Waiting for the Reichstag Fire

Back in November of 2015, I wrote a post that got a lot of pshaw-ing by people who ordinarily would be fairly close to me in political outlook.  In it, I compared Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler -- and the lead-up to the 2016 election to the situation in Weimar Republic Germany in the mid-1930s.

Some of the naysayers thought I was being an alarmist -- that okay, Trump had some pretty reactionary ideas, but (1) they weren't really so far out of the mainstream of conservative ideology, and (2) if he did go off the beam too badly, we have a system of checks-and-balances set up that will rein him in.  Others admitted that Trump was an amoral sociopath who was interested in nothing but self-aggrandizement and stroking his over-inflated ego, but they argued that he wasn't going to get very far.  I had one person say to me, "There's no way that man could ever get the Republican nomination, much less win the presidency.  Calm the hell down."

I don't like being wrong any more than the next guy, but believe me when I say that this is one time I'd have been delighted to be completely off-base.

And every time I think we've reached the absolute nadir, that surely someone is going to step in and stop our slide into a true fascist dictatorship, something worse happens.  Witness the poll by the Washington Post that found that over half of the Republicans surveyed would be in favor of Trump suspending the 2020 presidential election "as long as necessary," and more specifically until he could see to it that we'd "weeded out illegal voters."

If Congress got behind the move, the support rises to 56%.

[Image courtesy of the Creative Commons Michael Vadon, Donald Trump Laconia Rally, Laconia, NH 4 by Michael Vadon July 16 2015 03, CC BY-SA 4.0]

First, let's just put out there that Trump's repeated claim of "millions of fraudulent voters" has not a shred of evidence behind it.  An exhaustive study by the Brennan Center for Justice found that the incidence of voter fraud in the United States was right around 0.0003%, regardless of whether you looked at local, state, or federal elections.

Put bluntly, the president is lying for the sole purpose of whipping up fear of evil "illegals" rigging elections in order to manipulate his followers into supporting his becoming Dictator-for-Life.

And just as with Hitler, a lot of effort is going into making Trump seem superhuman.  Instead of the racial purity ideologues (although there's a measure of that, too), here what we have is the Christian evangelicals treating Trump as inviolable, God's representative on Earth.  Don't believe me?  Just two days ago, Leigh Valentine, host of Faith and Freedom on Bill Mitchell's "Your Voice America" network, said the following:

Let me tell you, whether you believe it or not, [Trump] is speaking words of life over our country and over this nation, and every word he speaks, I see the hand of God upon it.  He is a very, very smart man and he knows what he is doing.  He knows the art of the deal and a lot of this is God’s deal, let me tell you.

Then there's the story in The Atlantic this week wherein we read some pretty alarming stuff.  Back in January 2016 Thomas Wright, a Brookings Institute scholar, warned that Trump had a "fondness for authoritarian strongmen."  More chillingly, a senior White House official who (unsurprisingly) declined to be named described Trump's policy in three words: "We're America, Bitch."

If someone can explain to me how that's different from Deutschland über alles, I'm listening.

No wonder Trump is disdainful of an articulate negotiator like Justin Trudeau, and as I write this is overflowing with praise for a bloodthirsty, ruthless dictator like Kim Jong Un.

So what we have here is a president who is a wannabe autocrat and has no intention of turning over the reins of power when his term is up, and a Congress that seems to think its job is kissing Trump's ass and rubberstamping whatever he proposes.  The whole time, the state-supported propaganda mill over at Fox News is convincing the masses that as long as we do what Der Führer says (and salute at the right time, and don't do anything outright treasonous like kneeling during the National Anthem), everything will be fine.  America will be great again.

Still doubtful about the parallels between where we are and Weimar Germany?

All we need is the final ingredient -- this era's Reichstag Fire.  Something calamitous that ignites a frenzy in his supporters, and allows Trump himself to say, "See, I told you so."  And at that point, the slide into catastrophe might well be unstoppable.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a classic: the late Oliver Sacks's The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.  It's required reading for anyone who is interested in the inner workings of the human mind, and highlights how fragile our perceptual apparatus is -- and how even minor changes in our nervous systems can result in our interacting with the world in what appear from the outside to be completely bizarre ways.  Broken up into short vignettes about actual patients Sacks worked with, it's a quick and completely fascinating read.

