Oh, Religion —If It Only Had A Brain!

By Deborah Montesano

According to a study cited in the Los Angeles Times, “thinking analytically can cause religious belief to wane.” Analytical thinking and religion aren’t quite mutually exclusive, but when religious people exercise their brains, they tend to reach some conclusions that are antithetical to what their religions teach. A prominent example is in their attitudes toward women.

Former President Jimmy Carter is a thinking person of faith. In 2009, he left the Southern Baptist Church because of its refusal to ordain women and its strictures that women be subservient to their husbands. In leaving, he made these statements:

“At its most repugnant, the belief that women must be subjugated to the wishes of men excuses slavery, violence, forced prostitution, genital mutilation and national laws that omit rape as a crime. But it also costs many millions of girls and women control over their own bodies and lives, and continues to deny them fair access to education, health, employment and influence within their own communities….

“The truth is that male religious leaders have had—and still have—an option to interpret holy teachings either to exalt or subjugate women. They have, for their own selfish ends, overwhelmingly chosen the latter. Their continuing choice provides the foundation or justification for much of the pervasive persecution and abuse of women throughout the world.”

The abuses perpetrated on women around the world are horrific, but we don’t need to look any further than the United States to see the persecution of women by religious forces. Let’s consider the ten most religious states in America. They are Mississippi, Utah, Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia, and Oklahoma. These are some of the leaders in initiating anti-woman legislation—like Utah’s law to criminally prosecute some women for miscarriages, or Louisiana and Oklahoma’s attempts to pass personhood amendments that declare a fertilized egg to be a citizen with full rights, or Georgia’s effort to pass the cynically named “Protect Life Act” that would give hospitals the right to refuse treatment to a woman whose life is in danger—if it involves an emergency abortion. Georgia, by the way, ranks eleventh in the nation in its number of forcible rapes.

It doesn’t take much brainpower to see why there’s a link between religion and the mistreatment of women. Randall Bailey, of the Interdenominational Theological Center, goes even further than Carter. A thinking person has to see the logic behind this statement:

“We think we can use abusive texts in a sanitized way to prevent violence… If we continue to sidestep those issues, we are furthering abuse not only on those we want to help, but also on ourselves.”

That cuts right to the heart of the problem. The histories and holy books of the three major religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—are filled with God-sanctioned violence toward and control of women. All three religions have come from the same source: Abraham. The great founding father, Abraham, married his half-sister, Sarah, and then prostituted her to the Pharaoh of Egypt in order to save his own skin. He is the role model for every subsequent generation of believers in all three faiths. The bottom line is that women are seen as tools for men to use for their own purposes.

There has been a lot of emphasis in the media on the role of the Christian Right in political attempts to forcibly control the behavior of women, but the Right is the easy target. The truth is that the language of all the major religions victimizes and subjugates females. Randall Bailey is right; trying to use abusive texts in a sanitized way doesn’t come close to addressing the problem. The words shape attitudes and behavior. You can paint the walls of a building pure white and make it look quite holy and presentable, but when rot eats at the foundation, there is no salvaging the whole. It must come down.
Randall Bailey continues:

“What is this notion we have in religion that there is a spirituality that can be anti-human rights? What can even condone that as an option?”

Certainly women must not condone that form of spirituality—nor should any reasonable men. The major religions are irredeemably rotten at their foundation due to their promotion of abuse. The only hope for women, in the United States and around the world, is for thinking people to follow Jimmy Carter’s example: Abandon the rot!

Please check out my blog or join me on Facebook.

[SOURCE] 

Why Low Minimum Wages Kill Jobs and Crush Living Standards for Everyone

AlterNet / By Marshall Auerback

Contrary to right-wing propaganda, decent pay for workers helps the economy and boosts job creation.

 

 

 

Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, has introduced a bill to raise the federal minimum wage to $9.80 from its present level of $7.25. Polls are showing many voters in favor, though they are confused about what it would mean for the job market. The truth is that a move would be good for a slow economy and have a positive impact on the jobs crisis. Naturally, this has led to the usual cries of opposition, largely based on the notion that raising the minimum wage hurts the very people it is supposed to help. Typical of this view is a letter to the New York Times from Michael Saltsman, a fellow at the Employment Policies Institute, a business-backed nonprofit research group (surprise!).

Saltsman trots out the old canards against the minimum wage, claiming that research indicates that a minimum wage increase "simply doesn’t help the poor — in fact, it hurts them." He cites studies which showed that states with their minimum wages between 2003 and 2007 found no associated decline in state poverty rates. Saltsman gives three reasons for this:

1. A majority of working-age individuals who live in poverty don’t work, and thus cannot benefit from the raise.
2. A clear majority of those who do earn the minimum wage live in households that aren’t in poverty.
3. Less skilled and less experienced employees lose employment opportunities when the cost to hire and train them rises as a result of a minimum-wage increase.

Let’s take these arguments in turn. Implicit in the first point is that a majority of working-age individuals don’t work because they choose not to (i.e. they are lazy scroungers), or because unemployment is caused by laziness or lack of training. The argument they often use is that “I can get a job, therefore all the unemployed could get jobs if only they tried harder, or got better education and training.”

The way I go about demonstrating that fallacy is a dogs-and-bones example. Say we have 10 dogs and we bury nine bones in the backyard. We send the dogs out to find bones. At least one dog will come back without a bone.

We decide that the problem is lack of training. We put that dog through rigorous training in the latest bone-finding techniques. We bury nine bones and send the 10 dogs out again. The trained dog ends up with a bone, but some other dog comes back without a bone (empty-mouthed, so to speak).

The problem is that there are not enough bones and jobs to go around. The “bones” in the jobs discussion are insufficient spending power in the economy. It is certainly true that a well-trained and highly motivated jobseeker can usually find a job. But that is no evidence that aggregate unemployment is caused by laziness or lack of training. And besides, we could easily determine how much unemployment is truly voluntary. The government could serve as the “employer of last resort” under a job guarantee program modeled on the WPA (the Works Progress Administration, in existence from 1935 to 1943) and the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps, 1933-1942). The program would offer a job to any American who was ready and willing to work at the federal minimum wage, plus legislated benefits. No time limits. No means testing. No minimum education or skill requirements.

It's hard to believe that reducing or even eliminating the minimum wage (which is the corollary of Saltsman’s point), would actually enhance employment, when the problem is a basic lack of demand. Business will not hire more workers until it has more sales. Consumers will not spend more until they’ve got more jobs. A private-sector recovery requires 300,000 new jobs every month. But the private sector doesn’t need 300,000 new workers per month until there exists sufficient spending power in the economy to induce them to hire those workers. How is retaining a static, or reduced minimum wage, going to achieve this?

Higher wages means higher income and thus higher consumption spending, which induces firms to employ more labor. So the truth is that economic theory does not tell us that raising minimum wages will lead to more unemployment, indeed, theory tells us it can go the other way—raising the minimum wage could increase employment. That’s one of the reasons why Henry Ford believed in paying his workers a decent wage: so that they could buy his product.

To be sure, even an increase in the minimum wage to $12 or $15 an hour is not going to provide the means to purchase a Ford (or GM) today. And so what if, as Saltsman argues, the workers earning this minimum wage are not living in poverty? Does that mean they wouldn’t spend the money derived from an increased minimum wage? I wonder if Saltsman would also argue that tax cuts across the board are unnecessary because most of the people who receive them are not living in poverty?

That argument is a red herring. The truth is, if you earn your money through wages (unlike many of the 1 percent, who earn through things like investments and a tax system biased in favor of capital gains over income) then a higher wage, minimum or otherwise, would mean that you'd spend the additional dollars, creating jobs for other workers. You'd pay down your mortgages and car loans, getting yourself out of debt. You’d pay more taxes — on sales and property, mostly — thereby relieving the fiscal crises of states and localities. More teachers, police and firefighters would keep their jobs. America would get a virtuous cycle toward higher employment and, more importantly, the cycle would be based on a policy which creates higher incomes, not higher debt via credit expansion.

