The End of the Future of Reason:

Everything of value that people get from religion can be had more honestly, without presuming anything on insufficient evidence. The rest is self-deception, set to music.

Out further still, one meets religious moderates and liberals of diverse hues — people who remain supportive of the basic scheme that has balkanized our world into Christians, Muslims and Jews, but who are less willing to profess certainty about any article of faith. Is Jesus really the son of God? Will we all meet our grannies again in heaven? Moderates and liberals are none too sure.
Those on this spectrum view the people further toward the center as too rigid, dogmatic and hostile to doubt, and they generally view those outside as corrupted by sin, weak-willed or unchurched.
The problem is that wherever one stands on this continuum, one inadvertently shelters those who are more fanatical than oneself from criticism. Ordinary fundamentalist Christians, by maintaining that the Bible is the perfect word of God, inadvertently support the Dominionists — men and women who, by the millions, are quietly working to turn our country into a totalitarian theocracy reminiscent of John Calvin's Geneva. Christian moderates, by their lingering attachment to the unique divinity of Jesus, protect the faith of fundamentalists from public scorn. Christian liberals — who aren't sure what they believe but just love the experience of going to church occasionally — deny the moderates a proper collision with scientific rationality.

Sam Harris/LATimes/CommonDreams 16.Mar.07
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Everything that people get from the grocery store can be had more readily, more healthily if they grow it themselves. Without relying on faceless corporate entities that don't have their best interests at heart.

Of course they'll have to actually grow it, which takes time and depends on things like rain and frost etc. and if we shut down the grocery stores tomorrow there's going to be hell to pay until that all gets sorted out, because the transition will be neither smooth nor timely in its completion.
Theoretically science, or scientific reason, or rationalism, or rational/positivism, or some form of non-metaphysical, non-faith-based, non-outside-the-system-ish thought can as readily come up with a moral system whose laws and spirit - or whatever we're going to call that intent behind the making of regulations - will be more tuned to the exigencies of human life on earth as it is actually lived, now, and as it will be lived once we get all this religious claptrap out of the way.
Theoretically, sound reason will make better laws than mumbo-jumbo ever could. Of course it will.
But you better hurry up and get them in place, because everything that drives your scientific engines is coming directly out of the bizarre yet complex social architecture religion has made possible over the years and centuries. And every single last one of the hunter-gatherer societies that preceded whatever this is, or that parallels it out on its margins, had or has religion of some kind holding it together. In case you were thinking of some kind of retro-atavistic fall-back-and-start-over high-tech nomadic clad thingie.
But hey you can do it, in spite of the odds and obstacles. Have at it.
I have a few questions though.
Do you think that'll be before, or after Bush invades Iran at the behest of the delusional religionists that pull his strings behind the scenes?
Is there a "continuum", or a "spectrum" just like the ones Harris draws for believers, on the rational side of the polarity? Where the fanatics of the rational, like Joseph Mengele and Sidney Gottlieb and thousands of more anonymous but equally heartless scientific pragmatists take shelter in the benevolent shade of "progress"?
Does science have a justification, outside the burrows of academia and its erudite suburbs for placing rationality above delusional belief?
Evolution doesn't, we know that. We know evolution's all and only about success, through any means. Thus the poisonous frog, the poisonous butterfly and the not poisonous butterfly but looks-just-like-it. The carnivorous plant, with its enticing trap. The leaf-colored snake. The liar, the con-man, the politician, the - well you get the idea. Nothing in nature says you have to tell the truth. Nothing in nature says telling the truth will even improve your odds of surviving. That's beaten into you at school, or in church, or at home, and home and school's the only places that holds - the real world doesn't care if you're honest or not
But don't let that stop you. Honest people have just as much right to live as bullshit artists, any day. Will we have some Inquisitional determinations? Will it be against the law to teach kids to believe in an afterlife? Since we have no rational basis, no proof of that other world. The main complaint against religious delusion is it doesn't work - for the complainers. It works for the delusional, so where's that argument?
How hard is it to imagine a sci-fi dystopia where rationalism's the dogma, and scientists its priests, and heresy condemns you to the primate "research" camps? Will our new morality cover that specifically and strongly enough to protect us, the way compassion as dogma has protected us from at least some of the degradation of inhuman cruelty?
And how many people will be allowed to continue, you know, existing, once the rationalists assume control and it becomes clearly obvious there's way too many of us humans around demanding resources of which there aren't enough?
Ever stop to think maybe the delusionalists recognize that cull sitting just over the horizon, before you even think of it?
That that may be the single biggest payoff religion's providing them? Protection.
Survival. Hey.
Everybody's raison d'etre, c'est vrai.

