discovered a way to award gainful employment status to students enrolled in programs they are partially funding with stimulus cash. To their credit (I think), their most recent claim suggests they did not know that stimulus money for job creation was not to be used for something other than job creation.

Still unconvinced? Browse over to the Federal government’s own Recovery.org website, designed to show us how proficient our government is at accounting (if not accounting, at least they are whiz kids with Flash software) and you will find that Georgia has received over $1 billion in total stimulus including over $1.5 million in Georgia’s 86th Congressional district, $850,000 in the 25th Congressional, $725,000 in the 21st, $422,000 in the 19th Congressional and nearly $257,000 in the 14th Congressional not to mention the money we have received in Congressional districts that actually exist! Amorphously re-districted election maps are one thing. If it’s really true that Georgia has more than 13 Congressional districts, this is great news and I demand my other 73 representatives! (I’m still looking for the unaccounted for population boom but this kind of Congressional muscle will make us the seat of power for the whole nation - California, eat your heart out.) The disadvantage is none of these districts have created any jobs with the money they are hoarding. The up side is we have a rainy day fund for when the drought kicks back in and we need to buy a tri state solution. Georgia is in line for $4.2 billion dollars in promised stimulus booty so we have even more on the way. The only nagging question is why the Gwinnett County Board of Education is suing the State Board for money allocated to charter schools like Ivy Prep Academy when they register as one of the top 5 recipients state wide with over $104 million in their stimulus kitty.

The lessons learned from “job saver-creation” math are simple: when determining whether a job counts as a job created or a job saved, first calculate the average income in the district in which the job resides (or one day will reside), relative to that job category and the given skill level of the worker, then multiply that by a factor of 5 percent (or whatever percentage is conducive with average cost of living increases given the area in question) and determine the difference between the existing salary of the worker and the salary increase needed to save that job from extinction given rising inflation in the given area. If the discrepancy is greater, then congratulations, raising that salary saved a job. If the discrepancy is less, still give the worker his raise, multiply his “excess income” by the number of workers receiving a raise and shoe horn a group of average income salaries into the total to get the figure for the number of jobs you just created on paper. If none of this works, simply blame George W. Bush and hire a behavioral economist to tell us all that we just think we’re losing our jobs. In reality, we’re simply gaining valuable time to relax and think about what it will feel like to speak Chinese.

The War on Poverty is on the Wrong Battlefield!

The history of Medicaid and Peach Care for Kids and how to shore up funding discrepancies has been an annual theme over the last few legislative sessions in Georgia. In 2007, in the wake of a $131 million government funding shortfall, Georgia’s Peach Care for Kids program slammed the door shut on new enrollments. The State House responded by restricting the terms for enrollment in the program while still avoiding the retroactive application of the new terms. Unwilling to see children of working poor denied medical care, Governor Perdue robbed from Peter to pay Paul and dipped into Medicaid funding to cover the difference temporarily.

In the malaise of the 2008 Legislative Session, where the urgency of drought and transportation issues reduced much of the healthcare funding debate to a waterlogged hit-and-run victim, Governor Perdue called for funding that would not hurt taxpayers while the State continued to wish upon the Federal SCHIP star. At the time, the Administration had already handed down a rule requiring 95 percent of SCHIP eligible children – including those with incomes up to 200 percent of the federal poverty limit or a little over $40 grand for a family four – to be enrolled. After all, good medical care is an entitlement.

In the dramatic shake up and exchange of management power in the much beleaguered Grady Hospital debacle, Georgians became acutely aware of funding shortages. Everything from grabbing funding from the Feds to funding through percentages of collections from traffic violators was proposed.

The main issue in providing healthcare for the working poor is whether Georgia taxpayers should be obligated to supplement the medical care of others. Ultimately, this care should be carried out by a myriad of non profit organizations, employer programs, church and other religious institutions and not be a government imposed obligation. The SCHIP program, Peach Care, and yes, even Medicaid, create a permanent dependency through assured availability. Too often there is poor oversight of the funds going out and allocation of those funds can very quickly become a political, rather than a needs-based franchise. It becomes too easy to game the system, witness ever-rising healthcare costs.

