(NY Times Dec 10)

To the Editor:

As a former elected head of the American Humanist Association for 14 years, I am embarrassed by the A.H.A.’s “good without God” campaign of signs on transit vehicles. Humanists are philosophical naturalists, but more important than advertising, one item of the humanist worldview is emphasizing the many positive positions we hold in common with a wide range of religious believers.

I refer to such matters as peace, civil liberties, religious freedom, the environment, social justice, democracy, women’s rights and so on.

Our planetary society does not have the luxury of engaging in angry debates about philosophy. We, all of us, are faced with immediate problems like global warming, endless wars, environmental degradation, denial of civil liberties, widespread economic turndown, misogynistic patriarchalism, the triumph of greed and selfishness over empathy, unemployment and the need for health care reform.

Progressive and mainstream humanists, Catholics, Protestants, Jews and others of good will need to concentrate on what unites us, not on what divides us. Divisive ad campaigns invite blowback and stimulate both ends of the religious spectrum to engage in fruitless bouts of name-calling and invective.

Edd Doerr
Silver Spring, Md.

I had the privilege of knowing and working with Norman Borlaug — who has been aptly described by the Nobel Peace Prize Committee as the greatest hunger fighter of our time — for nearly 50 years. I first heard him in 1953 outline an innovative strategy for combating wheat rusts at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

From 1963 onwards, he visited India in March every year to see the wheat crop. During his extensive travels by road, he used to stop frequently, talk to the farmers, and examine the state of the health of the plants. Plants and farmers became his life-long friends and companions. Eliminating the wheat rust menace became his unrelenting mission.

Dr. Borlaug started his research career in agriculture in Mexico at a time when the world was passing through a serious food crisis. During 1942-1943, nearly two million people died of hunger during the Great Bengal Famine. China also experienced widespread and severe famine during the 1950s. Famines were frequent in Ethiopia, the Sahelian region of Africa, and many other parts of the developing world. It was in this background that Dr. Borlaug decided to look for a permanent solution to recurrent famines by harnessing science to increase the productivity, profitability, and sustainability of small farms.

The work he did in Mexico during the 1950s in breeding semi-dwarf, rust-resistant wheat varieties and its extension to India, Pakistan, and other countries during the 1960s brought about a total transformation in the atmosphere for the possibility of achieving a balance between human numbers and the human capacity to produce food. Developing nations gained in self-confidence in their agricultural capability. He disproved prophets of doom like Paul and William Paddock and Paul and Anne Ehrlich — who even advocated the application of the ‘triage’ principle in the selection of countries that should and should not be saved from starvation through American assistance.

The introduction of Mexican semi-dwarf varieties of wheat in India in the early 1960s not only helped improve wheat production but also led to the union of brain and brawn in rural areas. The enthusiasm generated by the new technology can be glimpsed in the following extract from an article I wrote in 1969 for an Indian magazine: “Brimming with enthusiasm, hard-working, skilled and determined, the Punjab farmer has been the backbone of the revolution. Revolutions are usually associated with the young, but in this revolution, age has been no obstacle to participation. Farmers, young and old, educated and uneducated, have easily taken to the new agronomy. It has been heart-warming to see young college graduates, retired officials, ex-armymen, illiterate peasants and small farmers queuing up to get the new seeds. At least in the Punjab, the divorce between intellect and labour, which has been the bane of our agriculture, is vanishing.”

The five principles Dr. Borlaug adopted in his life were (to use his own words): give your best; believe you can succeed; face adversity squarely; be confident you will find the answers when problems arise; then go out and win some bouts. These principles have shaped the attitude and action of thousands of young farm scientists across the world. He applied these principles in the field of science and agricultural development, but I guess he developed them much earlier in the field of wrestling, judging from his induction into the Iowa Wrestling Hall of Fame in 2004.

Having made a significant contribution to shaping the agricultural destiny of many countries in Asia and Latin America, Dr. Borlaug turned his attention to Africa in 1985. With support from President Jimmy Carter, Ryoichi Sasakawa, Yohei Sasakawa and the Nippon Foundation, he organised the Sasakawa-Global 2000 programme. Numerous small-scale farmers were helped to double and triple the yield of maize, rice, sorghum, millet, wheat, cassava, and grain legumes.

