Apollo +50: Little Joe 2

This posting is a part of a continuing series celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Apollo moon program, tracing the launches that occured 50 years ago between now, and the 50th anniversary of Apollo itself.

This is a celebration of a group of people who used a method of experimentation, discovering the natural and materialistic causes of what happened to each space craft, using reason to make adjustments, and repeating the process until what started out as a repeated string of failures simply testing a capsule, became a string of repeated successes delivering a number of crews to the moon and returning them safely back to earth.

Fifty years ago, NASA 9 years, 7 months, and 12 days of launching astronauts to the moon. However, this was not its goa - not yet. It was still trying to get a man into space.

The dominant interest in space at this time was simply in being able to occupy the high ground - space - in any future conflict with any enemy such as the Soviet Union, and in denying that high ground to that enemy. It also needed to ensure the protection of its space-based assets and resources (spy satellites, weather satellites, communication satellites, etc.)

Where was NASA at this point in its journey?

It's first test was an utter failure.

In spite of a malfunction in the Atlas rocket that launched the capsule, this mission sowed that an ablation heat shield (one that carries away the heat by boiling off a resin put on the space ship) will keep a capsule from bruning up on re-entry and keep the astronaut safe.

Showed that a test rocket that NASA had built will actually perform as expected, allowing NASA to conduct future tests.

Failed in a second attempt to see if the abort system will work under the most stressful conditions in a typical launch.

In other words, it had not accomplished much.

Fifty years ago, NASA went through the fifth unmanned launch of a Mercury space capsule.

The purpose of this launch was to determine i a human could actually function in zero gravity.

What was zero gravity going to do to the way the brain functions? Would it create sensations that would simply cause the agent to go into a wild panic? Would an astronaut be able to eat or drink without gravity helping the process? Would the lack of gravity destroy eyesight? Balance? Blood flow?

Little Joe 2 was to answer these questions by carrying a monkey, SAM, (which actually stood for School of Aviation Medicine, which was conducting the research) into space to experiece four minutes of weightlessness to see how he did. SAM would be launched up to a height of about 400,000 kilometers (about 70 miles), experience about 4 minutes of weightlessness, then use the abort and recovery system to land in the Atlantic Ocean where he would be picked up, just like any astronaut would be picked up.

This launch was not just meant to test the ability of a primate to function during weightlessness. The capsule was also filled with things from nerve cells to barley seeds to test the effects of radiation. It also provided an ability for engineers to see how the capsule function at the edge of space and, of course, to test the system for recovering a capsule after a short flight or an abort.

They would not be able to rerun the tests on how a capsule performed under max-Q - maximum dynamic pressure - which was the objective of two failures prior to this date. This is because, to test the effects of weightlessness, the capsule would be going through max-Q without triggering an abort. A new test of that aspect of space flight had to be put off until January of 1960.

Well, NASA had not yet had a fully successful launch, and this one was no exception. The rocket only reached a height of 53 miles, which means that SAM did not actually enter space (officially listed as starting at 00 kilometers or slightly more than 60 miles).

However, this was good enough to give NASA scientists and engineers a good set of data on all of the things they sought to test.

SAM experienced three minutes of weightlessness instead of four as the capsule arched across the sky, before the capsule started to experience the G-forces of re-entry. The engineers still got data on how the capsule itself performed during separation from the rocket, through this long arch of weightlessness, and through re-entry and splashdown. And the astronaut recovery teams were able to test their procedures for finding and retrieving a capsule that had splashed down.

So, the mission was considered a success.

It would be possible, it seemed, to put an astronaut in SAM's place and send him on a test flight, at least through a few minutes of weightlessness, and recover the astronaut without any ill effects - as soon as the hardware was made reliable enough to do this.

Putting a human into space seemed possible. Putting a human into orbit, however, was still a matter of speculation.

From this point on, I will no longer be able to say that NASA had not accomplished much. It had shown that putting a man in space, at least, was doable. It had done much of what it needed to do with the successful launch and recovery of a monky. It now needed to do the same thing with the launch and recovery of a human.

The major sticking point here was with man-rating a launch vehicle. This meant making the launch vehicle safe enough that one would be willing to put a life human being on the end of it. That was still going to require a lot of engineering.

The Manhattan Declaration Part X: Summary

The Manhattan Declaration, as it turns out, is an attempt by a bunch of religious conservatives to try to defend their least defensible policies (read: indefensible). As a result, it was not possible to find much at all of merit in what they wrote, or in the arguments they used to defend them.

(See: Manhattan Declaration: A Call to Christian Conscience.)

In fact, the Manhattan Declaration was a moral equivalent of creationism. Creationism is a desperate attempt to defend a group of absurd beliefs by twisting and distorting anything that the creationist can put his hands on to make it appear consistent with his beliefs. They provide a stark illustration of the degree to which people can ignore what is right in front of them, dismiss the most solid evidence, and embrace the wildest fictions, just for the sake of tenaciously defending an absurdity.

The Manhattan Declaration provides a similar defense of a set of moral absurdities.

Another name that we can give to embracing moral absurdities is 'evil'. Every evil - from individual evils such as the rape of a child or the robbing of a convenience store, to large-scale evils such as segregation, slavery, and genocide - is executed by people who have been able to convince themselves that they were moral saints doing good in the world. The fact that a person likes to think of himself as a defender of good and virtue is not relevant to answering the question of whether or not he is in fact evil. Hitler thought he was a great and moral individual, but the reality is that the firmness of his convictions counted for nothing. He was and is the archtype of evil.

I have spent the last several posts going through the Manhattan Declaration exposing one absurdity and contradiction after another. These are absurdities that are so plain and obvious that no good and decent person would be caught dead embracing them. They are exactly the same types of absurdities that were once used to defend slavery, segregation, apartheid, genocide, tyranny, terrorism, and the worst forms of abuses that one human can inflict on another.

There are the absurdities of the authors' conception of religious liberty.

"Religious liberty means that I have the liberty to do whatever I want, and you have the obligation to do what I say. If you should ever refuse to do what I command, then you are violating my right to religious liberty - which is the right to order you around in whatever way I deem fit."

Religious liberty, according to the authors of the Manhattan Doctrine, means, "I get to take control of your life and dictate who you can sleep with, who you can marry, the sexual acts you perform, and what you watch and read regarding matters of sex and relationships."

Religious liberty, according to the authors of the Manhattan Doctrine, means, "I get to take control of your life and dictate what you may do to the entity lacking desires or interests growing inside of that body, deny you health care treatments that could save your life or treat massively debilitating injuries and illnesses, and deny you the option of avoiding a long and torturous death with a quick and painless death."

In short, "religious liberty" to the authors of the Manhattan Declaration is the tyrant's liberty - a liberty to do whatever the tyrant sees fit to do, combined with a duty on the part of his subjects to obey and carry out those wishes.

The concept of marriage that we find in the Manhattan Doctrine is the bigot's concept of marriage. It is a natural presumption that, "Those who are like us" (e.g., heterosexual) are superior to "those who are different from us" (homosexual), and these inferior beings may be visited with all sorts of unjust and unjustified burdens and costs. There is really nothing behind these burdens but the bigoted arrogance of those who would impose them.

Of course, these people need a system where they can deny that these moral demands come from them. This is because, "You must obey me," tends not to come across very well. An alternative is needed, and for that alternative these arrogant bigots use, "You must obey God and I am the voice of God." This is, for all practical purposes, the same thing. However, the marketing department says that it will be more effective.

Yet, it is difficult to fatham the arrogance of asserting, "I am the voice of God."

The reason these people find so much agreement between their own attitudes and what they see in their God is precisely because they have created God in their own image. In doing so, they have assigned their own attitudes to that God.

Kind and just people create a kind and just God, and assign all of their kindness and love of justice to that God. They then use this God to teach kindness and justice to their children.

Arrogant, hateful, and bigoted people create a God that is arrogant, hateful, and bigoted as well, assigning their arrogance, hate, and bigotry to their God. Then use this God to teach their children to be as arrogant, hateful, and bigoted as they are.

To take this one step further; vicious and violent people create a vicious and violent God, and use that God to teach their children to become vicious and violent as well.

Along these lines, we should note that if a child does not adopt the attitudes of his parents - if arrogant and bigoted parents give birth to a kind and just child, that child will eventually overthrow the parents' arrogant and bigoted god, putting a kind and just god in its place, if he put any god at at all. This further demonstrates that people create God in their own image. Kind and just people create a kind and just god, while arrogant and bigoted people (like the authors of the Manhattan Declaration) create an arrogant and bigoted god.

However, the greatest cruelty to come from the authors of the Manhattan Declaration is the cruelty that comes from insisting that all of us be forced by the government to participate in the massive ritual of human sacrifice that they require of us (while telling us that this demand comes not from them, but from their God).

They . . . the authors . . . are the ones who decided to choose a god that demands these huge human sacrifices. They are the ones who attributed these beliefs and attitudes to their god. They are, ultimately, the ones commanding - and demanding that the government enforce - the massive human death and suffering that springs from the principles that they invent and that they assign to their god.