The other factor is the obsessive focus on trauma care over preventive care. According to the Georgia Department of Community Health, Georgia ranks 14th in the United States in adult obesity. No wonder we also rank 15th for the highest obesity rates for children ages 10 to 17. Governor Perdue addressed much of the need for change in focus when he signed HB 977 last year, encouraging insurance companies to offer high deductible insurance products to individuals and families.

A fundamental misconception that drives arguments for taxpayer funded healthcare programs for the working poor is the belief that this group occupies a “permanent poor” status. Consequently, the focus shifts from providing incentives to climb to another class level to maintaining status quo healthcare. It is fatalism in both principle and practice. It has existed ever since Lyndon Johnson declared his “War on Poverty” and enlisted the March of the Great Society by tinkering with the mechanics of New Deal programs like “Aid to Families with Dependent Children”.

In reality, statistical snapshots rarely distinguish between people with low current incomes and those with permanently low incomes. Three-fourths of Americans with incomes in the bottom 20 percent in 1975 were also in the top 40 percent at some point in the next 20 years. The vast majority of Americans in any income bracket are transient in those brackets. This economic truth should inspire us to fit policy with economic reality rather than a romanticized perception of the way things are.

Defining Conservatism in a Brave New World

Conservatism as a philosophy has vacillated between political parties throughout our history. The political framework of the 1870s held Democrats as the party of smaller government, lower taxes, civil rights and the like. Reconstruction Republicans would have done away with such principles. JFK championed tax cuts before the Carter Administration worked to put the traditional Conservative platform issues in the hands of Republicans and paved the way for the rise of Reaganomics. In light of the TARP funding that saw bipartisan support last Fall, many are now drawing delineations between Conservatives and the current Republican Party. In such a climate, it is important to define one’s self as a Conservative first and by their party affiliation second in order to steer a Conservative column as a true Conservative. As a Conservative, I build on what Abraham Lincoln articulated, that it involves “…adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried.” More specifically, F.J.C. Hearnshaw identified several canons of Conservative thought, honed by Russell Kirk, with which I agree. Conservatism posits a 1) Belief in a transcendent order where it follows that all political problems are ultimately peripheral representations of moral issues. Politics are the stage act on which the theatre of ideas performs. No one was more illogical than Senator John Kerry when he said during the 2003 campaign frenzy that he “does not allow [his] personal values to influence his policy decisions.” What are policy decisions if not personal values embodied in legislative form?! Conservatism also shows 2) An appreciation for diversity of thought over a homogenized cultural system of utilitarianism and egalitarianism. 3) A belief that civilized society requires order and classes as both an irrepressible reality and a necessary social mechanism. 4) A belief that freedom and property are closely linked and that while policy should aim for equality of opportunity, it cannot insure nor should it try to insure equality of outcome. 5) Custom, convention and tradition are indispensable guides that provide a hedge against anarchy, impulsive change and the innovator’s lust for power. And finally, 6) society must adapt prudently in order to preserve itself. Conservatives stand against failed systems of government such as collectivism (socialism), romanticism (feelings without critical logic analysis), utilitarianism (which has led too often to political expediency) along with moral relativism, secular humanism and other Leftist philosophies. As Burke writes, “vainglorious man in the role of guide, equipped with a map compiled from his own abstractions, would lead society to destruction.” I am a Conservative because I stand against these distractions and hold to a belief that it is our role to manage the systems of government and society but it is beyond our ability to redeem those systems to perfection. Our role is Manager, not Savior, the mistaken notion that drives so many Leftist ideologues to waste resources in an effort to supplant Heaven on Earth.

Why the Disenfranchised Conservative Should Still Vote for Saxby

Originally published on ControlCongress.com
Nov 21, 2008

The fight for balance in the United States Senate has reached its zenith in Georgia. For many Conservatives, Saxby Chambliss is a hard pill to swallow. The feelings of betrayal run deep. Saxby engineered a farm bill that President Bush called “bloated and expensive” and then led the assault against the Executive veto to push through subsidies that many voters still see as unnecessary. The Senator’s support of the $700 billion dollar bailout plan ran against the will of the majority of taxpayers. At the time, Rasmussen reported 45% of the country siding against the “recovery” plan while 30% cautiously lent their support. Those opposed to the plan included the overwhelming majority of Saxby’s Georgia constituents.