Everything in this blog is true

Regular readers of this blog may remember that about a year ago, a student of mine attempted to kill me by sending me a video clip of an apparently pathologically stupid woman attempting to defend the practice of homeopathy via misquotes from Stephen Hawkings [sic], a claim implying that mass and volume are the same thing, and a bizarre quasi-analogy that involves throwing a bomb at your neighbor's house because his dog pooped in your yard.  This student, who by all appearances is a moral and upstanding young man, nevertheless induced me to watch something which he knew might well have the effect of making me choke on my own outrage and die in horrible agony.

Needless to say, I survived the first murder attempt.  Not satisfied with failure, however, this same student has tried again, this time sending me a link to a website called “Truthism.com.”

I must say that as murder attempts go, this one was pretty inspired.  The homeopathy clip was only about eight minutes long, while this website took a half-hour to read thoroughly – thirty minutes of my life that I will never again get back, and a half-hour during which I made many muffled snorting noises, rather like a bulldog with a sinus blockage.  In case you’re understandably reluctant to waste that amount of time, or possibly risk dying of Exploding Brain Syndrome, I present below a summary of the gist of the Truthism website.

1. Everything on this website is true. 
2. If you doubt anything on this website, you are at best asleep, and at worst a mindless sheep who is being led about by evil government disinformation specialists. 
3. Many things which turned out to be true were disbelieved, even laughed at, at first.  Therefore if you disbelieve and laugh at this website, it must be true. 
4. You do not have access to government Top Secret facilities and records.  Therefore, anything this website claims is in those facilities and records must be true, because you can’t disprove it. 
5. Science is just another means for the ruling elite to control the populace. 
6. The ruling elite also invented religion and morality as a way to control the populace.  The fact that science and religion are often in conflict is an indication that they are both wrong. 
7. The current ruling elite are the same individuals who created the Egyptian and Mayan pyramids, Stonehenge, and the Nazca lines. 
8. These individuals, for good measure, also created humanity itself. 
9. Because the ruling elite aren’t actually people, but are super-intelligent reptiles from another planet. 
10. Called “Annunaki.” 
11. Did I mention that everything in this website is true? 
12. The fact that many ancient cultures depicted snakes in their art is proof that the earth is being ruled by reptiles from outer space. 
13. The caduceus, the symbol of medical science, is a pair of snakes coiled together.  It looks a little like a DNA molecule, which is the repository of all the genetic information in the cell. 
14. There you are, then. 
15. If that doesn’t prove it to you, then consider the following chain of logic: Crop Circles, Area 51, Ancient Astronauts, the Face on Mars, Freemasons, the Hollow Earth Theory! 
16. Ha. That sure showed YOU. 
17. And as a last piece of evidence; everything on this website is true.

I have to point out, at this juncture, how much it cost me to write all this out for you.  I can hear the pathetic little death screams of the neurons in my frontal cortex as I’m writing this.  But being the selfless reporter that I am, on the front lines of investigation, I’m willing to undergo significant risks to my own health, safety, and IQ in order to bring this story to your doorstep.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons SacroHelgo, 96ccb1 0c4b6a2ddbb4425f89f032a6f6ec9a19а, CC BY-SA 4.0]

And you know, it’s not as if I can’t see the attractiveness of this as a theory.  Think how positing the existence of evil, super-powerful cold-blooded reptilian alien propaganda specialists would explain, for example, Sarah Huckabee Sanders.  But alas, it’s not enough simply to like a theory, it has to fit with the data, and at the moment, the lion’s share of the evidence is in the “against” column.  So, sad to say, we must conclude that despite the website’s repeated claims of being true, its domain name should probably be changed to “EgregiousBullshitism.com.”

And with that said, I think I should go lie down for a while and recover from this latest assassination attempt.  If this keeps happening, I may have to hire a bodyguard.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a classic: the late Oliver Sacks's The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.  It's required reading for anyone who is interested in the inner workings of the human mind, and highlights how fragile our perceptual apparatus is -- and how even minor changes in our nervous systems can result in our interacting with the world in what appear from the outside to be completely bizarre ways.  Broken up into short vignettes about actual patients Sacks worked with, it's a quick and completely fascinating read.