Then there's the common belief that minimum wages cause unemployment, which relates to Saltman’s third point – namely that less skilled and less experienced employees lose employment opportunities when the cost to hire and train them rises as a result of a minimum-wage increase. It is at least partly true that for an individual firm, higher wages reduce the number of workers hired. But we cannot extrapolate that to the economy as a whole. The issue of eroding wage competitiveness, which allegedly follows from a higher minimum wage, doesn’t really apply to jobs which offer the minimum wage. It might apply to areas such as manufactured goods and traded services like insurance and banking. But these are sectors in which most people already earn far more than the minimum wage.

As far as the minimum wage goes, the jobs we’re talking about are in non-traded services like checkout clerks, haircutters, domestic help, and food-service workers. When checkout clerks and cooks earn more in wages, then businesses start getting the sales required to induce them to hire more workers. And if sales are robust enough, then guess what? Even more workers will be hired, or wages will actually be increased.

The point is: wages are a source of demand, as well as a cost input. Reduce wages and demand plummets, which more than overrides any cost savings derived from paying less to workers (especially given today's paltry minimum wage, which is hardly a living wage for any American).

Let's be clear; Americans have never embraced welfare. For better or worse, our nation has always preferred a more libertarian path: self-help, personal responsibility, individual initiative. As a result, our welfare programs have always been stingy, temporary and purposely demeaning. But maintaining the minimum wage at today’s ridiculously depressed level does not enhance anybody’s employment prospects. In fact, it makes it worse, because it sucks demand out of the economy and minimizes the chances of those now receiving unemployment benefits or other assistance to quickly get back into the workforce, to "pull themselves up by their own bootstraps," as conservatives like to say. They cannot do that when our work force continues to focus on policies which merely enhance the incomes of the top 1 percent.

 Marshall Auerback is a market analyst and commentator.

Sometimes Civil Disobedience is the Only Way to be Heard

Mind Blowing Speech by Robert Welch in 1958 Predicting Insiders Plans To Destroy America

May Day's Radical History

AlterNet / By Jacob Remes

 

What Occupy Is Fighting for This May 1st

Occupy actions planned on May Day are tied to the generations-long movement for the eight-hour day, to immigrant workers, to police brutality and repression of the labor movement.

American general strikes—or rather, American calls for general strikes, like the one Occupy Los Angeles issued last December that has been endorsed by over 150 general assemblies—are tinged with nostalgia.

The last real general strike in this country, which is to say, the last general strike that shut down a city, was in Oakland, California in 1946—though journalist John Nichols has suggested that what we saw in Madison, Wisconsin last year was a sort of general strike. When we call a general strike, or talk of one, we refer not to a current mode of organizing; we refer back, implicitly or explicitly, to some of the most militant moments in American working-class history. People posting on the Occupy strike blog How I Strike have suggested that next week’s May Day is highly symbolic. As we think about and develop new ways of “general striking,” we also reconnect with a past we've mostly forgotten.

So it makes sense that this year’s call for an Occupy general strike—whatever ends up happening on Tuesday—falls on May 1. May Day is a beautifully American holiday, one created by American workers, crushed by the American government, incubated abroad, and returned to the United States by immigrant workers.

The history of May 1 as a workers’ holiday is intimately tied to the generations-long movement for the eight-hour day, to immigrant workers, to police brutality and repression of the labor movement, and to the long tradition of American anarchism.

Perhaps the first nation-wide labor movement in the United States started in 1864, when workers began to agitate for an eight-hour day. This was, in their understanding, a natural outgrowth of the abolition of slavery; a limited work day allowed workers to spend more time with their families, to pursue education, and to enjoy leisure time. In other words, a shorter work day meant freedom. It was not for nothing that in 1866, workers celebrated the Fourth of July by singing “John Brown’s Body” with new lyrics demanding an eight-hour day. Agitating for shorter hours became a broad-based mass movement, and skilled and unskilled workers organized together. The movement would allow no racial, national or even religious divisions. Workers built specific organizations—Eight Hour Leagues—but they also used that momentum to establish new unions and strengthen old ones. That year, the Eight Hour Movement gained its first legislative victory when Illinois passed a law limiting work hours.

The demand for an eight-hour day was about leisure, self-improvement and freedom, but it was also about power. When Eight Hour Leagues agitated for legislation requiring short hours, they were demanding what had never before happened: that the government regulate industry for the advantage of workers. And when workers sought to enforce the eight-hour day without the government—through declaring for themselves, through their unions, under what conditions they would work—they sought something still more radical: control over their own workplaces. It is telling that employers would often counter a demand for shorter hours with an offer of a wage increase. Wage increases could be given (and taken away) by employers without giving up their power; agreeing to shorter hours was, employers knew, the beginning of losing their arbitrary power over their workers.

The Illinois eight-hour law was to go into effect May 1, 1867. That day, tens of thousands of Chicago’s workers celebrated in what a newspaper called “the largest procession ever seen on the streets of Chicago.” But the day after, employers, en masse, ignored the law, ordering their workers to stay the customary 10 or 11 hours. The city erupted in a general strike--workers struck, and those who didn’t leave work were forced to by gangs of their colleagues roaming through the streets, armed with sticks, dragging out scabs. After several days of the strike, the state militia arrived and occupied working-class neighborhoods. By May 8, employers and the state they controlled had won, and workers went back to work with their long hours. The loss of the eight-hour-day movement led also to a massive decline in unions, and the labor movement would not pick up in such numbers for almost two decades.

The Illinois law and its defeat, however, were not forgotten. By the 1880s, a new labor movement had grown up in Chicago. This one was more radical and was dominated by immigrant workers from Germany. They remembered 1877, when a strike by railroad workers spread around the country. For a brief moment, as strikers took control of St. Louis and Pittsburgh, staring down the national guard and local police, nobody knew what would happen. But President Rutherford B. Hayes called out the army and brutally repressed the strike. They also remembered the state was rarely if ever on the side of the worker. Yet they also remembered the brief shining moment when it appeared that there might be an eight-hour day.

So in 1886, the Chicago Central Labor Union again demanded an eight-hour day. Led largely by anarchists like August Spies and Albert Parsons, this renewed movement demanded “eight for 10”--that is, eight hours’ work for 10 hours’ pay. Throughout the winter of 1886, they successfully organized and won a series of small victories, largely in German butchers’ shops, breweries and bakeries, where owners agreed to recognize unions and grant shorter hours. Then they issued a new demand: that again on May 1, Chicago would go on a general strike and not return to work unless employers agreed to an eight-hour workday.

The demands of the militant Chicago anarchists coincided with a massive upswing in other militant movements. Workers and Texas farmers were rebelling against a monopolistic railroad system. The Knights of Labor were rapidly organizing and spreading their vision of a cooperative, rather than capitalistic, society. “What happened on May 1, 1886,” writes James Green, the most recent and most accessible historian to have written about it, “was more than a general strike; it was a ‘populist moment’ when working people believed they could destroy plutocracy, redeem democracy and then create a new ‘cooperative commonwealth.’”

Four days later, it all came crashing down. On May 3, police had shot to death six strikers at the McCormick Works, where a long-standing labor dispute had turned the factory into an armed camp, and beaten dozens more. On May 4, anarchists held an outdoor indignation meeting at a square called the Haymarket to protest the police murders. Anarchist leader Samuel Fielden was wrapping up his speech when the police, led by the same inspector who had led the charge at McCormick the night before, moved in to disperse the crowd. “But we are peaceable!” Fielden cried, and just then somebody wasn’t. Somebody threw a bomb at the police, the police open fire, and the course of American history changed. 