In the weeks after the Senate vote that closed the gap further between Wall Street and K Street, Saxby watched his 20-percentage point lead in the Georgia polls narrow to a dead heat. In the current runoff, his lead is down to 4-percentage points. The original intent of the bailout feels more and more like a bait and switch as companies like The Big Three automakers line up for corporate welfare from what was sold as a resource strictly relegated to the purchase of bad mortgages and liquidity for the financial sector.

I agree that Senator Chambliss has vacillated on several key issues that raised the ire of Georgia voters. Puritanical zeal aside, a lot of politics, for better or worse, is political safeguarding of the most crucial issues. True, there are no guarantees that Saxby will say no to additional bailouts for a future Democrat "recovery" package (a “Stimulus Sequel” that feels a lot like a Freudian fight after the Chinese gave us one bigger with $600 million dollars of their own). There’s no way to say that he will stand against credit default swaps or provide taxpayer-funded liquidity for entrenched Washington interests. Sure, the popular Fair Tax mantra may just be a turn-out-the-vote ruse for true believers, essentially irrelevant as a practical platform issue because it won't see the light of day under a Democratically-controlled Congress. And what of Congressional Democrats that are teeing up efforts to institute the Fairness Doctrine to reduce talk radio to schizophrenic programmers and frustrated talent? What of the rising tide of Democratic support for the elimination of secret ballots; an effort to put the screws to employees until they vote for union interests in virtually every industry in the country? If that were to happen the current headline - "UAW-Holds-Big-3-Auto-by-the-Gonads - starts to look like a mere requiem to a nightmare. A unionized labor sector would soon follow and touch countless industries. Democrats would be handed a fundraising machine that would make Tony Rezko wet himself! And the American entrepreneurial dreamers would be applying for business licenses on the Emerald Isle (not a bad idea). Sure, Saxby has said he would vote it down. And sure, he could change his mind. But the rules of the Senate can be funny things.

The filibuster is a little gem of a rule that allows a Senator to bloviate for hours on end until he runs out of things to talk about and essentially stall a vote from ever making it out of the Chamber. It gained a lot of legitimacy as a tool of the Senate when C-SPAN first brought cameras into the room and it lost a lot of clout when Senator Byrd relinquished his role as Chair of the Appropriations Committee to Hawaii-Five O War Hero Daniel Inouye earlier this month. Despite the awe-inspiring power of the filibuster, it is neutralized by the power of the Cloture Rule where a 2/3 supermajority of 60 seats in the Senate may halt the rhetorical stalemating and force a vote.

When it comes to the technical power of the Senate, Georgia’s Saxby Chambliss may well be the last man standing against a Leftist Democratic Blitzkrieg Agenda in the First 100 Days. He may prove disagreeable to many Conservative tastes. But in the hardscrabble world of D.C. political expediency, there's one way to guarantee the Leftist Agenda gets its full and final nod of approval (replete with a powdered bottom on the way out of the nursery and into the light of public policy). In light of Mark Begich the Brave and Comedian Al Franken (who may find his first success since leaving SNL in the recount of the Minnesota election), the only way for Conservatives to insure their losses would be a ballot cast for Jim Martin. Faced with this reality, Conservatives have two choices. Join my Facebook group, “Coalition to Unearth More Franken Back Taxes” just in case we need dirt for that run-off race. Or vote Saxby Chambliss for United States Senate on December 2nd.

The Prince of Peace and the Holiday Formerly Known as Christmas

I shall bear a column and it's name shall be called "The Prince of Peace and the Holiday Formerly Known as Christmas". Every year since The John Birch Society got the snowball rolling in 1959 with a pamphlet entitled "There Goes Christmas?!", someone in the ever-protesting world of quick-shake-up ultra-Conservatism has been whispering warnings about the demise of the Christmas season, issuing clarion calls to save Christmas from the tentacles of secular humanists and trial lawyers. [This will seem counterintuitive at this point in the column but go to local News-Talk 920am WGKA to send a Christmas Greeting Card to the ACLU, then read on.] This year, despite Wal-Mart's re-infusion of the Merry Christmas message along with other major department stores around the country, the Mayor's Office of Chicago made the "fateful" mistake of not accepting New Line Cinemas' "The Nativity Story" film to be shown at the German Christkindlmarket festival. (Cue the ultra-zealous Christian Conservative Right!) Few stopped to realize that the Mayor himself professes Christian faith. Few read deeply into the perfectly legitimate logic of the office's Executive Director, Jim Law, when he reasoned that "It would be contrary to acceptable advertising standards suggested to the many festivals holding events on Daley Plaza [to accept the story from New Line]". Despite many of the surrounding circumstances, some in the religious community are still marching out on cue with their "don't step on our baby Jesus" chorus.

