Ethics of atheists

Via Machines Like Us, I came across this article by researchers Gregory Paul and Phil Zuckerman that challenges the view among some religious people that atheists have poor ethics.

A growing body of social science research reveals that atheists, and non-religious people in general, are far from the unsavory beings many assume them to be. On basic questions of morality and human decency — issues such as governmental use of torture, the death penalty, punitive hitting of children, racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, environmental degradation or human rights — the irreligious tend to be more ethical than their religious peers, particularly compared with those who describe themselves as very religious. [My italics]
…
As individuals, atheists tend to score high on measures of intelligence, especially verbal ability and scientific literacy. They tend to raise their children to solve problems rationally, to make up their own minds when it comes to existential questions and to obey the golden rule. They are more likely to practice safe sex than the strongly religious are, and are less likely to be nationalistic or ethnocentric. They value freedom of thought.

Atheists may not be the most ethical people around but we can make a strong case that we are much more ethical than a certain prominent Christian theologian who likes to claim that without a god there can be no objective morality, and then proceeds to justify genocide and rape because his god commanded it.

If that is where objective morality takes you, then I am really glad to be a moral relativist.

The WikiLeaks model expands, sort of

WikiLeaks put the mainstream media in a bind. They benefited hugely from all the information that was released but at the same time they were embarrassed by using as a source a news organization that the US government hated.

Now the Wall Street Journal has started its own website aimed at getting whistleblower information in the same way as WIkiLeaks. But since they see themselves as ‘good’ journalists (i.e., subservient to the US government and oligarchy), they have inserted a clause saying that they will share any information with the government and other authorities. Hence their approach will likely fail.

But what this does reveal is what I have been saying all along, that the WikiLeaks model is the future of journalism.

Sanitizing the truth about Guantanamo

Chris Floyd reports on how the New York Times buried those facts in the latest WikiLeaks release on Guantanamo to hide the details that were embarrassing to the US.

Almost as sickening as the atrocities themselves, however, is the way the release has been played in the New York Times, whose coverage of the document dump will set the tone for the American media and political establishments. The Times’ take is almost wholly devoted to showing how evil and dangerous a handful of the hundreds of Gitmo detainees were, and to justifying Barack Obama’s betrayal of his promises to close the concentration camp. We are treated to lurid tales (many if not most of them extracted under torture, but who cares about that?) of monsters seething with irrepressible hatred of America, and so maniacally devoted to jihad that they inject themselves with libido-deadening drugs to ward off any sexual distractions from their murderous agenda.

There is almost no mention in the Times coverage of the many innocent people — including children — who spent years in the concentration camp, athough the main story about the documents does note, in an eyeblink, the case of one prisoner who was falsely imprisoned on the word of an Afghan official trying to hide his own complicity with insurgents. (Damn treacherous furriners!)

He points out that the international press had no difficulty discerning the real story in the same dossier, as this except from the Guardian shows:

The US military dossiers, obtained by the New York Times and the Guardian, reveal how, alongside the so-called “worst of the worst”, many prisoners were flown to the Guantánamo cages and held captive for years on the flimsiest grounds, or on the basis of lurid confessions extracted by maltreatment. The files depict a system often focused less on containing dangerous terrorists or enemy fighters, than on extracting intelligence.

Among inmates who proved harmless were an 89-year-old Afghan villager, suffering from senile dementia, and a 14-year-old boy who had been an innocent kidnap victim. The old man was transported to Cuba to interrogate him about “suspicious phone numbers” found in his compound. The 14-year-old was shipped out merely because of “his possible knowledge of Taliban…local leaders”

The documents also reveal … Almost 100 of the inmates who passed through Guantánamo are listed by their captors as having had depressive or psychotic illnesses. Many went on hunger strike or attempted suicide.