Psychedelic uplift

In a study released last week by a team of psychologists working at the University of British Columbia, we find that in an extensive survey of 1,266 men from the ages of 16 to 70, guys who had used psychedelic drugs (specifically LSD or psilocybin) had a statistically significant lower likelihood of abusing their partners.

In "Psychedelic Use and Intimate Partner Violence: The Role of Emotion Regulation," by Michelle S. Thiessen, Zach Walsh, Brian M. Bird, and Adele Lafrance, the authors write:

Males reporting any experience using lysergic acid diethylamide and/or psilocybin mushrooms had decreased odds of perpetrating physical violence against their current partner (odds ratio=0.42, p<0.05).  Furthermore, our analyses revealed that male psychedelic users reported better emotion regulation when compared to males with no history of psychedelic use.  Better emotion regulation mediated the relationship between psychedelic use and lower perpetration of intimate partner violence.

Given the role of psychedelics in changing levels of activity of serotonin -- a major mood-regulating neurotransmitter -- it's unsurprising that this correlation exists.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons: This image was created by user Caleb Brown (Joust) at Mushroom Observer, a source for mycological images.You can contact this user here., 2013-10-22 Psilocybe cyanescens Wakef 378614, CC BY-SA 3.0]

What is more surprising is that apparently, it only takes one use.  Consider, too, that one use of another psychedelic drug -- ketamine -- has been found to relieve many cases of intractable depression, acting in as little as thirty minutes and providing dramatic improvements that last for months.

If you've checked out the links, you may have noticed that none of these studies took place in the United States.  The first one was done (as I mentioned) in Canada; the research on ketamine was the result of two studies done in China.  Here in the United States it's extraordinarily difficult even for neuroscientists to obtain permission to experiment with psychotropic drugs, and there's been strong resistance to easing up these regulations by a group I can only describe as being the Morality Police.  Odd, isn't it, that alcohol -- a clearly mood-altering drug that is responsible for (by estimates from the National Institute of Health) 88,000 deaths yearly -- is legal.  Tobacco, which kills even more than that, is not only legal but is federally subsidized.

Psychedelics are unequivocally illegal in all fifty states.  At least some motion forward has happened with marijuana, which has been known for years not only to be effective for pain relief in terminal cancer patients, but has shown promise as an anti-anxiety medication.  The problem seems to be that marijuana and psychedelics have both become associated with recreational use, and I guess there's a sense that therapeutic agents shouldn't be fun.

I dunno.  Maybe there's a better reason, but if so I've never been able to figure it out.  It seems to me that careful administration of chemicals that can potentially alleviate depression and anxiety shouldn't be dependent on people moralizing about what amounts to this century's version of Demon Rum.

This is brought into sharper relief by the suicide last week of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain.  Depression is reaching epidemic proportions.  I use the word "epidemic" deliberately, and not as hyperbole.  Another study, released just three days ago by the US Center for Disease Control, has found that since 1999 there's been a thirty percent increase in suicides in the United States.  Only one state -- Nevada -- had a decrease, and that was by only one percent.  Twelve states had an increase of between 38% and 58%.  The result -- suicide has become the third highest cause of death, and is so frequent it's actually contributed to a statistically significant drop in American life expectancy.

This is a personal one for me.  As I've mentioned before in Skeptophilia, I've suffered from moderate to severe depression and serious social anxiety for as long as I can recall.  The depression is being controlled reasonably well by medication; the anxiety is still a work in progress.  But if I could knock out my depression -- potentially get off antidepressants permanently -- by one hit of ketamine, one use of LSD or psilocybin -- I'd do it in a heartbeat.  And I'd like to hear, if any of my readers are in the no-way-no-how column of the legalization controversy, a cogent argument about why I should not be allowed to do that.

Interestingly, I was asked that very question by one of my oldest friends, even before the tragic suicides of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain.  Would I be willing to try it?  Would I do so even before it was legalized?  My answer was an unequivocal yes.  Given a reasonable dosage, and friends to make sure I didn't do anything stupid while high, what exactly would be the risk?  Speaking perfectly honestly, if a 57-year-old middle-class science nerd with no social life had any access to the chemicals in question, I'd already have done it.