What if we were to turn the tables? The ultra-Conservatives say, "You can't outlaw something just to avoid offending someone because some people are always in a desperate hurry to be offended." The glaringly obvious response in cases like the "War on Christmas" is, yeah, like you! Why do ultra-Conservative Devil-Behind-Every-Curtain types so often react rather than respond? Reaction happens as a defensive maneuver and comes off to many as a brand of fear and, in some cases, hatred. Responding usually brings a more reasoned solution. Instead of losing your Christmas spirit in defense of the Christmas spirit, have a little fun with it. Send the ACLU a Christmas Card rather than railing against their every move. After all, believe it or not, on occasion they have silently supported the public expression of Christmas. Don't believe me? Look up the "Rita Warren against Fairfax, Virginia" case where the ACLU championed her right to erect a nativity scene on government property because of earlier precedents set by the City of Fairfax. The point is, the ultra-Conservatives are often guilty of the same hypersensitivity they accuse the Left of having (and I say this as a Conservative). Richard Hofstadter wrote in "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," "The typical procedure of the higher paranoid scholarship is to start with such defensible assumptions and with a careful accumulation of facts, or at least of what appear to be facts, and to marshal these facts toward an overwhelming `proof' of the particular conspiracy that is to be established." Chip Berlet, senior analyst at Political Research Associates, comments, "You have a dynamic here, where you have the Christian right hysterically overrepresenting the problem, and then anecdotally you have some towns where lawyers restrict any kind of display or representation of religion, which is equally absurd." Before long, you have the jingle bell rocks! Every misguided school that bans Christmas displays becomes a slippery slope that lobbyists and trial lawyers will use to push through in every classroom of every school district in North America until X-masness is the rule of the land. Sure, the ACLU will turn around and do the two-step with another case like outlawing Christmas carols in a Nashville, Tennesee school, but do you really think it will lead to a triumph of secularism over a holiday like Christmas that thrives on an indwelling belief that cannot be legislated against? And furthermore, what do Christians often do once we have achieved our objective of having "Merry Christmas" hanging over our favorite Simon Shopping Mall? Do we actively engage culture with a modeled faith throughout the year or simply say we've won the war of faith because it is now prominently displayed in public? Do we consistently share Christ or transfer our evangelical responsibility onto a "Merry Christmas" banner or some other religious display? Perhaps the war is not over eradicating Christmas from the public sphere, the public sphere has resoundingly said they want and in fact need it as a reminder of peace. The Season of a Saviour that represents that internal peace is not going anywhere within a public sphere that continues to express renewed fervor overall for the message. The question for the ultra-Conservative Christian Right, Are we serving that baby or using Him as our battering ram? What is the benchmark of His success? Is it simply keeping His presence in the public sphere, or His having a relevant presence there? If the latter is more true, then we better behave ourselves.

Richard Dawkins Has God on the Ropes in Science verses Religion Debate - Final Round - FIGHT!

The New Atheists still hold onto the hope that God may be tapping out of the fight. In recent months, they have hit the campaign trail in a fury. Dawkins has shown up on O'Reilly and The Colbert Report, Sam Harris has covered cable talk shows and talk radio segments, and even the late great Carl Sagan is making a comeback post-mortem with a new release due out in the coming months with or without the help of George Noory. Despite all the valiant efforts, New Atheists still find themselves running into some marketing setbacks. For one, they never seem to propose realistic solutions to the damage religion can cause. Atheism and fatalism start to sound synanomous after awhile. New Atheism fancies itself a straightforward appeal to our intellect, no emotion involved. The problem is, this approach proves dangerous if the religious community comes back and supports their belief with (shock and awe) Reason.

