Since About.com shut down the blog section of my Buddhism site, and since I have a book to promote, I’ve started a new Rethinking Religion blog to focus on religious issues. I’ll still be ranting about politics here, of course. I’m cross-posting today because I thought you might like this one:

If you’ve read my book Rethinking Religion, you know how much I want reactionary Christians to stop trying to force the rest of us to bow to their tribal totems. If it were up to me, there’d be no Ten Commandments monuments or Nativity scenes on pubic property. No store clerk would ever be harassed for saying “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.” There’s be no special legal favors for “Christian” corporations, no proselytizing anywhere, and separation of church and state would be global policy.

Although achieving this happily tolerant state won’t be easy and won’t happen in my lifetime, I think it could happen some day. But there’s a smart way to work toward a religiously tolerant world, and there’s the stupid way.

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For examples of stupid, see 5 atheist and Muslim billboards that drove the Christian right nuts at Salon. One is a large billboard with a picture of Santa Claus, captioned “Keep the MERRY.” Under that is Christ on the Cross, captioned “Dump the MYTH.” Another billboard reads “Who Needs Christ During Christmas? Nobody!” The name “Christ” is crossed out. These billboards were both sponsored by the group American Atheists.

The Salon article quotes American Atheist president David Silverman: ““We all love this time of year…Christianity has been trying to claim ownership of the season for hundreds of years. But the winter solstice came first and so did its traditions. The season belongs to everybody.” I agree. I also think that’s what they should have said on their billboards — The season belongs to everybody. Ridiculing Jesus was unnecessary.

Seriously, atheist dudes, the Christian Right is not Jesus’ fault. The CR may have adopted Jesus as its team mascot, but it’s ignored his teachings for years. And seeing Jesus ridiculed is as jarring to Christians — including the tolerant, progressive ones — as watching their mothers being publicly humiliated.

This is not a way to win hearts and minds; it’s just a cheap self-indulgence.

Before buying any more billboard space, I suggest that American Atheists sit down and have a good, long think about what they are trying to accomplish. And then they should take a look at current research in cognitive science and social psychology to craft a smarter way to achieve their goals.

For example, is the goal (a) to wean humankind from religion completely? Or is it (b) to foster a society in which religion is respected as a private matter and not something we’re perpetually hassling each other about?

I can tell you right now (a) is not going to happen in your lifetimes. Or this century. Likely not in this millennia. Something that has been part of civilization since there has been civilization doesn’t disappear that easily. I’m not even going to try to persuade you that (a) wouldn’t necessarily be a good thing, although I don’t think it would be. I’m saying it’s a fool’s errand to even try.

If (b), now we’re talking. That is more do-able. And a lot of religious people, like me, would happily join you in the effort. Even then it won’t be easy, but I think enough people are getting fed up with the antics of religious extremists that a smartly run campaign might actually work.

“Smartly run” brings us to the cognitive science and social psychology. Google “motivated reasoning” and read up on it. Rmuse at Politics USA explains,

What results of the several studies demonstrate is that once a partisan is confronted with unwelcome facts about their beliefs, the centers of their brain associated with emotional distress light up and remain active until their defective brains “rationalize away the unwanted information.” According to one of the scientists conducting the studies, when conservatives and Christian zealots rationalize away unwanted information, the centers of their brains associated with positive feelings turn on and “overlap substantially with those activated when drug addicts get their ‘fix.’”

The studies also prove that despite showing conservatives, Republicans, gun fanatics, and evangelical special interests facts, scriptures, and even video evidence that their strongly held beliefs are pure fantasy or absolutely wrong, conservative (and some liberal) brains automatically reject facts because they refute their personal beliefs. Research teams at Yale and Dartmouth discovered, for example, that highly skilled mathematicians will, more often than not, deliberately reach an incorrect answer if data leads to a conclusion that is contrary to their political worldview. There are myriad examples of conservatives and evangelical fanatics disputing hard data, the Constitution, and the Christian bible because they are programmed by conservatives’ buzzwords, memes, and outright lies into believing their errant conclusions and faith are fact.

I doubt that surprises anyone, but do re-read the first paragraph of the excerpt. If your message is one that triggers a negative emotional reaction in most folks, including those who might be persuadable, you are hurting your cause more than helping it.