I am speaking here of the suffering that is caused by demanding that others - against their will and better judgment - be forced to endure a tortuous pain rather than obtain a quick and relatively painless death, or that others be forced to stay alive at the cost of destroying the ends that the victim has spent his life trying to achieve. In this latter case, their demands are morally identical to forcing a soldier to live while the Constitution and the Country he would give his life to protect are destroyed for the sake of keeping the soldier alive.

I am also speaking of the death and the suffering that is caused by those who demand that the rest of us make religious sacrifices for the sake of entities that have no desires, and thus no morally relevant interests. For the sake of a clump of cells having no desires or interests of its own, the rest of us must endure any number of injuries and illnesses, even face premature death, because the god these people invent prefers this to using entities without desires or interests to treat those illnesses and injuries and prevent those deaths.

Here, too, as before, these people like to claim that these demands for human sacrifice come from god so that they can deny moral responsibility for their own choices and their own ideas. Yet, these demands come from the authors themselves, and come from their god only because they have decided to create a god in their own image.

In short, the authors of the Manhattan Declaration have given us a manifesto in which they reserve for themselves the liberty to impose any demands they see fit on others, while also preserving for themselves the liberty to refuse any demands that others may see fit to impose on them. It is a manifesto of arrogance and bigotry in which the authors deny moral responsibility for their own ideas by shifting that responsibility go a god that they invent in their own image. Thsi god they invented is not only an arrogant and bigoted god, but a god demanding massive human sacrifice in the form of premature death and suffering. The authors, of course, do not wish to admit that they are the authors of this demand for death and suffering. Here, too, they wish to shift the responsibility to a god that they have created in their own image.

The Manhattan Declaration Part IX: Euthanasia

In my last post I wrote about how the Manhattan Declaration is a call for the religious sacrifice of human beings to a god on a scale never before seen in human history - in terms of the death and suffering that would be the consequence of adopting its position on embryonic stem cell research.

Not only do they insist on human sacrifice on a massive scale, they insist that the government must be a participant and an enforcer of this religious sacrifice, helping to ensure that its victims do not escape or seek any alternative where they might avoid this sacrifice.

The Manhattan Declaration also calls for massive human sacrifice in its position on euthanasia. Here, they demand that countless people endure endless and senseless torture because the torture of these individuals somehow pleases their god. Here, too, they demand that the government be involved in ensuring that people actually endure the suffering their god demands of people, and that nobody who is to be tortured find any sort of escape or release from this fate.

(See: Manhattan Declaration: A Call to Christian Conscience.")

There are many and strong reasons to prefer a quick and painless death to a slow and painful death. In fact, the Catholic Church itself once relied heavily on this fact. In torturing people into confessing their crimes against the Church - in confessing to witchcraft or to being a practicing Jew or holding that the Earth is not at the center of the universe - they gave their victims a way to end the torture. "Confess, so that we may execute you."

"We are going to torture you indefinitely. However, if you confess your sins so that we can pronounce you guilty of heresy, then we can convict you on the basis of your own confession, and end your life quickly instead."

Relying on the many and strong reasons that people have for preferring a quick death to long and agonizing torture, they acquired a good number of confessions - confessions to things that were so outrageous that we now know that they were lies told for the sake of bringing an end to the torture.

Now, in the 21st century, the authors of the Manhattan Declaration are insisting that people who are suffering a slow and painful - indeed, a torturous death must endure this suffering with no chance of choosing a quick alternative. The only virtue is that they are not the actual cause of the torture that others are being forced to endure. In their mind, God does the torturing. They must simply make sure that nobody steps in and puts an end to that torture.

In a sense, the inquisitors were much kinder to their victims than the authors of the Manhattan Doctrine. The Inquisitors gave their victims a way out. The authors of the Manhattan Declaration argue that all ways out shall be blocked, and the victim must be given no option but continued suffering.

They say that this is because God is made happier by their continued suffering. When, in fact, it is the authors of the doctrine who are being made happier by their suffering, who are then assigning their desires to God. This is because, "I want you to suffer" is not as likely to generate as much obedience as "God wants you to suffer and I God's voice on Earth."

I also know that, in my own case, if I should enter a state where I cannot hold intelligent conversations with other people, with no reasonable chance that I might recover (miracles do not qualify as a reasonable chance) then I would prefer that my body be killed. I do not think of it as killing me since, without a functioning mind, I would have ceased to exist anyway. My body, at that point, may be considered abandoned property of no further use to its previous owner.

Though I have lived a modest life, I have struggled to put money into savings that I hope to give away when I die. My preferred beneficiary would be an organization that promotes teaching reason to young students. If I should enter a state where my brain no longer functions but my body remains alive, I do not want that money wasted on changing my diapers whole I lay in a bed hooked up to million-dollar machines that do nothing for me as a person. In fact, spending that money on me, rather than sending it off to the cause I have worked to benefit, would be a case of keeping me alive while destroying one of the most important reasons I have had for living.

It would be like keeping a soldier alive by betraying the country and the Constitution he fought to defend.

You would not be doing me any favors at all.

Still, I have some secular objections to allowing euthanasia.

My main objection is a worry that insurance companies, with an eye to cutting cost, would market and sell euthanasia as a least-cost alternative to treating certain illnesses. They would put professional marketers at work who will call in focus groups and run all sorts of experiments to discover the most effective way to convince people with illnesses requiring expensive treatment that "It's time to go." It would likely involve giving the patient a sense of hopelessness and futility, accompanied by some comments about how "it pains your family so to see you in this state, but they would be able to put this behind them and move on if you will only agree to this procedure."

I do not know how much this concern weighs against the very real torture that we see on the other end, as well as other losses. There are also a million different options that a community (a country, or a state) might use to maximize the overall benefits while avoiding the worse possible costs.

Because of this complexity, what I actually argue for is a doctrine of "state's rights". I think that each state should feel free to experiment with different systems, and for those systems that work to be adopted by other states while those that fail are ultimately replaced.

However, this system of experimentation and adoption does not have room for an argument that says, "These people must be made to endure torture, and must not be allowed to choose an option that ends their life while helping to preserve that which gave their life value, because it displeases our God to deny them that option."

We should also take care to distinguish those people who say, "Unfortunately, there are some problems with allowing people to choose a quick and relatively painless death to enduring a long period of torture and agony," from those who say, "Hey! Great! We discovered some problems with allowing people to choose a quick and relatively painless death. Now we get to continue forcing them to endure a long period of torture and agony."

One identifies the latter group of people by their excessive enthusiasm with seeing problems with permitting euthanasia - with their eager willingness to embrace even the most absurd premises, the wildest leaps of logic, and to discover interpretations and that support their desired conclusions. These are people who do not have the best interest of others at heart. No good person - no person actually concerned with human suffering and the quality of human life - would ever behave that way.

The Manhattan Declaration Part VIII: Religious Human Sacrifice

Imagine that a solar eclipse strikes the nation. Under the guidance of its religious leaders, the government immediately starts to round up people to be sacrificed. The idea is that, once enough people have been sacrificed, the gods will be appeased, and the sun will return. They conduct these sacrifices with assembly-line efficiency. People are lined up, prepared for the sacrifice. laid out on the altar, their chests are cut open, their beating hearts removed, the body and the dead organ are removed from the altar, and the line just keeps moving.

The Manhattan Doctrine advocates something very much like this, only far deadlier and never-ending. It would be more like the scenario above if the priests then say, "We can never stop this ritual sacrifice because, the instant we do, God will take away the sun again, this time for good."

So the line keeps moving, in perpetuity.

The death and suffering that the authors of the Manhattan Declaration are calling for, and that they insist the government help them in providing - is the death and suffering brought about by illnesses and injuries that may be treatable using embryonic stem cells or that would come from embryonic stem cell research.

They are not cutting open the chests of living individuals and pulling out their beating hearts. That would be a quick and merciful death compared to what the authors of the Manhattan Declaration require of us. They require a a slow and lingering death, or even that their sacrificial victims continue living with missing limbs, paralysis, an inability to recognize one's surroundings, a body that does not respond to simple commands of movement.

They would fill the whole world with stories of people enduring these effects, and claim that it is all done for the greater good - to appease their god, who would be angry if we took steps to potentially cure or treat these illnesses and injuries.

Keep in mind, the people who lined up the sacrificial victims so as to cut out their beating hearts to appease their gods did not think of themselves as brutal murderers. They thought of themselves as great benefactors to society doing great deeds. However, the fact is that they did not provide society with any benefit. They provided society with death and suffering that rational minds could have avoided.

Today, with issues such as embryonic stem cell research, the magnitude of the death and suffering they inflict on the world for no good reason has increased by orders of magnitude. The ancient human sacrifices were Sunday picnics in comparison to the global sacrifice certain religious leaders today are demanding.

One may argue that we have a duty to respect their beliefs and refrain from raising questions or objections. In fact, the morality requires that we condemn any who should raise questions or objections so such a widespread practice of human sacrifice. It is not 'politically correct' to question another person's religion no matter who or how many they would maim or kill in the practicing of that religion.

Yet, if anybody deserves our concern it is the victims of this human mega-sacrifice, not its perpetrators. Our first order of concern should be with those who end up dead or disabled for life, not with those who would who insist that the death and suffering be allowed to continue indefinitely.

The major charge that one would make against me is that I am begging the question. The advocates of all of this death and destruction are, in fact, preventing murder by sparing the use of innocent lives. Innocent people ought not to be sacrificed even for the achievement of such noble ends as saving lives and preventing illness.

