Utterly "Religulous"

I saw a screening of the new movie Religulous courtesy of the American Humanist Association in Washington, DC on Wednesday (Oct. 1, 2008).  The movie, presented by comedian Bill Maher, challenges the truth of and outright ridicules the world's three largest religions, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism.  Well actually, I use the term "documentary" loosely.  The film is highly one-sided and is more a long infomercial in the style of Michael Moore's films rather than a serious documentary.  Maher attacks religion with a combination of ruthless satire and simply letting its most extreme and ignorant adherents make fools of themselves.

Never the less, I loved this movie.  It fired some well-deserved ridicule at religion.  Some of the extremely religious people he interviewed acted and sounded like such nitwits that they were difficult to listen to.  Some of the other people he interviewed, particularly two Catholic priests, one a Vatican astronomer and the other a monsignor, were clearly very sophisticated and very modern.  The movie is hilarious and outs religion as the anachronistic absurdity that it is.  Near the end of the film, Maher warns of the dangers of religion, particularly in how deeply religious political leaders can make critical policy decisions based on the tenets of Bronze Age mythologies rather than a rational evaluation of current facts.  Maher goes on to claim that religion is a direct threat to the survival of civilization.

This film will probably not change the views of many deeply religious people.  However, for that large number of people who are religious, but still open-minded and capable of critical thinking, it may well facilitate doubts that they probably already harbor.  Maher is dead on in his assertion that religion is absurd, outdated, and dangerous.  If nothing else, it might encourage a few closet atheists to come out and challenge these anachronistic dogmas.

Maelstrom on Wall Street

Well, it's day two since the US House of Representatives in its great wisdom (smirk) voted down the treasury secretary's $700M bailout of the financial industry.  The ugly faces of petty partisanship and ideological zealotry reared forth among the histrionic vomitus spewing out from both sides of the aisle.  The Republicans blame the Democrats and the Democrats blame the Republicans for causing this mess.  SURPRISE!  Of course, the truth is, they both share blame.

 

Starting years ago with good intentions, but bad economic theory, the Democrats pushed forward the federal intervention in the housing market that made credit too easily available. They wanted to make home ownership attainable to a larger segment of the American population.  Through Fannie and Freddie, the Government made a lot more money available for mortgage lending.  This did make it possible for more people to buy houses and to buy bigger and better houses; however, in doing so, they disrupted one of the free market's natural checks and balances.  The free market normally hold's Wall Street's insatiable greed in check with risk.  But the Government made home more mortgages less risky than they would normally be for the lenders.  Risk was socialized while profits remained privatized.  What a deal for the lenders!  Through creative loan packages, they could make high-risk loans that they otherwise would not have touched and then quickly offload them to Fannie or Freddie who would repackage them and sell them off as securities.  And if the borrower can't afford the loan in the long-term, hey, it wasn't their problem.

This worked for a while.  Lots more people could buy homes or move up!  The real estate market soared and so did housing prices. As long as people could get loans at artificially low rates, the party went on.  Of course, there had to come a point when home prices got so artificially high that people couldn't afford them even with their complex hyper-packaged mortgages.  That's when the bubble burst.  So the Democrats, while trying to help more people own their own homes, made credit available to people who simply couldn't afford it.  Had the Government not intervened and made it easy for banks and mortgage companies to sell-off complex high-risk loans shortly after making them, things would never have come to this point.

Now the Republicans contributed their part to this debacle as well.  In the name of ideological purity, they would not let the Government regulate the free market.  No Government meddling in the economy.  Let Wall Street do its thing! Greed is good!  It moves the economy.  There's actually a perverse element of truth in this.  However, by guaranteeing  the value of home mortgage based securities, the Government had already meddled in the economy.  They made risky loans less risky--for the lenders, that is.  The Republicans let the tax payers absorb a big chunk of the risk, but would not let the Government regulate the lenders to make sure they staid within the bounds of prudence.  Thanks to Democratic risk reduction and Republican pseudo-laissez-faire, Wall Street had a feeding frenzy--on a charge card.

Moral of the story:  If you are going to follow a laissez-faire economic model, governments shouldn't meddle in the free market at all!  They shouldn't do anything that might disrupt the market's natural balance of risk vs reward that restrains reckless financial moves.  If you are going to intervene in the free market, no matter how noble your intentions, and interfere with its natural checks and balances, then you had damned well better regulate it to make sure that it doesn't overheat as it inevitably will.  What's truly pathetic is that the Government made this same type of mistake with the savings & loan industry in the 1980s.  They deregulated it while still guaranteeing the deposits.  With the natural check of risk removed, the S&Ls were free to gamble.  And gamble they did with predictably disastrous results.  Alas, history has repeated itself.  Some lessons are just never learned.

