I have a long-standing interest in science, and in fact I came perilously close at one point to getting into veterinary research after completing my vet degree, and I also have a passionate interest in the relationship between science and religion. So that — combined with the 200th anniversary Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of “The Origins of Species” gave me the perfect opportunity to post an article entitled, “Four reasons Buddhists can love evolution.”

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Charles M. Blow has a short but interesting column explaining that the vast majority of Americans believe that good people who are not Christians can go to heaven. The sub-plot of the article is the disbelief that some people experienced when they learned this finding. That suggests to me that the tenets of hard-right evangelicalism have come to be seen as normative, when in fact they are a minority position that happens to have a lot of political traction and a direct channel to the media.

In June, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life published a controversial survey in which 70 percent of Americans said that they believed religions other than theirs could lead to eternal life.

This threw evangelicals into a tizzy. After all, the Bible makes it clear that heaven is a velvet-roped V.I.P. area reserved for Christians. Jesus said so: “I am the way, the truth and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” But the survey suggested that Americans just weren’t buying that.

The evangelicals complained that people must not have understood the question. The respondents couldn’t actually believe what they were saying, could they?

So in August, Pew asked the question again. (They released the results last week.) Sixty-five percent of respondents said — again — that other religions could lead to eternal life. But this time, to clear up any confusion, Pew asked them to specify which religions. The respondents essentially said all of them.

And they didn’t stop there. Nearly half also thought that atheists could go to heaven — dragged there kicking and screaming, no doubt — and most thought that people with no religious faith also could go.

What on earth does this mean?

One very plausible explanation is that Americans just want good things to come to good people, regardless of their faith. As Alan Segal, a professor of religion at Barnard College told me: “We are a multicultural society, and people expect this American life to continue the same way in heaven.” He explained that in our society, we meet so many good people of different faiths that it’s hard for us to imagine God letting them go to hell. In fact, in the most recent survey, Pew asked people what they thought determined whether a person would achieve eternal life. Nearly as many Christians said you could achieve eternal life by just being a good person as said that you had to believe in Jesus.

Also, many Christians apparently view their didactic text as flexible. According to Pew’s August survey, only 39 percent of Christians believe that the Bible is the literal word of God, and 18 percent think that it’s just a book written by men and not the word of God at all. In fact, on the question in the Pew survey about what it would take to achieve eternal life, only 1 percent of Christians said living life in accordance with the Bible.

Now, there remains the possibility that some of those polled may not have understood the implications of their answers. As John Green, a senior fellow at the Pew Forum, said, “The capacity of ignorance to influence survey outcomes should never be underestimated.” But I don’t think that they are ignorant about this most basic tenet of their faith. I think that they are choosing to ignore it … for goodness sake.

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Georgia Representative George Broun is apparently worried that President-elect Obama will establish a Gestapo-like security force to impose a Marxist or fascist dictatorship.

“It may sound a bit crazy and off base, but the thing is, he’s the one who proposed this national security force,” Rep. Paul Broun said of Obama in an interview Monday with The Associated Press. “I’m just trying to bring attention to the fact that we may — may not, I hope not — but we may have a problem with that type of philosophy of radical socialism or Marxism.”

Broun cited a July speech by Obama that has circulated on the Internet in which the then-Democratic presidential candidate called for a civilian force to take some of the national security burden off the military.

“That’s exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany and it’s exactly what the Soviet Union did,” Broun said. “When he’s proposing to have a national security force that’s answering to him, that is as strong as the U.S. military, he’s showing me signs of being Marxist.”

I guess it’s a sign of progress that Rep. Broun understands that he may sound “a bit crazy and off base.” What is the basis for his paranoia (outside of his own mind, of course)? Obama gave a speech to a group of veterans in Colorado on July 4, 2008, in which he called for Americans to serve their country, and in which he outlined ways in which such service could be to the long-term security benefit of the US.

Just as we must value and encourage military service across our society, we must honor and expand other opportunities to serve. Because the future of our nation depends on the soldier at Fort Carson, but it also depends on the teacher in East LA, the nurse in Appalachia, the after-school worker in New Orleans, the Peace Corps volunteer in Africa, and the Foreign Service officer in Indonesia.