Unfortunately, such spectacular results in demonstration plots did not lead to significant production gains at the national level, owing to lack of infrastructure such as irrigation, roads, seed production, and remunerative marketing systems. This made him exclaim: “Africa has the potential for a green revolution, but you cannot eat potential.” The blend of professional skill, political action, and farmers’ enthusiasm needed to ignite another Green Revolution as in India was lacking in Africa at that time.

Concerned with the lack of adequate recognition for the contributions of farm and food scientists, Dr. Borlaug had the World Food Prize established in 1986, which he hoped would come to be regarded as the Nobel Prize for food and agriculture. My research centre in Chennai, India [the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation] is the child of the first World Food Prize I received in 1987. Throughout his professional career, Dr. Borlaug spent time in training young scholars and researchers. This led him to promote the World Food Prize Youth Institute and its programme to help high school students work in other countries in order to widen their understanding of the human condition. This usually became a life-changing experience for them.

When Mahatma Gandhi died in January 1948, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru said: “The light has gone out of our life, but the light that shone in this country was no ordinary light. A thousand years later, that light will be seen in this country, the world will see it, and it will give solace to innumerable hearts. For that light represented the living, eternal truth, reminding us of the right path, drawing us from error, taking humankind to freedom from hunger and deprivation.” The same can be said of Norman Borlaug. His repeated message that there was no time to relax until hunger became history will be heard so long as a single person is denied the opportunity for a healthy and productive life because of malnutrition.

Norman Borlaug was a remarkable man who was supported by a remarkable family —wife Margaret, son William, and daughter Jeanie. To my mind, Margaret who died in 2007 is the unsung heroine of the Green Revolution. Without her unwavering support, Dr. Borlaug might not have accomplished nearly so much in his long and demanding career.

Dr. Borlaug was not only a great scientist but also a humanist full of compassion and love for fellow human beings, irrespective of race, religion, colour, or political belief. This is clear from his last spoken words on the night of Saturday, September 12, 2009. Earlier in the day, a scientist showed him a nitrogen tracer developed for measuring soil fertility. His last words were “Take the tracer to the farmer.” This life-long dedication to taking scientific innovation to farmers without delay set Dr. Borlaug apart from most other farm scientists carrying out equally important research.

I was present when he was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 2007. He pointed out that between 1960 and 2000, the proportion of “the world’s people who felt hunger during some portion of the year had fallen from about 60 per cent to 14 per cent.” But the latter figure still “translates into 850 million men, women and children who lack sufficient calories and protein to grow strong and healthy bodies.” So he added: “The battle to ensure food security for hundreds of millions of miserably poor people is far from won.”

This is the unfinished task Norman Borlaug leaves scientists and political leaders worldwide. It will be appropriate for the Norman Borlaug Institute for International Agriculture to become the flagship of the movement for a world without hunger.

(This article is based on the Norman Borlaug memorial address given by the author at the Rudder Auditorium, Texas A&M University, U.S., on October 6, 2009.)

The greatest hunger fighter of our time warned against complacency, observing even towards the end of his life that ‘the battle to ensure food security for hundreds of millions of miserably poor people is far from won.’

UN bullion oro coins

(Reprinted from UN Today) The announcement by the United Nations this week that it will license the minting of silver and gold bullion coins bearing the UN logo may be the button that launches metal prices into orbit.

In its wide-ranging preview, the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) stated that the system of currencies and international banking practices within today’s economies were inadequate, and responsible for the present economic crisis. The report advocates that the present monetary system, wherein the dollar acts as the global reserve currency, be re-examined “with urgency”.

The UNCTAD Report was the first time a major multinational institution had forwarded such a suggestion or measure, although a number of countries, including Russia and Brazil have supported replacing the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. China’s central bank chief Zhou Xiaochuan has mentioned that the dollar could become a basket of currencies instead.

The UN commission dismissed such a widening, saying a multiple-country system “may be equally unstable, and not transparent.”

The panel is seeking more monetary balance for developing countries, and a means for them to retain their reserves and domestic savings independent of foreign agencies and arrangements.

