Great Minds Thinking Alike

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Joshua Holland has an article on Alternet that makes the same point I attempted to make in the “Muddying Questions, Squandering Answers” post on 9/11 conspiracy theories.

Having taken a long bath in the world of 9/11 conspiracism, I still think the most likely scenario is that the Bush administration was obsessed with rival powers — Russia and China — and ignored the terror issue. After the attacks, the security agencies were under enormous, unrelenting pressure to show Americans they were in control and they needed to show that they were on top of the investigation at all costs. These things would certainly require sanitizing in the 9/11 report and other official narratives for the sake of expediency and creating the appearance that the government was on the job.

Having said that, I’d also be receptive to evidence that the Bush administration had a far greater degree of knowledge about the how and why of the attacks, and looked the other way and let them happen. All I’d need to buy that would be a bit of evidence. After all, we’ve recently learned in a report published on AlterNet that New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who had a direct link to the most powerful office in Washington (Dick Cheney’s), said she had been warned of a terrorist attack.

But that kind of evidence is almost certainly not forthcoming; there will be no further serious investigation into the events of 9/11. Ironically, that’s largely because of the 9/11 “truth movement” itself — by embracing fanciful notions that the government blew up the World Trade Center with thermite charges, or that the Pentagon was hit by a missile — makes it hard for the rest of us to express rational skepticism of the official account.

The Middle Way

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I got up this morning determined to find something political to blog about, because I’ve spent most of the last couple of days first writing and then defending the religion post at Unclaimed Territory. By last night, after repeating the same couple of simple points for the five hundredth time, I had a throbbing headache and was veering perilously close to the “kiss my ass” stage of Rogerian argument.

The most frustrating part of the effort was that a great many people did not base their criticisms of the post on what I actually wrote. I don’t mind — well, maybe I mind a little, but only in an ego-attached way — those who expressed disagreement with something I did write. But a large part of the criticisms were from people who assumed what I must think and attacked me for opinions I do not have.

For example, a couple of self-described atheists attacked me for being anti-atheism and opposed to the separation of church and state. In fact, I have on occasion chided the religious for their intolerance of atheism. (I wish I could say I have defended atheism a lot, but the fact is most religious people don’t exactly, um, respect my opinions, either. I don’t belong to the majority tribe.) And there’s no other civil liberties issue that I care more passionately about, on a personal level, than protecting the separation of church and state.

I was both fascinated and frustrated by the commenters who assumed I am Christian even though I explicitly said I am not. Obviously, something in their heads caused the adjective religious to override “not a Christian.” Several complained that I didn’t understand how dangerous religion is, even after my rhetoric about “warring religious whackjobs” and “a genuine threat to civilization on this planet.” Others were dismissive of the post because I didn’t address their pet religious agendas. In some of those cases I actually agreed with the agendas, but they were way outside the scope of the points I was trying to make in the post.

And then, of course, my defenses of the post pushed buttons, too. Although I hadn’t wanted to write about my personal religious adventures, when one commenter complained that he didn’t understand what religion I followed, I provided a simple explanation as devoid of proselytizing as I could make it. Then another commenter complained because I was making “religious declarations.” I wrote that not all Christians are James Dobson zealots and was called a “Christian apologist.” When I expressed alarm at the dangers posed by James Dobson zealots I was told I was bashing religion.

I suppose now I’ll be told I’m whining.

If there’s one point that was driven home to me, it’s that some (adj., a portion or an unspecified number or quantity of a whole or group: He likes some modern sculpture but not all) on the Left really do harbor a palpable hostility toward religion per se. I know this is not true of the entire Left, but until this weekend I would have said the hard-core religion haters were a minority and not representative of the Left. I still think they’re a minority. Probably. But they’re sure as hell a big and assertive minority, and representative of something.

Bloggers before me have hit the same flame wall. This post by Steve Waldman at Washington Monthly discussing hostility to religion on the part of some liberals drew complaints that he was spreading GP talking points, interspersed with comments that were hostile to religion.

I’d like to clarify that I did not make a request for tolerance of religion because I’m worried about the rightie mythos that “The Left” hates religion. You know that righties are going to claim “The Left” hates religion as long as they can find even one leftie who hates religion. This doesn’t have anything to do with their concern for religion; they’re just looking for reasons to hate lefties. One stumbles onto rightie bloggers who admit they aren’t religious themselves but who still beat lefties over the head with the “they hate religion” meme. Libertarians tend to be unreligious, yet the Right thought the Libs were just peachy until the Libs turned against George W. Bush.

On the other hand, many UT commenters who denied there is a liberal bias against religion would, in the next paragraph, make some knee-jerk, narrow-minded comment about religion. I’d find you some examples except that I’m afraid to go to UT today. By now they’ve probably got me pegged as a paid agent of Jerry Falwell.