Negative attack ads work in elections — usually, anyway — because they can whip up enough low-information voters to vote against the guy the ads are attacking. Especially in a close election, just a few hundred voters can change the outcome.

But, dear atheists, you aren’t trying to be elected to a county commission. You’re trying to change society itself. That’s a whole ‘nother thing. And your “target audience,” the people whose minds you are trying to change, are not the hard-right religious extremists, because their minds will not change.

Your audience is everybody else, religious and not-religious.

Take a cue from same-sex marriage advocates. They are winning public opinion by engendering public sympathy. They are changing minds by presenting a positive image of themselves as loving, responsible and family oriented, not by bashing their opposition.

Years ago I formulated a basic rule for successful demonstrating that I call the “Bigger Asshole” rule. The job of public protesters is not to change the minds of the powerful people they are opposing, but to gain public sympathy for their cause. Especially in politics, the powerful won’t change until they are compelled to do so by a sufficient critical mass of public opinion saying they must.

So the job of protesters and demonstrators is to make the people they are protesting look like bigger assholes than they are. But if the protesters come across as bigger assholes than the protestees, the public will side with the establishment. And I assure you that, in terms of the Bigger Asshole rule, ridiculing Jesus is a losing strategy.

LGBT activists are winning public opinion by making gay-bashers look like the bigger assholes. And considering there’s a lot of overlap between homophobes and religious extremists, atheists ought to be able to do the same thing.

Jon Stewart was particularly brilliant last night —

You must not miss this story about an Arizona Republican who was nearly weeping about the poor immmigrant being bused to a shelter — this is not compassion, he said — when he was informed that the bus was actually carrying local kids going to a YMCA camp. D’oh! But, y’know, I wish he’d been pressed to explain what would be compassionate, considering the children are here. Making them re-cross the Rio Grande under gunfire? The wingnuts weep crocodile tears for these children but coming up with no response but “deport them.”

And I must say I’m disappointed with Gov.Martin O’Malley, who doesn’t want children sent to a facility in Maryland, but I appreciate his reasons:

O’Malley told Muñoz not to send any of the children to the facility in Westminster, Md., that the White House was looking at. It’s a conservative part of the state, he warned. The children were at risk of getting harassed, or worse, he said.

Gov. O’Malley’s aides say he’s looking for another facility that would be more suitable.

Republicans are nearly gleeful that they’ve finally found “Obama’s Katrina.” I’m not sure most Americans fully understand what’s going on, but I don’t think most Americas are yet so depraved they would throw refugee children into a meatgrinder to score political points. In time this could backfire on the GOP.

Maybe I’m not remembering the past correctly, but it seems to me that if the refugee children crisis had happened decades ago, Americans would have just helped them. State and local governments would have cooperated in some kind of humanitarian effort; church and other groups would be sending toys and blankets and offering to foster the younger ones, at least while their status was sorted out.

Now it’s like we’re a nation of grumpy old men yelling at everyone to get off our lawn. I’ve even heard politicians complain we have to turn them away because they might be carrying diseases.

What the children are fleeing is anarchy. they are fleeing failed states in which there is no functional criminal justice system and criminal activity, including murder, is carried out with impunity. People arm themselves and join gangs just to survive. In short, it’s the sort of place the “open carriers” and Bundy Ranch militia crowd are trying to turn the U.S. into.

The President has asked for $3.7 million billion to deal with the crisis and is also asking state governors to get behind hosting the children. I take it the request is running into a wall of NIMBY. Under current law and with current resources, it could take years to determine the status of and make decisions about many of these children. A couple of Texas politicians propose to amend the law to make it easier to ship the children back to the kill zones.

Republican politicians are complaining to Fox News that children are being shipped into states that are not on the border —

Fox News has learned that 748 unaccompanied minors have been transferred from areas near the border to the Chicago area. Of the original group of 748 kids, 319 have been placed with family members or sponsors while they await an immigration hearing. The other 429 have been placed in facilities run by the Heartland Alliance, a nonprofit organization that receives grants from the Department of Health and Human Services

Oh, the, um, humanity? We’re supposed to keep tens of thousands of children locked up in holding cells in Texas?

Sen. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., told Fox News Friday that he did not know the exact locations of the facilities where the children were being kept, and stated his belief that the White House did not want the children’s living conditions to be made public.