Yet, they are "sparing the use of innocent lives" in the same sense that the religious leaders in my illustrative example are "sparing the sun". In other words, they are not as a matter of fact saving any innocent lives in any morally relevant way, just as the tribe in the illustrative example was not saving the sun. Instead, they have been driven to set of absurd beliefs that have driven them to commit mass murder and great suffering for no good reason whatsoever - for the sake of a wholly imaginary benefit that exists only in the minds of those calling for death and suffering.

As I mentioned yesterday, embryonic stem cells have no desires. This means that they have no interests and they cannot be harmed in any morally relevant way. What we may legitimately do to an embryonic stem cell is no different to what we may do to a skin cell, a fingernail, or a lock of hair. The pretense that these entities have moral worth is a myth. It is a myth that the myth makers say makes it necessary to engage in human sacrifice on a massive scale.

Once those cells are organized into a being that has beliefs and desires, the situation changes. Now they are the objects of desires that we all have many and strong reasons to promote - aversions to killing and to doing harm to another human being, including one who is either permanently or temporarily suffering some mental or physical deficiency. A lump of cells without desires is just that - a lump of cells. It has no reason to act, and it has no reason to promote or inhibit any particular attitudes in us.

Think of this as your best friend sits in a wheel chair as a result of a spinal cord injury, as grandma sits in the hospital unable to recognize the grand children that come to visit her, or the cancer victim suffers the fatal destruction of an organ that cannot be replaced or removed. These are the people that some religious leaders have demanded be offered up as human sacrifice to their God.

The Manhattan Declaration Part VII: Shutting Down Debate

There is something monstrously arrogant in claiming that one gets one's morality from God.

The speaker is saying that, "The mind that gave birth to these moral principles is the mind of an all-knowing, morally perfect being." Of course, the mind that gave birth to those ideas is the speaker's mind, thus yielding the implication that the speaker's mind is the mind of an all-knowing morally perfect being.

One of the costs of this way of thinking is that it leaves no room for debate - no room for the speaker to say, "Ooops, I guess I was wrong." Because, clearly, an all-knowing, morally perfect mind cannot be wrong!

So, the arrogant and presumptuous individual who claims that he gets his morality from God locks in the results of his own human failings. He denies that they exist and, in doing so, shuts down the possibility that knew knowledge and understanding might correct his original errors.

On the issue of abortion, those who falsely claim that they get their morality from an all-knowing morally perfect mind have made a mistake. They have locked this mistake in concrete and they now devote huge amounts of resources - resources that could have gone to doing good in the world - pursuing this mistake.

On the issue of abortion, a being that has no desires has no interests. A being that has no interests cannot be harmed in any morally significant way. Any sacrifice that is made for the sake of an entity that has no interests is a wasted sacrifice. The person who makes the sacrifice is forced to be made worse off, and nobody benefits.

Now, after a while a conceptus will develop into a being that has desires. At that time, the being has morally relevant interests and there are legitimate prescriptions against what may be done to that person. But not before.

To illustrate this, let is compare and contrast the effect of aborting a fetus that has no interests to the decision not to conceive that same person. We have a couple with a choice to make. They can abstain from having sex (and, in doing so, prevent a particular conception), or they can have sex and abort the fetus that results before it acquires any morally significant interests.

In the case of abortion, we are often told to imagine some young child that would have existed if the abortion had not taken place - a young child at play (meant to generate an emotional response void of all reason).

We are told that the absence of this child is reason to condemn abortion and to hold that those who have or perform abortions have committed murder.

However, we can apply this same argument toa refusal to conceive. Take the same young child and ask, "What would have happened if that child's parents had decided to abstain from sex - if they had acted in ways that thwarted the conception of that future child." I am not talking about the use of birth control (though the argument applies). I am talking about the decision not to have sex.

The child has just as much of a reason to be grateful that the parents had sex as to be grateful that the parents did not have an abortion. If the act of aborting the fetus is murder because of the future child that does not exist. Then, the act of failure to conceive is also murder, because it brought resulted in the same non-existence of a future child.

We should fill the world with as many people as possible. As long as the planet can hold one more young child, we have committed a sin comparable to murder if we fail to act to fill that spot with a young child.

Monstrously arrogant people who attribute their morality to God give themselves permission to ignore any argument that they could be mistaken. "You have your puny and finite mind up against the all-knowing, morally perfect mind that invented these moral principles. You are going to lose by default. In fact, we can begin with the assumption that you are mistaken - because you must be - and work from there to find the source of your obvious error."

The error, of course, is that of the monstrously arrogant person who thinks that his ideas are the ideas of an all-knowing, morally perfect being that are incapable of error. They are, in fact, the ideas of a person with very limited knowledge and who falls far short of moral perfection who likes to think that he cannot be mistaken - and who then invents a way of preventing the possibility of error.

Of course, people who make this argument also claim, "No, I admit that I am a fallible human being with limited wisdom and with moral failings." So, one might want to argue that I am mistaken in calling such a person monstrously arrogant.

However, he is still taking the ideas that came from his own mind as the ideas of an all-knowing, morally perfect entity. He is still looking at these principles and saying, "WOW! Those ideas are so brilliant! So perfect! They must have come from an all-knowing, morally perfect being!" At this point we merely need to add the fact that they came from the speaker himself, and we get the monstrously arrogant conclusion, "Then I must be an all-knowing, morally perfect being who simply made a mistake in thinking I was a fallible mortal."

This blog is written by a mortal human being. It is written by a person who is capable of making mistakes. In fact, I have repeatedly asserted, and I will assert again, that this blog contains at least one false statement. I do not know which statement that is, but I know that it is in here somewhere. You, the reader, is not to take anything that I have written as gospel truth. With every sentence that you read, you must be aware that it may well be one of those statements that are certain to exist in this blog that is false, and to read it and examine it with a healthy bit of skepticism.

This is the difference between a person who recognizes the fact that his ideas are the ideas of a mere mortal and subject to error, and the person who thinks that his ideas come from an all-knowing and morally perfect mind (his own, as a matter of fact) that is incapable of error. It is the difference between inviting readers to question what the author says, and demanding that the reader accept everything that the author says without question.

The Manhattan Declaration Part VI: Responding to a Comment

I am still not clear on how you get to come up with the judgment of "bigot" on the writers of the Manhattan Declaration.

A bigot is a person who unfairly or unjustly identifies a group of people as being 'inferior" in some way - morally inferior, or inferior in capacity. The bigot pre-judges their inferiority, and then goes around looking for evidence that will lend legitimacy to this judgement.

In light of this, one of the ways to identify a bigot is that the bigot will embrace poor arguments - absurd premises or invalid inferences - simply because they support his prejudice (or pre-judgment).

In this series of posts I have identified a number of arguments in the Manhattan Declaration that fit this description. They are arguments that no fair and just person would embrace. That the authors of the Manhattan Declaration embrace those arguments strongly suggests that they are driven blind to the flaws in those arguments by their craving for something that will give even a shadow of legitimacy to their pre-judgment (their prejudices).

This is the behavior of a bigot.

If you find sufficient evidence to convict somebody of forcefully having sex with another person without her consent, it is quite legitimate to call him a rapist. And if you catch somebody struggling to convince others of something the speaker knows to be false then you are within reason to call that person a liar. Similarly, if you catch a group of people blind to gaps of logic because they are driven to the conclusion by their own prejudice, then it makes perfectly good sense to call those people bigots.

I would think twice before labeling people you don't really know are wrong in their beliefs.

Bigots never see themselves as being wrong. Bigots always see themselves as great benefactors of society, targeting some threat that others in society simply refuse to see. White supremacists see themselves as trying to save the white race from contamination from the inferior races and think that their beliefs that the white race is superior to the other races to be perfectly justified. The anti-gay bigots see themselves as saving marriage from the contamination of inferior unions and think their beliefs that heterosexual relationships are superior to homosexual relationships are perfectly justified.

I wonder how you would feel if someone labeled you a "bigot" simply because you don't believe in God.

It does not matter how I would feel. Truth is what matters, not feelings. I imagine that the rapist feels quite poorly when he is called a rapist. But the real question to ask is not, "How does it make the rapist feel?" What matters is, "Is he really a rapist."

I have made my charge. I have defined my terms. And I have presented sufficient evidence for a conviction. I have identified the specific arguments that support the conclusion that the authors of the Manhattan Declaration embraced arguments that no fair and just person would embrace - purely because those arguments support the authors' pre-judgment in the inferiority of others.

I rest my case.

Well, not quite yet. I have a little more to say and a few more posts to say it in.

In my dictionary, bigot is defined as one who is intolerant of the opinions of others.

So, how tolerant are you of the opinions of the Nazi, or of the child molester? How tolerant of you of the drunk driver who assures you that he can make it home, or of the person who flies airplanes into sky scapers because he sees America as a threat to Islam?

How tolerant are you being of my opinions here? In writing this comment, are you not demonstrating intolerance of my views?

As far as I can tell, what you are saying is, "Anybody who calls somebody else a bigot is a bigot." If we take this argument to its logical conclusion, you are calling yourself a bigot because of your intolerance of my views.