In an ideal America, voters wouldn’t care about a political candidate’s religious proclivities. Well, unless those proclivities involved human sacrifice or a belief that URLs are coded messages from another galaxy, in which case some concern might be warranted. But a vast body of empirical evidence shows us that just because a politician says he’s found Jesus doesn’t mean he can find his ass with both hands. And I doubt, sincerely, there’s even a slight statistical correlation between public declarations of faith and private virtue. Even Jesus told his followers that displays of devotion do not constitute quality assurance. (See, for example, Matthew 7:15-23.)

But many Americans live a culture that combines a crass religiosity with jingoism and nativism and several varieties of bigotry, simmered together in a toxic, psuedo-fascist soup. And appeals to reason, tolerance, social betterment, prosperity, or good government do not get soup-dwellers to the polls nearly as well as waving the Bible and promising to uphold God’s Law. (God’s Law being a nasty, repressive business that no god worthy of respect would have any part of.)

This culture has existed in one form or another throughout American history. However, in my lifetime I’ve seen it get worse. The marriage of the GOP and the Christian Right, combined with the power of mass media, has made it both more powerful and more widespread.

The power of the Christian Right has hurt the Dems, no question. Political pundits tell Dems they have to get “more religious” to appeal to Christian voters if they’re going to win the White House in 2008. Maybe, but there are good ways to do that, and there are stupid ways to do that. The stupid way is for candidates who are uncomfortable with Bible Belt culture to try to “fit in” by talking about Jesus. Even if the Jesus talk is sincere, the politician will still transmit the message “I’m an alien to your world” in a thousand subtle ways. Trust me on that.

The smart way, IMO, is to enlist the help of native religious moderates to persuade other religious moderates that it’s OK to vote Democratic.. See, for example, “When Would Jesus Bolt?” by Amy Sullivan in the April 2006 Washington Monthly. Even better, right now the Dems should be searching for presentable and articulate liberal evangelicals (not an oxymoron, believe it or not), to take guest bobblehead gigs on political talk shows. The public face of Christianity doesn’t have to be a right-wing one.

As I said, the hard-core Right is a lost cause, but they aren’t the only voters in red states.

We must break the grip of the Christian Right’s political power, but the way to do that is not for secularists to wage war against religion. The way to do that is for the non-religious, and the religious who want to maintain religious liberty, to make common cause against the theocrats.

I’d like more religious Americans to understand that a “secular society” is not hostile to religion. Rather, a secular society is one in which citizens are free to explore many religious paths, or none, without coercion or interference from government. It is a society in which religion can remain free of the corruption of worldly political power and flourish according to its merits.

Maybe someday we’ll see a society in which an atheist can be elected President of the United States. Well, I don’t expect it to happen in my lifetime, but eventually.

And in the far distant future, maybe secularists will stop spouting knee-jerk, narrow-minded views about how all religious people are knee-jerkers with narrow minds. Needless to say, I’m not holding my breath on that one.

[Cross-posted to The American Street because I lack the nerve to post it on Unclaimed Territory. I’m not into martyrdom.]

It’s Cold Out There

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I’m guest-posting at Unclaimed Territory, and this morning I posted a merged and condensed version of my last two religion posts. Which pissed off a lot of people who clearly didn’t read what I wrote. They just saw the word “religion” and went ballistic.

I may not have as many readers as Glenn, but y’all are way smarter.

Update: Speaking of religion, these people are just plain twisted.

Where We Came From

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Dana Milbank writes at WaPo about Tracy Henke, the genius behind the Homeland Security allocation.

Henke seems rattled. Arriving for her speech yesterday to a DHS-backed group called the Citizen Corps, she was a bit out of breath and hurried to the stage, saying “I’m up again.” She immediately brought up the controversial grant announcement and appealed to her audience for some love. …

… In this time of torment over big-city terrorism funding, Henke opted to recall her small-town upbringing. “People come to Washington and they forget where they came from and they think all knowledge, all information, all good ideas generate in the marble buildings of Washington, D.C.,” she argued. “Guess what? Not true. Not true at all. I’m very fortunate, I come from a very small town in Missouri.” She said she keeps a sign in her desk that says “Remember where you came from.”

Henke has. St. Louis, not far from her hometown of Moscow Mills, gets a 31 percent boost in counterterrorism money under the new formula.

Well, guess what? I’m from a very small town in Missouri, too. And although Park Hills (which was named Flat River when I lived there) is not quite as small as Moscow Mills, Moscow Mills is about thirty miles closer to St. Louis, which means Park Hills is more rural. Moscow Mills has a higher median income ($37,067) and house value ($78,800) than Park Hills — $25,277 and $53,900, respectively. Thus, being from Park Hills/Flat River carries a higher hick value.

I can say with some authority that, although there’s nothing wrong with being from a small town in Missouri, it’s not exactly something to brag about, either. Unless you’re competing in a “worse redneck” contest, of course. It doesn’t confer any special virtue, and if you move away you can never answer the question “where are you from?” without tossing in a geography lesson.

And while I do not for a minute think that all knowledge, all information, and all good ideas come out of marble buildings in Washington, DC, if any knowledge, information, or good ideas ever came out of Moscow Mills, I’d like to know about it. Park Hills/Flat River was always better at generating curiosities than knowledge. I heard tell they’ve had some ideas over in Potosi, but the folks that had ’em’s in jail now.