Perhaps we're waking up, though.  Like I said, there is an increasing push to legalize certain drugs, and that's encouraging.  (Nota bene: I'm not saying these drugs should be completely unregulated.  There are very good reasons for keeping them away from children, and for making sure that they're not used before someone gets behind the wheel of a car.  But if we can handle those challenges with alcohol, we can handle them with other chemicals.)  It's to be hoped that we'll see reason -- and potentially do something to alleviate the suffering of people whose illnesses have heretofore been essentially untreatable.

And maybe, in the process, reduce some of those suicide numbers, which are absolutely horrifying.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a classic: the late Oliver Sacks's The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.  It's required reading for anyone who is interested in the inner workings of the human mind, and highlights how fragile our perceptual apparatus is -- and how even minor changes in our nervous systems can result in our interacting with the world in what appear from the outside to be completely bizarre ways.  Broken up into short vignettes about actual patients Sacks worked with, it's a quick and completely fascinating read.

Chain of hysteria

Because confirmation bias alone is apparently not enough, a team of psychologists at the University of Warwick (England) has just found that when bad news is passed from person to person, its capacity for inducing alarm and hysteria increases.

The study, released just this week in the journal Risk Analysis, was led by Thomas Hills, who summed up the research as "The more people share information, the more negative it becomes, the further it gets from the facts, and the more resistant it becomes to correction."  What they did was to take 154 test subjects, split them into fourteen groups of eight people each, and gave one person in each group a balanced, factual news article to read.  That person had to write a summary of the article in their own words, and pass that to another person in the group -- who read the summary, and had to summarize that, and pass that to the next person, and so on.

The sixth person was given not only the fifth person's summary, but the original article, to see if reading the original unbiased facts changed how they summarized the information.  And the scary thing is, it didn't.  The version passed on to the seventh person in the chain was just as inaccurate and alarmist as the previous ones had been.  So that points to a second, rather disturbing, conclusion from the Hills et al. research: once people have accepted a scary, emotionally-laden view of an issue, even presenting them with the facts doesn't change anything.

"Society is an amplifier for risk," Hills said.  "This research explains why our world looks increasingly threatening despite consistent reductions in real-world threats.  It also shows that the more people share information, the further that information gets from the facts and the more resilient it becomes to correction."

So it's kind of like an ugly, and potentially dangerous, game of Telephone.

1941 British advertisement [Image is in the Public Domain]

What interests me the most is this "resilience to correction" -- which I have to admit sounds way better than what I'd have called it, which is "ignorant, willful, pig-headed stupidity."  This tendency has been manipulated with what I can only interpret as cunning and malice aforethought by Fox News, which unhesitatingly broadcasts complete, outright lies, then (much more quietly) issues a "retraction" later -- knowing full well that the correction will not undo the outrage and misapprehension the original story created in the listeners.  It's what was going on this past week with the nonsense over Donald Trump's petulant and toddlerish withdrawal of the invitation to the Superbowl-winning Philadelphia Eagles over the controversy regarding players "taking the knee" during the National Anthem in protest of the unfair treatment of minorities.  Fox broadcast a story about Trump's cancellation of the visit (obviously siding with Trump, not that I probably had to mention that), and backed up the story with photographs of Eagles players kneeling.

The problem is that none of the photographs were of players "taking the knee" in protest during the National Anthem.  Every damn one of them was a photograph of a player kneeling to say a prayer prior to the start of the game, which (given their ongoing hysteria over the "War on Christianity" you'd think they'd have been in favor of).  When several players said, "Hey, wait a moment.  That picture of me wasn't what they implied it was," Fox finally (two days later) made a mealy-mouthed, and short, retraction statement.

Which one do you think got more views, and generated more attention and more emotion, the original story, or the retraction?

Don't answer that.  Rhetorical question.

So the scary part of the Hills et al. research is that knowing this, media agencies can knowingly manipulate this tendency -- start out with a sensationalized and hysteria-inducing story, which will then only amplify further in the retelling.  Then they can retract anything that was an obvious falsehood (or at least any of the falsehoods that enough people object to), and the retraction will have exactly zero effect.