If you want to avoid these types of problems then you need a better definition 'bigot'. I would recommend the one that I use - a person who embraces blatantly false premises or makes grossly fallacious leaps of logic to reach the conclusion that some group of people are inferior. With this definition one can then prove bigotry by identifying those blatantly false premises or grossly fallacious leaps of logic. Which is exactly what I have done in these posts.

And before you bite back, consider this, if there is no God, then there is no equality either. You can't have it both ways. The party with the biggest mouth and biggest stick is the winner, and the losers will just have to put up and shut up. Is that the kind of world you want to live in?

Well, this is one of those wild leaps of logic used to view others as inferior.

It is as absurd as claiming that if there is no God then there is no reason to establish a fire department that will rescue me if my house shall catch on fire, or no reason to establish a police department who will secure my property from theft and vandalism. It is as absurd as claiming that if there is no God then there is no reason to promote a culture that condemns rapists, thieves, and murderers because (sarcasm on), as we all know, atheists have no reason to want to avoid being raped, robbed, murdered, censored, enslaved, imprisoned without trial, or tortured.(sarcasm off).

The type of person who would believe these things is somebody who craves viewing himself as better than others, and for the sake of that prejudice is inclined to grasp onto any absurdity that says, "you are morally inferior to us."

The Manhattan Declaration Part V: Kinds of Marriage

The Manhattan Declaration is a declaration written to present a particular religious view on moral issues regarding life, marriage, and religious liberty. The Declaration is so filled with holes and inconsistencies that they easily identify the document as being, not the work (or the word) of some divine wisdom, but the flawed work of mortals - and bigoted, arrogant, self-serving morals at that.

They are the words of people who recognize - either consciously or unconsciously that, "Do as I command," tends to be far less effective then, "Do as God commands and I am the word of God," and so they give in to a craving to assign their bigotries and prejudices to God in a document that they called the Manhattan Declaration.

(See: Manhattan Declaration: A Call to Christian Conscience.")

I have identified a number of flaws already - flaws that a fair and humane person would have recognized, but the authors, blinded by their bigotries, their arrogance, and their self-serving desires made themselves did not recognize.

Another of the flaws that no fair and just God would endorse, but which fills the needs of a bigoted human seeking to inflict harms on the interests of others and coat it in an illusion of legitimacy, is the claim that if we permit homosexual marriages we must also permit heterosexual marriages.

They make these argument in spite of the fact that heterosexual incestuous marriage has none of the flaws that the authors suggest are reasons to condemn homosexual marriage. Heterosexual incestuous couples can have children and, in having children, have an interest in seeing the marriage protected so that both parents can serve in raising that child. The child would have a mother and a father. As such, all of the arguments these bigots offer for protecting the institution of marriage are arguments for protecting and preserving heterosexual incestuous marriage.

If there is a reason to reject heterosexual incestuous marriage, then it is independent of the reasons for rejecting homosexual marriage. This places the bigots who use this argument in a logical bind.

If there is no independent reason to justify condemning heterosexual incestuous marriage, then these bigots themselves have provided the justification for recognizing these marriages as proper and legitimate marriages within their definition.

If, on the other hand, an independent reason to condemn heterosexual incestuous marriage exists, then it is not the case that permitting homosexual marriage implies permitting heterosexual incestuous marriage - because heterosexual incestuous marriage would still run afowl of this "independent reason."

The same dilemma applies to plural marriages. Plural messages, likewise, can result in children and for the same of whom the marriage should be protected and preserved. In fact, many of the arguments these bigots give for the value of heterosexual marriage are even more true of a polygamous marriage. The death of a single parent or an accident causing permanent injury, the loss of a job, or severe illness is far more devastating to a two-parent family than to a multi-parent family. So, these bigots themselves provide us with reason to recognize and protect these marriages.

If there is any independent reason to reject these marriages it is not in virtue of what they have in common with homosexual marriages (because they have far more in common with heterosexual marriages), but must be some other reason. This "other reason" buts the bigot in the same bind that they are in with incestuous marriage.

A fair and just person would see these flaws - or at least be able to show that he put a responsible effort into finding them. Any god created by such a person would also be fair and just - a god that also condemned the bigoted, arrogant, self-serving people who irresponsibly blinded themselves to these moral problems.

However, the authors of the Manhattan Doctrine have shown themselves to be too deeply blinded by their bigotry to examine their own arguments for signs of unfairness and injustice. They are not looking to do what is right. They are looking to give their own bigoted, arrogant, cruel, unjust sentiments an illusion of legitimacy. They do this by inventing a God that is just as bigoted, arrogant, cruel, and unjust as they are and then declaring, "These are not my actions. These are commanded by God" - a god the bigot has created in his own image.

As it turns out, there are, in fact, independent reasons to justify condemning heterosexual incestuous marriage (and, by extension, other forms of incestuous marriage). These reasons have nothing to do with the problems of genetic illness. It would scarcely be considered just to nullify a marriage on the grounds of the genetic inferiority of any children that may result.

The argument against incestuous marriage is grounded on the real-world observation of the great deal of harm and suffering that results from incestuous abuse generally. The only way we could permit heterosexual incestuous marriage is if we were to lower the social barriers against incestuous relationships generally. Lowering the psychological barriers against these types of relationships runs the very real risk of causing a significant increase in the amount of overall incestuious sexual abuse. People will act to fulfill the most and strongest of their desires (given their beliefs). A weaker aversion to incestuous relationships can not help but result in an increase in incestuous acts.

So, the many and strong reasons we have for reducing these types of abuse and the harms they cause are many and strong reasons for promoting an overall aversion to incestuous relationships. It is an aversion fed somewhat by a natural disinclination towards incestuous relationships. However, nature's inclination is clearly not as strong as it should be - given the number of events that still occur, and the harms that could be prevented if the aversion were stronger. Thus, morality calls for socially strengthening (though its moral institution) this (amoral) natural aversion.

The moral institutions for strengthening that aversion catches incestuous marriage in its net. An inversion to incestuous relationships necessarily implies an aversion to incestuous marriage. The result is a moral prohibition on such marriages.

However, this moral prohibition says nothing about the morality of homosexual marriages (other than to say that homosexual incestuous marriage should also be prohibited - a conclusion argument that the 'genetic immorality of incest' theory cannot handle).

This argument will not appease the bigoted, arrogant, self-serving authors of the Manhattan Declaration. It will not justify the harms that they seek to inflict on others. They want an argument that will give an illusion of legitimacy to their own behavior, motivated as it is by their own unjust and unkind prejudices. The clearly flawed argument that they wrote into the Manhattan Declaration serves that purpose – as long as they blind themselves to its flaws. But blinding oneself to reason is something that bigots have historically shown themselves to be quite good at.

The Manhattan Declaration Part IV: Government Obligations Respecting Religious Beliefs

Religious liberty means that the government has an absolute obligation to ban the raising of pigs and the selling of pork, demand the wearing of hats, the practice of giving patients blood transfusions, and working on the Sabbath. Failure to do so is not only a violation of the religious liberties of those who hold that these prohibitions come from God, it abuses the rights of parents to teach their children that these practices are immoral.

There are certain arguments that virtually scream I'M A BIGOT because no fair and just mind could ever embrace such an absurdity. A couple of them appear in a recently released document called the Manhattan Declaration in the section that discusses marriage.

These are arguments that are so absurd that no fair and just person could embrace them. These are not the types of arguments where a good person could ponder and say, "Ah, yes, I see your point." There is no point to see. Something other than reason has to be seducing the agent into thinking that these claims are justified, and that "something" is a deep-seated bigotry that craves anything that will give his bigotry an illusion of legitimacy.

The Declaration contains the following quote:

Marriage is an objective reality - a convenantal union of husband and wife - that it is the duty of the law to recognize and support for the sake of justice and the common good. If it fails to do so, genuine social harms follow. First, the religious liberty of those for whom this is a matter of conscience is jeopardized. Second, the rights of parents are abused as family life and sex education programs in schools are used to teach children that an enlighten understanding recognizes as "marriages" sexual partnerships that many parents believe are intrinsically non-marital and immoral

(See: Manhattan Declaration: A Call to Christian Conscience.")

If this argument made any sense at all, it would be an argument for the government stepping up and prohibiting by law anything and everything that any religion.

Blood transfusions should be banned.

Why?

Because failure to do so violates the religious liberty of those for whom this is a matter of conscience.

Furthermore, the rights of parents are abused as programs in schools teach children that an enlightened understanding of medicine recognizes blood transfusions as legitimate medical practices that many parents believe are immoral.

The eating of pork must be banned of the same reason. It is a violation of the religious liberty of the Muslim to allow the selling of pork. Furthermore, if it is not prohibited, then the rights of Muslim parents to teach their children is compromised by a state that, in refusing to ban the practice, sends those children the message that the eating of pork is legitimate.

The proper principle to apply in each of these cases is that different religions are free to accept whatever prohibitions their religion tells them to adopt, but they are not permitted to force those prohibitions on others. A religion can tell its followers not to accept blood transfusions, but it cannot justify prohibiting blood transfusions across the whole society. It can tell its followers not to eat pork, but it cannot ban the buying and selling of pork. It can tell its followers not to marry others of the same gender, but it cannot prohibit people generally from marrying somebody of the same gender.