Ms. Henke remembers where she is from. Judging by the photos, there’s not much there to remember, so remembering shouldn’t tax her brain much. I suggest she put more effort into noticing where she is now.

Defending Jesus

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Jesus didn’t ask me to defend him, but sometimes I do anyway. He gets picked on so.

Today’s potshots come from Barry Seidman, who describes himself as a humanist and secularist. In response to recent advances by the Christian Left, Seidman writes that he’s happy the Christian Left is “joining the good fight against Christo-fascists like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Tim LaHaye and President Bush.” However,

… the coupling of religion and politics is as dangerous for the left as it is for the right, because absolutism, authoritative supernaturalism and the actual tenets of the Abrahamic religious texts can never be reconciled with democracy and freedom.

In my experience religious liberals tend to respect the principle of separation of church and state, so it’s not clear to me what worries Mr. Seidman. I infer he thinks religious people will always try to impose their doctrines on others and thus cannot be trusted in politics, liberal or not.

Seidman bases much of his opinion on a book by Hector Avalos titled Fighting Words: The Origin of Religious Violence. Avalos is an anthropologist and biblical scholar who teaches at Iowa State University. I have not read this book, but Avalos states his basic thesis in this interview:

In Fighting Words Avalos looks at the role religion has historically played and continues to play in violence in the three main Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam).

“Most religious violence is the result of real or perceived scarce resources,” he said. “When people believe that there is not enough of something valued, they may fight to acquire it or to maintain it. When religion causes violence, it does so because it has created new scarce resources.”

Fighting Words focuses on four scarce resources that can be created by religious beliefs – inscripturation (sacred scriptures), sacred space, group privilege and salvation. The book shows examples of how each of these can be seen as scarce resources that have precipitated violence in Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

The “scarce resource” of inscripturation can look at religions who say that God communicates to us in only one text (the Koran or Bible for example) and access to God is available only through the one text the religion believes in.

This explanation seems thin to me. I am inclined to think most religious violence occurs when religion (any religion) becomes tribalistic or gets mixed into struggles for political power. As I said I haven’t read the book, and perhaps Avalos makes a good case. But the “Abrahamic religion” thing bothers me. One, we’re back in the same old trap of defining religion as monotheism, when most of the world’s religions are not, in fact, monotheistic. And as I sort of argued here, even within the monotheistic religions the occasional genius or mystic has broken out of the God box — Spinoza comes to mind.

It has long seemed to me that there are two basic ways to approach religion — legalistic (or dogmatic) or mystical. All three of the major monotheistic religions — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — have mystical traditions as well as legalistic ones. It is true that the legalistic and dogmatic approach is far more common. The dominant sects of all monotheisms tend to treat scripture as law and assume that theological and moral questions can be answered by referring scriptural statute.

On the other hand, most other religions (there are exceptions) more often take a mystical approach and treat sacred texts as guides to truth, not truth itself.

His Holiness the Dalai Lama was once asked what he would do if science disproved something written in a sutra. He said that he would revise the sutra. Westerners sometimes don’t know how to take this, but even the Buddha told his followers they shouldn’t accept anything he taught them on faith. Believing the sutras is not the point of the sutras, any more than believing in science is the point of science.

Christianity may be the most dogmatic major religion on the planet. (Judaism is much less dogmatic, and I don’t know enough about Islam to judge.) In most denominations the follower is presented with an elaborate belief system and told he must accept these beliefs absolutely; doubt often is considered weakness. Since the West is overwhelmingly Christian, even the nonreligious assume this must be what religion is all about. But it can be argued that Christianity’s emphasis on literal and rigid belief in doctrines is an aberration among religions and is not even true of all schools of Christianity.

Further, the notion that a Christian must accept the entire Bible without question is not as rigidly a given as Seidman and, apparently, Avalos believe. I have had lovely discussions with liberal Christians who understand the Bible was written by people with limitations and prejudices, and that ideas about God have evolved over time. They can even accept historical evidence that the Gospels were not, in fact, written by Apostles but by second- and third-generation followers who didn’t know Jesus personally. Once you accept that Jesus’s teachings may have been imperfectly recorded in the Gospels, then disregarding the parts that seem out of whack or are of questionable provenance (e.g., most of the Gospel of John) is not “cherry picking,” but critical thinking. (See also the Jesus Seminar.)

Seidman writes,

Even apart from his discussion of religious-created scarcities, Avalos uses a close reading of the Bible to reject the view that Christianity essentially espouses love and peace. He argues that in Romans 12:14 we do not really see an example of Christians loving their enemies at all, though this section is often cited by Christians for this very reason. The section begins, sure enough, “Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them.” But what most liberal Christians then ignore is the rest of the section, “If your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads” (Romans 12:20). Heaping burning coals on their heads? Avalos suggests that read as a whole, the commandment to be nice is a way to build up the potential for violence against an enemy. The nicer one is to one’s enemies, the more they will deserve the violence done to them in the end.