Panel Chair US economist Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel economics laureate, has made plain that there was “a growing consensus that there are problems with the dollar reserve system. Developing countries are lending the United States trillions dollars at almost zero interest rates when they have huge needs themselves,” Stiglitz stated.

“It’s indicative of the nature of the problem. It’s a net transfer, in a sense, to the United States, a form of foreign aid.”

A report contributor, Detlef Koffe, concluded that “Supplementing the dollar with a bullion currency would solve some of the problems related to the potential of countries running large deficits and would help stability,”

US Fed spokesperson Patrick Paulsen acknowledged that there could be some strong reaction in the US to the global currency, and that it would “…be viewed as a step toward a New World Order. But those same people have probably lost patience with the money-changers as well.”

He clarified that he would “…nonetheless anticipate that the western currencies will continue to depreciate, given Asia’s ascendancy in trade and manufacturing, to find their own value and enable their economies to compete. This is a UN perogrative we cannot and should not control, it’s returning to what we had with Bretton-Woods.”

The UN decided to provide a “public option” savings currency, whereby currency mints will be licensed to mint two kinds of bullion coins the size of the 1€ coin – the Uno (silver ~$5) and the Oro (gold, ~$500). The names were adopted from the book “The Humanist”, which foresees the UN being better funded by 2015 via its licensing fees, expected to be 10-15%.

The coins have a marker chemical in them that enables their authentication and issuance by modified institutional ATM and exchange processors, currently in Europe, to be distributed globally. Any licensee mint, public or private, can produce such bullion coinage under contract. The United Nations is doing no more than what most countries do already, except that the value of its coins will reflect their bullion weight.

Armand Dufour of the European Bank welcomes their introduction. “People have enough Fiat currency options, government and banks cannot intrude on bullion coins – they will have their own inviolable value.”

He does have one concern, however. “If we see a dismounting from the US dollar, as is inevitable in the main view, there will be a strong move to the Oro, which may drive its price up to the point where governments will not allow its circulation; they will try to isolate it.”

“That’s when the fun begins.” he said.

War

The United States has always meddled in other people’s affairs. For those readers who think this statement is an exaggeration, I urge them to peruse the chronology of interventions compiled by the Congressional Research Service. This historical predilection for meddling, however, grew enormously in depth and breadth during the Cold War, and to make matters worse, it is now clear that it exploded after the end of the Cold War.

The Bush-Obama perpetual war on terror is now the longest and second most expensive war in US history, exceeded only in cost by WWII, even if one removes the effects of inflation from the comparison. And this war comes on top of the incessant warmongering during the 1990s, including the bombing of air defense sites in Iraq, the drive by shootings with cruise missiles in the Sudan and Afghanistan, and the bombing in Bosnia and Kosovo during the Wars of the Yugoslavian Succession. Anyone who opposes the meddling and warmongering is labeled an isolationist by the defenders of the status quo, like Senators McCain, Graham, and Lieberman. But this is absurd name calling, as Sheldon Richmand cogently explains in this essay. This absurdity of the isolationist label has a long lineage dating back to the misrepresentations by so-called ‘internationalists — ironically,by mostly liberal democrats — of the foreign policy views of Senator Robert A. Taft in the 1940s and 1950s.(here)

Today, the United States is locked in a throes of perpetual war, and our politics are dominated by its political handmaiden, perpetual fear. If you doubt this, just think about the recent expansion of drone assaults to Libya and Somalia or your next invasive pat down in an airport or the continuation of the onerous Patriot Act. Some critics believe perpetual war is driven primarily by the lust for empire. No doubt, empire lusting is a factor, but for the reasons I explained in The Domestic Roots of Perpetual War, I believe perpetual war is primarily the issue of a deadly mutation of domestic politics, particularly the imperative to prop up a sclerotic Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex (MICC) — a political-economic faction that lost its raison d’être when the Cold War ended, and now needs the perpetual threat of war, to pump money through it, if it is to survive and flourish on its own terms, at the expense of others.