To this day we do not know, nor will we likely ever know, who threw the bomb. Some say it was an agent provocateur. Some say it was an anarchist. If it wasn’t an anarchist, it surely could have been, since there were indeed anarchists who made bombs and would have thrown one given the opportunity. But we also know that many of those who died that night, including police, were felled by the police bullets.

We also know that the effect of the Haymarket bombing was far greater on the labor movement than it was on the police. 

Eight anarchist leaders were rounded up and put on trial for the murder of a police officer. No evidence was ever given that any of them threw the bomb, and only the flimsiest evidence was presented that any of them were remotely involved. All eight were convicted, and seven were sentenced to hang. Two of these had their sentences commuted, and a third—Louis Lingg, undoubtedly the most radical and militant of them—cheated the hangman by chewing a detonator cap and blowing off his jaw. The remaining four—August Spies, Albert Parsons, Samuel Fischer, and George Engel—were hanged on November 11, 1887. They went to their deaths singing the Marseillaise, then an anthem of the international revolutionary movement, and before he died, Spies shouted out his famous last words: “The time will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today.”

Before that happened, the state ensured more silence. The strike collapsed. Police around the country raided radicals’ homes and newspapers. The Knights of Labor never recovered. In the place of the radical industrial labor movement of the mid-1880s rose the American Federation of Labor, the much more exclusive and conservative organization that would dominate the labor movement until the 1930s. Meanwhile, it would take until the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 to finally enshrine the eight-hour day into federal law.

May 1 would live on, mostly abroad. In 1889, French syndicalist Raymond Lavigne proposed to the Second International—the international and internationalist coalition of socialist parties—that May 1 be celebrated internationally the next year to honor the Haymarket Martyrs and demand the eight-hour day, and the year after that the International adopted the day as an international workers’ holiday. In countries with strong socialist and communist traditions, May 1 became the primary day to celebrate work, workers and their organizations, often with direct and explicit reference to the Haymarket Martyrs. May Day remains an official holiday in countries ranging from Argentina to India to Malaysia to Croatia—and dozens of countries in between.

Yet in the United States, with some exception, the workers’ tradition of May 1 died out. Partially this was because the Knights of Labor had already established a labor day in September. Opportunistic politicians, most notably Grover Cleveland, glommed onto the Knights’ holiday in order to diminish the symbolic power of May 1. In 1921, May Day was declared “Americanization Day,” and later “Loyalty Day” in a deliberately ironic attempt to co-opt the holiday. Even that was not enough, though, and in 1958 Dwight Eisenhower added “Law Day” to the mix, presumably a deliberate jibe at the Haymarket anarchists who declared, “All law is slavery.” Today, few if any Americans celebrate Loyalty Day or Law Day—although both are on the books—but the origins of May Day are largely forgotten. Like International Women’s Day (March 8), which also originated in the U.S., International Workers’ Day became a holiday the rest of the world celebrates while Americans look on in confusion, if they notice at all.

Yet May 1 lives on, and indeed has been rejuvenated in the United States in the past few years. In 2006, immigrant activists organized “a day without an immigrant,” a nationwide strike of immigrant workers and rallies. It was perhaps the largest demonstration of workers in United States history. These immigrants, mostly from Latin America, had brought May 1 back to its birthplace, and in so doing they resurrected its history as a day specifically for immigrant workers.

It is appropriate that when the Occupy L. A. first issued its call for a general strike this May 1, it said the strike was “for migrant rights, jobs for all, a moratorium on foreclosures, and peace.” The order was significant, for migrants in the United States have been the ones who have made sure that the voices the state strangled that November day have remained so powerful. And regardless of what happens on Tuesday—and of course an actual general strike, in which cities grind to a halt and workers control what activities occur, is unlikely—we can, through a national day of action for the working class, work toward a new cooperative commonweath. We have a opportunity now to create and renew the labor movement, through new tactics, but ones that pay homage to the generations that preceded us.

Jacob Remes teaches history and public affairs at Empire State College, SUNY’s college for adult learners.

[SOURCE]

How I Left My Evangelical Christian Faith

AlterNet / By Valerie Tarico

 

Lots of people have successfully left their religious faith behind. Here's what the path out looks like.

 

Photo Credit: Kurt-Rune Bergset

I am what you might call a slow learner. I managed to make it all the way through high school, despite an eating disorder I couldn’t pray away, and all the way through college, despite a suicidal depression triggered by the same eating disorder, and almost all the way through grad school before I finally gave up on my religion and god. 

By contrast, my friend Geoff figured things out in the second grade. One day a nun at his Catholic school tried to pour holy water on the one Black kid in the school to exorcise the devil because he kept getting in fights. But Geoff thought to himself: It’s not Satan, it’s because all the other kids pick on him. Today Geoff is a psychologist working for Seattle Children’s Hospital –which is, ironically, the same place that did in the last shreds of my Evangelical beliefs.

I can’t recall the name of the small person who severed the final strands of my faith. There's just a vague image of soft brown hair and trusting brown eyes. I was 26, in the last stage of my PhD program, which required a year-long internship at the University of Washington. In one of my rotations, the one at Children’s Hospital, interns provided mental health consultation for families of patients on the medical wards. He was two, and in the first phase of treatment for a spinal cord tumor that would leave him paraplegic even if the nightmare course of chemotherapy were successful. I don’t know how long he survived.

Maybe it was his eyes, or his inability to comprehend why he couldn’t walk anymore, or why people who looked kind kept hurting him. Maybe it was the unbearable tenderness of his parents, who simply wanted to take their child home and love him rather than watch him suffer inexplicable months of “treatment” for a long shot at extending his life. But something inside me broke.

For years I had been patching my Christian faith together, as I like to say, with duct tape and bailing wire. My beliefs had become more and more idiosyncratic as I tried to hold together the lot of moral and rational contradictions that make up born-again, Bible-believing Christianity. Now, finally, after two decades of warping my feelings, perceptions and intellect to defend the absolute goodness of the Christian God, I got mad. I said to the god in my head, "I’m not making excuses for you anymore. I quit." And just like that, God was gone. All that was left was the frame of tape and wire: empty excuses, rationalizations and songs of worship that sounded oddly flat.

I tell you these two stories because they illustrate two extremes of leaving faith. On the one hand you have Geoff, whose parents were casual believers and whose skepticism kicked in early. On the other hand you have me, who took things to the brink of suicide because, as I thought, if I couldn’t pray away bulimia and depression then I was a failure in God's eyes. There are many paths into religion and many paths out.

The Damage Done

Most freethinkers were religious at one point in their lives. Whether you need a recovery process to move beyond that -- and how intensive that recovery process will be -- depends on what you believed, how deeply you believed it, and how much of your social support depended on fellow believers. ExChristian.net hosts forums that give people a chance to talk about their exodus from faith with support from fellow travelers. As often as not, loneliness is one of the hardest parts of the process. A believer can go anywhere in the world and find a ready-made community of fellow Christians. But a former believer can find himself or herself alone at the dinner table surrounded by family members but harboring a dark secret that would trigger rejection and judgment -- if they only knew.

Ministers who lose their faith often face the worst isolation, which is why Richard Dawkins and other have launched the Clergy Project to support those who are in transition. My friend Rich Lyons is a member of the project. He had to leave his home in Texas and excavate old radio skills he hadn’t used in over a decade in order to start life over in Seattle.

Questioning cost him not only his livelihood, but also his wife, access to his beloved daughter, and his small-town reputation as a decent person. Rich now produces a podcast series called Living After Faith – his way of offering a helping hand to other exiles from Christian fundamentalism.