And later in the same speech:

“Renewing that spirit starts with service. Make no mistake: our destiny as Americans is tied up with one another. If we are less respected in the world, then you will be less safe.”

So in context it’s clear that what he’s saying is simply that it’s good PR to send Americans overseas (amongst other things) to help the world in non-military ways, and that better PR for the US will result in better security.

In fact, he said the following:

“We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we’ve set. We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.”

And that’s the bit the right wing is going nutty over.

In a typical comment, one republican said:

“If we’re going to create some kind of national police force as big, powerful and well-funded as our combined U.S. military forces, isn’t this rather a big deal? I thought Democrats generally believed the U.S. spent too much on the military. How is it possible their candidate is seeking to create some kind of massive but secret national police force that will be even bigger than the Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force put together?”

The levels of confusion here are quite astonishing. First, Obama spelled out the nature of the “civilian security force” — which would consist of people working for the Peace Corps, teaching, consulates, etc. It’s all there in the speech. How this turns into a “secret national police force” is anyone’s guess.

Second, the words “civilian security force,” referring as they do to entities such as the Peace Corps, are clearly metaphorical.

Another conservative commented:

“In 2007, the U.S. Defense budget was $439 billion. Is Obama serious about creating some kind of domestic security force bigger and more expensive than that?”

This seems to be a either an inability to understand the meaning of the words “just as well-funded,” or a willful misunderstanding of them. It hardly seems likely that Obama would be planning to spent over $400 billion and not tell anyone, so “just as well funded” would presumably mean that education, the Peace Corps, etc, would have their needs covered in an adequate way, just as the military has its needs covered in an adequate way. As they say, when was the last time you heard of the military having a bake sale to raise money for a new jet? And yet our school system is perpetually in that state. To fund, say, the Peace Corps, as well as the military doesn’t mean spending the same amount as the military gets, it means making sure that it’s, well, “well-funded.”

“We can’t be lulled into complacency,” Broun said. “You have to remember that Adolf Hitler was elected in a democratic Germany. I’m not comparing him to Adolf Hitler. What I’m saying is there is the potential.”

No, he’s not comparing Obama to Hitler, he’s just saying that Obama might be like Hitler. Just as many, many other conservatives, commenting on an extract of Obama’s speech on YouTube, have done:

This could be the equivalent of Hitler’s SS.

The Messiah has spoken….disarm and give your weapons to him, leave yourself with no protection, be patriotic and help spread the (your) wealth, help him put into a militant civilian military (Blaque Panthers) in order to suppress the military from overthrowing him. Submit all white weak people.

This makes no sense at all. We have the worlds mightiest army. Why do we need a civilian force? Where have I heard this before? I know, in Cuba. I can see a pattern here. These guys all follow the same pattern. He wants a civilian force made up of his supporters so he can perpetuate himself in power. Castro, Hitler, Chavez, they have all done it.

obama is a real nazi!!!

This is exactly was Hitler was saying before his civilian army helped him make his fascist police state..Anyone ever heard of the SS? All you who think Obama is some cool black dude who is gonna make America peachy better open your eyes. This is the making of new Hitler.

War on the people

etc, etc, etc.

Once again, I wonder where all this poison is going to go now that Obama has been elected? At a time when a president-elect has to be shielded by several inches of bullet-proof glass and there have been more than 500 threats to and at least two attempts on his life, we’d expect our elected representatives to be a bit less inclined to supply pitchforks and flaming torches to the village mob.

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Further to the post in which I draw attention to conservatives that rejoice in Obama’s grandmother’s death, this is from a flyer by the Westboro baptist Church, which regularly pickets funerals to tell us how much they (and their god) hate homosexuals:

Westboro Baptist Church
3701 SW 12th St. Topeka, Kansas 66604
785-273-0325
www.godhatesfags.com

NEWS RELEASE
WBC to picket the funeral of Madelyn Payne Dunham, – pursuant to the picketing laws of Hawaii or Kansas or, etc., wherever burial occurs, – in religious protest and warning to the living; to wit: “Prepare to meet thy God.” Amos 4:11.

