Pascal's Wager and Monergism

If you've never encountered Pascal's Wager or don't know what is, here's a brief summary. If you believe in a god and a god exists, you go to its heaven. If the god doesn't exist, there is no loss. However if you don't believe in a deity and it turns out he does exist, you burn in hell forever.

Therefore, since there is cost to believing in a deity, you may as well believe.

There are numerous holes in this theory, the most obvious being that there are thousands of deities and you have to be sure to pick the right one because most of them don't like each other.

However there is another hole in this idea of Pascal's. Simply put, there is a huge cost to having religion. Don't believe me? Look at the monergism website. (It's okay, I know it has "gism" in the title, but it's completely safe for work) What is Monergism? Quoth I, Monergism is:

The view that the Holy Spirit is the only agent who effects regeneration of Christians. It is in contrast with synergism, the view that there is a cooperation between the divine and the human in the regeneration process.

Now look at that absolutely monumental website, entirely dedicated to this miniscule portion of Christian belief. Think of all of the intellectual time spent by these people rationalizing this tiny schism of Christian doctrine. Just gaze in rapt fascination at the sheer insanity of it all.

Now tell me again how the premise of Pascal's Wager, that "there is no cost to believing", is an accurate depiction of how people practice religion. Imagine how much better off our society would be if all of the historical church figures who had been indoctrinated in to this nonsense and therefore spent their mental power on it had instead spent their time refining our understand of the natural universe.

Imagine how far we would have progressed by now. Instead we have centuries of writings and examinations on whether an imaginary man will forgive our crimes based on our interactions with a ghost or based solely on the power of the ghost.

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War is Stupid. Everybody knows that.

Oh, if only this were true.

Unfortunately there's a huge crowd of people on the right wing of politics everywhere who believe that war is the inevitable state of humankind. There has always been war, they will tell us, and therefore there will always be war.

Well, there are a lot of things that "always were", and yet we've put a stop to so many. You don't see a whole lot of land wars in Europe or human sacrifice anymore, do you? And there a lot more "always were"s that we're slowly stamping out: genital mutilation; asbestos; honour killing.

The most telling comment, though, regarding the father of the man who died so recently in Afghanistan, is this one from the mother of another deceased soldier:

"You've gotta believe that what they did, they did for a reason," she said, adding: "I honestly believe they're there for a good reason."

It sounds sadly desperate, doesn't it? You gotta believe. You just gotta. They can't be dying and killing for no reason. No. No way.

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Harper Apologizes to the Natives

The Conservative government perplexes me. In amongst all the obvious pro-business, pro-wealthy tax cuts, the military expansion, their involvement in the torturing of prisoners and their secret assistance to the invasion of Iraq - they go off and apologize to native Canadians for their mistreatment at the hands of the government's residential schools.

It's a well deserved apology. These people were horribly mistreated. The basic crime is attempting to destroy someone's culture. We're not talking about the "culture" that Jeffrey Simpson and that lot are worried about (wherein, apparently, all Muslims want to come to our country and change our constitution in to sharia law). We're talking about speaking your own language, signaling yes and no the way you were raised to do so, eating your own food and following your own religion.

Yes, that was bad enough. But on top of that we've got to deal with the rampant sexual and physical abuse at these schools. It's very hard for us, as Canadians, to believe that we perpetrated this level of abuse on people in our country.

The question for Mr. Harper is this: what will you do now?

Will you recognize that these residential schools were not isolated outcasts or small stains but rather symbolic of the nature of our treatment of native Canadians? Do you now realize that the way that we act toward these people, our fellow Canadians, our fellow human beings, has to change? Do you now see, along with all of the other parties in government, that we need to reexamine our handling of our relations and our treaties with the natives?

The apology is only a first step. Any money paid is largely irrelevant.

What matters is that the policy changes. If it doesn't, the apology rings hollow.

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McLellan on the Bandwagon

Honestly, I'm not even going to read the man's book. It's nice that people who leave the Bush Administration are telling us what a bunch of dogmatically driven pack of liars they are, but it's a bit late, Scott.

The time we needed you to call them out was sometime in 2003, when you were helping them lie. You're no hero. You're too late. You're too late by 4000 American dead, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead and hundreds of billions of American dollars spent.

Good luck with the book, though.

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Unions and Goodness

Unions have always been a mixed blessing. Historically, unions of workers have given us a lot of the things we hold dear. Reasonable working hours, weekends, benefits, living wages and worker's rights against abuse are all valuable things. When the rights and wages of the lowest people on the ladder are improved, we get two main benefits. One is that the wages of the rest of us go up. The other is that unions shift wealth toward the poorest which helps fuel our mass consumption driven economy as well as improve the education and health possibilities for those with lower incomes.

It's a much more reliable method of improving things than, say, giving massive tax cuts to corporations and wealthy people and hoping that this magically improves the lives of poor people through some unspecified mechanism (usually given the implication-laden title of "trickle down").

But unions have also used their heft to prevent innovation by mechanization, to help workers do their jobs poorly (thus "dealer prep") and to protect workers who are actually lousy at their jobs.

I read this article today and I found it idiotic.

GM is laying off 2600 workers at its truck and SUV plant and Buzz Hargrove, the super powerful union leader, has declared that he won't let it happen.