Getting out of the church can be a complicated process -- but it's easy compared to getting the church out of you. A while back, I wrote an article titled "Getting God’s Self-appointed Messengers Out of Your Head." I talked about a concept psychologists call “introjects.” When you are a toddler, your mobility outpaces your good sense. Left to their own devices, many toddlers would play in traffic -- without even being told to. Caregivers have to provide constant external supervision. One of the ways that a toddler becomes capable of greater autonomy is that the voices of those external supervisors get internalized. The toddler brain develops what we call an introjected parent -- an internal model that can say, "Don’t follow that ball into the street," even if the real-world mother or father isn’t there. We create virtual, introjected parents (and teachers and preachers), so that even if all of those authority figures disappear we will still know how to function. But at some point having your parents along in your head is a disadvantage -- say, for example, when somebody really hot has just undone the top button on your shirt.

I think of recovery from religion like peeling layers off of an onion. Dissenting intellectually from teachings or doctrines you learned as an adult is like peeling off one of the outer layers. But if you keep going, you find scripts that got laid down earlier—attitudes, emotional conditioning, ideas you were taught before you had the capacity to question them. And some of these are tremendously harmful from a psychological standpoint.

I once was speaking to a group of Hindus who wanted to understand evangelical Christianity, because rampant proselytizing was dividing their villages and splitting families down the middle. After the talk, a woman named Mohini came up to me. She asked, “Is what you told us really true -- that Christians believe children are born evil?” I explained again the doctrine of original sin. She was horrified. She said, “When babies are born into Hindu families, we whisper to them: 'You are perfect. You are a spark of the divine.'”

Last week, I was working alongside my friend Al, who is a carpenter and used to belong to a Christian commune. I asked him, “If you were talking to a group of college students about recovery from religion, what would you tell them? What would you most want them to know?” He said: “Tell them they are OK just the way they are." Getting rid of the sense that you were born deeply, unacceptably flawed can be a lifetime endeavor.

Triggers for Leaving

Like my own experience at Children’s Hospital, many former believers experience some kind of acute trigger. Religion has an immune system made up of promises, threats and behavioral scripts that keep belief from crumbling under pressure from outside information. In Bible-believing Christianity, that immune reaction includes disparagement of rationality:

“Thinking themselves wise they became fools” (Romans 1:22) or “The fool has said in his heart there is no God” (Psalms 14:1). The Bible is full of threats against the faithless, from the story of Noah’s flood to the tortures promised in Revelation. Rules for believers prohibit emotional attachments to outsiders: “Be ye not unequally yoked with unbelievers, for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness and what communion hath light with darkness” (2 Cor 6:14).

When the religion’s immune system is working, it can seem like nothing gets through. A motivated believer will fend off any amount of linear reasoning or evidence. Backed into a corner he or she will simply insist, “I just know.” I picture some of my own family members surrounded by a polished wall of smooth steel—impervious, with no foot or handhold.

And yet, over time, life creates little windows of opening. Sometimes the trigger is unignorable hypocrisies or cruelty by church members. Sometimes it is a life crisis—a divorce, natural disaster, injury or loss of a loved one. Sometimes new social connections open up new ideas. Sometimes the accumulation of contradictory information reaches a tipping point.

Bible-believing Christians, those who see the Bible as the perfect word of God, would be horrified to know how often loss of faith is triggered by someone deciding to read the good book and discovering the long litany of slavery, incest, misogyny, genocide, or scientific absurdities there.

Stages of Recovery 

When the walls of faith start crumbling, people often go through a process that I think of as roughly four phases based on the dominant emotions of each stage:

1. Denial and fear. When religion has provided the structure to your life, doubt can be terrifying—especially if you’ve been taught that doubt is a sign of spiritual weakness or comes straight from the devil. In this phase, many believers redouble their efforts to shore up their faith. They may pray desperately for God to take away the doubts. Increased Bible-reading is common. So is missionary work: if you can convince others God is real, then surely it must be true. Psychologist Marlene Winell specializes in recovery from religion. For this phase of recovery, she offers clients two bits of advice that she sums up as “Get real” and “Get a grip”:

Be honest with yourself about whether your religion is working for you. Let go of trying to force it to make sense....Don’t panic. The fear you feel is part of the indoctrination. All those messages about what will happen to you if you leave the religion are a self-serving part of the religion. If you calm down, you’ll be just fine. Many people have been through this.

2. Uncertainty and guilt. At some point, doubt gains the upper hand. But that doesn’t mean the transition is over. When those final threads of my own faith broke, I kept my thoughts to myself. I didn’t believe in God anymore, so I told myself, but I didn’t want to drag anyone else to hell with me. A friend described this phase as “I don’t believe in Hell. Does that mean I’m going there?” It would take several years and several therapists after my Children’s Hospital rotation before I risked asking my brother Dan how he managed to hold onto our childhood beliefs. (I found out his beliefs were as long gone as mine.)

My book, Trusting Doubt, is particularly valuable in this phase because it digs into core evangelical teachings, showing how they can’t possibly be true. Information is powerful in helping to purge those last lingering shreds of doubt and the guilt that goes with them. Learn about yourself, the world around you and the history of your religion. Former Mormon Garrett Amini says his parents called books and articles that were critical of his religion “spiritual pornography.”

Evangelicals don’t use this term, but the concept is probably familiar to anyone who has ever been a part of a sect that has to constantly fend off reality. So, read widely: evolutionary biology, analysis of sacred texts, psychology of religion, physics. Listen with open ears. The truth will set you free.

3. Loss, grief and anger. Once there’s no going back, it’s not unusual to feel bereft, spiritually, socially, intellectually and emotionally. The loss is real, even if Jesus is not. Religion offers clarity, identity, purpose, community, a channel for joy, a structure around which to sculpt the week and the calendar year. That is a lot to lose -- even if your parents or spouse don’t kick you out. Grieving is important. So is anger. Anger is an activating emotion, it gives you the guts to say what is real—to yourself and to others, and to make hard changes. Christians often are taught that anger is bad, and many people will encourage you to shutter it during the recovery process. It can feel risky, too big or too out of control. But the reality is that each of our emotions has a purpose, and sometimes we need to express anger so we can learn how to take care of ourselves without it. Learning to express anger in a way that is appropriate and modulated takes practice.

When you get stuck in either grief or anger, it's time to get help. Marlene Winell's book, Leaving the Fold, has great self-help exercises for fundamentalists in recovery. But sometimes self-help isn’t enough. Winell offers long-distance phone consultations and RecoveringfromReligion.org is creating a referral list of mental health professionals who are able to work with clients in recovery.

4. Emergence, curiosity, affirmation. The very first ex-Christian Web site I ran across  -- now almost 10 years ago -- was called losingmyreligion.com. Its archive still exists, headed by the same banner it had then -- a picture of a dead fish and an inscription that says: "Stay home Sundays, save 10 percent." Just beneath the banner is this poem:

Awake
 
I woke up to an empty room

No more angels watching over me.
No more demons to be held at bay
by the invocation of
an Anglicized version
of a Hellenized version
of a Hebrew name

I woke up to an empty room:

Just a room. Four walls, ceiling, floor.
Just a room. Nothing more.

I woke up to an empty room
and embraced the solid air.

I woke up to an empty room and knew myself
awake.
 
What Comes Next?

In those wonderful interludes when you find yourself awake, the dominant emotions shift from focusing on who you were to focusing on who and what you want to be. Which values and habits from your religion do you want to keep? What do you want to call yourself? What new discoveries most excite your curiosity? What matters – really matters to you?

As a movement, atheism—freethought—secularism is just becoming strong enough to move beyond a defensive posture and beginning to ask these questions. Are there secular moral absolutes? Dare we talk about secular spiritual community? How do we build ritual, holidays and music back into our communal lives? Absent religion, how can we together express wonder and joy?

Joseph Campbell had this to say:

People say that what we are all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonance within our innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive….”