To which a liberal Christian would say that the book of Romans was written by Paul, and reflects Paul’s understanding, which may not have been the way Jesus saw things. Look instead at Matthew 5:43-48, which possibly had a eyewitness account as a source:

Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the publicans so? Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.

I submit that to love others requires not wishing to heap burning coals on their heads, the authority of St. Paul notwithstanding. Seidman snorts at Christians who “cherry pick,” then does some pretty selective cherry-picking himself.

Whatever Jesus was about got buried pretty quickly under the interpretations of lesser teachers and dogmas that arose in the centuries after his death. The Doctrine of Trinity itself didn’t become the central doctrine of the church until the 4th century; many biblical scholars doubt very much that Jesus saw himself as God. (As a Jew, he might have been appalled at the idea.) And although most Christians don’t question doctrine, there are some who find their true spiritual quest in digging through the doctrinal minutia of the ages to get closer to the authentic Jesus.

Dogmatism and mysticism struggled with each other throughout Christian history. Great Christian mystics like Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross lived in the shadow of the Inquisition. Dogmatism prevailed, but mysticism didn’t die altogether. And in a time when the light of science makes dogma seem absurd to thinking people, some Christians are working to restore the mystical traditions to their former place of respectability. Even though I ducked out of that struggle to take up the Buddhist path instead, I heartily wish them well.

My point here is that secularists like Mr. Seidman should not prejudge the religious and assume we’re all enslaved by ancient superstitions or even believe in God. Clearly, Mr. Seidman has a narrow and limited understanding of what religion is.

Thomas Jefferson said “it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” Likewise, Mr. Seidman need not concern himself with the religious views of others who aren’t concerning themselves with the secularist views of Mr. Seidman. Instead of worrying that the Christian Left will contaminate democracy, I recommend that he, like Jefferson, swear “eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” That’s the enemy of us all, religious or not.

We Got One!

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I had expected more tin foil hat comments on the “Muddying Questions, Squandering Answers” post on the collapse of the World Trade Center towers. I got a few, which I deleted as they weren’t terribly interesting. But today one Chris Michie has posted a lengthy comment on my “intemperate and unfocused rant,” challenging me to defend what I wrote. Which I won’t; it’s all in the post or the documents I linked to in the post, as far as I’m concerned. (The Mahablog Motto: I ain’t your monkey.) But Mr. Michie’s comment is a classic, an articulate and robust demonstration of junk science combined with a near-total failure of critical thought. So I’m calling your attention to it for your reading enjoyment. You can argue with him if you like; I haven’t twit-filtered him. Yet.

Fun With Linear Time!

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Let’s study this sequence of events.

November 20, 2005 — U.S. Marines in Haditha, Iraq, report that on Nov. 19, fifteen civilians and one Marine were killed by a roadside explosion and eight insurgents were killed in subsequent combat. According to Time magazine (Tim McGirk, “One Morning in Haditha,” March 27 issue),

A day after the incident, a Haditha journalism student videotaped the scene at the local morgue and at the homes where the killings had occurred. The video was obtained by the Hammurabi Human Rights Group, which cooperates with the internationally respected Human Rights Watch, and has been shared with TIME. …

… Soon after the killings, the mayor of Haditha, Emad Jawad Hamza, led an angry delegation of elders up to the Marine camp beside a dam on the Euphrates River. Hamza says, “The captain admitted that his men had made a mistake. He said that his men thought there were terrorists near the houses, and he didn’t give any other reason.”

But the military stood by its initial contention —that the Iraqis had been killed by an insurgent bomb— until January when TIME gave a copy of the video and witnesses’ testimony to Colonel Barry Johnson, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad.

January 2006 — Time magazine told military officials in Baghdad — that Iraqis said the fifteen civilians were not killed by a bomb but were deliberately killed by Marines. According to Time, military officials began to investigate what happened in Haditha in January.

According to Reuters, in January 2006 —

Journalism student Taher Thabet, via an Iraqi human rights group, passes video of bodies and homes where they died to Time magazine. Time says [Captain Jeffrey] Pool dismisses it as al-Qaeda propaganda. But Baghdad military spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Barry Johnson recommends investigation into possible foul play.

February 10, 2006 — According to the Associated Press, on this date a Time magazine reporter alerted military coalition authorities that the November 19 incident may have involved Marines deliberately killing civilians. The Navy Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) began an investigation.

February 14, 2006: The New York Times reports that “the first official investigation” of the Haditha killings began on this date. The investigation, Col. Gregory Watt, would be concluded three weeks later (see more below).

February 15, 2006: According to Reuters, “Lieutenant-General Peter Chiarelli, the No. 2 US commander in Iraq, initiates a preliminary investigation” on this date.

March 9, 2006 — Colonel Watt described the findings of his investigation to Lt. Gen. Chiarelli. Chiarelli directs the (NCIS) to investigate further, according to Reuters.