A fair and just person - a moral person - would have begun this assessment with a presumption of liberty. He would start by saying, "I will not interfere with the liberty of others unless I am forced to the conclusion that it is necessary to do so."

On hearing an argument that says that liberty must be restricted, his first instinct would be to look for the flaw in that argument - to assume that the restriction of liberty is a mistake.

It is only when he is forced to the conclusion that a violation of liberty is necessary that he will reluctantly yield to that conclusion.

If, instead, a person too eagerly accepts an flawed argument for violating the liberty of others, we have reason to suspect that in place of a love of liberty, he has a desire to do harm to the interests of others. The more absurd the argument that the agent embraces, the more likely it is that the agent is acting on a hatred and prejudice that is so deep that he craves anything that would give the harms he seeks to inflict on others the illusion of legitimacy. No leap of logic is too great, no claim too absurd to be believed, as long as it gets the agent to the conclusion that he may inflict the harms on the interests of others that he so deeply craves to inflict.

The absurdity above is an excellent example of this.

A fair and just mind would look on how we handle these issues and come to the conclusion that religious liberty means that the followers of a particular religion are free to adopt any restrictions on their own behavior that they think comes from God, but may not force those restrictions on others. The Muslim may refuse to eat pork but must not prohibit others from eating pork. The Christian Scientist may refuse blood transfusions but may not ban others from accepting blood transfusions. The Seventh Day Adventist may refuse to work on Saturday but may not prohibit others from working on Saturday. The Catholic and Evangelical Christian may refuse to marry somebody from the same gender but they may not prohibit others from marrying somebody of the same gender.

This is the lesson that a fair and just person - the moral person - would draw from these conclusions.

The hate-filled bigoted person, on the other hand, would draw a different set of conclusions.

I have been writing this series under the overall theme that morality does not come from God. Morality comes from man, and those men create God in their own image. A kind and compassionate man will create a kind and compassionate God and will see himself as being commanded by God to act in a kind and compassionate manner towards others.

A hateful and bigoted man, on the other hand, invents a hateful and bigoted god. He then declares that the hateful and bigoted acts that he craves are the commandments of this God that he has created.

The more absurd the argument that an individual tries to grasp onto to give his harmful behavior apparent legitimacy, the deeper we have reason to believe his bigotry goes. Because nobody actually likes to admit that they're a bigot. They like to think of themselves as good people who have good reasons for what they do. They grasp on to absurdities such as this in order to say - as much to themselves as to others, "I am not a bigot." Yet, they are like the man with clenched fists shouting at the top of his lungs, "I am not angry!"

We can know you by your actions, and these actions scream, "I AM A BIGOT!"

Gods are created by man in his own image. Bigoted men create bigoted gods so that they can claim divine guidance in doing that which is based, not on divine guidance, but human bigotry.

The people who think that the argument found in the Manhattan Declaration actually makes sense are hateful and bigoted men. The God they have created that tells them to act in this way is a hateful and bigoted God, created in their own image. That God is imaginary.

However, the people harmed by these individuals who have invented such a God and use this invention to demand an unobstructed right to inflict the harms their God commands are real.

The Manhattan Declaration Part III: Infidelity

I have been writing this month on the Manhattan Declaration - a document outlining a set of principles on matters of life, marriage, and religious liberty.

The Declaration contains the following line:

To strengthen families, we must stop glamorizing promiscuity and infidelity and restore among our people a sense of the profound beauty, mystery, and holiness of faithful marital love.

(See: Manhattan Declaration: A Call to Christian Conscience.")

On this, the Manhattan Declaration is correct.

Of course, I would not put it in those same terms. In desire utilitarian terms, we have many and strong reasons to promote an aversion to promiscuity and infidelity, and to promote stronger desires for tight marital bonds between individuals.

A basic long-standing objection against adultery is that it involves the breaking of a promise. The wedding vow itself is a promise not to sleep around with others. A person who then has sex with violates that promise and this, in itself, involves doing something that no good person would do.

But what do we say about the people who never make such a promise? They enter into a marriage in complete agreement that each may have sex with others, No promise is done, so there is no wrong.

Another way of stating the issue with respect to adultery is that it is not a question of whether a promise, once made, should be kept. It is a question of whether the promise should or should not be made - what the promise (or the lack of a promise) itself says about the moral character of the individual.

The desire utilitarian case against adultery is that people have many and strong reasons to praise those who make (and then to keep) a promise a marital (or relationship) fidelity, and to condemn those who engage in sex without that fidelity - engage in promiscuous and adulterous behavior.

A large portion of those many and strong reasons comes from the many and strong reasons we have to prevent the spread of disease, and the desire-thwarting that those diseases bring. We get many of these reasons from preventing the spread of disease such as syphilis and AIDS. Recent medical research is showing that many forms of cancer - cervical, pancreatic, oral, anal, and even potentially some breast cancers - are cause by the spread of sexually transmitted viruses.

(See: Stanford University series on Darwin's Legacy Lecture 8)

We have many and strong reasons to hope that we, ourselves, do not get these diseases. We have many and strong reasons to hope that those we do not care about get these diseases, We should have many and strong reasons to hope that we can keep these diseases out of the future of any child's life. So, we have many and strong reasons to promote strong desires for extended monogamous relationships, and to condemn those who are promiscuous or adulterous - as well as those who promote and glorify promiscuity and adultery.

We have many and strong reason to hold that those people who make a promise of marital fidelity and keep that promise are better people - far better people - then those who show those values that have in the past and will continue to contribute to the spread of these diseases and the desire-thwarting that result from them.

These points argue that there is a virtue in promoting institutions, norms, and policies that have the effect of encouraging long-term monogamous relationships and of discouraging those things that tend to break marriages apart.

This idea of promoting desires that tend to fulfill other desires and inhibit desires that tend to thwart other desires (such as promoting an aversion to promiscuity and adultery and promoting a desire to be in a long-term monogamous relationships) is one that has to take the scientific facts into account. People like to imagine all sorts of harms and benefits circulating around the fulfillment of their own desires.

While abstinence-only sex education is certainly consistent with promoting an aversion to promiscuity and (later) adultery, we cannot ignore the evidence that says that this option is so drastically opposed to our biological natures that the attempt does more harm than good. We get more disease, more misery, and more death trying to teach abstinence then we would get by supporting long-term, mutually caring, relatively safe monogamous relationships.

If you wish to absolutely avoid any chance of getting in an automobile accident then this can be done by totally abstaining from ever getting into a car or being near a road. However, insofar as this is completely impractical, the next best option is to teach people to drive safely.

Consistent with all of this is the fact that those who oppose homosexual marriages are the true enemies of marriage itself. The many and strong reasons we have for promoting long-term monogamous relationships are reasons for promoting long-term monogamous relationships among both homosexuals and heterosexuals alike. Our institutions should be (a moral person would insist that they are made to be) just as strongly supportive of the long-term monogamous homosexual relationship as it is of the long-term monogamous heterosexual relationship.

People who are not supportive of long-term homosexual relationships through the institution of homosexual marriage have placed themselves on the side of promiscuity, disease, misery, and death instead. In at least this part of the lives, they bring evil into our society, and the suffering that comes along with it. If they are unable to see the evil that they do, it is because their prejudices and bigotry as well as their own egos refuse to admit the vicious truth of what they do.

The Manhattan Declaration Part II: Marriage

Religious moralities do not come from gods. They come from human beings. They are assigned to gods as a way to give them an illusion of legitimacy - because history has shown that "You must obey me," tends to be far less effective than, "You must obey God, and I am the voice of God."

Religious moralities come from human beings, and human beings put into those moralities all of their prejudices and biases, their lust for power and to be served by others, their likes and dislikes and their arrogant presumption that they have figured out all of the truths to be known and any who disagree with them are not only wrong, but wicked, and must be punished.

One of the prejudices that nature has given human beings is the prejudice to view the objects of their own desires as having intrinsic merit - as being not only, "That which I like," but "That which deserves to be liked because of its intrinsic qualities." This leads to the attitude that "different is evil." When confronted with others whose likes are not compatible with one's own the tendency is to view those likes as "perversions" - as a warped and disgusting tendency to pursue that which has no or negative value.

"And I know it has no or negative value because I do not like it or actively dislike it."

The vast majority of us are heterosexual. Nature has created in us a strong desire for heterosexual acts. As I think back on my ancestors across millions and millions of generations I can tell you very little about a great many of them. Yet, I can say that, since the evolution of sex, none of them - or almost none of them - died a virgin.

Combine this with the unfortunate prejudice mentioned above and we see people reaching an unfortunate conclusion that heterosexual relationships are intrinsically good and tht there must be something defective in those who do not pursue that which intrinsically ought to be pursued.

This is an unfortunate prejudice in that it causes some people to do harm to others who do not deserve to be harmed. they do harm to others because it pleases them to see themselves as superior and "the others" as inferior. However, if there is any clear line in the moral universe, it is that doing harm to others merely because it makes us feel good sits on the far side of that line.

There may be a natural human disposition to view "different as evil" but it is a disposition that good people will try to hold in check. The institution of morality was invented for the purpose of establishing a set of institutions that hold our poorer nature in check and to allow our better natures to flourish (to promote desires that tend to fulfill other desires and inhibit desires that tend to thwart other desires). This means holding in check the disposition to view "different as evil" and to grant liberty to those who are different, so long as they are not dangerous.