The distorting powers of domestic political faction (described elegantly by James Madison in Federalist Paper #10) and executive warmongering were the two great fears of the Framers of the Constitution. The Constitution’s system of checks and balances was designed around the idea of preventing the rise of an all-powerful domestic faction and curbing the power of the executive to unilaterally declare war. The emergence of the Cold War, especially with Truman’s signing NSC-68 in August 1950, which established the political template for equating military strategy to arms production and economic policy to Military Keynesianisim, institutionalized the MICC as a permanent player in the US political economy.

It is clear the Framers of the Constitution would have considered the MICC to be the most dangerous of all factions, because the MICC has seamlessly synthesized both of their fears: It is an all-powerful domestic faction whose self interest is to promote war or the perpetual threat of war.

Why do I use the modifier “all powerful”?

One need only to consider the conditions surrounding the current paralysis in our government to sense the MICC’s ubiquitous power: Today, what’s left of our constitutional system cannot muster the political will to stop the ongoing succession of wars, despite polls suggesting a majority of Americans want these wars to stop. Nor will Congress make a significant reduction in the defense budget, even though it is at a post-WWII high, there is no superpower threat to justify this level of expenditure, only a small part of the defense budget is funding the ongoing wars, and there is now a political majority in favor of cutting federal spending to reduce the deficit. Moreover, the President and Congress cannot or will not stop either the war or the defense spending binge despite the facts that (1) there is widespread knowledge of horrendous waste and excessive profiteering in the defense budget; (2) it is a well established fact that a dollar of defense spending creates fewer jobs than just about any other kind of spending, yet job creation is the central need of a stagnating American economy poised on the cusp of a double dip recession; (3) the fact that the members of Defense Department hold the Accountability and Appropriations clauses of the Constitution in contempt, because they can not and will not account for how they spend the money Congress appropriates for it — a refusal that occurs despite the fact that every member of the Defense Department has taken a sacred oath to uphold and defend the Constitution; and (4) the members of Congress either refuse or are afraid to exercise their duty to enforce that accountability under the powers assigned to it under Article 1 of the Constitution.

And why is the government paralyzed?

The political system is paralyzed for the simple reason that the gamesters in the MICC have deliberately paralyzed it by playing the defense power games which I have explained here and here. On the other hand, the iron triangle of a large standing military, an outsized industrial base of defense contractors, and their network of wholly owned subsidiaries in Congress is less of a simple conspiracy than an emergent complex adaptive system that self organizes its order by processing the flow of money through itself and expels disorder — taking the form of paralyzing those trying to control it — into its environment. The MICC in its current form (i.e., a large standing military, a large contractor base, and its widespread congressional patronage network) cannot survive without war or the threat of war to lubricate the continuing money flow it requires like a body requires food for energy. The entire structure in its current form cannot survive or reform itself for the simple reason its defense contractor wing knows full well it cannot convert to the production of commercially viable products at competitive prices. So without a paralysis of the larger governing system system, the MICC could not protect and add to the money flowing through it, and without that continuing money flow, the whole self-organizing edifice of the MICC — a large standing military, a huge contractor base, and hundreds of wholly owned legislators to dutifully shovel money to their districts — would collapse into chaos, which some believe would bring down the US economy, which brings us full circle to the political entropy flowing out of the military Keynesianism that has grown and prospered since 1950, when President Truman signed NSC-68.

NSC-68 portrayed itself as a strategic blueprint for a long term confrontation with the Soviet Union. But it was first and foremost a plan for a huge weapons development and production program, and while its authors, led by arch cold warrior Paul Nitze, claimed to have compared the military and economic capabilities to the Soviet Union to the United States, NSC 68 rested on the intellectual bedrock of military Keynsianism.

In fact, language of NSC-68 asserted that increases in Pentagon spending would “increase the gross national product by more than the amount being absorbed for additional military and foreign assistance purposes,” In effect, the authors of NSC-68, generalized the peculiar experience of WWII, by making an unconstrained claim that the defense build up would create so much economic stimulus that it would pay for itself — in effect, promising a free lunch.

NSC 68 was more a marketing document than a strategy; it did not even contain any specific cost estimates or economic analysis to justify its claim of a free lunch. But by equating strategy to a weapons buildup, NSC 68 established the template for strategic planning that transformed George Kennan’s political theory of containment into a military strategy grounded on weapons R&D and production.  Such an approach to “strategy” was realistic in one sense: it fit the domestic economic needs of the defense-dependent manufacturers, like the aircraft companies who needed federal subsidies to survive, as a hand fits a glove.