What this does is make it even more imperative that we somehow fix the biased, slanted nightly shitshow that popular media has become.  How to do this, I have no idea.  But if we don't, we end up in a frightening positive-feedback loop -- where we believe the hysteria more strongly because the media insists that it's true, and they insist that it's true because it gets listeners who already believe it.

And the end result, I'm afraid, will be a nation filled with easily-led, emotion-driven dupes -- which, honestly, is probably precisely what the powers-that-be want.

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This week's featured book is the amazing Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, which looks at the fact that we have two modules in our brain for making decisions -- a fast one, that mostly works intuitively, and a slower one that is logical and rational.  Unfortunately, they frequently disagree on what's the best course of action.  Worse still, trouble ensues when we rely on the intuitive one to the exclusion of the logical one, calling it "common sense" when in fact it's far more likely to come from biases rather than evidence.

Kahneman's book will make you rethink how you come to conclusions -- and make you all too aware of how frail the human reasoning capacity is.

Artificial psycho

New from the "Don't You People Ever Watch Horror Movies?" department, we have: a group of scientists at MIT who have created an artificial intelligence that is psychopathic.

At least that's kind of what it looks like.  The AI, which has been programmed to analyze, understand, and learn from photographs, was then trained on horrific images -- pictures of humans being injured or otherwise abused, obtained from the site Reddit -- and afterwards asked it to interpret Rorschach ink blots.

Here are a few of the responses given by the AI, who has been named "Norman" after Norman Bates from Psycho, and for purposes of comparison, the responses from a control AI that had been trained on a variety of different sorts of images (rather than all violent ones):

Control: a close-up of a wedding cake on a table.
Norman: a man killed by a speeding driver. 

Control: a black-and-white photograph of a baseball glove.
Norman: a man murdered by machine gun in broad daylight. 

Control: a black-and-white photograph of a small bird.
Norman: a man being pulled into a dough machine. 

Control: a person holding an umbrella in the air.
Norman: a man shot dead in front of his screaming wife.

Control: a black-and-white photograph of a red-and-white umbrella.
Norman: a man gets electrocuted trying to cross a busy street. 

The trio of scientists responsible, Pinar Yanardag, Manuel Cebrian, and Iyad Rahwan, don't seem unduly concerned by their creation, although they do point out the hazards of training an AI using skewed input.  "Norman suffered from extended exposure to the darkest corners of Reddit," they said in an interview, "and represents a case study on the dangers of Artificial Intelligence gone wrong when biased data is used in machine-learning algorithms."

[Image released into the Public Domain by its creator, Michel Royon]

What it makes me wonder is to what extent our own brains get co-opted by this sort of thing.  It's often claimed that people who (for example) play lots of violent video games become inured, desensitized, to violence in general.  But maybe it's more than that.  Maybe if we expose ourselves to ugliness, we become more likely to interpret neutral situations as ugly.

Sort of seeing the world through awful-colored glasses.

I saw an example of this, albeit of a milder variety, in my own parents.  My folks were the type that had the television on in the evening whether anyone was watching it or not, and a favorite channel had reruns of the show Cops on every night.  I'm a little puzzled as to why anyone would watch that show to start with -- after all, it's not like the plot varies -- but I noticed that after a time, my parents (especially my mom) started viewing the world as an unsafe place.  People are always waiting to hurt you, she said, and you have to stay on your guard constantly.  I still recall the last thing she told me before I left for a month-long walking tour of England:

"Don't trust ANYBODY."

In England, for fuck's sake.  I mean, it's not like I was planning on hiking across Sudan, or anything.

So what you immerse yourself in day after day does make a difference.  I'm not suggesting that we be Pollyannas, nor to look at the world in the way of Dr. Pangloss from Voltaire's masterpiece Candide ("Everything happens for the best, as this is the best of all possible worlds.")  But it bears keeping in mind that we can bias ourselves by what we choose to watch, read, play, and participate in.

And I do hope they know where the "Off" switch is on Norman.  Because that sonofabitch scares the hell out of me.

