Humans and Gods

I listened to an interview with Reza Aslan, his new book is entitled God a human history, on KPFA radio in Berkeley. I heard so many assertions that I consider to be unfounded that I was amazed that the interviewer, Brian Edwards-Tiechert didn't challenge them. Aslan argues, ineffectively in my opinion, that humans have an innate belief in a separation between the material and the spiritual, the body and the mind (brain) and thus an innate need to create gods. I am reminded of two books by Sigmund Freud on this subject. In the first book, The Future of an Illusion, Freud presents his hypothesis (one I share) that all forms of faith/religion are mental illnesses, neuroses or psychoses. The distinction is that belief in an illusion (something which cannot be proved) is a source of neurosis, whereas belief in a delusion (something which can be proved to be false) is a source of psychosis. In that book, Freud presents these ideas with elegant logic, and unlike some of his clinical work (interpretation of dreams, alleged female fantasy of parental rape), his ideas on faith and religion hold up well in my opinion.

In the second book, Civilization and Its Discontents, Dr. Freud discusses the many social problems, such as wars, which these mistaken beliefs can cause. However, I want to focus on the introduction. Freud says that friends of his said to him that they could appreciate his ideas in the first book, but what about the "oceanic feeling" that there is something greater than us in the universe. Freud's response was that he feels no such oceanic feeling and therefore it must be something which is planted in the human brain by society. That is where I think Aslan drops the ball, in my opinion. Are there false beliefs which go back far into human history? Of course there are. Many humans believed that the earth is flat and that the sun revolves around the earth. Indeed, you could be severely punished by the medieval Roman Catholic church if you questioned those views. We now know that both ideas are false and can be proven to be false.

Is the universe much more complex than we can perceive? Of course, it is. We see and hear, for example, in a fairly narrow range of frequencies. Other species have wider ranges of frequencies which they can perceive. We have invented devices to perceive way beyond the frequencies we can directly perceive. Add to that the strange architecture of our brains and their mechanisms of cognition and storage of information (for example, we use the same mechanisms to store and retrieve information, and we often overwrite older information). We also have half a dozen processes that operate in our brains and negotiate the thoughts which make up our consciousness. It is a miracle, of sorts, that we have learned and achieved as much as we have with such poorly constructed mental faculties. None of that, however, in any way means that there has to be a nonmaterial part of the universe, for which, by definition, there can be no evidence whatsoever. I reject the notion that there is a spiritual component of the universe precisely for that reason.

Aslan also makes other strange claims. He says that fundamentalism is only about a century old. Galileo would have questioned that, as would the many victims of the inquisition. So would the victims of the Crusades. He says that the predominance of nonreligious beliefs among millennials is a new phenomenon. Has he never heard that many of the founders of the USA were deists, which is precisely a belief in a supreme being without the trappings of religion. Of course, it is also possible that some of them were atheists since Deism was often used as a protective cover by atheists. Openly asserting atheism could be very dangerous to one's personal safety.

Modern cognitive research has revealed a number of innate capabilities in our brains. We are born with a fully formed visual cortex with the ability to interpret the photons that fall on our retinas. We are born with the ability to learn language; Noam Chomsky did pioneering work on that. We are not a blank slate. But the development of our brains is also profoundly influenced by our experiences. Through experience we form neural pathways. I would like to see any evidence which proves that the tendency to form irrational beliefs (faith, religion, flat earth) is innate in our human brains. Arslan speculates that such a tendency evolved either because of a direct advantage or because it is linked to another train which does give us an advantage, but he asserts that the tendency is there in every human. On that, I give the same answer as Freud. I was not born with that tendency and do not have that tendency. Therefore, it is much more likely something introduced socially, i.e., by the interaction with other humans. The tendency of religious social groups to demand belief and to punish disbelief
would have played no small role in propagating and maintaining nonrational beliefs.

In conclusion, I think what most offends me about Arslan is that he tries to lay a scientific basis for something which is precisely non-scientific. He uses the language of science but not the tools of scientific inquiry. Faith and religion have unquestionably played large roles in human history and society. They should, therefore, be studied, but they should not be elevated into something which they are not.

Who Is the Worst US President So Far?

I can hardly think of anything for which we can be grateful to Donald Trump; however, he has resolved the debate about who has been the worst US president in his own favor. I am not a historian, though I do know a lot about the histories of the Middle East, Africa, and other places. So, I tend to be better able to evaluate presidents I have seen in action while I have been alive. To be sure there were villainous 19th century presidents. Consider, for example, Andrew Jackson who led the genocide against Native Americans and set the stage for later US war crimes throughout the world. In the 20th century, consider the devout racism of Woodrow Wilson. Still, in looking for the lowest points, prior to Trump I saw Ronald Reagan as the worst president ever. He led a major downhill change in direction by the US government aided by his confusion of cinema with reality. Bill Clinton did awful things, but he should be viewed as an implementer of Reagan's terrible ideas. In the same way, Barack Obama continued many of the worst policies of George W. Bush, who was pretty awful but not nearly so awful as Reagan. Still, we have to thank Trump because the debate now is about who is the second worst president in US history.