More likely the White House doesn’t want a bunch of Fox News-watching goons to try to seize the children and dump them back over the Rio Grande.

Speaking of which, Fox News also is reporting that bodies of dead children have been found in the Rio Grande; they apparently died trying to cross. The geniuses who write right-wing blogs are blaming President Obama because of “his” immigration policy (a law passed in 2003 and amended in 2008).

For President Bush, Katrina became a toxic political subject due to dead bodies floating in the waters to underscore the human crisis. But at least he responded.

That’s a joke, right? Dubya got his picture taken with firefighters. End of response. See also New Orleans: What a Difference a Year Didn’t Make and Stormy Weather.

For President Obama the question is, will the floating bodies of young “Dreamers” finally stop the President from playing politics and start playing leader of the free world?

What’s driving those children to the U.S. is going on in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, not Washington. And if anybody is “playing politics,” it’s Republicans in Congress and elsewhere who seem to want to make the refugee crisis as messy as possible to make the President look bad.

Unfortunately I don’t see a real solution that wouldn’t require some kind of action on the part of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, which are even more dysfunctional than the U.S. House of Representatives. Our basic choices at the moment are either to give the children shelter or ship them back to a place where many more will die. If we choose the former, we need to spend some money and make an effort to treat these children humanely so they have a chance of growing up to be responsible and law-abiding people.

If it’s the latter, wingnuts stop the phony outrage about bodies in the Rio Grande. If we ship them home, we’re shipping some of them to their deaths; the only difference is that they’ll die out of reach of Fox News cameras.

A guy at Brookings looked for a correlation between anti-ACA ads, mostly paid for by the Koch boys, and found one. Yes, it appears the anti-ACA ads increased ACA enrollment. People in states heavily bombarded by Koch ads were more likely to learn about the insurance exchanges and sign up. They were also more likely to beieve that Congress would repeal Obamacare at any time, so they may have rushed to take advantage of the program before it disappeared.

A circuit judge just un-gerrymandered Florida. Heh.

In our famous laboratories of democracy called states, a number of Republican governors have proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Laffer Curve is a fantasy, and cutting business and other taxes while also cutting government spending and social services does not grow the economy. In fact, it holds economic growth back. Not that actual proof will put any dents in right-wing anti-tax ideology.

On the less happy side, a Bundy-style militia headed by a Texas “open carry” fanatic is forming to patrol the border, and they say they will shoot anyone who tries to cross. Yes, we need a bunch of tough-talking he-men with maximum firepower to protect us from … children?

I say we keep the children and deport the he-men. Or, we could paint a rosy picture of their right to open carry in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, along with the high probability they would get to shoot somebody if they moved there. Maybe they would leave. See also Digby.

Finally — House GOP members are anti-tax tightwads who don’t like to pay dues, either.

The President is being slammed on parts of the Left for child cruelty. Specifically, he has been criticized for seeking to speed up deportation of Central American children crossing the border from Mexico into the United States. Granted, there’s a lot there to criticize. More recently he has asked for money to deal with the crisis, and the money is for everything from health care to transportation costs.

However, he is being slammed on the Right for causing this humanitarian crisis, and even for encouraging it. And he’s being berated for “lawlessness” because he is enforcing the law.

There’s an All In With Chris Hayes segment that explains this pretty well. There are all kinds of laws, some on the books from long before the Obama Administration, that spell out how unaccompanied minors crossing the border illegally are to be “processed” by the system, and the Obama Administration is following those laws. The Right, which perpetually rages that the President has become a “dictator,” wants him to seize dictatorial powers to break the law.

The children are fleeing violence in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, and many are being sent here with “coyotes” by their families in the belief they would be allowed to stay. I emphasize this is a humanitarian crisis involving children. Over 57,000 migrant children have tried to cross the border this fiscal year.

And how does the Right want to respond? Deport them all, now, and bleep the law. No screening, no due process. We have no money even to take temporary care of these children, although Sen. Tom Coburn says we have plenty of money to fly them back home, on first class seats, no less. A number of communities have passed or are considering resolutions declaring that none of these children will be housed within city limits. (example)

However, having demonstrated they have no interest whatsoever in taking care of these children in any humane way, the wingnuts are slamming the President for not actually going to the border, as if that would make any difference. If he did go to the border they’d accuse him of using the crisis as a photo op.