While Truman did not reject NSC-68, he sat on it. Then, on June 25, 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea and gave Truman the opportunity to approve NSC-68, and the MICC was off to the races.

—————–

Cross-posted from Counterpunch.

Errata: The attached essay is slightly different from the one published in Counterpunch. It contains a few minor editorial changes. More importantly, the second reference to George Kennan in the penultimate paragraph was incorrect and has been deleted.  A change that has no effect on the argument.  Finally, urls for supporting information are included. CS.

Read more: http://battleland.blogs.time.com/2011/07/06/why-the-war-machine-keeps-on-running/#ixzz1RTodd65y

Poverty vs Plenty

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/03/to-beat-back-poverty-pay-the-poor/

World Heart Federation: NCDs: Time to pay attention to the Silent Killer.

As a humanist writer I sometimes feel that I am revisiting his conundrum of that day. I have all the firepower of our powerful species at my disposal – knowledge, science, the Internet – but there are infantry among the guns here too – atheist klingers wearing our uniforms.

If humanists look for other free thinking colleagues on the Net, they are likely to come across freeratio.org, ostensibly an oasis of fellow intellectuals and a safe haven from the holy rollers. But not so fast – if I am going to discuss humanism at their site, I shall be attempting to distill Grand Marnier from bunker oil.

The opposition to evangelical America among these infidels is so dug in and intractable (understandable after the religious orgies of the Bush era) that I had to eventually opt for an orderly retreat and wash my mouth out with soap. It isn’t supposed to be that way, but these guys are tar babies and it’s not for me to lead them out of the wilderness. There’s just too many of them, Sarge, and they all claim to be humanists, oh yes!

What a treat then to come across an outfit like ieet.org, which operates on a higher plane. Nobody’s wasting time here rehashing the British analytic parlor game of ‘what’s in a word?’ and claiming it’s the only real philosophy. A case in point immediately jumps out at me – a superb article on the realities of space travel by Charlie Stross, entitled the Myth of the Starship.

Charlie has no trouble lowering his formidable scientific gun barrels and laying waste to the idea of travel among the stars, and it is a great pleasure to see a techie use his gift of the gab destructively – I mean creatively – to demolish star tourism.

He discounts our current space ventures as understandably primitive, and cites the root problem thus:
“Rather, what intrigues me is the possibility that the entire conceptual framework of the starship is a dangerously misleading dead-end, and that what we need is a new framework for thinking about interstellar travel.”

As a lifetime boater I adore ships, but Chas will have none of it:

“Such an interstellar capability isn’t going to look much like a “ship”. It’s going to look more like a DVD balanced on a microwave beam, or a can of beans hanging below a light sail energized by lasers powered by huge orbiting solar power stations. There won’t be any biological agencies aboard: just AGIs or something equivalent ported out of a fleshbody’s cranium. No hands, only nanotech assemblers.  And after a voyage of decades or centuries it’s going to have to stop — somehow braking at the other end — then spend more decades farming rocks, slush and sunlight to build ever-bigger physical structures until it can build the equipment with which to phone home.”

I love it when a science pro talks dirty like that! But I agree that this is one elevator pitch a Harvard MBA is not going to see an immediate ROI in… Charlie remains an optimist that some day we can reach out into space – the mind is willing, but the starship idea has no legs.

He concludes: “If we succeed in doing it, it’s going to look nothing like the Starship Enterprise. Or even New Horizons. The whole reference frame we instinctively assume when we hear the word “ship” is just so wrong it’s beyond wrong-ness: it’s on a par with Baron Munchausen’s lunar exploits as seen in light of the Apollo Program. We need a new handle for discussing and analyzing such a venture. And the sooner we consign the “-ship” suffix to the dustbin of failed ideas, the better.”

So we take a lesson from Charlie Stross, the renowned SF writer, to the effect that travel to the stars is just too far out, and we must agree with him there, body and figure.