Yes. Dying time is truth time, and reflection time, and time for meditating on the weighty issues of life: getting right with God, life, death, Heaven, Hell, sin, righteousness, judgment to come, etc. Obama says his grandmother Dunham raised him, and, her “influence on his manner and the way he viewed the world was substantial.” If so, then she has much to answer for as she stands before the Lord. Obama says he will use the White House as a Bully Pulpit to advance the cause of murdering more babies and same-sex marriage. “God hath appointed a day, in the which He will judge the world in righteousness by Christ.” Acts 17:31.

“And shall not God avenge his own elect, which cry to him day and night?” Luke 18:7.

“For we know him that hath said, Vengeance belongeth unto me, I will recompence [sic], saith the Lord. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God..” Reb. 10:30,31.

These people need lovingkindness. They need to learn how to love. What about 1 John 4:20-21?

If anyone says, “I love God,” yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother.

Or 1 Corinthians 13?

If I … have not love, I am nothing … Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

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In Colorado voters shot down Amendment 48, the “Personhood Initiative,” by a three-to-one margin. The measure would have defined human life as starting “from the moment of fertilization”—which in essence would have made abortion a crime and put the brakes on embryonic stem cell research there.

I’m not pro-abortion by any stretch of the imagination, and neither is my wife. We (or more strictly she) would never have an abortion, and I wouldn’t encourage anyone to have an abortion. I do support abortion (albeit with some reluctance) when the life or health of the mother is seriously in danger. I can understand when someone chooses to have an abortion because of some serious developmental abnormality of the fetus. I’m pro-contraception. I’m pro sex-education (countries with better sex ed have lower teen pregnancy rates).

But I consider the idea of legally defining a fertilized egg as a person with legal rights as not just silly but dangerous. Here are some things I wonder about, should a fertilized egg ever be considered as a person with legal rights:

• When a child dies in the home there is an investigation because of the possibility of infanticide or neglect. Given that about 1/3 of conceptions end in miscarriage or the death of the embryo, should we investigate every miscarriage as a possible crime in case negligence (or worse) was involved?
• It’s not commonly acceptable to freeze one’s children. Should parents be legally able to freeze embryos as part of IVF treatment?
• In IVF treatment, should it be legal to discriminate between embryos that are malformed and stand no chance of developing normally, and those that are considered viable? Should all have an equal chance to be implanted?
• Should a father be able to sue on behalf of a frozen embryo, demanding that it be allowed to gestate and come to term?
• What if there are a dozen frozen embryos? Two dozen?
• With advances in cloning, all stem cells will have the potential to become a full human being. Should stem cells be granted legal rights?
• Should we issue “conception certificates” to all fertilized eggs to legally mark their personhood (after all we keep track of persons)?
• Should parents have to file a death certificate in the case of miscarriage?
• Is it murder for a surgeon to remove an embryo that’s developing abnormally and might kill the mother — as in an ectopic pregnancy?
• Should women be charged with murder if they use IUDs or hormonal contraception? Should they be subject to the death penalty in states where that method of punishment exists?

I’m sympathetic that people want to create a clear line. My personal feeling is that at some point a developing fetus does attain some kind of personhood, in that killing it deliberately should be criminalized (with health exceptions, etc). If a woman and her 8 month-old fetus are murdered, for example, I’m sympathetic to the idea that there be two murder charges. But there are few clear-cut lines in nature, and fertilization is not to my mind a socially acceptable line to draw for personhood.

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North Carolina tossed Elizabeth Dole out of office despite her ad campaign aimed at convincing the state that her opponent, Kay Hagan, was an atheist. This was accomplished, you may remember, through the creative strategy of showing Hagan’s picture along with another woman’s voice saying: “There is no God!” If Dole had won, by the next election we would have been bombarded with ads that appeared to show candidates saying “I support adultery!” or “Let’s kill the puppies!” Now that won’t happen. Thank you, North Carolina.

More hilarity can be found here.