Some of them are gleefully siting G.W. Bush’s failure to respond to Hurricane Katrina. But Bush’s failure was not that he didn’t go to New Orleans; it was that he was utterly oblivious to what was happening in New Orleans, and when finally did go there it was to congratulate his team, including the hapless Brownie, for their great work. And he continued to not respond to Katrina except for occasional photo op trips in which he got his picture taken wearing a toolbelt.

So no, this is not Obama’s Katrina. And Republicans had better hope Americans don’t get a close look at thousands of little children being sent back over the border, or worse, thousands of little bodies turning up in the desert.

See also Charles Blow.

This article on a libertarian “festival” — I’m not sure what else to call it — in New Hampshire is more amusing than alarming. But there are some alarming things in it.

Once a year for the past 11 years, this campground in the northern part of the Granite State turns into a libertarian utopia. And this year, roughly 2,000 people — mostly white men — have paid between $45 and $100 to experience for one week what life would be like without the onerous mechanisms of laws, if the market ruled to the exclusion of all else. Want to wear a loincloth and sell moonshine, shop at an unregulated market that accepts Bitcoin and silver, or listen to a seminar called “How the Collapse of the State is Inevitable”? Then this is the place for you….

… The ideological motivations, which Free Staters discuss over homemade mead and beers, are relatively easy to understand. The U.S. government suffers from low approval ratings, we have been fighting wars for years without a satisfying result in sight, and privacy is slipping away. Why not just dissolve it all — or most of it— and live as individuals? In other words, live like the porcupine: Let your lifestyle not encroach on others, but if someone comes at you, don’t hesitate to protect yourself with quills. Or your AR-15.

It strikes me that only people who take the comforts and blessings of civilization utterly for granted would think this way. It’s not surprising this crew is mostly white. One suspects if they ever got their wish to live like this all the time, most of them wouldn’t last a year. Perhaps literally.

Although there were some women present, this explains why the group is mostly male:

A tractor rumbles by, spilling brown sludge out of a bucket.

“It’s okay, it’s Agora Valley, it should be covered in sewage,” says an onlooker eating breakfast across from an outdoor tattooing station. “It’s unregulated and we have no infrastructure.”

It had been raining, so the sludge mixed well into the muddy path; the smell blended with the heady fumes of armpits, pot, and brewing beer.

I’m a resourceful person and can manage without many things, but I require plumbing. And soap. This is not negotiable. Seriously, I could see 19th century scourges like cholera and typhoid making a comeback if these guys were in charge.

Human communities have functioned with gender-based divisions of labor from the beginning of recorded history. Not all societies have divided labor exactly the same way, but usually it has been men who built the infrastructure and made the regulations. In most of human history idealized views of manhood have been associated with building and creating civilization at least as much as with war.

I assume many of the guys in New Hampshire were influenced by Ayn Rand. Weirdly, while Rand appeared to appreciate building and creating (e.g., The Fountainhead), she didn’t appear to appreciate civilization or notice that creativity and building have no value or purpose outside of civilization.

And now a collection of white guys in New Hampshire would happily let civilization rot rather than be saddled with the obligation to take care of it, and they aren’t ashamed to say so. I suspect their great-grandfathers would be mortified.

Speaking of civilization rotting, Paul Krugman notes that the “we won’t build that” syndrome is not limited to libertarians.

The federal highway trust fund, which pays for a large part of American road construction and maintenance, is almost exhausted. Unless Congress agrees to top up the fund somehow, road work all across the country will have to be scaled back just a few weeks from now. If this were to happen, it would quickly cost us hundreds of thousands of jobs, which might derail the employment recovery that finally seems to be gaining steam. And it would also reduce long-run economic potential. …

…What’s useful about the looming highway crisis is that it illustrates just how self-destructive that political choice has become. It’s one thing to block green investment, or high-speed rail, or even school construction. I’m for such things, but many on the right aren’t. But everyone from progressive think tanks to the United States Chamber of Commerce thinks we need good roads. Yet the combination of anti-tax ideology and deficit hysteria (itself mostly whipped up in an attempt to bully President Obama into spending cuts) means that we’re letting our highways, and our future, erode away.