I could be a CEO!

I think I found the job I want.  I want to be the CEO of a Wall Street financial firm.  Where else could you fail utterly, drive the company's stock value into the toilet, send the company into near bankruptcy and still walk away with a multi-million dollar bonus or golden parachute?!  In any other job, such a disastrous performance would get you fired and out on the street without a dime.

I'm going to write to these financial firms and offer them my services as CEO.  I could drive the company into the ground, wipe out its stock value, send it into bankruptcy, and wreck its reputation for a fraction of what their current CEOs are charging to do the same thing.  Financial firms, why pay your current CEO tens of millions to wreck the company?  I'll do if for less than half the price!

On Patriotism this Fourth of July

Well, it's Independence Day, 4th of July 2008. This has always been one of my favorite holidays, not just because of its national significance, but because it's in the middle of summer when the weather is warm. I love warm weather. I see myself as just as patriotic as most Americans, but I've never been much of a flag waver. To me, that's insincere. I think that one should show patriotism through charity, donating one's time to public service and conserving our country's natural resources. Waving the flag costs you nothing and requires no effort or sacrifice on your part. So who's more patriotic, the person who does nothing but stick a flag on the bumper of his gas guzzling and environmentally destructive SUV or the person who donates his or her time and money to causes which better the lives of fellow citizens?

Sadly, conservative demagogues in my country, the USA, have cynically usurped the flag and patriotic words like "freedom" to justify jingoism, excessive militarism, a hegemonic foreign policy, and the suppression of basic rights at home. Defending the writ of habeas corpus and our constitutional prohibition against "unreasonable search and seizure" (electronic and otherwise) from a government that is attempting to disregard them is patriotic! Attacking other countries who did not attack us is not!

And when Americans stand up and demand that our government respect the principles of human rights and the rule of law that used to define what America stood for, conservatives accuse them of being "unpatriotic!" What hypocritical nonsense!

Books

Finished reading the book "God Is Not Great" by Christopher Hitchens.  It's well written and direct, although at some points he sounds a bit pugnacious and condescending.  Because of his harsh tone, I rather doubt that it will impress many theists and inspire them to question their beliefs.  I think he's preaching to the choir (yes, a rather odd phrase to use here).  But overall, it's  worth reading.

I also read the book "The Devil in Dover" by Lauri Lebo a few weeks ago.  It's about the Dover, PA evolution vs "Intelligent Design" (ID) (a.k.a. creationism) court case which transpired in 2005 and resulted in ID being appropriately labeled a "breathtaking inanity."  This is a very good book and I recommend it to anyone with an interest in the battle of science vs superstition in our public schools.

Hello Blogosphere

OK, so I'm finally starting my own blog.  I wonder if anyone is going to read it, but I guess it doesn't really matter.  The purpose of this blog is mainly to give me a place to vent and rant.  I'm going to write mostly about contemporary issues relating to the rise of religious fundamentalism in the United States, the assault on reason, and the grotesque incompetence of the current administration in the White House.  Maybe along with the zillion other blogs out there on the net, this will be of use to some future historian who is trying to make sense of the early part of the Twenty-First Century.

So, about me:  I'm a 45-year old American male.  I'm divorced and have two young children.  I have an undergraduate degree in Geology from a well-known university in California and a Master's degree in computer geekery from an old Ivy League college in New England. I've worked as a software developer for the past twenty years primarily in the aerospace field.  I like to think that I'm well-read and well-informed about politics, history, science, and life in general. Others may disagree with me on this.

I'm an atheist.  I'm an atheist because I find no credible evidence that any god or supernatural entity exists or ever has existed and I find very solid and convincing evidence that God is entirely a human invention.  No, I can't prove that God doesn't exist and I can't be 100% sure that He does not exist, but I can say the same thing about unicorns and the Tooth Fairy.  Yes, being an atheist puts me in one of the most (unfairly) distrusted minority groups in the United States, but the evidence is what it is.

So I'm going to write about how destructive I believe that religion is to society.  I don't believe that religion is the cause of all of the World's problems, but I do believe that the World would be a much more peaceful, humane, and compassionate place if all theistic religions were to suddenly vanish.