Mr. Hargrove insisted the U.S. market could not possibly have declined so sharply in such a short period of time that GM would have to break that agreement.

Is he insane? The market for SUVs and trucks could not have declined? Has he seen the price of gasoline? Of course North Americans are finally getting smarter and realizing that the giant vehicles they drive are expensive and irresponsible.

What is the argument here? That no one saw this coming? What you should have been doing, Mr. Union Leader, is negotiating for the past several years, on behalf of your brothers, to have those factories slowly converted over to efficient passenger cars in advance of this very, very obvious impending crisis.

It's that kind of behaviour that frustrates me. There is a place for the Union concept. Democracy simply can not react quickly enough to protect large numbers of workers from large scale abuse - especially with the penchant corporations have shown for trust violations. A Union or Federation can step in and threaten to halt production in order to extract fairness from the corporation rather than having all of the workers uproot their lives to change jobs.

But this is not it. This is not what the Union should be doing - attempting to stave off the unavoidable tide of change. I'm not too worried though, about the plight of these particular workers. I hear there are autoworking jobs elsewhere:

The dramatic shift in U.S. demand benefits Asian-based auto makers, which have dominated the passenger-car side of the business since the 1990s, when Detroit focused the bulk of its product development and investment on SUVs.

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The Apology Industry

There's a loud lament from the right side of Canadian politics against what is called the "Apology Industry" or the "Apology seeking industry". This is surmised to be some sort of legal establishment that funnels people in to lawsuits and PR campaigns for the purpose of taking money from the government for previous immoral actions of the government.

As examples, we have the payments that went out to the descendants of those who paid the "Chinese Head Tax" or to those who suffered under the "Indian residential schools".

The right wingers tell us to stop and they give this warning: "When does this all end? Do we apologize to everyone we've ever wronged?"

I hate to break it to you, but yes. Believe it or not, in spite of all of the rhetoric, you in fact have to apologize to everyone you've wronged. That's maturity. That's adulthood. That's responsibility.

It's not just about the money. Beating children to death or letting them die in the snow can not be healed by passing money to their parents or to some descendants or fellow band members. It's about changing policy.

If you publicly apologize to the people who paid the Head Tax, you implicitly publicly acknowledge that this was an immoral Tax and thus guarantee (one would hope) that future Canadian governments will avoid such idiocy.

When you apologize to the native Canadians whose children were taken from them, you are speaking to an immoral policy of assimilation that continues, in one form or another, to this day. Yes, the money can help those who have been mentally damaged by these schools, but the money is not the crux of the matter.

It's much more important that we recognize the brutality inspired by the arrogance that led previous governments to institute schools where children were beaten for refusing to pray to Jesus, speak English and start nodding their heads for "yes". The same governments who made those schools also made the rest of the policies towards our native population. Therefore we must suspect those policies of containing within them the same soul of arrogance and brutality.

And consequent to realizing how brutally we've been treating the native population, we must act to change that policy.

That, not money, is what these apologies are about.

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Argue Like Right Wingers

I think it's time to consider whether or not we on the progressive, left wing of politics ought to start arguing with right wingers the way they argue with us.

You might be thinking: don't we all argue the same way, using facts, logic, reason and persuasive rhetoric?

No, actually we don't. You don't have to look too far to find that the debating tactics of the left usually rely on reasonable argument based on concern for fellow human beings, both within one's nation and outside of it and tolerance of different ideas. Yes, there's name calling on both sides, but the right wing has a different set of tactics. I can demonstrate this by arguing the left wing point of view in the manner of right wing argumentation.

I will begin now:

Why do you conservatives hate Canada?

Your knee-jerk anti-Canadianism disgusts me. Every time anything happens anywhere in the world, all that you people can do is blame Canada first. You blame the health care system that the majority of Canadians support. You blame our attitude of collective responsibilty for one another. You blame our desire for peaceful resolutions to all of the international conflicts in the world. Why do you hate the peace, health and cooperation that Canadians love? Why do you hate Canada?

Why do you hate our troops so much?

The majority of Canadians want our troops to be used to support international peace and defend our nation. But you right wingers want them out there fighting aggressive wars in other countries. You want our troops to be in danger. Therefore, you must hate the troops. Why do you hate them so much?

(Please note: this is really easy. I had no idea until I tried how little brainpower it takes to "argue" like this.)

You right wingers are so unpatriotic.

You don't support any of the ideals that have made our country great: our care for fellow human beings; our desire for peace; our economic security. How can you consider yourselves Canadian and not stand for these Canadian ideals? You're a bunch of Canada haters, is what you are ... a bunch of self-hating Canadians. When are you going to grow up and realize that in the real word, adults use peace and diplomacy as the real answers that lead to real happiness? When will you learn that war-mongering is just a waste of resources and this childish "war is unavoidable" thing you have going on is just ridiculous playground bullying and not supported by history?

(Oops, I may have used a "fact" there. That doesn't belong in this style of rhetoric.)

Also, you act just like Hitler used to. I don't have to back that up. It's enough just to shout "Hitler" at you, or maybe just mention Big Lie Theory and let the implication ride.

Now I want all you knee-jerk anti-Canadian, troop-hating, unpatriotic, Hitler-like right wingers to top those "arguments".

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