March 19, 2006 — Matthew Schofield of Knight Ridder reported that “Navy investigators announced last week that they were looking into whether Marines intentionally killed 15 Iraqi civilians – four of them women and five of them children – during fighting last November.” Time magazine posts a web exclusive by Tim McGirk:

In January, after Time presented military officials in Baghdad with the Iraqis’ accounts of the Marines’ actions, the U.S. opened its own investigation, interviewing 28 people, including the Marines, the families of the victims and local doctors. According to military officials, the inquiry acknowledged that, contrary to the military’s initial report, the 15 civilians killed on Nov. 19 died at the hands of the Marines, not the insurgents. The military announced last week that the matter has been handed over to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (ncis), which will conduct a criminal investigation to determine whether the troops broke the laws of war by deliberately targeting civilians. Lieut. Colonel Michelle Martin-Hing, spokeswoman for the Multi-National Force-Iraq, told Time the involvement of the ncis does not mean that a crime occurred. And she says the fault for the civilian deaths lies squarely with the insurgents, who “placed noncombatants in the line of fire as the Marines responded to defend themselves.”

April 8, 2006: Nancy A. Youssef of Knight Ridder reported that “the Marines relieved of duty three leaders of the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, which had responsibility for Haditha when the shooting occurred.”

May 17, 2006: Rep. John Murtha appears on MSNBC’s Hardball. Murtha said stress on our troops and failure by the Bush Administration to meet the needs of troops were the root causes of the atrocity.

May 18, 2006: Right blogosphere goes ballistic on Murtha, calling him “dishonorable,” a “traitor,” and advocating he be censured.

May 27, 2006: Pentagon announces Marines could face murder charges.

May 30, 2006: Iraqi Ambassador to the U.S., Samir Sumaidaie, tells CNN that he heard about the killings at Haditha …

… very soon after the event in November from some relatives. And as it happened, my own security detail [man] comes from that neighborhood. And his home is hardly a hundred yards from the home which was hit.

And he was in touch through the Internet with his folks and neighbors. And the situation which he reported to me was that it was a cold-blooded killing. …

… I was at the United Nations, and I found it unbelievable that the Marines would go in and kill members of a family who had nothing to do with combat. But I was under pressure by my friends and relatives to raise this issue.

Without any evidence in my hand, I didn’t really want to make any claims that I could not substantiate. That was, remember, before any video came out. It was just word of mouth, people telling me what happened.

And I know the power of the rumor and the power of allegations without foundation. But in this case, it was more than that.

The Ambassador also said one of his cousins had been shot by Marines in a separate incident.

I’ve already commented on the Haditha killings here and here. Now I’m just looking at how the story emerged and how the U.S. military responded. As you can see from what I pieced together from news stories, it isn’t clear exactly when U.S. military officials in Iraq became aware of the allegations. Maybe it was January, maybe February, but maybe earlier. Nor is it clear when the military began to investigate the allegations; maybe it was two months after the incident, maybe three. The NCIS may have become involved in February, or maybe March.

Even if the top brass in Iraq were unaware of what might have happened, it sounds like the allegations were well known to the Iraqis of Haditha, and their friends and relatives. So the suggestion by some righties that talking about Haditha undermines the war effort doesn’t make much sense.

Today Eric Schmitt and David Cloud report for the New York Times,

A military investigator uncovered evidence in February and March that contradicted repeated claims by marines that Iraqi civilians killed in Haditha last November were victims of a roadside bomb, according to a senior military official in Iraq.

Among the pieces of evidence that conflicted with the marines’ story were death certificates that showed all the Iraqi victims had gunshot wounds, mostly to the head and chest, the official said. …

… The three-week inquiry was the first official investigation into an episode that was first uncovered by Time magazine in January and that American military officials now say appears to have been an unprovoked attack by the marines that killed 24 Iraqi civilians. The results of Colonel Watt’s investigation, which began on Feb. 14, have not previously been disclosed.

It is now more than six months since whatever it was that happened, happened, which is six months for word-of-mouth about what happened to spread through Iraq. I am skeptical that the investigation into what happened needed to take that long. Even if the preliminary investigation by Col. Watt concluded on March 9, that’s more than three months ago. Now we’re getting leaks from senior military officials. The charges are serious, but the facts of the case don’t seem so complex that it would take this long to either obtain indictments or put forth evidence that the allegations are false.

Schmitt and Cloud continue,

Colonel Watt also reviewed payments totaling $38,000 in cash made within weeks of the shootings to families of victims.

What does “within weeks” mean? January? February?

In an interview Tuesday, Maj. Dana Hyatt, the officer who made the payments, said he was told by superiors to compensate the relatives of 15 victims, but was told that rest of those killed had been deemed to have committed hostile acts, leaving their families ineligible for compensation.

After the initial payments were made, however, those families demanded similar payments, insisting their relatives had not attacked the marines, Major Hyatt said.

Major Hyatt said he was authorized by Colonel Chessani and more senior officers at the marines’ regimental headquarters to make the payments to relatives of 15 victims.