Even here we must be wary, because the disposition to view different as evil - the good feelings generated by holding "us" as superior and "them" as inferior - will seduce us into seeing a threat where no threat exists. We WANT to believe that we have reason to do harm to those who are different, so we accept things as evidence even though they stand in bold conflict with reason and responsibility.

The Manhattan Declaration contains the following quote:

[Permitting homosexual marriage] would lock into place the false and destructive belief that marriage is all about romance and other adult satisfactions, and not, in any intrinsic way, about procreation and the unique character and value of acts and relationships whose meaning is shaped by their aptness for the generation, promotion and protection of life.

(See: Manhattan Declaration: A Call to Christian Conscience.")

There is nothing in this but an expression of the attitude, "Different is evil." This is an expression of people who have taken what they like and assigned it extraordinary or supernatural virtue, so that they can generate in themselves the "good feeling" of seeing themselves as superior to those who are different.

This is bigotry and prejudice in its true form, prejudging those who are "like me" as superior, and prejudging those who "different" as "defective" and "worthy of condemnation."

It is accompanied by claims that "the others" are dangerous that make no sense when held up to the light of reason. They are claims of harm accepted by those aching for an excuse to act in ways harmful to others, and will grasp at any straw that can be offered as "justification" - to people who are similarly seduced by their own bigotries to accept.

They claim that marriage is meant for procreation and for raising a child.

Yet, nothing in a childless homosexual marriage is a threat to a heterosexual couple raising a child. And the belief that a homosexual couple must necessarily do a poorer job of raising a child has little or no basis in fact. People accept these claims, not because the research forces them to accept these claims, but because the pleasure of seeing themselves as superior to others seduces them into accepting these claims.

The most blatant irrationality with respect to the claim that these bigots have the best interests of the children at heart is the fact that many of those children are homosexuals. There is a very real harm being done to the interests of those children to put on the scale against the imaginary harms and benefits that spring from the bigot's imagination. It is a clear and obvious harm that is ignored because . . . well . . . "those who are different from us" are inferior and inferior interests do not need to be considered.

Even if there is a difference of opinion on this matter, morality demands that we give those who may be harmed the benefit of the doubt. The burden of proof is never on those who say that harm may not be inflicted, but always on those who say that harms must be inflicted. Furthermore, the moral person demands that the proof be something more substantial than, "It kinda feels like it might be a good idea." Harm requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt. The bigot's standards for evidence are much, much lower.

The authors of the Manhattan Declaration have made the situation worse. They have created a god in their image. They have assigned their prejudice to a god, creating a god that shares their prejudice and who, then, sanctions and defends the unjustified harms that the bigots would cause to "those who are different from us."

They pump up their chests with arrogant and false pride over the declaration that, "We have devoted ourselves to a higher power. We have devoted ourselves to pursuing God's will."

No, you have devoted yourselves to acting on natural prejudices and bigotries that you only imagine to be God's Will because that combines the good feeling of doing harm to those who are "different from us" to the good feeling of "serving a higher power who smiles on us when we do harm to those who are different from us."

When humans assign their prejudices and hatreds to a god, they then wrap those prejudices in an armor of faith where they can close their ears and refuse to listen to any argument that suggests that they are wrong. "God said that we may . . . indeed must . . . harm those who are different from us, and God cannot be mistaken."

Perhaps God cannot be mistaken. But humans can - and the gods that humans invent are prone to all of the same weaknesses and faults - prejudices and bigotries - of those who create their gods in their own image.

The Manhattan Declaration Part I: Religious Liberty

According to a recent declaration on Christian principles, if a person were to stand up in a crowded room, shout "Allah Akbar", and start shooting everybody present, it would be a violation of his religious liberty to duck and cover and head for the door, or to shoot the person who is doing the shooting.

A group of Christians have released a proclamation that they have titled the "Manhattan Declaration: A Call to Christian Conscience" in which they talk about a number of moral concerns regarding life and death (abortion, euthanasia, stem cell research), marriage (homosexual marriage), and religious liberty.

(See: Manhattan Declaration: A Call to Christian Conscience.")

I have no doubt that the authors of the text would protest the above account. However, their discussion on religious liberty leave this as a logical implication of the principles they put forward.

No one should be compelled to embrace any religion against his will, nor should persons of faith be forbidden to worship God according to the dictates of conscience or to express freely and publicly their deeply held religious convictions. What is true for individuals applies to religious communities as well.

What the shooter in this example is doing is expressing freely and publicly his deeply held religious convictions. Apparently, according to this declaration, he has a right to do so. To say that somebody has a right is to say that others have a duty to interfere. Clearly, when the authors of this declaration argue for a right to religious liberty, they are arguing for a duty on our part not to interfere with them. A direct application of this principle to the example of the shooter implies that we would be morally prohibited from taking any action that would interfere with the shooter's interest in expressing his most deeply held religious sentiments.

Clearly, the authors of this declaration would not declare that the shooter has such a right. However, this leaves them with a choice. If they are going to deny that such rights exist, then they need to alter their principles accordingly. Sometimes it is permissible to interfere with somebody else's expressions of deeply held religious convictions.

In this declaration, the authors state that Christian doctrine requires that they obey the law and to engage in civil disobedience when the law is unjust. However, this is a Christian doctrine. To impose this doctrine on others would, it seems, be a violation of the prohibition on "worshiping God according to the dictates of conscience." So, even though a Christian who would sign this declaration may not be an advocate of the use of this type of violence, the declaration gives moral sanction and permission to those who would.

Should a person whose conscience permits such violence be prohibited from worshipping God according to those dictates? If the answer is "sometimes yes", then the prohibition can clearly sometimes be violated.

One of the great advantages of having an inconsistent and inherent moral philosophy is that the agent gets to appeal to that half of the contradiction that is most useful at the moment in justifying their actions. If a health care provider wishes the liberty to refuse to provide abortion services to somebody who may want an abortion, prohibiting them from refusing is a violation of their religious liberty. If a homosexual couple wishes to get married according to the dictates of their conscience, apparently, then it is the religious liberty of the Christian signers of this document to prohibit such unions that is at stake.

For some reason the authors of this doctrine have adopted a set of principles in which they get all of the liberty, while everybody else gets all of the burdens. Yet, they claim that this self-contraditory and self-service doctrine does not come from man (specifically, not from the brains of the authors guided by their own convenience), but from God.

This is not an argument, which I have been protesting against in the past week, that says that religious moderates are to be condemned for the wrongs of religious extremists. This is an argument that looks at a specific declaration that has been set forward and shows the logical implications of that declaration. It is no different than raising objections to act utilitarianism on the grounds that it would authorize a doctor to kill a healthy patient to use his organs to save five patients who would otherwise die.

I assign my criticism only to the argument itself, and to those who endorse this argument – specifically its signers, but also any who would endorse the principles even without signing.

The principles in this policy ultimately implies that there is no limit on what a person may do, since any opposition or interference would, on these principles, violate the agent's right to "express freely and publicly their deeply held religious convictions."

That is exactly what the 9/11 hijackers were doing . . . expressing freely and publicly their deeply held religious convictions.

That is exactly what the terrorist who detonates a nuclear weapon in Washington DC would be doing . . . expressing feely and publicly their deeply held religious convictions.

Certainly there must be religious convictions that people must not be permitted to express freely and publicly. Yet, the Manhattan Declaration gives us no such limit.

There is a reason why the Declaration does not give us any limit. This is because it is not actually a doctrine of religious liberty. It is a recipe for religious tyranny. It was written by people who, in the first two sections of the paper, wish to impose their religious beliefs on others even to the point of doing great harm to the interests of people who do not share their religion. It is quite certain that people with those types of values are not going to want to declare that there are limits in the harms that religious people may impose on others.

Instead, they are going to cap their declaration of religious tyranny with a set of principles that say that "We support religious liberty. This means that we have the liberty to do whatever pleases us and the rest of you have an obligation to submit."

No, I did not forget that they are not actually speaking about a right to "do whatever pleases us". They have a right to worship God according to their own conscience. Yet, there is no God. Nobody gets any moral law from God. Instead, people assign their own wishes and desires to God, and they do so according to their own pleasure. So, while they declare, believe, and certainly wish us to believe that they are acting on a higher moral value. They are, in fact, acting according to their own pleasure and using God in an attempt to justify the harms that they would have others suffer.

That is certainly what we find here. We find a declaration written by people who would be pleased with the liberty to impose their values on others without regard to the people made to suffer. To give their actions legitimacy they tell us that they are not actually acting according to their own pleasure. Instead:

The nature of religious liberty is grounded in the character of God Himself, the God who is most fully known in the life and work of Jesus Christ.

In other words, it is God that grants them to do these harms. These are not being inflicted at the pleasure of those who created the Declaration. They are God's will. So, they must be legitimate. And we have an obligation to "religious liberty" to allow them to inflict those harms it pleases them to inflict.

It is a very convenient theory.

Blaming the Moderates - Considerations of Rationality

All fiction should be condemned. If not banned outright, we should at least universally condemn all fictionists - people who create and distribute works of fiction.