That is the quest of a lifetime.

Valerie Tarico is a psychologist and writer in Seattle, Washington and the founder of Wisdom Commons. She is the author of "Trusting Doubt: A Former Evangelical Looks at Old Beliefs in a New Light" and "Deas and Other Imaginings." Her articles can be found at Awaypoint.Wordpress.com.

Losing Your Religion

News | Mind & Brain
 

Analytic Thinking Can Undermine Belief

A series of new experiments shows that analytic thinking can override intuitive assumptions, including those that underlie religious belief

By Marina Krakovsky

Image: Wikimedia Commons/innoxiuss

 

People who are intuitive thinkers are more likely to be religious, but getting them to think analytically even in subtle ways decreases the strength of their belief, according to a new study in Science.

The research, conducted by University of British Columbia psychologists Will Gervais and Ara Norenzayan, does not take sides in the debate between religion and atheism, but aims instead to illuminate one of the origins of belief and disbelief. "To understand religion in humans," Gervais says, "you need to accommodate for the fact that there are many millions of believers and nonbelievers."

One of their studies correlated measures of religious belief with people's scores on a popular test of analytic thinking. The test poses three deceptively simple math problems. One asks: "If it takes five machines five minutes to make five widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?" The first answer that comes to mind—100 minutes—turns out to be wrong. People who take the time to reason out the correct answer (five minutes) are, by definition, more analytical—and these analytical types tend to score lower on the researchers' tests of religious belief.

But the researchers went beyond this interesting link, running four experiments showing that analytic thinking actually causes disbelief. In one experiment, they randomly assigned participants to either the analytic or control condition. They then showed them photos of either Rodin's The Thinker or, in the control condition, of the ancient Greek sculpture Discobolus, which depicts an athlete poised to throw a discus. (The Thinker was used because it is such an iconic image of deep reflection that, in a separate test with different participants, seeing the statue improved how well subjects reasoned through logical syllogisms.)

After seeing the images, participants took a test measuring their belief in God on a scale of 0 to 100. Their scores on the test varied widely, with a standard deviation of about 35 in the control group. But it is the difference in the averages that tells the real story: In the control group, the average score for belief in God was 61.55, or somewhat above the scale's midpoint. On the other hand, for the group who had just seen The Thinker, the resulting average was only 41.42. Such a gap is large enough to indicate a mild believer is responding as a mild nonbeliever—all from being visually reminded of the human capacity to think.

Another experiment used a different method to show a similar effect. It exploited the tendency, previously identified by psychologists, of people to override their intuition when faced with the demands of reading a text in a hard-to-read typeface. Gervais and Norenzayan did this by giving two groups a test of participants' belief in supernatural agents like God and angels, varying only the font in which the test was printed.

People who took the belief test in the unclear font (a typewriterlike font set in italics) expressed less belief than those who took it in a more common, easy-to-read typeface. "It's such a subtle manipulation," Norenzayan says. "Yet something that seemingly trivial can lead to a change that people consider important in their religious belief system." On a belief scale of 3 to 21, participants in the analytic condition scored an average of almost two points lower than those in the control group.

Analytic thinking undermines belief because, as cognitive psychologists have shown, it can override intuition. And we know from past research that religious beliefs—such as the idea that objects and events don't simply exist but have a purpose—are rooted in intuition. "Analytic processing inhibits these intuitions, which in turn discourages religious belief," Norenzayan explains.

Harvard University psychologist Joshua Greene, who last year published a paper on the same subject with colleagues Amitai Shenhav and David Rand, praises this work for its rigorous methodology. "Any one of their experiments can be reinterpreted, but when you've got [multiple] different kinds of evidence pointing in the same direction, it's very impressive."

The study also gets high marks from University of California, Irvine, evolutionary biologist Francisco Ayala, the only former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science to have once been ordained as a Catholic priest, and who continues to assert that science and religion are compatible. Ayala calls the studies ingenious, and is surprised only that the effects are not even stronger. "You would expect that the people who challenge the general assumptions of their culture—in this case, their culture's religious beliefs—are obviously the people who are more analytical," he says.

The researchers, for their part, point out that both reason and intuition have their place. "Our intuitions can be phenomenally useful," Gervais says, "and analytic thinking isn't some oracle of the truth."

Greene concurs, while also raising a provocative question implicit in the findings: "Obviously, there are millions of very smart and generally rational people who believe in God," he says. "Obviously, this study doesn't prove the nonexistence of God. But it poses a challenge to believers: If God exists, and if believing in God is perfectly rational, then why does increasing rational thinking tend to decrease belief in God?"

The Number One Threat Facing America Is Its Debt Burden

Decline and fall: the remains of the Packard Motor Car Company, which ceased production in the late 1950s, in Detriot, Michigan.

Photograph: Charles Ommanney/Getty Images.

Granted extraordinary access to Pentagon officials, Edward Luce discovered that even they admit the era of US global dominance is over

 
By Edward Luce | Published 18 April 2012

Beyond the naval shipyard in south-east Washington lies Fort McNair, America’s third-oldest continuous fort, which looks across the Potomac at the Ronald Reagan national airport. Sacked by the British in the war of 1812, the fort is today better known as the home of the National Defense University (NDU) – the descendant of the Army Industrial College that was set up in 1924 to prevent a recurrence of the procurement difficulties that had blighted the US military during the First World War. It was also supposed to act as a kind of internal think tank for the military.

NDU was the place where promising officers were sent to prepare their minds for leadership. Dwight Eisenhower, after whom its main redbrick building is named, graduated from here. By focusing on the resources needed to sustain the US military, these mid-career officers think differently to others: they grasp the importance of a robust economy. “Without it, we are nothing,” says Alpha, a thoughtful air force colonel, who, as is the custom, is known by his military nickname (a name I have changed to protect his identity). “People forget that America’s military strength is because of our power. It didn’t cause it.”

I got to know Alpha in peculiar circumstances. Unusually for a foreigner, particularly one whose forebears once trashed the place, I was invited by the NDU to judge the school’s annual exercise in national strategising. Along with two other “distinguished visitors” – a label that has never before, and is unlikely again, to be bestowed on me – I was invited to assess a ten-year national security plan for the US that the students had spent the previous two weeks thrashing out. The campus also conducts hi-tech war simulations in which outsiders with military or diplomatic expertise are invited to participate.

This was an exercise in much fuzzier geopolitics. In short, what should America do over the next decade to sustain its global pre-­eminence? I was intrigued to hear what these soldiers thought. Would they focus on defeating al-Qaeda, pacifying Afghanistan and disarming Iran? Or would they concentrate more on containing China as the emerging challenger to American power? As the saying goes, give a man a hammer and all he sees are nails. These people (I reminded myself) are the product of by far the most powerful military machine the world has ever known. Which nails were they seeing?

In what will qualify as another first and last, when I entered the room all its occupants stood and then, even more excruciatingly, sought my permission to sit down again. I momentarily thought about making a run for it. Instead we made our introductions. Of the 16 members of the group, nine were in uniform and the remainder were mostly senior civilian officials from the Pentagon, the department of homeland security and the state department. To judge from their accents, at least half of them were from the south. Most had done combat duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. “I think you could still describe the US military as a bastion of Republicanism,” Alpha told me a few days later. “But it’s a different kind to what’s in ­fashion nowadays.”

Over the following three hours, this heavily be-medalled group laid out its blueprint. For the most part it was a highly articulate pre­sentation. The only small exception was a ­tendency to stray into military jargon. Terms such as “off-ramp”, “kinetic” and “situational awareness” kept recurring. It reminded me of an American colleague at the Financial Times who, on his return from a briefing at the ­Pentagon was asked what he had picked up.