The American Society of Civil Engineers gives the quality of U.S. public infrastructure a D+. This isn’t about just roads. It’s waste treatment; it’s drinking water; it’s the electrical grid and ports and air traffic and levees. And it’s roads, bridges and tunnels. We’ve been letting it all rot for years because “fiscal conservatism” doesn’t want to spend money because fiscal conservatives don’t want to raise taxes. They’re just as short-sighted and selfish as the crew in New Hampshire, although they are still using plumbing.

And someday, when they turn the designer faucets in their McMansions and brown sludge comes out, no doubt they will blame liberals.

There’s a Taoist idea that everything carries within it the seeds of its own demise. Many civilizations have died because they outgrew their food supply or because population density encouraged infectious disease (like cholera and typhoid). We’ve learned how to get around those limitations now, so there’s no reason to assume that civilization, and quality of life, are not infinitely improvable. But we may be bumping into the ultimate limits on what humankind can achieve — selfishness and stupidity.

A side note: The word husband comes from an Old Norse word that meant “male householder.” It shares an ancestral root word with house, in fact. In verb form, that word referred to managing or stewardship, a meaning retained in husbandry. For the record, wife also has Old Norse/Germanic roots but originally just meant “woman.”

Until relatively recently, western culture generally valued the male role of husband. To be a husband was an honorable thing; something to aspire to. At some point in the 20th century that changed. In popular culture now the word husband has a faint connotation of drudgery, or of being chained to onerous obligations.

The rise of the He-Man Woman Hater subculture, the libertarian Randbot subculture, and “movement conservatism” all do seem to be interrelated, largely driven by men, and tied to an erosion of the value of building and stewardship that used to be connected to cultural definitions of “manhood.” Not that I have any idea how to turn that around; I’m just saying there’s a common thread there somewhere.

AP:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Tuesday confirmed that its decision a day earlier extending religious rights to closely held corporations applies broadly to the contraceptive coverage requirement in the new health care law, not just the handful of methods the justices considered in their ruling.

The justices did not comment in leaving in place lower court rulings in favor of businesses that object to covering all 20 methods of government-approved contraception.

I find Ben Domenech’s opinion deeply offensive. Just make the pill over the counter, he says.

There are a number of objections to this, but I find them to largely amount to unconvincing paternalism. The chief argument advanced is that standard oral contraceptives mess with hormones and have all sorts of side effects. This is, of course, true! But: dangerous side effects are rampant within all sorts of other over the counter drugs. Women can think for themselves and make decisions with their doctor and pharmacist about what drugs they want to take – and the evidence shows they are good at self-screening. In fact, it would actually increase the ability to mitigate and respond to unanticipated side effects, since changing tracks will no longer require a doctor’s visit and getting a new prescription. Assuming that women won’t or can’t take responsibility for themselves to consult with a doctor unless required to by arbitrary government policy is absurd.

Some of those side effects are life threatening, and women with certain medical conditions shouldn’t take them. Most women would be okay, of course. But Domenech’s attitude send a big flashing neon message that he doesn’t value women. We are some alien Other that should just take care of our lady parts and not bother him about it.

There’s an argument for making birth control pills OTC, and maybe it’s a reasonable thing to do. But if you look at this map (scroll down), it seems to me that there’s a strong correlation between prescription requirement and the status of women in those countries — the lower the status, the lower the requirement to see a doctor. It does not comfort me a lot to be told that the pill is OTC in “most countries” when in most of those “most countries” women are second-class citizens. In some of them they’re still wearing head baskets.

This is my favorite:

EchoLight Studios, run by former presidential candidate Rick Santorum, said Monday it will release a movie Sep. 1 that explores the Hobby Lobby Supreme Court decision that was handed down Monday.

The film, a documentary called One Generation Away: The Erosion of Religious Liberty, has been in the works for several months. The movie makes the case that the free expression of Christianity has lately been taking a backseat to free speech, government expansion and political correctness, and the Hobby Lobby case is one example from the film.

It’s the golden age of Christian persecution porn, I tell you. The fundies eat this up.

I’m seeing news flashes that SCOTUS ruled in favor of Hobby Lobby, 5-4. I am unhappy but not surprised. I’m sitting on some deadlines and cannot take time to comment, but discuss among yourselves.

Update:

A startling bit, in which Alito basically says, “no worries, this applies only to women’s health” pic.twitter.com/V4c0G8tTiF

— Michelle Dean (@michelledean) June 30, 2014

Unbelievable.