(NY Times Dec 10/09)

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., Dec. 2, 2009

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.’

Kurtz has been the leading intellectual and organizational figure in the atheist/freethought/humanist movement for over 40 years. Throughout his long career Kurtz has sought to develop a positive alternative to the reigning theological orthodoxies of the day. While Kurtz has spent much of his life critically examining religion, he believes that secular humanists need to emphasize and build positive alternatives to religion. For Kurtz, it is not enough to reject God. He has always maintained that secular humanism and atheism are not identical. Throughout the years this put Kurtz at odds with atheist firebrand Madalyn Murray O’Hair. For many years both Kurtz and O’Hair were the leading foes of leaders of the religious right such as Pat Robinson, Jerry Falwell, Tim LaHaye, David Noebel and others. Now with the emergence of “the new atheism” Kurtz finds himself in the uncomfortable position of being the elder statesman and founder of a movement tempted by tactics he has warned against before.

“I hope this statement will help reorient the humanist movement in a positive and constructive direction by emphasizing what we are for rather than against,” said Kurtz, who founded the Council for Secular Humanism in 1980 and the Center for Inquiry in 1991. He now serves as chair emeritus for both organizations.

Among the signers of this new statement, coming ten years after Humanist Manifesto 2000, are heavyweights Rebecca Goldstein, Colin McGinn, Steven Pinker, Lionel Tiger, Patricia Schroeder, Phillip Kitcher, Owen Flanagan, and Ann Druyan (the widow of Carl Sagan). Also included are movement insiders such as R Joseph Hoffmann, Joe Nickell, James Randi, DJ Grothe, Carleton Coon, Edd Doerr, Terry O’Neill, Dale McGowan, Anthony B. Pinn, along with many others.

Writing in the December 2009/January 2010 issue of Free Inquiry, the magazine he founded, Kurtz declared “militant atheism is often truncated and narrow-minded…it is not concerned with the humanist values that ought to accompany the rejection of theism. The New Atheists, in my view, have made an important contribution to the contemporary cultural scene because they have opened religious claims to public examination…What I object to are the militant atheists who are narrow-minded about religious persons and will have nothing to do with agnostics, skeptics, or those who are indifferent to religion, dismissing them as cowardly.”

“While I certainly don’t believe that we ought to abandon our criticism of religious fanaticism or allow religious doctrine to dictate public policy, the future of the secular humanist and scientific rationalist movements depends upon appealing to a wider base of support,” continued Kurtz. Some 16 percent of the American population is not affiliated with any church, temple, or mosque–approximately 50 million Americans–whereas only 2 to 3 percent are estimated to be out-and-out atheists. Hence, Neo-Humanism wishes to address its message to a broader public who we believe should be sympathetic.”

Kurtz says that his new manifesto advances a new form of humanism that is not antireligious per se, nor avowedly atheist. “There are various forms of religious and non-religious beliefs in the world. On the one end of the spectrum are traditional religious beliefs; on the other ‘the new atheism.’ Not enough attention is paid to humanism as an alternative,” declares the statement.

“This statement aims to be more inclusive by appealing to both non-religious and religious humanists and to moderate religious believers who share common goals. It seeks to foster moderation rather than divisiveness and to spark a genuine conversation about meaning and value and the common problems that confront us all as a nation and inhabitants of planet Earth,” added Kurtz.

The “Neo-Humanist Statement of Secular Values and Principles” is available online atwww.paulkurtz.us.

Article Unattributed in the Huffington Post

Jan 05, 2010 – A revealing article in Time Magazine highlights the hypocrisy around the “Iran Crisis”, during which Iran has been relentlessly hounded by Western nuclear nations on suspicions that it too is developing nuclear weapons, while NATO countries have been secretly harboring them for decades.

First mentioned by Humanist philosopher Dwight Gilbert Jones in his 2009 novel “The Humanist”, in which he describes their longtime control by the Dutch military, Time’s article extends their proliferation to three more supposedly nuclear weapon-free countries.

“The truth is that Belgium, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands store nuclear bombs on their air-force bases and have planes capable of delivering them.” writes Eben Harrell, Time, Jan 4/2010. “There are an estimated 200 B-61 thermonuclear-gravity bombs scattered across these four countries.”

Harrell further states that the nuclear weapons’ control  ”…can be transferred to the control of a host nation’s air force in time of conflict.” Given the number of weapons cited, Europe is a nuclear holocaust-in-waiting with no credible enemies.

When asked about his earlier disclosure of the nukes’ reality, Jones was unequivocal.

“It’s the last stand of the militarists.” he said. “If you read The Humanist, the world reacts to this revelation with a boycott  that breaks the nuke countries economically – no trade, no visits – until they finally defer to the UN and a citizen world. The 4N Countries boycott will happen,” he says “and, nota bene, we’ll see the United Nations oversee our species’ governance at last.”