To be fair, Charlie was debunking starships as a means of transportation, citing the ridiculous amounts of energy and time required to transit unimaginable distances, just to the nearest star. He didn’t touch on the science fiction device of using black holes etc. as doors to other universes, which can negatively impact your lifetime, now and there. Let’s take what we learned from his summary, and discard travel to the stars within the foreseeable future – period.

There is a cuter plan.

We’ll accept the Universe as our neighbor, as cool wallpaper, and not get too exercised about its existence – this remoteness buffers us from intruders. As a busy little species, our activities during the coming millennium will likely be conducted in complete privacy – there’s some comfort in that knowledge.

Our destination will be Venus, not the stars, for a number of great reasons. An obscure paper by NASA scientist Geoffrey Landis on the Colonization of Venus has this abstract:

“Although the surface of Venus is an extremely hostile environment, at about 50 kilometers above the surface the atmosphere of Venus is the most earthlike environment (other than Earth itself) in the solar system. It is proposed here that in the near term, human exploration of Venus could take place from aerostat vehicles in the atmosphere, and that in the long term, permanent settlements could be made in the form of cities designed to float at about fifty kilometer altitude in the atmosphere of Venus.”
It gets better, as Landis elaborates:

“At cloud-top level, Venus is the paradise planet. At an altitude slightly above fifty km above the surface, the atmospheric pressure is equal to the Earth surface atmospheric pressure of 1 Bar. At this level, the environment of Venus is benign.
• above the clouds, there is abundant solar energy
• temperature is in the habitable “liquid water” range of 0-50C
• atmosphere contains the primary volatile elements required for life (Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen, and Sulphur)
• Gravity is 90% of the gravity at the surface of Earth.”

The fact that Venus is almost the size of the earth with 0.9 of its gravity means that I will immediately lose 20 pounds, and humans will not require an exoskeleton to support them when returning to Earth, as Mars colonists would. A challenge even for my Hong Kong tailor.

We can’t find so much as yellow snow on Mars, while Venus has been our tropical paradise-in-waiting – go figure. Who hired these space cowboys?

In the ebook “The Humanist – 1000 Summers” (www.smashwords.com) this opportunity on Venus is not lost on the Japanese. They did launch a troubled probe to investigate the Venusian atmosphere. Coincidence? I don’t think so. (Use coupon TS69J to read it free this month).

What might we do on Venus? Our breathable air (nitrogen and oxygen) is a lifting gas in CO2, so any dirigibles we build can carry great weight. In perpetual sunlight and shielded laterally from cosmic rays, we’d build a nanocarbon frame and wrap a light plastic film around the city, which needs no pressurization, to shield us from the sulphuric acid droplets in Venus’ atmosphere. No space suits are required, because it really is shirtsleeve weather at 1 atm – truly miraculous.

Cities, countries and the UN on Earth could sponsor such colonies, there’s lots of room – the area of the cloud surface is three times that of earth. Solar planes can readily navigate from one city to another. Over time Venus would begin to cool as its cloud cover and sunlight was converted, and the super-hot temperature on its surface drops toward Earth’s.

If we can configure an atmosphere like Earth’s, our species gains one virgin planet. One thing is for sure – if we build on the Japanese program there will be continuing interest and support from all humanity. So starships, no. But planetship beacons for our youth, calling them to a future on Earth’s twin sister – oh yes.

Charlie Stross convinced us that star travel was a non-starter, so we accept the Cosmos as little more than scenery – works for me – I had not yet made any plans. Heaven can wait.

Looking around, we found an obscure NASA paper inviting us to colonize Venus, so as surely as the Caribbean attracts snowbirds – tropical paradise, here we come.

But really, why would we do this? Obviously the Earth is crowded and we could use some lebensraum, with more natural resources – no question. But there are deeper reasons, ones that make up the core of humanism.

Our species suffers from two main cancers – militarism and corruption, and together they impoverish us. The only lasting solution to either of these diseases is world government, through the United Nations.

Next, if we define humanism as an inclusive sensibility for our species, planet and lives then our species’ governance is its proper study. Humanists must become trusted critics and arbiters of the human condition.

That’s our baseline.