On Inaccurate Language and Sloppy Thinking

Two of the most bitter debates underway in mid-2017 are over Syria and over the campaign against Russia. Many charges are thrown around loosely and without evidence. I'll give two examples. You are not an apologist for the Syrian government simply because your provide evidence that that government has been falsely accused of using chemical weapons. The Syrian government is a very repressive government, though it has a long secular history in a region which is far from secular. The enemies of the Syrian government include both an internal democratic opposition as well as foreign powers and salafist groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS. The latter are doing most of the fighting against the Syrian government with aid from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Israel, and Turkey. Seymour Hersh has written extensively on attempts by Turkey and Western intelligence agencies to pin fake charges on the Syrian government that it has used chemical weapons in the current war. Hersh's normal US outlets, such as the New Yorker, have declined to publish his work. To argue that Hersh is right is not to be an apologist for the Syrian government, which has enough documented crimes in its record without these bogus charges. Those charges are intended only to "justify" direct attacks by Western governments on the Syrian government and the campaign to remove it. They do not address what is really going on in Syria, and they will not lead to a just end to the conflict in Syria.

By the same token, the charges of Russian intervention into the 2016 US election are filling the news every day. It started with the charge that the Russian government was behind the release of DNC Emails proving their conspiracy against the Sanders candidacy to Wikileaks. There is still zero public evidence that this charge is true, and some convincing evidence that it is not true. Now, the charges are escalating, though it is very interesting that nobody has provided any evidence of information from Russia being used to discredit candidate Clinton in the actual election. There is no charge, for example, of Russian involvement concerning Clinton's private Email fiasco. I find it very sloppy thinking, therefore, to believe that anything that the Russian government may or may not have done had any significant effect on the election. It may very well be that members of Trump's inner circle has had traitorous and despicable relations with the Russian government, and they should be held to account for that if it can be proven. But none of that should be fuel for a new cold war against Russia. We all have minds, and we should be able to parse not only what is proven from what is not proven and what is important from what is not important. Three US intelligence agencies (not 17) say they are confident that the Russian government interfered in our election. A fourth, the NSA, says it thinks that is true but with lower confidence. If such interference involved releasing DNC Emails to Wikileaks (Wikileaks maintains that an insider leaked them), that was a service to the American electorate, but it seems far-fetched to believe that those released Emails swayed the election. How else might Russians have interfered? There is a charge that they hacked some of our famously insecure voting machines (strong Republican opposition has prevented us from having more security in voting), but no charge that they actually did anything to affect vote counts. As the famous commercial once asked, "Where's the beef?" What exactly is that the Russians, who also have real crimes to answer for, such as their totally unjustified annexation of Ukrainian Crimea and meddling on Ukraine's eastern border, what is it exactly that Russia did to influence our election? Meanwhile, the Trump regime's program to deregulate everything, from clean water to net neutrality, marches on. I understand the desire to stick charges of treason on Trump and his cronies, but there isn't likely enough substance to make those charges stick, even if every allegation were proven to be true. And if they do, we'll get Mike Pence, an ultraright Christian supremacist, who conceivably would be much more effective in pushing Trump's agenda than Trump himself. Progressives are often contemptuous of how Trump's supporters are being manipulated to support things that will hurt them. When will many progressives wake up to the manipulation which is doing the same to them?

On Voting

I turned 21 and thus became eligible to vote in November 1967. The first presidential election I could vote in was in 1968. I honestly don't recall how I voted that year. I had just begun graduate school in UC Berkeley, and I was very active in SDS and the issues of the day. In 1972, I voted for George McGovern, though I wrote a letter to the New York Guardian explaining why I was opposed to endorsing McGovern (it's in my FBI file). In 1976, I voted for Jimmy Carter who started out sounding and acting progressive, but by 1979, it was clear that he had shifted sharply to the right, especially about Israel. He was the last Democratic presidential candidate that I voted for. In ensuing elections, I voted for candidates like Jesse Jackson, Ralph Nader, and Jill Stein. I voted for Peace and Freedom candidates and later for Green candidates.