“I learned that situational awareness is a force multiplier,” he said. “Which means if you know where you are, you don’t need so many people.” When I related this to Alpha he smiled. “We could have done with some more situational awareness when we went into Iraq,” he said.

The group’s premise was that the US still had enough power to help shape the kind of world it wanted to see. By 2021 that moment would have passed. The country needed to act very fast and very pragmatically. “The window on America’s hegemony is closing,” said the ­officer selected to provide the briefing. “We are at a point right now where we still have choices. A decade from now, we won’t.” The US, he continued, was way too dependent on its military. The country should sharply reduce its “global footprint” by winding up all wars, notably in Afghanistan, and by closing peacetime military bases in Germany, South Korea, the UK and elsewhere.

It should not to go to war with Iran. “We have to be able to learn to live with a ­nuclear-armed Iran,” the briefer said. “The alternative [war] would impose far too high a cost on America.” In Asia, the US should recognise the inevitable and offer the green light to China’s military domination of the Taiwan Straits. In exchange for the US agreeing to stand down over Taiwan, China would push North Korea to unite with South Korea. Finally, the US should stop spending so much time and resources on the war against al-Qaeda (the exercise took place about three weeks before Osama Bin Laden was killed).

All this was a means to an end, which was to restore the US’s economic vitality. It would not be easy. It may not even be possible, they conceded. But it should be the priority. “The number one threat facing America is its rising debt burden,” said the briefing officer. “Our number one goal should be to restore American prosperity.” Intrigued by the boldness of their vision, I was unprepared for what followed. The briefer said they had all agreed on the need to shrink the Pentagon budget by at least a fifth, partly by closing overseas bases, partly by reducing the number of those in uniform by 100,000, but also by cutting the number of “battle groups” – aircraft carriers – below its current level of 11.

Most of the savings would be spent on civilian priorities such as infrastructure, education and foreign aid. None of this would be possible were the US at war, or even under threat of war, they said. It could be pulled off only if the country were, in effect, to cede – or “share” – its domination over large parts of the world. “We would need to persuade our friends on the Republican side that America has to share power if we want to free up resources to invest at home,” the briefer said. “We tried really hard to come up with alternatives. But we couldn’t find a better way to do this.”

Led by my two “co-judges”, we probed the 15 men and one woman for signs of hesitation. Expecting some kind of a reaction, I suggested that their plan would be seen as dangerous. Pull out of Europe? Accept nuclear parity with China?

Embark on a Marshall-style plan to revive the US economy? The chances of anything like this happening were zero.

“Nobody here thinks the politics in this town is going to change overnight,” said an army colonel from Tennessee with a classic military buzz cut. “All we are saying is that we’re in trouble if they don’t.” I heard his words and saw the person from whom they were issued. It was still a struggle to match them up.

Later it occurred to me that what the group had laid out was within the mainstream of Republican tradition. In the 1860s, Abraham Lincoln unleashed a series of investments that were to unify the continent into one national economy – from the railroads to the public universities. In the early 1900s, Teddy Roosevelt, another Republican, broke up the oil mono­polies, introduced regulation of workplace conditions and set up the first national parks to preserve the wilderness. Dwight Eisenhower, their fellow alumnus, responded to the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957 with massive investments in public education, science and road-building. In a classic of unintended con­sequences, he also created the research agency that went on to develop the internet.

Even Ronald Reagan, the undisputed icon of today’s conservative movement, shepherded through an amnesty for illegal immigrants, closed down thousands of income-tax loopholes and set up a public-private partnership to defend the US’s embattled computer chip ­industry. Reagan once said: “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me.” Given the Republican Party’s instinct to equate virtually any taxes with socialism nowadays, it looks like Lincoln’s party has left the US military – or at least its upper reaches.

Even with my grasp of polling methodology, I knew a group of 16 officers was too small a sample from which to draw any big ­conclusions. So it was with particular interest, a few weeks after the session, that I came across an article in Foreign Policy on a report issued by the Pentagon, by the mysterious “Y”, entitled “A National Strategic Narrative”. The report made much the same arguments. It paid homage to the famous “long telegram” from Mos­cow by George Kennan, published under the byline “X” in Foreign Affairs in 1947, which argued for a strategy of “containment” of the Soviet Union. In an attempt to get more attention, Admiral Mike Mullen, then chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, and therefore the head of all the US armed services, agreed to allow the names of the two “Y” authors to be revealed. These were Captain Wayne Porter of the US Navy and Colonel Mark “Puck” Mykleby of the US Marine Corps. Both were on loan to Admiral Mullen’s office when they wrote it.

The authors argued that the US could not hope to practise “smart power” abroad if it did not practise “smart growth” at home. Unlike Kennan’s intervention, the article written by “Y” generated little response. Barring a few bloggers, none of the major newspapers or television stations saw it as newsworthy. Kennan had been compelled to reveal that he was “X” after a mounting campaign of public speculation. The authors of “Y” elicited barely a shrug when they volunteered their identities. Yet their piece offered a key insight into the troubled mindset of the US senior military.

Much like the NDU group, Porter and Mykleby argued for a new spirit of “shared ­sacrifice” in America. It was Alpha who gave force to that phrase for me. Having patrolled the skies of Iraq – acting as the “unblinking eye” of the army – Alpha, like many of his colleagues, was disappointed with how the civilians managed that war. “In this country ‘shared sacrifice’ means putting a yellow ribbon around the oak tree and then going shopping,” he said, in reference to George W Bush’s infamous call for Americans to hit the ski slopes and the shopping malls after the 11 September 2001 attacks. The memory still bothered him. “Taxes are the price we pay for civilisation,” he said, in quotation of the jurist, Oliver Wendell Holmes.

America’s ability to reverse her fortunes could come about only through being admired around the world, rather than feared, Alpha said. There was a thin line between being feared and being mocked. “Should we be seen as a hegemon that imposes its will on others, or as a beacon?” he said when I asked whether the US should regain its appetite to promote democracy overseas. “The best thing we can do for democracy around the world is to change our act here at home.”

Alpha’s group had recommended lifting the foreign aid budget by $30bn a year, entirely at the expense of the Pentagon.

“We know there’s no lobby in Washington for foreign aid,” he said. In a poll by World Public Opinion a few months earlier, the American public estimated that a quarter of the US federal budget was spent on foreign aid. In fact, Washington spends little more than a dollar on aid for every 99 dollars it spends on something else. The gap between perception and reality is occasionally stunning. In practice, and given the patchy record of the aid industry around the world, it is unlikely more money would buy the kind of goodwill that Alpha’s group would expect for the US – development is a complicated business. But that seemed beside the point. What I took from Alpha and his colleagues was a visceral concern about America’s future.

I picked up the same concern from Admiral Mullen in an interview that he gave me three months before retiring as head of the US military. Mullen was in a talkative mood. In 2010, in the midst of overseeing a 30,000 troop surge to Afghanistan, Mullen had vented alarm about growing US national debt, declaring that it was the country’s biggest threat – greater than that posed by terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and global warming. He had since repeated his point. We met amid the rolling high drama that led up to the last-minute decision in August 2011 to raise the US national debt limit by more than $2trn.

Perched at his utilitarian semi-circular desk, with a bank of television screens behind him, the admiral munched happily through two hot dogs, both of which he had drowned in mustard. It did not slow his word rate. “We are borrowing money from China to build weapons to face down China,” he said. “I mean, that’s a broken strategy. It may be OK now for a while, but it is a failed strategy from a national security perspective.”

Mullen spoke of the need for Washington to take more effective decisions at a time when the US is entering a lengthy phase of fiscal austerity. It was clear he did not think Washington was up to the task. It still hadn’t made a proper account about the events that led up to the September 2008 meltdown in the days that followed the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Nor was there strong reason to be confident that such a meltdown would not recur. “Where were the overseers, as opposed to the finger pointers, which is what they became?” he asked. “Where was the oversight – the helpful, regulatory, legislative oversight to keep us in limits? Because it wasn’t there. It wasn’t there. Where the hell is the accountability for this?”