In “The Humanist – 1000 Summers” the ascendancy of the UN allows us to “lift up our eyes unto the hills”, the higher salients that humanity alone can contemplate. The cooperative process of colonizing Venus over 1000 years beckons, and could achieve the following:

1) End our long night of war, nationalism and racism.
2) Inspire youth to respect and trust in science, and to participate in terraforming our new planet.
3) Instill a consensus period and rationale for stabilizing and enjoying Earth for 1000 years.
4) Allow Homo sapiens a suitable time interval to deal with the Singularity, which is the dangerous inflection point wherein our native intelligence is surpassed.

All well and good, but what’s in it for us personally? Everything, if the truth be known.

Again from my book, I propose that humanists partner up with such as the Jesuits, or ex-Jesuits as the case may be. (Fear not, I am neither Catholic, Christian, nor Jesuit – agnostic at best – just looking for a trained and proven crew to place in our ship’s wheelhouse).

When it comes to elaborating a catechism around the study and support of Man, the Jesuits are nonpareil. Their ranks are thinning fast, their churches are standing near-empty, and there is an opportunity at hand to simply change the books in the pews and continue – as humanists. We must be mature enough to recognize the worth of our own traditions, and responsible enough to morph and manage them properly on our watch.

Our movement then gains fellowship, ritual and tradition by recycling churches, not by mocking or abandoning them. This process can occur within Islam and Hinduism as well as Christianity -modernizing their metaphysics while keeping their ethics – again in the book.

Someday I hope to participate in a ceremony in a centuries-old church, whereby I place my genetic records – DNA, genome, tissue samples and life data – into the hands of Jesuit-like stewardship. Then, with my grandkids downstairs in Sunday school learning about Darwin and Venus, I’ll stand up and out-holler the choir on one or all of Pete Seeger’s humanist hymns.

I won’t have to be rich or famous in my short lifespan, I’ll have more of them coming here, or on Venus. If “men live lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with their song still in them” (Thoreau), I’ll die contented, knowing that I have entrusted all to my human family and our institutions.

This aspiration then will be our humanist starship. We shall navigate to the one part of the Universe that matters to us – the other side of death; to the future. Death is a feature of biology; it is not our eternal albatross. Work with me on this.

Support the UN and starve out the military – we’re going to need some big money for knocking the new planet into shape.

- Dwight Gilbert Jones

It is fashionable to concatenate the revolution in Tunisia with the ones underway in  Egypt and Libya and to ask whether other countries  like Jordan, Yemen, Saudi Arabi, Syria et alia are next.

This is what happens when large numbers of people gather in the nation’s public squares, as they did last year in Washington. Hope is given light, the aroma of freedom blesses all who are there, new beginnings are sensed and pledged.

Let’s compare Egypt with the US and see if there are similarities:

Sad to say,  it is readily apparent that the problems of the USA run much deeper than Egypt’s, and that the Americans are now lost as a people, never mind as a nation.

We shall not see the spirit that once guided America again in our lifetime.

Dwight

The Humanist movement is about to become a dominant credo for our species, as the age of orthodox and fundamentalist religion fades in the face of the Internet’s expansion of education to Everyman.

Humanism  originated in Greece classicism and was revived during the Italian Renaissance by Petrarch and his followers. In the ensuing five centuries of struggle Humanists had to keep conservative religious oligarchies at bay, defending its distinctive free-thought initiatives. Man’s new-found freedom from supernatural interlopers and priesthoods embodied the  Humanist philosophy.  That battle is now largely won, with nothing to be gained by continuing it. True Humanists must first deal with anti-religion’s trophy hunters.

It is incumbent on us to welcome a 2nd generation Humanism – an inclusive sensibility for our species, planet, and lives.  To be inclusive, it is vital that we not be judgmental about a fellow human’s religion. The criteria that concern us lie elsewhere, private beliefs do not determine whether or not someone can be a good Humanist and a species/planet partner.

Today Humanism is a captive and exploited philosophy, shot for its antlers and hijacked for its name by aggressive atheists. Their inverted religious obsession has obscured Humanism from wider acceptance and misbranded it as moral nihilism or worse.  This must end immediately, while we work to earn trust and respect for Humanists as critics and champions of our own species, toward our destined brotherhood.

Can we not pause for a thousand years to harmonize our planet –  and utilize our powers to bring forth the paradise that lies within, and all around us?