My approach to voting is strongly influenced by some important writings by Lenin, in which he said that the main function of elections in capitalist countries is to assess the political consciousness of the working class. If they vote for their class enemies, as most do in the USA, they are politically backward. If they have their own parties and their own candidates and vote for them, they are more conscious. Still, there is no expectation that elections can challenge the fundamental inequities built into capitalist society. The best we can hope for are some temporary reforms.

For these reasons, I always vote and encourage others to vote for candidates we can support, candidates who reflect our views and represent them. I do sometimes vote for Democratic candidates. I voted for Ron Dellums and his successor, Barbara Lee, though I did not vote for her in 2014 when she voted for more arms for Israel while the Israelis were again committing genocide in Gaza. I also strongly opposed her vote in 2008 for the financial bailout, but I probably will vote for her again in 2016. I never voted for Dianne Feinstein, though I did vote for Barbara Boxer and will likely vote for Kamila Harris this year. I make those decisions based on what I know of the candidates and their records. In presidential elections, I see the failure to desert the Democratic Party when it puts forth unacceptable candidates and platforms as an impediment to building a genuine movement to challenge the self-destructive system that runs the USA and the world. Every four years, fear mongers denounce me for not voting against the Republican menace. In their hysteria, they paint my Green vote as being a vote for the Republican candidate, which is a strange form of mathematics that no mathematician could parse. I see their argument basically saying that because millions of Americans are too politically backward to vote for their interests outside of the Democratic Party, therefore I must join my backward friends in voting for the Democratic candidate.

To me, that is totally illogical. It makes no sense. I refuse to be manipulated into voting from fear, into voting for a candidate I despise to stop one I am told to despise more. In my view, this approach to politics makes the USA the most politically backward country in the world, and I refuse to join my well-meaning friends in wallowing in that backwardness.

Attempts to Muzzle BDS Are Essentially Fascist in Nature

I doubt that most people understand the pernicious nature of the Israeli-instigated assault on the BDS movement. It is certainly legitimate for people to disagree on whether boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel is something they support, but the actions of New York Governor Cuomo (with other states threatening to follow) and, perhaps, language in the Democratic Party platform, are explicitly fascist in nature because they try to control what people think and how we exercise our democratic rights. I am not exaggerating. If you have any concern for civil and democratic rights, you need to investigate these dangerous trends and take a stand. Supporters of Israel are unable to defend the apartheid state with rational arguments so they are resorting to very heavy-handed and openly fascist tactics to suppress dissent. That cannot be tolerated.

The European Union's "New Clothes"

In all the discussions I have so far seen on the Brexit vote, there is something obvious missing. Why have we seen no thoughts on whether there is something wrong with the European Union and what might be done to change it, to make it more democratic, more responsive to the needs of most people, less dominated by the wealthy and powerful corporations, and so forth? Perhaps austerity needs to be imposed at the top of the economies instead of at the bottom. It seems obvious to me that these are legitimate concerns of British voters, even though leaving the EU per se does not directly address them. It is also clear to me that these are essentially the same issues raised by the malicious TPP, TTIP, and similar "trade" treaties, which surrender control over our governments and our lives to corporations. These are also the issues raised by the Sanders campaign and likely the issues, however distorted and malformed, that motivate support for Trump. It's obvious that the EU is dysfunctional if we look at its inept and heavy-handed handling of the Greek crisis and similar crises in the wings to erupt. Rather than rail at British voters, perhaps the economic and political underpinnings of the current global economic system are what need to be examined and radically transformed. Is the emperor, indeed, wearing any clothes?

Al Jazeera article censored outside the USA

Saudi Arabia uses terrorism as an excuse for human rights abuses

The kingdom is ramping up executions of Shias, with the tacit approval of the United States