Colonel Chessani “was part of the chain of command that gives the approval,” Major Hyatt said.

Over on the Right, Captain Ed links to the Schmitt and Cloud New York Times story and says,

From this description, rather than the impression of official denial and cover-up, the Marine Corps took decisive action early to ensure that evidence could be retained and that investigators started working on unraveling the deaths in Haditha. By the time that Time reported this incident publicly in the March 27th issue, the US military had already determined that war crimes had potentially been committed at Haditha. Time Magazine reported as much in its story, noting that it presented the military with the information that started the investigation.

If the US military had already determined that war crimes had potentially been committed by March 27, IMO they should have been a hell of a lot more pro-active about making information public and obtaining indictments asap. Seems to me that time is of the essence. The longer the military remains silent, the worse the rumors and the suspicions become.

And, frankly, if Rep. Murtha hadn’t started talking about Haditha a couple of weeks ago, we in the U.S. probably would know even less about what happened than we’ve learned so far.

See also: “A reporter’s shock at the Haditha allegations” by Arwa Damon, CNN.

Cross posted to The American Street.

A Tale of Two Democrats

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Oliver Burkeman and Jonathan Freedland of The Guardian report that Al Gore called the Bush Administration a “renegade band of rightwing extremists.”

Al Gore has made his sharpest attack yet on the George Bush presidency, describing the current US administration as “a renegade band of rightwing extremists”.

In an interview with the Guardian today, the former vice-president calls himself a “recovering politician”, but launches into the political fray more explicitly than he has previously done during his high-profile campaigning on the threat of global warming.

Denying that his politics have shifted to the left since he lost the court battle for the 2000 election, Mr Gore says: “If you have a renegade band of rightwing extremists who get hold of power, the whole thing goes to the right.”

Righties are outraged, because Gore made these remarks in Britain. To a rightie, criticizing Dear Leader on foreign soil is the worst kind of lèse-majesté. Of course, they’d be just as outraged if he’d said the same thing in the U.S. There’s no pleasing some people.

Burkeman and Freedland continue,

The new levels of attention he is receiving have led some Democrats to call on him to run again for president, while others have responded with anger that Mr Gore did not show the same level of passion in the 2000 campaign.

He has since acknowledged that he followed too closely the advice of his consultants during that campaign, and – before he started to scoff at the idea of running again – swore that if he ever did so, he would speak his mind.

It says something about the state of politics in the U.S. when politicians in office are afraid to speak their minds. (Such as …)

According to Steve Thomma of Knight Ridder, some Dem Party insiders are starting to criticize Hillary Clinton for being a wuss. Finally.

As she kicks off her campaign Wednesday for a second term, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York carries the image of a leader of her party and the expectation she’ll be the front-runner for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination.

Yet many Democrats and analysts think she’s failed to lead at a pivotal time for her party and the nation, complaining that she’s been overly cautious and timid in her first term. They contend that she’s remained a backbencher on major issues such as the Iraq war and immigration. And they say she’s squandered the unique platform her celebrity gives her to put other issues in play, such as expanding health care.

The approach may help or hurt her political career. But it’s angered or frustrated some Democrats who want more from her, and has contributed to the buzz within the party for former Vice President Al Gore as a more forceful champion heading into the 2008 campaign.

“As we tackle the great issues and debates, I don’t know that she has defined them for us,” said Joe Turnham, the state Democratic chairman in Alabama.

At a recent gathering of state and national Democratic leaders in New Orleans, Turnham said, “I sensed . . . a great yearning for someone to step up to the plate and speak the truth with almost a disregard to their own political posturing . . . even the Clinton admirers admit she’s not ready to go there yet.”

Is it too much to ask that our leaders be, well, leaders?

“Members of Congress scratch and claw to get one line of a news story. Hillary Clinton can wake up and decide to put health care on every front page in the country. But she hasn’t,” complained David Sirota, a liberal activist and former Democratic congressional aide.

“If you ask, `What does Hillary Clinton really represent?’ It would be hard to tell.”

“On the big issues, she hasn’t been there,” agreed Ross Baker, a political scientist at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

He said she’d worked to build a record of collaborating with Republicans on small, noncontroversial issues, much as her husband built up his political capital with proposals such as requiring school uniforms or installing V-chips in televisions to control children’s exposure to violence.

“She’s very cleverly co-sponsored a lot of minor legislation with conservative republicans like Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., so people can say she’s not divisive. It’s not on anything of great importance,” Baker said.

Speaking of David Sirota, this post suggests he probably approved of what Gore said about the rightwing renegades.

In my new book Hostile Takeover, I spend a good deal of time showing how ultra-conservative right-wingers have hijacked the terms “centrist” and “mainstream” and disconnected them from what’s actually “centrist” and “mainstream” among the public. This is no small matter (and a topic I have focused on before) – it is a hugely important and powerful linguistic weapon deviously employed by the most destructive forces. That’s right – today in Washington, positions that are way to the right of where the American public stands are regularly called “centrist” or “mainstream.” That’s no accident – it is a deliberate strategy employed by Big Money interests that run the Establishment to effectively marginalize the vast majority of the population from its own political debate and political system. It is, in short, a hostile takeover not just of our government, but of political discourse itself.