If truth is merely an idea with no Figurehead, you’re going to have a hard time getting a movement off the ground, right? Maybe the movement needs an Ascension into Heaven. Perhaps look into making a god to follow out of someone with star power – a galvanizing character of their own to follow. Oprah and Keanu Reeves come to mind. Sam Harris might do, but no offense against Sam, they need a little more sex appeal, a haggard beard, the Hippie-look, someone like Jesus Christ. Someone that people see like they did back with the Guy from Galilee and say, now there’s a guy that has that Shepherd Smith swoon appeal. I’ll follow him to the ends of the earth. Where do I put my nets?

The Urgency Conundrum

In addition to the lack of a Mobilizing Force, New Atheism wrestles with what I call the Urgency Conundrum. Warren Allen Smith, author of the year 2000 encyclopedia “Who’s Who In Hell?”, spent six decades up to age 85 sending letters asking people if they believe in God. He is a committed atheist. He is currently working on his magnum opus: a Web site called Philosopedia. He’s working hard. Why the urgency, you ask? He fears he doesn’t have many years before the memory drain. And he worries about the threat of fundamentalism in the East AND the West. It's a bit paradoxical. Why be so worried about saving a world with no intrinsic value, anyway? We don’t bend over backwards to save a cockroach. All they do is freak out the kids. We kill it, then we flush it, and we still sleep well at night.

The March of Morality

Another big question the movement can't seem to market its way out of is the "Origins of Morality" quest. A recent U.S. News article finds Jay Tolson planting these questions in the scientific fields of Consciousness Research. French mathematician Rene' Descartes gave us Cartesian Dualism where bodily organs send perceptions and other information via the brain to the mind. The mind would ponder, then makes decisions and direct the bodies' responses in word and deed. Cognitive theorists, over time, scoffed at this as the “Ghost in the Machine” argument but it worked well for awhile.

Recently neuroscientists like Francis Crick have picked up the trail with works such as "The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul". He argues that "You, your joys and sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”

Tufts University philosopher Daniel Dennett backs him up with his `Fame in the Brain' analogy. At any one moment there are many potential conscious states in the body, many contending neuronal "assemblies", vying for "celebrity", for their moment in the spotlight. But only one can win the competition and it all depends on who is the Alpha-Neuronal assembly.

This begs the question, Where do the rules come from for the game? The conscious mind comes up with orderly representations of meaning, but it doesn’t create meaning. Where do we get the meaning from? Why do we want to give something meaning? Why does a kiss mean more to us than just, “Hmm, my brain just registered pressure from an outside force against my face. (Maybe that’s why man invented the French Kiss, just to take the pressure off the situation, but I digress).

All of this brings up the question posed by Jay Tolson. Am I just a survival machine? Is "meaning" nothing more than the sum of appropriate responses to information in ultimate service to life. If this is true, then life purpose, freedom and individuality are just reassuring illusions of possible survival value. (And great fodder for making the NY Times Bestseller list for a lot of psychobabblers involved in Life Coaching). But if our personality and very beliefs are simply the end result of some physiological Great Race to the service of our ultimate survival, then why do we have heroes willing to die for others rather than survive? Somebody should tell firefighters that they’re really screwed up in the head!

As recent as this summer, Richard Dawkins and Francis Collins, Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, himself a professed convert to Christianity, faced off in a scientific smackdown on the invitation of Time Magazine. Evolution, the complexity of life, miracles, stem cell research, the problem of good and evil and other heady topics were discussed. My impression after reading the transcripts is what follows.

Every decade or so a new group of people rise up to take God to the mat over His existence. They do this because they are enlightened. They have seen ALL the variables and have measured God and found Him wanting. Their omniscience allows them to do this. They explain to us that our faith has held us back from exploring and they show us gently how we have explained God into existence. They can do this because they have explained Him out of existence. They pity us. We should pity ourselves. If we were only willing to try something new, we would discover things we would never have known otherwise. Think about it, someone had to be the first to look at a cow and say, "I think I'll squeeze these dangly things, here, and drink whatever comes out", right? If it wasn't for someone's faith...er...enlightenment, we'd still be eating our cereal dry. And if it wasn't for these enlightened individuals, we'd all still be running around amazed by the size of the universe and acting like we don't yet understand its farthest reaches. When all is said and done, I say, thank GOD for atheists!