December 3, 2015 2:00AM ET

by Arjun Sethi @arjunsethi81

Reports emerged last week that Saudi Arabia intends to imminently execute more than 50 people on a single day for alleged terrorist crimes.
Although the kingdom hasn’t officially confirmed the reports, the evidence is building. Okas, the first outlet to publish the report, has close ties to the Saudi Ministry of Interior and would not have published the story without obtaining government consent. Some of the prisoners slated for execution were likewise recently subject to an unscheduled medical exam, a sign that many believe portends imminent execution. There has already been a spike in capital punishment in Saudi Arabia this year, with at least 151 executions, compared with 90 for all of 2014.
The cases of six Shia activists from Awamiya, a largely Shia town in the oil-rich Eastern province, are particularly disconcerting. The majority of Saudi’s minority Shia population is concentrated in the Eastern province and has long faced government persecution. The six activists were convicted for protesting this mistreatment and other related crimes amid the Arab uprisings in 2011. Three of them were arrested when they were juveniles. Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, a prominent Shia religious leader who was convicted of similar charges, also faces imminent execution.
All the convictions were obtained through unfair trials marred by human and civil rights violations, including in some cases torture, forced confessions and lack of access to counsel. Each defendant was tried before the Specialized Criminal Court, a counterterrorism tribunal controlled by the Ministry of Interior that has few procedural safeguards and is often used to persecute political dissidents. Lawyers are generally prohibited from counseling their clients during interrogation and have limited participatory rights at trial. Prosecutors aren’t even required to disclose the charges and relevant evidence to defendants.
The problems aren’t just procedural. Saudi law criminalizes dissent and the expression of fundamental civil rights. Under an anti-terrorism law passed in 2014, for example, individuals may be executed for vague acts such as participating in or inciting protests, “contact or correspondence with any groups ... or individuals hostile to the kingdom” or “calling for atheist thought.”
One of the defendants, Ali al-Nimr, was convicted of crimes such as “breaking allegiance with the ruler” and “going out to a number of marches, demonstrations and gathering against the state and repeating some chants against the state.” For these offenses, he has been sentenced to beheading and crucifixion, with his beheaded body to be put on public display as a warning to others.
Because of these procedural and legal abominations, the planned executions for these Shia activists must not proceed. They should be retried in public proceedings and afforded due process protections consistent with international law, which includes a ban on the death penalty for anyone under the age of 18.
No other executions should take place in Saudi Arabia. Capital punishment is morally repugnant and rife with error and bias, as we know all too well in the United States. Moreover, any outcome produced by the Saudi criminal justice system is inherently suspect. Inadequate due process, violations of basic human rights and draconian laws that criminalize petty offenses and exercising of civil rights are fixtures of Saudi rule.

Saudi Arabia often escapes moral condemnation in large part because of its close relationship with the US.

They’re also fixtures of authoritarian regimes in general. Those who simply expect Saudi Arabia to reform its criminal justice system ignore the fact that the kingdom is an authoritarian regime that uses the law as a tool to maintain and consolidate power. They also ignore the reality that Saudi Arabia often escapes moral condemnation in large part because of its close relationship with the U.S.
In 2014, for example, President Barack Obama visited the kingdom but made no mention of its ongoing human rights violations. In return, he and the first family received $1.4 million in gifts from the Saudi king. (By law U.S. presidents must either pay for such gifts or turn them over to the National Archives.) The two leaders discussed energy security and military intelligence, shared interests that have connected the U.S. and Saudi Arabia for nearly a century.
Obama traveled to the kingdom earlier this year to offer his condolences on the passing of King Abdullah and to meet with the new ruler, King Salman. Again, human rights were never mentioned. Instead, U.S. National Security Adviser Susan Rice tweeted that Abdullah was a “close and valued friend of the United States.”
This deafening silence is not lost on Saudi Arabia and has emboldened its impunity. In the wake of the Arab uprisings, the kingdom’s brutal campaign against its Shia minority and political opposition has deepened. Shias have limited access to government employment and public education, few rights under the criminal justice system and diminished religious rights. Those who protest this discrimination face arbitrary trial and the prospect of execution for terrorism. Consider that Saudi Arabia has not carried out a mass execution for terrorism-related offenses since 1980, a year after an armed group occupied the Grand Mosque of Mecca.
Dissent of any kind is quelled. In November, Ashraf Fayadh, a Palestinian poet and artist born in Saudi Arabia, was sentenced to death for allegedly renouncing Islam. His supporters allege that he’s being punished for posting a video of police lashing a man in public.
Even the kingdom’s neighbors aren’t immune from its authoritarian agenda. Numerous reports suggest that the Saudi-led coalition against opposition groups in Yemen has indiscriminately attacked civilians and used cluster bombs in civilian-populated areas, in violation of international law.
Despite its appalling human rights record, Saudi Arabia was awarded a seat on the U.N. Human Rights Council last year and this summer was selected to oversee an influential committee within the council that appoints officials to report on country-specific and thematic human rights challenges. Unsurprisingly, Saudi Arabia has used its newfound power to thwart an international inquiry into allegations that it committed war crimes in Yemen.
It’s not by happenstance that the kingdom announced the mass execution just days after 130 people were killed in Paris in the worst terrorist attacks in Europe in more than a decade. Even before Paris, the U.S. used its “war on terrorism” to invade and occupy Afghanistan and Iraq, engage in mass surveillance and develop an assassination program immune from judicial oversight. Is it any surprise that Saudi Arabia feels emboldened to intensify its own “war on terrorism”?

Arjun Sethi is a writer and lawyer in Washington, D.C. He is also an adjunct professor of law at the Georgetown University Law Center.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera America's editorial policy.

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