And in case you missed it, here’s the ad. Watch it now before Dole uses the DMCA to have it pulled from YouTube.

Hagan, Dole’s opponent, is an elder in her church and a Sunday school teacher. Dole knew this, of course, which makes her ad all the more slimy. The bigger question of whether it should matter whether someone is an atheist tends to be eclipsed by the fact that Dole brazenly lied about Hagan’s religious beliefs. Hagan is suing. Good.

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I believe psychologists talk about “confirmation bias,” which is the tendency for us to seek out or to accept information that reinforces our existing beliefs. One of the plagues of modern politics (and the wider “culture wars”) is this very tendency. Republicans tend to watch the right-leaning Fox news, and Democrats prefer to watch left-leaning MSNBC. Thus we limit our exposure to other viewpoints and never really make the effort to appreciate them.

Then things go a stage further and we build up what are in fact mutually-exclusive alternative realities. For some people Obama is a crypto-Islamic terrorist-sympathizing Marxist. For me he’s a very decent guy — very moderate politically. I don’t think that on the left the criticisms of McCain get quite so unhinged from reality, although maybe that’s my own confirmation bias filtering those messages out. But some see him as unstable, erratic, and unprincipled, while others of course see him as having the opposites of those qualities — an honorable, patriotic, decent man.

I have to say it’s a bit frightening realizing the extent to which people inhabit camps into which no positive view of the “enemy” may intrude. A recent example was watching a video of Obama on You Tube:

Now in this speech Obama outlines his vision of participative democracy, including an expansion of Americorps and the Peace Corps, and reopening shuttered consulates. And he says he wants these to be as well-funded as the military who, unlike our schools, never have to run bake sales in order to pay for essential items. I hear a call to service, a call to voluntarism, and a promise by government to help the kinds of programs that will raise the standing of the US in the eyes of the world.

But how is this heard by the right wing? I’d suggest reading some of the comments posted under that video or of a quotation taken from it and posted on YouTube here. Here are a few:

This is a veiled attempt at getting your guns. Obama wants to
create a “militia”(which is what a civilian security force is) then
turn around and say if you are not in the “militia” you will not be allowed to own guns. Militia members will be microchipped
for their own “safety”. COLD DEAD HANDS muthafucka!

I’m with you, hdame! And I’ll say that I’ve got plenty of ammo and several fine guns! IF this creepy radical socialist wins this election, when he sends these jackbooted Obamanation thugs to take me & mine, they best bring a sacklunch. They’ll likely get me, but I’ll get a LOT of them! There are MILLIONS of us who feel the same way. NO SURRENDER to radical socialist tyranny! Semper Fi!

You are correct but when the jackbooted thugs of “The One” come calling and want to search your home for any gun of any kind, what will you do? I am 77 and I will shoot but in futility, I realize. Sandy.

God love you Sandy, I’ll shoot too. Obama wants an armed force like Hitler had his Brown Shirts to bully defenseless citizens. Already Obama is fighting free speech every where (instigating investigations into McCain supporters that run 527 ads to intimidate them, declaring he will not allow people to speak about his wife, launching background checks into people like Joe the Plumber who ask tough questions, banning TV stations for asking tough questions; try to comment on his videos, etc.).

I have lived amongst Obama’s people for years now and have seen this coming. Let’s face it, he has 2 followers, the Liberal FAR left that are all races and then the part of the Black community that HATE whites. I lived near the later. A WAR ZONE! Period.

No one will ever take my guns. If this nation ATTEMPTS to dives into Marxism, Islam, Socialism, Communism then WE will all react and these entities will be taken out.

I really would not worry people. America will not fall.

I literally lifted five of the first six comments.

With attitudes like this, I wonder how we can ever achieve dialog?

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That’s amply demonstrated in a post that the excellent Mahablog links to, in which Jonah Goldberg purports to write from 2012, reporting on Obama’s failed presidency. It’s a bizarre, even hysterical, piece of writing in which, apparently, Obama’s administration will be damaged by Biden making bizarre statements:

…he told the Russian foreign minister he’d “rather punch a nun in the throat” than cooperate on an Iranian nuclear deal, the Obama administration knew they had a problem on their hands.