Like I said — In the past several years the media has made right-wing extremism seem “centrist” while progressivism, which has a long and respectable history in mainstream American politics, has been marginalized as something alien and weird and loony. Media enabled the Republicans to become the dominant party in national politics even though the Dems are more representative of American public opinion on issue after issue. It’s more accurate to say that a large right-wing extremist faction has been able to co-opt and coerce a large part of American mass media into reflecting its point of view. What Gore said is, of course, the plain truth, except that the extremists that control our government are not limited to the Bush Administration.

David goes on to talk about a fight for the soul of the Democratic Party. I think that, these days, Al Gore is the soul of the Democratic Party, and the question is whether those who control the party will allow the soul to inhabit the body or drive it away. A Dem Party led by Clintonites and the DLC seems a cold, lifeless, soulless thing to me.

Old-Time Religions

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If you have access to Salon, I recommend the interview of Karen Armstrong by Steve Paulson. In particular I recommend the interview to those of you who hate religion, although I believe you’d enjoy it if you don’t hate religion.

Armstrong is a former nun-turned-agnostic and religious historian who has written some excellent books, including A History of God, The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism, and a lovely biography of the Buddha.

In this interview Armstrong makes several points near and dear to me. One point is that religion isn’t primarily about belief in some Big Daddy God. Nor is it about miracles or belief in an afterlife or in supernatural beings, like angels. The problem is that westerners, and no doubt Americans in particular, cling to a very narrow and mostly infantile definition of religion that focuses on belief in a Big Daddy God, heaven, miracles, etc. So most of us in the West think that’s what religion is. That, and the fact that the world seems infested with warring religious whackjobs, makes religion easy to hate. I understand that.

But the problem isn’t with religion. The problem is that, somehow, we’ve allowed religion to be defined by the stupid and the warped, resulting in stupid and warped religion at war with all things rational and humane.

At the same time, Armstrong argues, hatred of religion is a pathology. She says that some people who hate religion are “secular fundamentalists. They have as bigoted a view of religion as some religious fundamentalists have of secularism.” I can relate to that, but I think many people in western culture have been exposed only to the most ignorant, dogmatic, low-level kinds of religion, and have no clue religion can be any other way. Some commenters to Mahablog will write that all religion is superstition or even mental illness, which saddens me.

How do good religions go bad? Armstrong’s newest book, The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions, looks at the Axial Age, 900 to 200 BCE, during which the world’s great religious traditions developed, independently of each other, in four regions of the world — Confucianism and Taoism in China; Hinduism (I would have narrowed that to Vedanta), Buddhism, Jainism in India; monotheism in Israel; and philosophical rationalism in Greece.

Armstrong says,

Without any collusion, they all came up with a remarkably similar solution to the spiritual ills of humanity. Before the Axial Age, religions had been very different. They had been based largely on external rituals which gave people intimations of greatness. But there was no disciplined introspection before the Axial Age. The Axial sages discovered the inner world. And religions became much more spiritualized because humanity had taken a leap forward. People were creating much larger empires and kingdoms than ever before. A market economy was in its very early stages. That meant the old, rather parochial visions were no longer adequate. And these regions were torn apart by an unprecedented crescendo of violence. In every single case, the catalyst for religious change had been a revulsion against violence.

First of all, they all insisted that you must give up and abandon your ego. The sages said the root cause of suffering lay in our desperate concern with self, which often needs to destroy others in order to preserve itself. And so they insisted that if we stepped outside the ego, then we would encounter what we call brahman or God, Nirvana or the Dao.

But by “god” the sages didn’t necessarily mean a big daddy in the sky:

In my book “A History of God,” I pointed out that the most eminent Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians all said you couldn’t think about God as a simple personality, an external being. It was better to say that God did not exist because our notion of existence was far too limited to apply to God.

“God” in this sense is not a person or spirit. “God” might represent the ground of being, for example. But if religion isn’t about worshipping gods, what is it? Armstrong says,

Religion is a search for transcendence. But transcendence isn’t necessarily sited in an external god, which can be a very unspiritual, unreligious concept. The sages were all extremely concerned with transcendence, with going beyond the self and discovering a realm, a reality, that could not be defined in words.

The mystical traditions of most religions are about disciplining oneself to transcend “I” and directly experience beingness outside of space and time. Some neurobiologists suggest that some of the older meditation practices — which are nothing like “transcendental meditation” or the relaxation techniques that pass for meditation these days — cause some parts of the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain to shut down so that the seeker experiences being without the boundaries of “I” and the passage of linear time. However it happens, through this experience the mystic’s perception of self and other, life and death, time and space, etc., changes. With the guidance of a skilled teacher or guru, the mystic becomes more at peace with himself, and he develops more selfless compassion for others.