Mullen’s concerns reminded me of Eisenhower’s famous address in 1961, just before John F Kennedy was inaugurated as president, in which he warned of the dangers posed by the US’s emerging “military-industrial com­plex”. The world has turned at least half circle since then. Nowadays, those in Mullen’s position spend more time worrying about the foreign components that go into US military equipment. The global supply chain is a growing reality for the Pentagon. In such a hyper-integrated world, very little is made purely in America.

The world is changing rapidly, Mullen continued, and the US cannot be expected to do all the heavy lifting. Much of its industrial base, including the naval shipyards and certain kinds of missile-building systems, was now in a “critically fragile” state, he said. “Once you lose that capacity, it’s hard to get back. We’re going to have to have something like a global security strategy that involves our allies and our alliances, so that our industrial capacities are complementary.” In short, America’s allies should share much more of the economic burden. “There is not a country in the world that can do this alone any more,” Mullen told me.

A few weeks after the NDU course finished, Alpha went back to Afghanistan to a war in which he believes the US has again set its heights too high. “We should be more modest in what we think we can achieve,” he said. “The American military was never supposed to be an aid agency.” For Alpha, as for Mullen, American recent history offers a lesson in overreach. The US military has been asked to pull off the impossible in far away places. But whatever it has learned only reinforces its scepticism about what it can achieve. The real challenges are at home.

It is a mindset increasingly shared by the American people, more than seven out of ten of whom tell Gallup they believe their children will be worse off than they are – a strikingly un-American pessimism. Yet it is deeply rooted: a large chunk of the middle class is worse off, or the same, in real terms as their parents. Their contempt for Washington, which seems unable to grapple with the structural challenges facing US competitiveness, keeps growing, whoever is in office. Last year, just 9 per cent said they believed Congress was doing the right thing all or some of the time, which pretty much confined it to “blood relatives and paid staffers”, as the joke goes.

And while Washington prevaricates, the rest of the world keeps expanding its share. In 2000, the US had 31 per cent of world income, according to the IMF. That is now down to 23 per cent, heading towards 17 per cent in the next decade. Yet even Barack Obama, whom Mitt Romney likes to portray as the declinist-in-chief, says, “anyone who says America is in decline doesn’t know what they’re talking about”. To tackle a problem you must first recognise that it exists. That is what they are taught in officer school. For the most part, the US’s problems are not obscure. But the will to confront them appears to be missing in action.

For Alpha, the best illustration of Washington’s falling IQ – among a rich embarrassment of choices – is its reluctance to address the ­festering morass  in the American immigration system. As a nation of immigrants, America is supposed to attract people. “We take the world’s smartest kids and we give them the best education available, and then we put them on a plane back home,” he said. “How smart is that?”

Edward Luce is the author of “Time to Start Thinking: America and the Spectre of Decline” (Little, Brown, £20)

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Thank You for Your Service? No Thanks!

By Gary D. Barnett

April 25, 2012 "Information Clearing House" 


--- It would be very difficult for me to think of any term that disgusted me more than those words uttered continuously in the presence of virtually any soldier in the United States: "Thank you for your service."

 

What service is actually being praised by those conditioned to say these empty words? Why are they thanking and praising nearly every soldier they see? 

• Is it because hatred of the U.S. is increasing, and new enemies are being created in the Middle East and all around the rest of the world?
• Is it because thousands and thousands of innocent people are being killed now in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and many more are being threatened?
• Is it because 20,000,000 to 30,000,000 foreigners, mostly innocent civilians, have died just since World War II due to U.S. interference and war?
• Is it because indefinite detention without due process, torture, assassination, and rendition are now common and accepted practices?
• Is it because suicide rates among American soldiers have increased 80% since the Iraq War began?
• Is it because mental problems now send more military personnel to the hospital than any other cause?
• Is it because destruction and separation of military families is rampant?
• • Is it because civil liberties have all but disappeared due to so-called terrorism legislation? (terror legislation would be more accurate)
  • Is it because of the creation of the USA PATRIOT Act, Military Commissions Act, NDAA, TSA, and Department of Homeland Security (DHS)?
  • Is it because of the massive buildup of killer drones abroad and at home?
  • Is it because the huge deficit spending to support multiple aggressive wars is causing economic chaos?
  • Is it because of the surging number of double amputees of American soldiers?
  • Is it because of increasing energy costs due to the United States unwarranted presence in the Middle East region?
  • Is it because the domestic police have now become a brutal militarized force, bent on controlling the entire population?
   
  I could of course go on, but the picture is clear. Those who continue to believe the propaganda about all U.S. wars leading to the protection of freedom, and to our national security, are blinded by ignorance, and consumed by pathetic false patriotism. No U.S. wars have ever served the purpose of freedom; they have only served to destroy it.
   
  Due to these wars of aggression and occupation, our freedoms are virtually non-existent today. We are spied upon, tracked, searched without warrant, sexually assaulted, and radiated. There are now checkpoints in many parts of the country where it is demanded that we "show our papers," and killer spy drones are filling our skies. Government agents and the military are patrolling all U.S. borders, and Blackhawk war helicopters sporting heavily armed soldiers hanging on tethers are flying over our cities.
   
  Because of these wars, the government has gained enormous power, and continues its assault on liberty. A police state environment has taken hold, and if not curbed soon, will lead to Martial Law in the near future. The DHS has purchased enough killing ammunition to murder more than twice the population, and on the say so of one man, Americans can and are being assassinated. Why?
   
  In order for our national security to be defended, we first have to be attacked. That has not happened. In order to protect freedom here at home, all foreign wars must cease, and all the government agencies and "terrorism" legislation created since 9/11 should be abolished immediately! 
  
  
  Every U.S. base on foreign soil should be closed, and every troop stationed in another country should come home and enter the private sector. At least that would be a good start.
   
  There is a reason that the young are sent as cannon fodder to die in the wars of the politicians, bankers, and corporations. They are less likely to challenge the orders they are given; orders meant to be obeyed regardless of the immoral nature of those demands, and regardless of the horrible consequences they will most certainly face. Those who "serve" do not serve the people who falsely praise them; they only serve one master, and that master is the nation state and its benefactors. It is not "we the people."
   
  Thank you for your service? Absolutely not! We can’t afford any more of this kind of service!
   

  Gary D. Barnett is president of Barnett Financial Services, Inc., in Lewistown, Montana. Visit his website. 

  
  
  This article was first published at Lew Rockwell
  Copyright © 2012 by LewRockwell.com.

Why You Should Care About and Defend Your Privacy

By Alan Henry

Privacy is dead, right? Facebook knows everything about you, and the world is still turning. Whether you don't mind companies or the government knowing all about your private life or still feel completely uneasy at the idea, we often gloss over exactly why your personal data is worth protecting. We teamed up with the Electronic Frontier Foundation to get to the heart of the issue, and dispel some common myths around the ways your data is used.

We sat down with Rainey Reitman, Activism Director at the EFF, to discuss why digital privacy is important, why you should keep a skeptical eye to services that make promises of "free" services in exchange for tidbits of personal information, and why you should care about the privacy of others even if you're not concerned about your own data and how it may be used. All in all, the message is clear: It's tempting to throw up your hands and say "privacy is dead," but nothing could be further from the truth.

Cause for Concern: Why No One's Telling You Your Data Is Valuable

When we discussed how companies track you on the web and what you can do to stop them, I drew on my personal experience working for a company that trades in information—both personal and aggregate—to explain why your data is so valuable to the businesses that want it. Making the case that information about you, your demographics, your behaviors and habits—all information you may think has little to no value—is valuable to the people looking for it is one important step in explaining why this is all important. After all, if someone a company is able to build their business model on getting your information, it must be worth something, right?  