The strange comments and behavior kept coming: at an international summit on child poverty, he accused the Dalai Lama of issuing a “brain fart,” he phoned Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts at home and called him a “[re]tard in short pants…”

And so on and so on. Goldberg manages to reveal his racism: “The last straw was Biden’s complaint, emphatically offered at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, that he would have more influence over foreign policy if he were black.”

See. A black president, ergo he won’t listen to white people.” Now imagine if this was a liberal saying not to vote for McCain because McCain’s too much of a racist to listen to the concerns of racial minorities.

The Mahablog, however, has I think missed an even nuttier example of fear-driven Republican prognostication: Fundamentalist Christian Janet Porter’s “A newscast from a future we must never see.”

Now at this point I’m cursing myself for having used the word “hysterical” to describe Goldberg’s writing. That leaves me, perhaps appropriately, wordless to describe Porter’s insanity.

“Obama campaign supporters from al-Qaida to Hamas to Hezbollah, to Islamic Jihad and the Muslim Brotherhood, continue to dance in the streets.”

See — Obama is a friend of terrorists! [Ignore that Al Qaeda in fact endorsed McCain].

The “Death to America Coalition” released a statement: “We have not celebrated like this since 9/11!”

See — Obama hates America.

And he plans to force Americans to have abortions!!!

“The only thing left of the abortion agenda not yet accomplished is the forced abortion policy of China.”

We will also see a “government takeover of health care” and of course guns will be banned. [Fundamentalist Christians apparently like guns -- What assault weapon would Jesus choose?].

The Osama bin Laden video released yesterday has been shown to be authentic.

OSAMA speaks in Arabic.

TRANSLATOR: I am looking forward to meeting with President Barack Obama without preconditions to negotiate our demands of “submit or die.” We have much in common: the same supporters, the same allies and we both have friends who blew up the Pentagon.

See — Obama really, really is a friend of terrorists — even though the core of his foreign policy is to take troops from Iraq so that we can finally destroy Al Qaeda.

[Louis Farrakhan] today received another honor from the president, who asked him to be the keynote speaker at the Presidential Prayer Breakfast. Attendees were reportedly told to face east.

Farrakhan called for the loud siren signaling the Muslim call to prayer heard in Muslim Countries (and in Michigan) to be sounded in the capital five times a day. Not surprisingly, President Obama repeated the words he said in a February 27, 2007, interview with the New York Times that this call to allegiance to Allah as the “one true god” was “one of the prettiest sounds on earth.”

And he’s not just a terrorist, but a Muslim terrorist!

Conservative talk radio just became a thing of the past with President Obama answering the Democrat Congress’ call for a gag rule on Rush Limbaugh, conservative and Christian talk radio.

And he’s against free speech and — well he’s a Muslim, isn’t he? — he wants to ban Christian radio.

And perhaps worst of all, he’ll “place vulnerable orphan children in the homes of homosexual activists.”

(Please make up your own subtext for that one].

And just to make sure you’ve got the message, she also has a column titled, “You cannot be a Christian and vote for Obama.” Subtle, eh?

It’s clear that these people see Obama as a monster, not as a human being. They believe he is capable of anything. Whatever the neuro-chemicals associated with fear, Goldberg and Porter’s brains appear to be swimming in them.

According to her website, Porter (née Folger) “has appeared on NBC’s Today Show, ABC’s Evening News, 20/20, and Nightline, CBS This Morning, FOX News including The O’Reilly Factor, Hannity & Colmes, The Big Story and Heartland with John Kasich), MSNBC including Hardball with Chris Mathews, CNN, including Inside Politics and CNN Headline News, and the syndicated Extra among others.”

Dear, gods! How can someone like this be taken seriously enough to appear on all these TV shows? I excuse them for having brains intoxicated with anxiety. But aren’t there some sensible people out there who can say, “Wait, this person clearly has a diminished capacity for thinking clearly. Is this the kind of person whose views we want to foist on a world that needs a little wisdom, truth, and common sense?”

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