The full Guardian dossier on this latest release also has an analysis by Julian Glover who says:

The leaked files published by the Guardian and the New York Times reveal horror that lies only partly in the physical things that were done to inmates – the desperate brutality of heated isolation cells, restraining straps and forced interrogation.
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But what is given new prominence by these latest Guantánamo files is the cold, incompetent stupidity of the system: a system that tangled up the old and the young, the sick and the innocent. A system in which to say you were not a terrorist might be taken as evidence of your cunning.
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It didn’t work, much of the time. These files show that some of the information collected was garbage and that many of those held knew nothing that could be of use to the people demanding answers from them. Far from securing the fight against terror, the people running the camp faced an absurdist battle to educate a 14-year-old peasant boy kidnapped by an Afghan tribe and treat the dementia, depression and osteoarthritis of an 89-year-old man caught up in a raid on his son’s house.

Other cases are just as pathetic. Jamal al-Harith, born Ronald Fiddler in Manchester in 1966, was imprisoned by the Taliban as a possible spy, after being found wandering through Afghanistan as a Muslim convert. In a movement of Kafkaesque horror the Americans held him in Camp X-Ray simply because he had been a prisoner of its enemy [My italics]. “He was expected to have knowledge of Taliban treatment of prisoners and interrogation tactics,” the files record.
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At times, I have feared that obsessing over the injustices of Guantánamo Bay has become a surrogate for a wider hatred of America. Read the files, and you’ll realise that obsession is the only possible humane response.

I would have said that what happened and is still happening at Guantanamo should be the nation’s everlasting shame, if I didn’t feel that we had lost the capacity to feel shame.

Preventing cheaper treatments to increase profits

Reader Norm sent me this news item which alleges that sheer greed for excessive profits is causing one drug company (Genentech) to try to block a possible cure for macular degeneration (which can cause blindness) from being tested and approved, because the cost of this drug ($50 per dose) Avastin is forty times less that the alternative treatment Lucentis ($2,000 per dose) marketed by the same company.

The Plain Dealer also ran a story on the fact that the Cleveland Clinic ran a comparison test anyway and found that Avastin worked as well as Lucentis.

The bin Laden photos

I don’t understand what is driving those people who demand that the photos of the dead bin Laden be released, other than the need to satisfy some prurient interest or to gloat. It is not that photos of dead people should never be published. Publishing the images of war dead and wounded can play an important role in highlighting the tragic cost of wars. But bin Laden’s photographs would serve no such a purpose. It would be more like publishing the photos of people executed for crimes or shot in gunfights and seems like a partial step backwards to the days of public executions to satisfy people’s blood lust

While I am in general in favor of not keeping information secret, such information should have some public benefit. What benefit would be gained by releasing the photos? It will not serve as proof that bin Laden is dead because die-hard skeptics can claim that the photos are faked, just like some are claiming that Obama’s birth certificate is a fake or that the moon landing was faked or that the Bush administration was behind the 9/11 attacks. They will then demand the release of the videos. There will never be definitive proof that will satisfy the skeptics and at some point you have to take the circumstantial evidence in support of a basic fact as conclusive, though one can legitimately have doubts about specific details.

I don’t see any reason to doubt the claim that bin Laden was killed in this attack. I don’t see any upside for the Obama administration to fake the news about the death and plenty of downside. So many people are involved that a lie could easily be revealed and blow up in their faces. Furthermore bin Laden had faded from the news a long time ago and the sense of urgency to capture him had dissipated to a low level of nagging dissatisfaction, so why create such a sensational falsehood?

I think it is very clear that the US government wanted bin Laden killed and not captured alive. The fact that he was unarmed and they were able to carry his dead body out along with computers and other stuff suggests that they could have easily overpowered him and taken him alive if they had really wanted to.

While he should have been given a fair trial, we seem to have gone long past the stage where people concern themselves with such quaint old-fashioned legal niceties and now live in an age of summary justice. While a captured bin Laden might have been a useful source of information, what to do with him would have been so problematic as to outweigh the benefits of treating him like a criminal. An open trial might have revealed embarrassing information about the former links between him and al Qaeda and the Taliban with the US and Pakistan. A secret trial or a kangaroo court comprised of a military tribunal followed by an execution would have been long drawn out and had negative implications. People in the US already get into hysterics about giving low-level Guantanamo detainees a trial in civilian courts or to even house them in prisons on the US mainland. Imagine their reaction if bin Laden were to be held in a US prison.