The reason we should adopt this attitude is because all works of fiction are basically lies. To tolerate fictionism is to tolerate lying. Those who tolerate lying, in turn, are enablers for all of those who engage in fraud and other forms of deception. If we condemn all lying - even fiction - then there is no way that the fraudster, the deceptive advertiser, the political manipulator, or the public relations specialist can get the idea that the lies they engage in are somehow permissible.

This argument is meant as a reductio ad absurdum of the claim that religious moderates must be condemned as enablers of the actions of the violent religious extremists. Blaming the former for the actions of the latter is as absurd as blaming "fictionists" for the actions of liars and other forms of malicious manipulators of the truth.

It has been my position in this blog that all moral condemnation must be tightly focused - that only those who are actually guilty are to be condemned. There is a human tendency to divide the world into tribes of "us" and "them", and to take the wrongs committed by a subgroup of "them" (or even imagined wrongs) and apply it to all of "them". This is used to "justify" intertribal conflict - such as conflict between the atheist tribe and the theist tribe.

The way to avoid this outcome is to constantly focus attention on keeping condemnation tightly focused only on those who are guilty, to be on guard for the tendency to make irrational leaps from the subset to the whole, and to attack them when and where we find them.

Which is one of the things I try to do in this blog.

The claim that moderates are to be condemned for the actions of the extremists is one of those irrational absurdities embraced, not because they make sense, but because they mask tribal hatreds in a cloak of apparent legitimacy.

If it is permissible to condemn the moderate for the behavior of the extremists, then it should be just as permissible to credit the extremists for the behavior of the moderate. Consider two extreme cases - one of a deeply religious doctor who thinks that God wants him to provide medical care to the impoverished children in third world countries, and the other a violent jihadist who seeks to blow up a crowded shopping mall.

What argument can we give for saying that the doctor deserves to be condemned for the actions of the terrorist that is not also an argument for giving the terrorist moral credit for the actions of the doctor.

The argument is the same. Just as the doctor who promotes devotion to God is an enabler of the terrorist, the terrorist who promotes devotion to God is an enabler to the doctor. To claim that the argument is valid when used as a reason to condemn the doctor for the actions of the terrorist, but invalid when offered as a reason to praise the terrorist for the actions of the doctor, is itself irrational.

If irrationality is the true enemy, then this is an example of the true enemy. Only, this time, we are talking about the irrationality of atheists.

Rationality says that these inferences are invalid. If rationality is a virtue (and I hold that it is a virtue, though it is one we have only a limited ability to practice), then no good (rational) person would embrace this argument. In fact, the good (rational) person would condemn those who use this argument - particularly when it is used to give an illusion of legitimacy to what is used to condemn (to promote and, in some cases, sell) hatred of all members of a target tribe.

Which is what I am seeking to do here.

Please note, this is not an argument for being nice to religious moderates because it is politically expedient to do so. This is not an argument for promoting niceness at the expense of reason. This is an argument that embraces the position that rationality is a virtue and irrationality is a vice, and condemns a popular form of reasoning because it is irrational.

The claim that we must blame the moderates for the actions of the extremists is irrational - it is an invalid inference and for that reason no friend of rationality would embrace it. For that reason, any friend of rationality would condemn those who practice it.

From here we actually start down a long train of irrational arguments.

Why not credit the terrorist for the good done by the doctor? Answer: Because people can do good without God.

However, people can also do evil without God, so that argument doesn't work.

Ahhh, Alonzo, but what you are missing out on is that religion is required to do evil in the name of God.

Yes, but religion is also required to do good in the name of God, so that argument still does not work. We still do not have anything that a friend of rationality would embrace - that an enemy of irrationality would not condemn.

Religion, Condemnation, and Appeals to Scripture

In light of some recent discussion, I think it is time to specify some basic propositions.

(1) There is no God.

Some people may be distressed by this fact. However, I am under no obligation to bury the truth simply because someone cannot handle the truth. In order for people to best fulfill the most and strongest of their desires, given the fact that they act to fulfill the most and strongest of their desires given their beliefs, they need true beliefs. Belief that a God exists is not on the list.

Even if there is a God, we know nothing about its qualities. It could be a childish God who created the earth and its occupants at set us to war against each other for its own amusement. Or it could be a bored God concerned with something else in some other part of the universe where we are an unforeseen side-effect that God cares nothing about. Or it could be a God who is more impressed with the human who uses its brain and available evidence to conclude that it does not exist than with those who shamelessly assert that faith is a virtue. All claims about what God is like have to be justified separately from the proposition that a God exists.

(2) Belief that a God exists is not morally objectionable.

We all have false beliefs. None of us have time to hold all of our beliefs up to the light of reason and sort them all out, so we all have unfounded false beliefs.

Consider a person with no beliefs. How does he hold that first belief up to the light of reason to judge whether to accept it or not? He cannot. Our first beliefs are acquired arationally. Later beliefs are evaluated in part based on their coherence with these early arational beliefs. They help to select subsequent beliefs. It is a method prone to error. If people are to be held in moral contempt for every false belief they adopt, then we must hold everybody - even ourselves - in moral contempt.

(3) People who base behavior harmful to the interests on others on scripture are evil.

If you are going to do something harmful to the interests of others - if you are going to do anything that has a reasonable chance of harming the interests of others - you have a moral obligation to provide good reason to do so. You have an obligation to begin with the assumption that others are not to be harmed unless the value of doing harm is proved beyond a reasonable doubt, and to provide that reason.

Religious texts offer no good reason whatsoever for behavior harmful to others.

As soon as somebody quotes scripture in defense of a law or policy that is potentially harmful to the interests of others, that person has done what no good person would do. that person has violated the moral prescription against doing harm without good reason.

Religious beliefs are fine for people who apply them to their own lives. If you want to use scripture to decide what to eat, when to eat, what to wear, when to work, when to refrain from working, and the like, you are free to do so. Just as you are free to base these decisions on your horoscope, tea leaves, tarot cards, or the role of a die, if that pleases you.

However, if your scripture tells you to do harm to your neighbor, your act is no more justified than that of the person who looks at his horoscope, reads, "CANCER: Your neighbor must die today. Do anything in your power to make sure that he does not survive to see another dawn."

Killing your neighbor and appealing to scripture makes you a murderer. This includes those who support capital punishment who quote scripture that calls for "an eye for an eye." They are murderers, because they have killed without providing good reason to kill. They are murderers for the same reason the person reading the horoscope above and acting on it would be a murderer.

Maiming your neighbor and appealing to scripture makes you guilty of malicious assault. Taking your neighbor's property and appealing to scripture makes you a thief. This applies to anybody fighting over land where they base their fight on the claim, "God gave this land to us." You are thieves. And if you kill others whole engage in an act of theft then you are guilty of murder here as well.

The instant a person appeals to scripture to justify harm to others, at that instant they have done evil. Even if the person harmed actually deserves to be harmed - even if they are actually guilty, the person who has appealed to scripture to justify doing harm has still committed an evil act. This is because it is still the duty of every human being to presume that others are not to be harmed and to use only good reasons to show that they should be harmed.

Again, it is just like the horoscope case. Even if the neighbor turns out to be somebody who deserves to be killed, the fact that the killer did not have good reason to do so makes the killer a murderer.

Yes, this means that there are a lot of people around the world patting themselves on the back and puffing out their chests with pride over how great they are because they are fighting God's war should be ashamed of themselves. Their arrogant false pride is wholly undeserved. For the sake of their victims - those to whom they do harm without justification - it is not only permissible, it is obligatory to stick a pin in that inflated sense of pride and tell these people what type of people they really are.

The Christian conservative who looks to scripture and finds justification for banning gay marriage is guilty of the same moral crime as the Muslim who looks to scripture and finds justifiation for flying an airplane into a skyscraper.

If your reasons are not the type of reasons that are admissible in court, then they are not the types of reasons that should be permissible in Congress.

However, this applies ONLY to those who appeal to scripture to justify harmful actions. As I have argued, a rancher who gets drunk and drives around his ranch - where there are no other people to hit - is NOT guilty of any type of moral negligence, because he does not put others at risk. Similarly, people are free to be as intellectually reckless as they wish with beliefs that do not threaten others. It is when people put others at risk that they acquire the obligation to act (and to think) more responsibly. It is when they consider policies harmful to others that they become evil if they seek justification for those harms in scripture.

So, if we are going to condemn people, the people who deserve our condemnation are not "the religious". It is "the people who base behavior potentially harmful to others without good reason" - a group both broader and narrower than "the religious" and likely includes a good number of atheists as well.

If a person commits an act of attempting to justify behavior harmful to others by means of appeal to scripture, then this makes that person a member of the group, "People who have attempted to justify behavior harmful to others without good reason" - all of whom have done something evil and can justly be labeled as such.

This is true in the same way that a person who commits rape becomes a member of the group, "Rapists", all of whom have done something evil. And anybody who commits theft becomes a member of the group "thieves", all of whom have done something evil. There is no bigotry involved in labeling these groups what they are or to say that they all deserve condemnation based on that fact.

But nothing in this - nothing at all - justifies extending condemnation to anybody outside of the group, "rapists", "thieves", and "those who seek to justify behavior harmful to others without good reason."

Pledges, Promises, and Prescriptions

Pledges, Promises, and Prescriptions

A 10 year old boy, Will Phillips, is getting attention because he has made a principled stand not to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance because America does not provide “liberty and justice” for homosexuals.