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This week's featured book is the amazing Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, which looks at the fact that we have two modules in our brain for making decisions -- a fast one, that mostly works intuitively, and a slower one that is logical and rational.  Unfortunately, they frequently disagree on what's the best course of action.  Worse still, trouble ensues when we rely on the intuitive one to the exclusion of the logical one, calling it "common sense" when in fact it's far more likely to come from biases rather than evidence.

Kahneman's book will make you rethink how you come to conclusions -- and make you all too aware of how frail the human reasoning capacity is.

The smell of death

In Agatha Christie's wonderful novel The Pale Horse, a group of self-styled witches claim to be able to curse someone to death.  And they're happy to do it for you -- under a dubiously moral but entirely legal scheme wherein you bet the ringleader that your worst enemy is going to die within six weeks.  If your enemy dies, as promised, you pay up.  If not, the witches pay you.

Because, after all, you haven't asked anyone to act as a hit man -- all you've done is speculate that someone is going to die.

Of course, given that it's Christie, there's no chance that there's actually anything supernatural going on, and the death-by-curse scheme is actually a cover for very deliberate murder.  I won't spoil it further for you, because it's a hell of a read (you can buy it at the link above); but the point is that even when things look their woo-iest, there's usually some sort of completely rational explanation behind it.

This all comes up because of a claim I ran across over at the site Mysterious Universe, in an article by Paul Seaburn called, "Psychic Claims She Can Smell Your Impending Doom."  In it, we hear about a woman named Ari Kala, of Hunter Valley, New South Wales, Australia, who claims that she can tell if someone's going to die -- by their smell.

Kala tells about her first experience with this alleged ability, at age twelve, when she detected an odd odor from someone who was dying.  'The night before his death I picked up this odd, sickly sweet rotten kind of smell in the house," Kala said.  "I thought it was the smell of his remains as I had never smelled that before.  But no one else could smell it."

[Image is in the Public Domain]

When she became an adult, she became aware of other psychic abilities (she claims), and started working as a "psychic coach."  But the ability to smell death remained with her.  It wasn't pleasant, she says, and not just because death doesn't smell so good:

Sometimes it feels like a burden.  I used to want to say something, however, I realized it’s not my duty.  It’s kind of useless – how could it help anyone?  How I can walk up to strangers with this smell and help them?  What if they don’t know they are going to die soon?  If I told them that and they weren’t aware, it could be catastrophic.  I don’t see how it’s up to me to interfere with their fate.

Which I suppose makes sense, not to mention the fact that it would make her sound more than a little threatening -- rather like our witches-for-hire in The Pale Horse.

So is there anything to this?  If she'd claimed that she could tell if anyone was going to die, by any means, I'd be inclined to laugh it off.  Such abilities also appear in fiction, most famously in one of the best-ever episodes of The X Files, "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose."  As interesting as this idea is, there's no way I'll believe someone who claims that they can tell that tomorrow I'm going to get pushed in front of a Mack truck or something because I smell funny.

But what makes me wonder is that Kala says she's only picked up the smell in places where people are dying of natural causes -- hospitals and old-age homes.  It made me think of a study two years ago of dogs that can detect cancer by smell -- in some cases, before the tumor is causing any obvious symptoms.  The ability, which has not been thoroughly researched, is thought to come from dogs' sensitivity to volatile organic compounds released either by the cancer itself or by the body's attempt to fight it, but that piece is speculative.

So could Kala be picking up on something like that?  I suppose it's possible, but the difficulty is that it's not going to be easy to test.  It's not like hospitals would welcome the Death-Sniffing Psychic to wander around in the ICU.

And whatever's going on here -- whether it's a hoax (after all, she's only made the claim after the person in question has died, making it easy enough for her to say she smelled it beforehand), or whether she actually has a nose sensitive to the onset of death -- I'd be willing to bet a significant amount of money that there's a perfectly rational explanation behind it, just as there was with our group of Evil Witches For Hire in The Pale Horse.

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This week's featured book is the amazing Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, which looks at the fact that we have two modules in our brain for making decisions -- a fast one, that mostly works intuitively, and a slower one that is logical and rational.  Unfortunately, they frequently disagree on what's the best course of action.  Worse still, trouble ensues when we rely on the intuitive one to the exclusion of the logical one, calling it "common sense" when in fact it's far more likely to come from biases rather than evidence.