I think it is clear that the commandos had orders to kill him, although killing an unarmed person is a potentially illegal act, which is why Attorney General Eric Holder has conveniently come up with the novel doctrine that it was justifiable as an act of ‘national self defense’, whatever that is.

Leon Panetta, the head of the CIA, said that they were not certain that bin Laden was in the house, which clarifies another mystery which was why they carried out a high risk operation like they did without simply sending in a drone to bomb the building. After all, it is not like the government worries that much about innocent civilians being killed in their air strikes.

If they had held on to the dead body, that would become a hot potato too. What could they do with it? Where could they bury it? If his family asked for it, how could they respond? Once they had possession of the body, they would have to find ways to get rid of it. Later summarily dumping it into the sea with the whole world watching would have been explosive. It was this reason, rather than any concern to follow Islamic customs, that I think led to the hurried burial at sea, so that the world was presented with a fait accompli.

I think the US government carried out the mission this way because they wanted to make sure that bin Laden was dead, that they had proof, and also did not want his body and funeral and grave to become political symbols. I think it is reasonable to conclude that the bare bones of the story, that the US government gave the order to kill bin Laden and bury his body at sea, is true. The release of the photos and videos will not add anything to it.

Not everybody reacted with cheering

Some people reacted to the death of bin Laden with hooting and cheering and raucous celebrations, as if this serious and somber event was like their home sports team winning a big game. But not everyone, even in New York City, responded this way.

I was not sure if this was a hoax video, in which a normal subway ride taken at some other time had had the voice added. It looked like the person doing the shouting had also taken the video and I was not sure why he would post a video that made him look foolish, unless he thought that the apathetic response of the people revealed the lack of patriotism of people living in the bicoastal areas who, as we are repeatedly told, are not ‘real’ Americans like those in the mythical ‘heartland’.

It was the non-reaction of almost everyone in the subway car to someone shouting about anything that was surprising to me and made me suspect a possible hoax. If I had been there, I would have at least looked around to see who was making such a ruckus.

But I am not a New Yorker. Maybe this is how they react to anyone trying to get their attention in a public place.

The unreliability of government statements

In a post I wrote six years ago, I warned that we should not believe the reports that government officials release in the immediate aftermath of a major event because they are invariably unreliable, either because full information is not available or more frequently because governments deliberately lie as part of the propaganda process, knowing that the first version of events is the one that sticks in people’s minds. As such, I said that we should not believe any of the details that are released until they have been substantiated.

The bin Laden story seems to be another example. The government initially said that he had been armed and using his wife as a shield when he was killed ‘in a firefight’, resulting in her death as well. It turns out that both these details were false. It would not be surprising if we find out in the days, months, and even years to come that other details are also false. Look how long it took for the true stories about Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch to emerge.

So why gild the lily? Why not simply take credit for what seems like a carefully thought out and well-executed plan? Perhaps the government felt the need to discredit bin Laden. But this is pointless. After all, those who hated him do not need any additional reasons to do so, while those who are inspired by him will not believe such stories. Some may even claim that the reports of his death are a fabrication.

I think governments simply cannot help themselves. They cannot let the facts speak for themselves but feel compelled to embellish in order to either cover up their mistakes or, as seems to be the case here, to make themselves look as good as possible and their enemies as bad as possible.

What is truly surprising is that the members of the media, who should know better by now since they have been burned time and again, seem to fall for government propaganda every single time, and pass on government statements as fact, without even the hint of skepticism.

Surprising, unsurprising, and amusing facts about US religious knowledge

The recent Pew survey of US religious knowledge that I discussed on the radio and on this blog, had some features that I want to discuss further.

The things that surprised me about the Pew study were:

  • That 45% of Catholics did not understand what transubstantiation meant. You would think that this would be a big part of their preparation for first communion and subsequent devotional activities. That the number of unaware people is so high suggests that this part of their doctrine is viewed as so absurd that it is downplayed. I mean, really, the idea that the wafer and the wine become the actual body and blood of Jesus because of a prayer and are then consumed seems outlandish and even macabre. It is likely that although the words “This is the body” and “This is the blood” are said during the service, it is not emphasized that people should take it literally.
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