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1943799,00

For an update, read here: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2024161,00.html

(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.

Please support a World Parliament that is democratically elected in place of the superpower-controlled Security Council – we must coalesce  as a species and become responsible for our own internal governance.

Be the first on your block to see our future. http://en.unpacampaign.org/index.php

The topics on this website range from an impatient distaste for militarism through to speculation on trans-Humanism and our destiny within the Universe. Humanism is unashamedly utopian from his perspective, and his new novel portraying the ascendancy of Humanism and the UN is available on Amazon.

The Future News on his personal website at Humanist.ws offers up  ”news releases” as we might like to see them someday, when ideas are allowed to come to the fore, ahead of commercial and nationalist interests.

Dwight Gilbert Jones studied Physics, Philosophy and Biosciences at McGill, Simon Fraser  and Berkeley, and writes speculative fiction. He lives in Vancouver, Canada and is married with four children.

For his latest school science fair project he has invented painted, plastic decals that can be placed — discreetly — right in the middle of a window pane.

“This paint is a colour that birds can see but humans can’t,” he said Wednesday on CBC Radio’s All in a Day. “It’s like putting a big stop sign in the middle of the window.”

The colour is ultraviolet, beyond the range of colours visible to humans. That means the “stop sign” lets birds know the window is solid, but is nearly invisible to humans.

Similar flying falcon-shaped decals already exist on the windows of some buildings, but unlike Sobcov’s, they are black and can obstruct part of the window.

Sobcov, who studies at the Turnbull School, a private school in Ottawa, said he first fell in love with birds while on a trip with his parents to Costa Rica four years ago. He learned that bird populations were decreasing around the world, and that many scientists were blaming global warming.

He later read that about 500 million birds a year in Mexico, the U.S. and Canada were dying as a result of crashing into windows. Many deadly bird collision are with the windows of skyscrapers along their migratory paths.

Sobcov resolved to help save the lives of some of those birds.

Paint for cosmic bowling

He started researching bird vision and found out that a bird’s eye view includes colours in the ultraviolet range.

After a search, he managed to find a company in Montreal that made fluorescent ultraviolet paint. The paint is used in the entertainment industry for things like “cosmic bowling,” to make lanes glow. In normal indoor lighting, the paint is invisible, but when ultraviolet “black lights” shine on it, it emits light of a different colour — within the range that people can see.

So far, Sobcov has tested his flying falcon-shaped decals on the sunroom of a cottage neighbouring his family’s cottage.

“Immediately the birds stopped flying into those windows,” he said.

Sobcov has since posted a notice in the newspaper asking people to volunteer to help him test the decals, which can be easily peeled off and reused on a different window or a different part of the same window. He said he received responses from about 40 volunteers, including many who asked how they can buy the decals.

Sobcov said he needs to have his experiment completed by early February, but after that he may consider marketing his new invention.

After a comment on the story on CBC.ca suggested that a coating be applied internally to double-pane windows, to provide a visible grid or screen to birds, there is now the prospect that the Canadian building code will be altered to stipulate that for every exterior window in new houses.

1) Military Spending

No matter how bad the recession gets, how close we are to an actual depression, the Pentagon’s budget will never be discussed as a prime opportunity to conserve resources in this time of need. In fact, the New York Times published a feature article last week arguing that “defense” spending was the way to rejuvenate the economy.

2) Nuclear Weapons

With all the hand-wringing that Iran may be on the verge of having nuclear weapons, or that Pakistan’s may fall into the wrong hands, there is never a suggestion that the time may be at hand whereby nuclear weapons must be universally banned and their manufacture made illegal. The Pentagon’s stated policy that any competing nation may be pre-emptively attacked is the greatest insult inflicted on our species since the decrees of the Romans.

3) A World Government

The idea of a world government centered on the United Nations is anathema in the US, where it is most always pictured as an Orwellian plot to institute Big Brother himself. Yet the UN is expected to resolve every little war or famine when its budget is smaller than the NYC fire department’s.

4) Metrification

How much longer can the US be the only remaining country on the planet to take miles, pounds and gallons seriously? What does this act of governmental cowardice do to hamstring manufacturing, decade after decade?

5) The 10:1 Wage Disparity and Devaluation

The US will lose just about every factory that remains to offshore labor if it cannot devalue its currency quickly and thoroughly enough to universally lower US wages within hailing distance of those in China. Only when the millions of unemployed have no income at all, and swell to become tens of millions, will this grave matter be addressed for what it is. In the meantime there is a devaluation race between the US dollar, the Yen, Sterling and the Euro that is undeclared but in full cry. Obama must print a trillion dollars before they become a trillion quarters, but like all of the above, you won’t see that in the press either.