(WSJ, W. McGurn) When the poet Matthew Arnold wrote of faith’s “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,” the thought was that scientific inquiry had forever undermined claims to certitude. In hindsight we see Arnold was only half right. In place of Genesis we now have scientism—the idea that science alone can speak truth about man and his world.

In contrast to the majority of scientists whose wondrous discoveries seem to inspire humility, today’s advocates of scientism can be every bit as dogmatic as the William Jennings Bryans of yesteryear. We saw an example a week ago, when the New York Times reported that many scientists view “outspoken religious commitment as a sign of mild dementia.”

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Associated Press

NIH Director Francis Collins

The reporter was Gardiner Harris, and the object of his snark was Francis Collins—the new director of the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Collins is perhaps best noted for his leadership on the Human Genome Project, an effort to map the genetic makeup of man. But he is also well known for his unapologetic talk about his Christian faith and how he came to it.

Mr. Harris’s aside about dementia, of course, is less a proposition open to debate than the kind of putdown you tell at a private cocktail party where you know everyone in the room shares your orthodoxies. In this room, there are those who hold that God cannot be reconciled with what science has discovered about the human body, the origin of the species, and the beginnings of the universe. The more honest ones do not flinch before the implications of their materialist principles on our understanding of human dignity and human rights and human freedom—as well as on religion.

In 1997, for example, an International Academy of Humanism statement in defense of human cloning—whose signatories included scientists such as E.O. Wilson, Francis Crick and Richard Dawkins—went out of its way to attack the special dignity of human beings. “Humanity’s rich repertoire of thoughts, feelings, aspirations, and hopes seems to arise from electrochemical brain processes, not from an immaterial soul that operates in ways no instrument can discover.” They concluded “it would be a tragedy if ancient theological scruples should lead to a Luddite rejection of cloning.”

Here’s the problem: Almost no one really believes this. Not, at least, when it comes to how we behave. And the dichotomy between scientific theory and human action may itself have something to tell us about truth.

That’s not to deny electrochemical brain processes and the like. It is to say that much as we may assent to the idea that we are but matter in motion, seldom do we act that way. We love. We fight. We distinguish between the good and noble and the bad and base. More than just religion, our literature and our politics and our music resonate precisely because they speak to these things.

Remember Peter Singer? Mr. Singer is the Princeton utilitarian who accepts scientism’s view that human beings are not fundamentally different from animals, just more complex. In his thinking, those who cannot reason for themselves or have lost their self-awareness have no real claim to life. Yet when Alzheimer’s struck his mother, he paid for care to prolong and sustain her life. The irony is that an act that does him credit as a son must discredit him among those whose principles about life he claims to share.

To put it another way, while we talk about the clash between God and science, in practice it often comes down to disagreements about man and morals. The boundaries are not always neat. Many Americans who are indifferent to faith will confess they find themselves challenged as they try to raise good and decent children without the religious confidence their parents had. The result may not be a return to religion but a healthy agnosticism about agnosticism itself.

I once had the opportunity to interview one of my heroes, Sidney Hook. This was a man whose commitment to his atheism and secular humanism was beyond question. One example: A doctor saved Mr. Hook’s life by going ahead with an operation against Mr. Hook’s wishes. Mr. Hook recovered—and promptly published an op-ed taking his doc to task.

It is possible, of course, to imagine a good society in the absence of a belief that man’s dignity comes from his being fashioned in God’s image. Something of the sort would have been Mr. Hook’s ideal. Yet in his writings, the Almighty in whom Mr. Hook did not believe makes an extraordinary, one might say miraculous, number of appearances. When I asked him why he was not more dismissive, Mr. Hook replied that he was never comfortable with the dogmatism of the village atheist.

Perhaps he thought it “a mild form of dementia.” – William McGurn,  Wall Street Journal

Your Editor Comments:

The missing link between God and Science is Humanism.

If the religionists decry the lack of moral standards among nonbelievers, they need  look no further than to the traditions of Humanists. When atheists bring up evolution for no other purpose than to bait the fundamentalists, they are a pale shadow of true Humanists, which they often claim to be.

Humanism requires two pieces of ID, and simple atheists can at best muster one.