Faith and Accountability

In When God Talks Back, TM Luhrmann describes her study of American "charismatic" evangelical groups. She spent several years embedded as an anthropologist in a few of these communities, and gives a thorough and generally sympathetic view of them in the book. Her sympathy, such as it is, stems not so much from shared beliefs, but from her scrupulous efforts at scholarly neutrality -- a product, as she reminds us time and again, of her training as an anthropologist.

Over the course of my own life, I have become ever more firmly atheist as I think more carefully about the meaning of a belief in God in the sense usually meant by "religion." My work as an undergraduate focused in part on the nature of religious belief (specifically in early Mormons) and I am not fool enough to claim any certainty on the question of what God is or is not. Religious faith, like all matters of conscience, can not be disputed objectively, and therefore all serious systems of belief must be afforded a high degree of respect and deference. God does not talk to me, and I don't honestly believe that he talks to anybody (not the least because I don't think anything as large as God could be gender-specific) but I am more than willing to listen to people who say they can converse with the deity. I am very much interested in what they mean by the claim and what consequence they think it has.

And therein lies the rub. Luhrmann tells several stories about congregants who abdicate all responsibility for the consequences for their beliefs. Near the end of the book she offers an account of an exchange between several women in a prayer group. One woman says her daughter refused to wear "floaties" while swimming because "if I had gone down to the bottom of the pool God would have whispered in your heart and told you I was down there." [p.331] The mother and some her friends then laugh, and one even says "I would have said 'Honey, I know this God. You wear those floaties.'" But one member of the group was offended and suggested "we all ought to believe in God like that little girl." In another story a woman refuses to move out of an apartment she can't afford or take a job she does not like because she believes God wants her to be entirely dependent on him. In other words, God is a sadistic enabler.

That kind of stuff bothers me because it leads to irresponsible behavior. Believe what you want, but don't think that it absolves you of all accountability in my eyes or in anyone else's. Only the self-involved and self-indulgent can find a way to justify a staunch faith in God's desire to let them off the hook. Even Muhammad said "trust in God and tether your camel." And if the true believer goes to Congress and argues that we should not worry about climate change because God will take care of it and/or we ant the apocalypse, then his self-involved faith interferes with my efforts to clean up a mess.

Drones Come Home

In April of 2011, I posted a comment here on the implications and consequences of drone warfare. My basic concern was (and is) that targeted killings represent a drift from the rule of law. The United States arrogates to itself the authority to identify wrong-doers and to kill them without any transparent or even vaguely public process. Such actions may seem fine when the targets are foreign evil-doers in the "war on terror," but they still indicate a certain attitude about law and the use of force that troubles me.

In the latest New Yorker, Nick Paumgarten describes the ways in which drone technology is moving into the civilian sphere. "Police tend to have a fetish for military gear," he says, "which the purveyors of [drone aircraft] seem to recognize." Though most drones are too expensive for most law enforcement budgets, cops (and others) relish the prospect of using eyes in the sky to find and capture bad guys just like their buddies in Pakistan do. "Still," Paumgarten notes,

military innovation usually assimilates itself into civilian life with an emphasis on benign applications. The public proposition, at least at this point, is not that drones will subjugate or assassinate unwitting citizens but that they will conduct search-and rescue operations, fight fires, catch bad guys, inspect pipelines, spray crops, count nesting cranes and measure weather data and algae growth... Of course, they are especially well suited, and heretofore been most frequently deployed, for surveillance.

In other words, drones don't have to do bad stuff. Like guns, they are tools to be used by moral creatures, as Paumgarten points out.

But that, precisely, is the problem. If our moral and political framework comes to embrace the unilateral killing of bad guys -- if we are no longer governed by a strict sense of the value of the rule of law -- we are far more likely to behave in ways I don't like. The fact that we have shrugged off drone use overseas indicates that we are inclined to accept it elsewhere. I am not reassured that hovering clouds of bee-like drones are not likely to come into existence for a long time because the technology is too far off.

I'm not worried about the machines. I'm worried about us.

Our Descent into Orwellian Language

On April 1, President Obama remarked that a Supreme Court decision striking down the health care law would be "judicial activism" because it would be "an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically-elected congress."


The blogosphere exploded. As one nut-job yelled, "In his latest display of his full USA federal government dictatorship over both the American people and the former co-branches of government, Dictator Obama is warning the Supreme Court to either rule in his favor or face severe consequences." Never mind that the "consequences" this "dictator" referred to were electoral -- that's far too complex for people of this guy's intelligence level. Fox News commentators fueled the flame, of course, so people with no credentials at all could quote a powerful (but of course never "main stream") news source. 

But just 7 weeks earlier, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, who I assume, have no aspirations to be "dictator," excoriated the Federal Appellate Court decision on Proposition 8. "Today, unelected judges cast aside the will of the people of California who voted to protect traditional marriage," said Romney. Gingrich went further: "With today's decision on marriage by the Ninth Circuit, and the likely appeal to the Supreme Court, more and more Americans are being exposed to the radical overreach of federal judges and their continued assault on the Judeo-Christian foundations of the United States."

So why is it that when Republicans point out judicial activism they are guarding our liberties but when Obama does it he is tyrannical? Because the Republican Party and its mouthpieces have lost all sense of rational discourse.

And the result? Faith in the legitimacy of the Supreme Court has declined (as I said it would in my last post.) This is a bad state.

Everybody needs to start talking more sanely, but by that I am really calling on Republicans, who have gone off the reservation.