Kahneman's book will make you rethink how you come to conclusions -- and make you all too aware of how frail the human reasoning capacity is.

Endorsement of coercion

Some days, I really don't understand my fellow humans.

The latest example of my complete incomprehension comes because of a case that was just decided in the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, wherein a self-styled Satanist had brought a lawsuit against the United States government to have "In God We Trust" removed from currency, on the basis of its being an unconstitutional endorsement of religion.  The lawsuit was thrown out a couple of days ago.  The court's ruling said, in part, "a reasonable observer would not perceive the motto on currency as a religious endorsement."

I read the entire story with an expression like this on my face:

Let's just review what the phrase "In God We Trust" means, shall we?

It means "we trust in God."  I.e., God exists.  I.e., Christianity is right.  I.e., endorsing a particular religious viewpoint.

The ruling went on to say, "The inclusion of the motto on currency is similar to other ways in which secular symbols give a nod to the nation’s religious heritage... similar to the phrase 'One Nation, Under God' in the Pledge of Allegiance."

No, the phrase is not a "nod to religious heritage."  Depictions of the Puritans founding the colony of Massachusetts is a "nod to religious heritage."  But then, so would depictions of the witches being hanged in Salem, so maybe that's not where we want to go, either.

What escapes a lot of people about all this is that the motto of the United States was changed in the 1950s from E Pluribus Unum -- "Out of Many, One" -- in order to show the godless commies what for.  Same for adding "One Nation, Under God" in the Pledge.  Neither of these has a long historical timeline, and only appeared when the Christians started feeling threatened and required that everyone state their belief in God whether or not a person thought it was true.

The mandate for the phrase to appear on currency comes from a bill introduced by Representative Charles Bennett of Florida in 1955, wherein Bennett argued that "In these days when imperialistic and materialistic communism seeks to attack and destroy freedom, we should continually look for ways to strengthen the foundations of our freedom."

Including, apparently, the freedom to believe anything you want as long as it's Christianity.

I also take issue with the suggestion that the founders of the country intended this kind of coercion with respect to religion.  Take, for example, what Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom, when he was a member of the Virginia House of Delegates in 1777:

Be it therefore enacted by the General Assembly, That no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burdened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in nowise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.

James Madison concurred, observing, "Torrents of blood have been split in the old world, by vain attempts of the secular arm, to extinguish Religious discord, by proscribing all difference in Religious opinion."

Even more to the point, Jefferson wrote, "What has been the effect of [religious] coercion?  To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites.  To support roguery and error all over the earth."

And more fundamentally, I wonder why the religious want religion to appear on currency.  Isn't there the whole "render unto God what is God's, and render unto Caesar what is Caesar's" thing in the Gospel of Matthew?  And as far as the Pledge goes, what earthly purpose can the "one nation, under God" phrase serve?  If you say it but don't believe it, you're lying.  If you already believe it -- well, you already believe it.  Why is a public affirmation in a secular space required?

The bottom line is that you are free to participate in any religion you want to.  Even as a staunch atheist, I have no desire whatsoever to constrain what you believe, or how you express those beliefs.  But that tolerance comes to a screeching halt when you try to coerce me, or anyone else, to adhere to your beliefs simply because people of those beliefs are currently in the majority in the United States, and hold nearly all the positions of power.

I suppose it's heartening that even the people in favor of it recognize they're on such tenuous ground that they have to make such outright ridiculous statements as "'In God We Trust' is in no way a religious endorsement" in order to defend it.  What's unfortunate is that we have to spend our time and resources arguing about this stuff, when there are considerably more pressing matters to attend to, such as the fact that our president seems to regard the Constitution as a list of suggestions.

If he's actually read it, which I'm beginning to wonder.

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This week's featured book is the amazing Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, which looks at the fact that we have two modules in our brain for making decisions -- a fast one, that mostly works intuitively, and a slower one that is logical and rational.  Unfortunately, they frequently disagree on what's the best course of action.  Worse still, trouble ensues when we rely on the intuitive one to the exclusion of the logical one, calling it "common sense" when in fact it's far more likely to come from biases rather than evidence.

Kahneman's book will make you rethink how you come to conclusions -- and make you all too aware of how frail the human reasoning capacity is.