Photo by Andy Mabbett.

That's part of the problem—individuals are all too often told that the information collected about them is "non-identifiable," which may very well be true to the party requesting it, but not so for anyone else with access to it later.

"Consumers are often unaware of the transaction that takes place when they sign their information away," Rainey explained, noting that this lack of transparency, coupled with the fact that companies who trade in and use that information resist efforts for consumers to opt-out of behavioral marketing are causes for concern. The fact is, your data is worth real, tangible money to the companies that offer you free services (in Facebook's case, you're worth just shy of $5 per year) and the companies they do business with, even if they're not asking you to open your wallet.

Does Anyone Actually Care Anymore? Isn't Privacy Dead?

Hardly. Rainey explained "People do care about privacy!" She directed me to a 2009 study by KnowPrivacy, a research group headed by Jason Schultz and Chris Hoofnagle of the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic at the University of California Berkeley, that shows that people are indeed concerned about what data is requested of them, how much of the requested information is required for the service they want to use, and how their data is eventually used. The survey notes that even young people are concerned about their privacy, the ones often written off as part of a generation that's willing to share everything online.

Photo remixed from jayfish (Shutterstock).

"These same people are comfortable telling their friends what they ate for breakfast," Rainey remarked, "but they're not comfortable telling their medical insurer, or having their medical insurer get access to their Facebook account because they clicked a Like button, for example." These results were reiterated in a 2010 USA Today/Gallup poll that uncovered similar results—people are still quite concerned with their privacy. The baseline for privacy has simply changed.

Rainey says that even those who dismiss privacy concerns become concerned when confronted with the depth of information they've revealed, and when shown how that information is used once they give it up. In the end, the argument isn't a zero-sum game: people don't want their services free and their privacy intact, Rainey reiterated. "They just want control over what information they give up, what they agree to, and what information is made public versus kept private in the databases and annals of the companies and organizations that get to see it."

Who's More Dangerous? The Government or Businesses?

The short answer is that there's no real difference between the two. Here's why:

• The Government: When you sign up for a new web service, you might assume that your data goes only as far as the company you've signed an agreement with. Unfortunately, that's not the case. Rainey points out that filing a simple FOIA request revealed that government agencies like the DEA and even the IRS regularly collect, store, and request information from companies like Facebook and Twitter.
  
  
  So the government uses the information they collect on social media to hunt and catch criminals—that's not so bad, right? It's not that simple. "Those organizations all map social graphs to see how people of interest relate to each other, and subsequently investigate their friends, followers, and others in their networks," Rainey explained. To boot, the government often doesn't bother to get a court order or justify the reason they want this information to the network in question—they make a few phone calls or send over a letter asking for someone's information, and the service responds with the requested data.

• Businesses: At least the government has to provide some measure of transparency. Private entities are largely exempt from the Privacy Act of 1974, and once they collect your information, there's no way to tell what happens to it after that. Some companies reserve the right to sell the information, and while most explicitly promise not to in their privacy policies, they give themselves the out of being able to "share" information with their "strategic partners," which is the same thing, just without a cash transaction taking place.
  
  Photo by Ludovic Hirlimann.
  
  
  But these companies don't keep personally identifiable information (PII), right? You're just an aggregate number to them, so what's the worry? Well—that information sharing is generally done between companies in order to obtain that information and refine their marketing efforts. While it may mean nothing more than a few coupons at your doorstep, the fact of the matter is the trade in aggregate information is a hot one, and companies specialize in taking aggregate information and making it very personal. Even if that's not a problem for you, the real issue is that once that information is assembled, and once it is personal, you have no rights or access to it once you've signed it away. "Most people don't ask themselves, ‘Do I still have the rights to this data once I click OK?'" Rainey explained. "And then, once it's gone, you don't even have the right to change it, update it, or even request your information be removed later if circumstances change."
  
  
  She then pointed me to the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse's Chronology of Data Breaches, a massive collection of data publicly reported data breaches at companies that store public and private information going back to 2005—everything from missing laptops to massive hacks. "The fact is, that once your data is collected, even if it's aggregate, and stored in one of these databases, it's being actively targeted by people who want it, and it's vulnerable to breaches. One study showed that a year after a database like one of these is broken into, your chance of being a victim of identity theft is four times greater." That's long after the courtesy credit and identity theft monitoring services most companies offer if their databases are hacked, and as we've seen from recent credit card breaches, once your information is lost it may be a big deal to you, but on an individual level, it's not horribly valuable to the company tasked with protecting it.

So while the government and businesses are both scrambling to collect as much information as they can, you should have serious reservations about whether the data is being kept securely, what rights you have after the fact to remove personally identifiable information should be it collected, and how that information is being used by other groups you didn't sign an agreement with once you give it up to the one you did. The issue is so pervasive that the White House recently called for a Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights to ensure both the government and private agencies only collect the information required to provide specific services, and no more—a measure that many called a good first step, but just that: a first step.

But Targeted Ads are Better than Random Ones, Right? And If We All Keep Our Data Private, Nothing Will Be Free Anymore and the Internet Will Cease to Exist!

When I brought up this concern to Rainey, she laughed: "It's always entertaining to hear the argument swing from ‘but people like these ads' to ‘and without them the Internet will be gone forever!' The problem with the first part is that if it were true that people really did prefer and actually enjoy behavioral marketing, then why not give consumers the option to opt-in to them instead of forcing them to opt-out of every kind of marketing entirely? If they like it, giving them the choice to turn it off won't stop anyone!" She explained that privacy advocates aren't fighting for an ad-free Internet, they just want to give consumers who care about their privacy a way to opt-out of behavioral and targeted marketing efforts, something industry groups are fighting them on tooth and nail.  

Photo by Jim Linwood.

As for the "death of the free internet," Rainey noted that while the basis of revenue-generation on the internet has always been advertising, it's only been recent years that we've seen a massive shift towards behavioral and targeted marketing that sticks with individuals not just on a single page, or in one company's services, but across all of their activities online. She's right—Jeff Jarvis wrote at BuzzMachine that even while he thinks much of the concern over privacy and do not track is a tempest in a teapot, companies at least need to be transparant about how they do what they've always been doing, and give consumers a choice. He noted that fast-forwarding through ads on television has been around for a long time, but that hasn't led to the death of the TV advertising industry. "Ads don't have to track you to make money," Rainey said, "You [advertisers] just need to give consumers the choice—the option to see ads without tracking! Then you could have both options and make everyone happy!" It's that lack of choice—she explained—that's the real problem.

So What Do I Do About It? What Does It Matter?

Even if your privacy isn't important to you, there are others for whom privacy is paramount. "Even if you're comfortable giving up your personal information," Rainey said, "there are plenty of people who aren't, and they shouldn't have to fight to keep their addresses out of publicly accessible databases or off of a website where it's easily obtained. Victims of domestic violence, members of the LGBT community, political activists, human rights activists, police officers, even public figures all need privacy to make sure their families and homes are safe." Even if you're not convinced that your data is worth protecting, there are others who need that protection. To that point, it's worth remembering that on many social networks, we give up information about those we're connected to when we let another app or service in—even if we've consciously decided we're okay trading the information requested about ourselves.  

Image by freelanceartist (Shutterstock).

So what do you do now? We've shown you how to protect yourself and even how to watch companies track you in real time. In the end, the important thing to remember before you click through another privacy policy is to be actively aware of the transaction you're making. Just because something claims it's free doesn't mean it is, and it's up to you to decide whether the service is worth the price of admission.

Rainey Reitman is Activism Director at The Electronic Frontier Foundation. She graciously offered her time and expertise for this post, and we thank her.