The problem with mysticism is that it’s a ton of work. So over the years religions developed myths and rituals as learning aids. The myths may have begun as guides to the ineffable, not meant to be taken literally. But over time myths become beliefs and harden into dogma, and the ineffable ground of being is given a personality and parameters, and it becomes Big Daddy God.

IMO religion that defines itself by doctrine and ritual is not religion at all, but a cheap substitute thereof.

A theme that runs through several of Armstrong’s books is that, before the modern era, people didn’t take scripture literally. Even though fundamentalists think “old-time religion” means taking every word of the Bible literally, in fact this rigid literalism is a newfangled thing that arose in the past couple of centuries or so.

Well, faith is not a matter of believing things. That’s again a modern Western notion. It’s only been current since the 18th century. Believing things is neither here nor there, despite what some religious people say and what some secularists say. That is a very eccentric religious position, current really only in the Western Christian world. You don’t have it much in Judaism, for example. …

… I think we’ve become rather stupid in our scientific age about religion. If you’d presented some of these literalistic readings of the Bible to people in the pre-modern age, they would have found it rather obtuse. They’d have found it incomprehensible that people really believe the first chapter of Genesis is an account of the origins of life.

A mystic might say that Genesis is a parable about the development of human consciousness, for example. Adam and Eve become self-aware, and after that come shame, greed, and other unpleasant things they weren’t aware of before. The original moral might have been that the cure for shame, greed, etc. is to transcend ego.

Armstrong says that scripture should be read like poetry. “It’s an attempt to express the inexpressible.” She also makes the interesting point that science sometimes uses mythological language — e.g., “Big Bang,” “black hole” — for realities that dangle just outside the scope of most human cognition. “I think some scientists are writing a new kind of religious discourse, teaching us to pit ourselves against the dark world of uncreated reality and pushing us back to the mysterious.”

Armstrong goes on to call belief in an afterlife a “red herring” (the Buddha said pretty much the same thing in one of the early sutras). Also,

Sometimes, I think the way monotheists talk about God is unreligious. … people very often talk about him as a kind of acquaintance, whom they can second-guess. People will say God loves that, God wills that, and God despises the other. And very often, the opinions of the deity are made to coincide exactly with those of the speaker. … God transcends personality as God transcends every other human characteristic, such as gender. If we get stuck there, this is very immature. Very often people hear about God at about the same time as they’re learning about Santa Claus. And their ideas about Santa Claus mature and change in time, but their idea of God remains infantile.

One of the things I came to appreciate about Buddhism is the attitude that all teaching is provisional. The student may be taught myths or doctrines or initiated into some esoteric practice, but always it is understood that the lessons are like rungs in a ladder; to get to the next rung you have to leave the old one. In some religions belief in a god or gods is such a provisional step. But monotheists too often get stuck at Santa Claus God level, and even the churches have forgotten what comes after believing in Santa Claus God. And limited, fearful people who feel threatened by the modern world have twisted religious beliefs into something hard and ugly. Instead of practicing religion as a guide to transcendence, they’ve reverted to primitive, tribal forms of religion to protect themselves from whatever it is they are afraid of.

In the 1930s, Albert Einstein wrote that religions seem to have three levels. Level one is religion practiced to assuage fear; believers perform rituals and pray to imaginary gods to protect them. At level two, people form a social or moral concept of God. “This is the God of Providence,” Einstein wrote, “who protects, disposes, rewards, and punishes; the God who, according to the limits of the believer’s outlook, loves and cherishes the life of the tribe or of the human race, or even or life itself; the comforter in sorrow and unsatisfied longing; he who preserves the souls of the dead.”

But there is a third stage, with “no anthropomorphic conception of God corresponding to it.” Einstein called it a “religious feeling” — I think he might have bumped into the limits of language, as that sounds pretty lame — but he continues,

The individual feels the futility of human desires and aims and the sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves both in nature and in the world of thought. Individual existence impresses him as a sort of prison and he wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole. The beginnings of cosmic religious feeling already appear at an early stage of development, e.g., in many of the Psalms of David and in some of the Prophets. Buddhism, as we have learned especially from the wonderful writings of Schopenhauer, contains a much stronger element of this.

The religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by this kind of religious feeling, which knows no dogma and no God conceived in man’s image; so that there can be no church whose central teachings are based on it. Hence it is precisely among the heretics of every age that we find men who were filled with this highest kind of religious feeling and were in many cases regarded by their contemporaries as atheists, sometimes also as saints. Looked at in this light, men like Democritus, Francis of Assisi, and Spinoza are closely akin to one another.

How can cosmic religious feeling be communicated from one person to another, if it can give rise to no definite notion of a God and no theology? In my view, it is the most important function of art and science to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in those who are receptive to it.

Einstein goes on to argue that those who have dedicated their lives to scientific inquiry are “the only profoundly religious people” in this materialistic age. And, truly, there is no reason for science and religion to be at odds with each other. It’s not religion, but the fear, ignorance, and superstition that passes for religion, that’s the problem.