Richard Dawkins Has God on the Ropes in Science verses Religion Debate - Round 1 - FIGHT!

Friedrich Nietzche is getting new support from Big Wig Atheists in the `God Is Dead Campaign’. Fortunately God is being leant support from morticians in the `Nietzsche Is Dead Campaign’”. According to a recent study, 85% of America has a faith in God ("What We Believe" Time Magazine, Oct 30th, 2006). However, we part ways into one of several categories when we drill down to Who or What God actually is. Undeterred by our obstinance, the New Atheists of the world hold onto their faith (no, that's not a Freudian Slip though maybe it should be) that God may yet be on the verge of tapping out of the ring. A slew of recent works have flown off the shelves by the likes of Oxford University prof Richard Dawkins, neuroscience Know-it-All Sam Harris, and Tufts University philosopher Daniel Dennett. We now have the Multiverse Hypothesis in cosmology saying we may have upwards of 300 billion universes, and if we’re one in a billion, why not spring up accidentally without divine intervention? Annoyingly enough, that also increases the chances that nature is even more outside the scope of our understanding, but, I digress.

Logic Attacks Religion

Dawkins sees it as a closet movement “I believe we’re in the same position the gay movement was in a few decades ago. There was a need for people to come out. The more people who came out, the more people had the courage to come out. I think that’s the case with atheists.” He goes on to goad in a November Wired Magazine article that “Highly intelligent people are mostly atheists. Not a single member of either house of Congress admits to being an atheist. Either they’re stupid, or they’re lying. And have they got a motive for lying?…Everybody knows that an atheist can’t get elected.”

Yeah, and your point? Most people, on occasion, grant legislators both stupidity and dishonesty. But what do you do with the other 85% of "stupid" God-fearing Americans when you figure that many of them are doctors, lawyers, and the like. New Atheist Glen Slade, the organizer of the monthly atheists “Brights” group in London offers more hope that the War on Terror is setting the stage for a No-Faith Takeover by raising awareness about the existence of more than one world religion. Well, so do specials on The History Channel but no matter how high-priced basic cable gets, it’s still cheaper than a war on terror – I think we had knowledge of multiple world religions before the war stepped in. Glen Slade continues, "A lot of moderates give a power base to extremists. A lot of Catholics use condoms and get divorced and even listen to punk rock like Bad Religion (Greg Graffin’s an atheist). They still stay Catholic. But when the Pope speaks, he still gets credit for speaking for a billion people." Hmm, I actually like Slade. He’s more religious than most religious people I know. He wants to call BS on religious apathy. It's all or nothing, baby! Dawkins, however, gives a tired argument. "As long as we accept the principle that religious faith must be respected simply because it is religious faith, it is hard to withhold respect from the faith of Osama bin Laden and the suicide bombers.” Sure it is, if you believe that all religions are fundamentally the same.

So if logic can't win the day for the New Atheist, you can always drag out the Apocalytic Threat.
Sam Harris, author of Letter to a Christian Nation, believes we are going to kill ourselves off over religion. But he’s not worried that time won’t change us and we will eventually see the error of our ways. He points to slavery and rests his case. “At some point it is just going to be too embarrassing to believe in God." But won’t that only work for those people who succumb to the very thing you’re asking them to lay aside, namely, groupthink and a culture of religious belief? When asked about the look and feel of a world without God, Sam offers a Religion of Reason, the 21st Century equivalent of Robespierre's Culture of the Supreme Being. He offers the Atheist Prayer – “That our reason will subjugate our superstition, that our intelligence will check our illusions, that we will be able to hold at bay the evil temptation of faith.”

All of this double-speak makes my head hurt. It works on the tired premise that religion is not rational. Well, riddle me this, Batman? Where does your motivation for disproving faith come from? A desire to have cognitive resonance? Where is your dissonance coming from? These incovenient questions pose a marketing hurdle for the New Atheist movement. (That and the supremely depressing end result of their logical arguments). As it turns out, so does new scientific discovery in the field of consciousness research. And that is where we will turn in Round 2...