(See: Arkansas Times A Boy and His Flag)

Technically, this involves a misunderstanding of the Pledge of Allegiance. The Pledge is not a mere description of America that happens to be false. The Pledge is a prescription – a statement on what the pledge taker will try to bring about. A person who refuses to say the Pledge is a person who refuses to promise to support liberty and justice for all.

This does not imply that Phillips was wrong. A part of the purpose of a protest is to generate publicity for a message – and Phillips has certainly accomplished that. Furthermore, Phillips’ protest is a statement of moral condemnation of those who treat homosexuals unjustly. It is quite refreshing to see such a widely publicized statement of moral condemnation of a group of hate-mongering bigots coming from a 5th grader.

In this sense, the statements that follow may be seen as pedantic, but they have important implications.

The Pledge of Allegiance is not a values-free description of what America happens to be as a matter of fact. It is prescriptive. It is meant to set forth an ideal – to make a statement of what America should be. It should be one nation, with liberty and justice for all. To the degree to which we fail to provide liberty and justice for all, to that degree we have fallen short of our goal, and the Pledge is a promise to work harder to obtain that goal.

All of this applies to the phrase, "One nation, under God" as well. This, too, is meant to set forth an ideal – to make a statement of what America should be. It should be one nation under God. To the degree that we fall short of this objective, the Pledge is a promise to work that much harder towards that goal.

Of course, we can never be a nation 'under God' because there is no God to be under. People who demand that we be a nation 'under God' typically see themselves as God's self-appointed magistrates on Earth. So, the promise to be ‘under God’ is a promise to be ruled by those who claim the authority to speak for God, which means being 'under' a religious institution of some sort.

As long-time readers of this blog will note, I hold the Pledge (as written) and the Motto in particularly high contempt – as I do anybody who supports these bigoted hate-mongering prescriptions.

Pledge of Allegiance is a promise on the part of those who take it to fight against the four great anti-Americanisms; atheism, secession, tyranny, and injustice.

It is unconscionable, particularly in a nation that pledges religious freedom, to have children promising to devote their lives to fighting atheism, or for the government to call decent citizens un-American simply because those citizens do not believe in a God.

I count this as hate-mongering, or the selling of hate for profit, because those who sell this particular brand of hate profit by establishing a filter that is 99.9% effective at keeping atheists out of public office – or, at least, keeping out atheists who will admit to being atheists.

And the Motto is pure tribal divisiveness. Its purpose is to divide the population into two tribes. It declares that the primary requirement for being a member of the favored 'us' tribe is to trust in God. If you do not trust in God, you cannot be one of 'us'. You must, then, by the process of elimination (and I use the term in its fullest sense) be one of 'them' – beneath 'us', unworthy of membership, unworthy of respect, worthy only of contempt.

It is precisely because the Pledge of Allegiance and the Motto are prescriptive that they are so contemptible. It is because they prescribe bigotry. Furthermore, their most important function is to teach bigotry to young children, where its lessons are planted at a deep and emotional level that they will find difficult to shake even as rational adults. It is one of the major contributors to the fact that atheist adults, though substantial in numbers, are so politically impotent – because of the shame that makes them admitting what they are even to themselves, let alone to others.

Just as anti-black bigotry was successful even at turning blacks against other blacks, and anti-gay bigotry is successful at turning gays against themselves (leading to high suicide rates among teenage homosexuals and other forms of self-destructive behavior), we see atheists hiding meekly in the closet ashamed to show themselves in public, turning on each other, and, in many cases, ashamed to admit their atheism even to themselves.

In this sense, it does not matter whether the law or social pressure requires people to stand and say the Pledge of Allegiance. The law, at one time, required blacks to sit at the back of the bus, to attend black public schools, to eat only in the 'colored' section of restaurants, to use only those bathrooms set aside for 'colored' people, and prohibited from buying houses in neighborhoods that had racial covenants.

When it comes to unjust laws and social customs – when it comes to laws and social customs that are built on a foundation of hate-mongering bigotry and whose primary aim is to turn the next generation into bigots as well – when the law can be broken without violence and without harm to any person or institution other than the institution of bigotry from which it sprang – then there are times when a good person would not obey a particular law or custom. These are times when a good person, in fact, identifies himself as such by his decision to refuse to obey a law or custom.

Even if the law required American citizens to promise to become bigots (or at least act as bigots act), we can still ask the question of whether good people would obey such a law. And even if legislators insist on posting signs in public buildings that declare, "Those who do not trust in God do not belong amongst us," this does not obligate any citizen to show that message any respect.

I once answered the question, "Why don't you stand for the Pledge of Allegiance," with the question, "Why do you stand? Are you such a fan of bigotry that you are willing to make a promise to the state and to your fellow citizens to support it. Because the Pledge of Allegiance is a promise to treat one who does not believe in God the way one would treat secessionists, tyrants, and the unjust."

A person with good desires - a person with a proper aversion to hate-mongering bigotry - just would not be willing to stand for that type of behavior.

The New York Terrorist Trials

A great many Republican politicians and pundits, and a few Democrats, apparently think that rights are the blessings of government - that government bestows rights and governments can freely take rights away for even light and transient reasons.

Since the announcement came out that some of the people captured and accused of involvement in the 9/11 hijackings were to be tried in civil court in New York "like common criminals", many have protested that such a move is objectionable on the basis that it grants the accused certain rights. There is no talk of these being inalienable, human rights - that governments are instituted to secure rights such as these. Instead, the argument is grounded on a seemingly unquestioned premise that rights are to be spoken of only as conveniences one has at the whim of those holding political power.

The theory that rights are government blessings is the theory that there is no such thing as a just or unjust government. Government can do no wrong if right and wrong are determined by what the government does. The possibility of just and unjust government requires that there is a standard outside of government that dictates what governments may or may not morally do.

At the same time, desirism denies that there are intrinsic moral properties - some type of fundamental moral ought that comes from some sort of great law-giver (either God or evolution) that dictates universal moral oughts.

Rights, in desire utilitarian terms, are facts about relationships between malleable desires and other desires. They are facts about the value of aversions to governments committing certain types of acts - curtailing free speech, arbitrarily arresting and imprisoning citizens at the whim of the head of state, denying people a say in selecting who will make the laws, etc.

These people who object to a public trial are people who clearly have little or no desire to see the government as a protector of rights. They have little or no aversion to the government simply sweeping away rights as a matter of convenience. If they have no desire to see rights protected generally, then they have no desire to protect your rights or to see governments sweep your rights aside on a whim. And they broadcast the same attitude to the rest of the world - telling the whole global community that humans have only those rights that their government tells them they have and no more.

Clearly, there are some circumstances in which there may be reason to deny a prisoner an open trial. Let us assume that somebody working for the German army is captured early in 1944 trying to smuggle plans to Nazi Germany, or somebody captured today needs only to broadcast the activation code for a nuclear bomb he has hidden in a major city. We clearly have good reason to deny that person an opportunity to broadcast the information he wants to get out. Absolute rules fail absolutely.

However, rights do have a weight, and they are not to be violated for trivial reasons.

We hear reasons like:

(1) We do not want to give these people a platform at which to speak. We do not want to give them a platform that they can then use to mock their victims.

Obviously, the right to a trial can be revoked by the government whenever there is a risk of the accused making statements that the government disapproves of what they say. This is not a case of the accused giving some vital piece of information to those who would use it to do great harm. This is a case of shutting people up because those with power do not want them to speak.

There are legitimate reasons to keep people from speaking. However, "Because I do not like what you would say" is not a good reason. It is, in fact, a reason that substantially denies that there is a right to freedom of speech. If the government has the right to silence people who might say something those with power disagree with, then none of us can claim a right to speak. We must all, instead, accept that we may be silenced as well if the government should not approve of our message.

The right to freedom of speech means nothing if it is not construed as a right to say things that others might not want to hear.

(2) The trial will be a circus. It will be out of control.

Again, these protestors are asserting the principle that the right to a trial can be revoked whenever the government declares that it cannot have an orderly trial. Of course, I can think of a great many circumstances in which the government may declare that it cannot have an orderly trial. They correspond to any case in which the government might want to lock somebody away without a trial.

Let us imagine, as a hypothetical example, that the Democrats have set up their campaign headquarters at the Watergate Hotel, and a group of Republicans then get caught trying to bug the Democrats. Let us assume that the President is somebody who wants to protect himself from what might be revealed in any public trial or hearings of those involved. All that President would have to do, if we establish such a principle, is declare that the trial would be a circus and, for that reason alone, must only be held behind closed doors where the words of the accused cannot be heard by the general public.

A politician or pundit who has particularly warm feelings for tyranny and for the government's ability to silence its critics is going to have particularly warm feelings for the idea that it can suspend any trial that the government declares would be a 'circus'.

The biggest circus that a tyranny has to fear is one that exposes the depths of its tyranny.

There are others, but this is a fine start for such a confined space.

In all cases where people are arguing against such a trial, I invite you, he reader, to look for the principle that lies at the heart of their alleged reason to deny such a trial. Look at what it says about the speaker's desire for fair trials and his aversion to the arbitrary exercise of government power. Then ask yourself how secure you would be if those sentiments became universal.