Love in its anatomical connections:

o, the seat of love, in the female head
from Artwork Archival Objects list
at EugenicsArchive 
 Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory's Image Archive on the American Eugenics Movement
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Francis Galton's right hand print
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Wild men within commuting distance
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Carrie and Emma Buck at the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, taken by A.H. Estabrook the day before the Buck v. Bell trial in Virginia 1924
(Buck v. Bell was the occasion for Oliver Wendell Holmes' infamous "three generations of imbeciles are enough")
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paranoia

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Reading "Against Their Will" by Hornblum, Newman, and Dober
( firedoglake book salon with authors/brief review at Philly.com)
One of the more unsettling, and personally interesting, facts presented in the first couple chapters is that while the Nuremberg Doctor Trials were happening, while they were happening, American doctors were conducting human experiments on a large scale, invisibly, using the institutionalized populations of prisons, mental asylums, and orphanages. Orphanages.
 The German doctors had mixed fates, seven acquitted, seven executed, and nine got ten to life in prison. Joseph Mengele, the most heinous, escaped, twice.
The American doctors made bank and professional status, and kept on with their research and experimentation.
The confluence of the behaviorist data garnered by the inhuman science of the Nazis, transferred in bulk to the US and its Allies post WW2, with the eugenic philosophy that was seemingly unfettered by personal or collective conscience, and evidently rampant in the 50's and 60's US medical research community - "Think of the lives we're saving!" - is most interesting to those of us who grew up during that time.

Noble joined other former cult members and experts at APA's 2002 Annual Convention in Chicago during the session "Cults of hatred" to speak out on the effects of mind control and destructive cults. Panelists made a plea to the association to form a task force to investigate mind control among destructive cults.

"Extreme influence [such as mind control and cults] has remained dormant in the field of psychology," Alan W. Scheflin, professor of law at Santa Clara University, told the audience.

Mind control, or "brainwashing" as it's commonly referred to by the media, is often viewed by many psychologists as science fiction. However, panelists stressed that mind control is being used by cults to recruit and maintain followers and can have dangerous and lasting psychological consequences.

Cults that use mind-control techniques "have been able to do so with impunity, and the people who are victims of these techniques get no treatment," Scheflin said.

{ "dude. and you know what else? you can't be hypnotized to do something you wouldn't normally do. no, seriously man, I read it in Time or Newsweek or something. twice"
this is the most egregious hogwash. the supposed 'dormancy' of 'extreme influence' research is because the practitioners were being recruited from the same institutions that the field of psychology draws its recruits from, and this evil can't or at least couldn't exist in the light of day, and it was being funded where mainstream psychology also gets its support.
from Mengele and the stinking darkness behind him right through the 'Phoenix' and 'Artichoke' and whatever else programs, and on, to the present day. these areas are not dormant.
as though a means of completely controlling people's minds would be ignored by the scum that would implement Agent Orange or atomic weapons, that would run the School of The Americas, that would do all the satanic things that are being done, now, but no, not that.
no, only Sci*******y does that. and Koresh. and um....Jim Jones and ....uh.....Manson....and um.....uh.....them Raelians and ...um.....I feel odd, suddenly...........what were we talking about?}

Bible Study, rivers:

Look now toward heaven, and tell the stars,
if thou be able to number them:
and he said unto him, So shall thy seed be.
[...]
And it came to pass, that, when the sun went down, and it was dark,
behold a smoking furnace, and a burning lamp that passed between those pieces.
In that same day the LORD made a covenant with Abram, saying,
Unto thy seed have I given this land,
from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphra'tes
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Woe to the land shadowing with wings, which is beyond the rivers of Ethiopia: that sendeth ambassadors by the sea, even in vessels of bulrushes upon the waters, saying, Go, ye swift messengers, to a nation scattered and peeled, to a people terrible from their beginning hitherto; a nation meted out and trodden down, whose land the rivers have spoiled!
All ye inhabitants of the world, and dwellers on the earth, see ye, when he lifteth up an ensign on the mountains; and when he bloweth a trumpet, hear ye.

Isaiah 18
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And a man shall be as a hiding place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest; as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.
And the eyes of them that see shall not be dim, and the ears of them that hear shall hearken.
The heart also of the rash shall understand knowledge, and the tongue of the stammerers shall be ready to speak plainly.
The vile person shall be no more called liberal, nor the churl said to be bountiful.
For the vile person will speak villainy, and his heart will work iniquity, to practise hypocrisy, and to utter error against the LORD, to make empty the soul of the hungry; and he will cause the drink of the thirsty to fail.
The instruments also of the churl are evil: he deviseth wicked devices to destroy the poor with lying words, even when the needy speaketh right.
But the liberal deviseth liberal things; and by liberal things shall he stand.

Isaiah 32
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By the rivers of Babylon,
there we sat down, yea, we wept,
when we remembered Zion.

We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.
For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song;
and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying,
Sing us one of the songs of Zion.

How shall we sing the LORD's song in a strange land?

If I forget thee, O Jerusalem,
let my right hand forget her cunning.

If I do not remember thee,
let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth;
if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.
Remember, O LORD, the children of Edom
in the day of Jerusalem;
who said, Rase it, rase it,
even to the foundation thereof.

O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed;
happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us.
Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth
thy little ones against the stones.

Psalm 137
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And it came to pass at the end of two full years, that Pharaoh dreamed: and, behold, he stood by the river.
And, behold, there came up out of the river seven well-favored kine and fat-fleshed; and they fed in a meadow.
And, behold, seven other kine came up after them out of the river, ill-favored and lean-fleshed; and stood by the other kine upon the brink of the river.
And the ill-favored and lean-fleshed kine did eat up the seven well-favored and fat kine. So Pharaoh awoke.
And he slept and dreamed the second time: and, behold, seven ears of corn came up upon one stalk, rank and good.
And, behold, seven thin ears and blasted with the east wind sprung up after them.
And the seven thin ears devoured the seven rank and full ears. And Pharaoh awoke, and, behold, it was a dream.
And it came to pass in the morning that his spirit was troubled; and he sent and called for all the magicians of Egypt, and all the wise men thereof: and Pharaoh told them his dream; but there was none that could interpret them unto Pharaoh.
Then spake the chief butler unto Pharaoh, saying, I do remember my faults this day:
Pharaoh was wroth with his servants, and put me in ward in the captain of the guard's house, both me and the chief baker:
and we dreamed a dream in one night, I and he; we dreamed each man according to the interpretation of his dream.
And there was there with us a young man, a Hebrew, servant to the captain of the guard; and we told him, and he interpreted to us our dreams; to each man according to his dream he did interpret.

Genesis 41
also: Genesis 31
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AMY GOODMAN: This latest story, the Anti-Defamation League calling on Georgia State Rep. Ben Bridges to apologize for a memo distributed under his name that says the teaching of evolution should be banned in public schools, because it is a religious deception stemming from an ancient Jewish sect. The memo calls on lawmakers to introduce legislation that would end the teaching of evolution in public schools, because it's "a deception that is causing incalculable harm to every student and every truth-loving citizen."

CHRIS HEDGES: And there's a bill now in the Texas state legislature that will abolish all mention of evolution in school textbooks and make Bible study mandatory in public schools. And the role of creationism is extremely important in this movement. It's not just wacky pseudoscience. It is really a war against truth. It is not about presenting an alternative. It's about saying facts are interchangeable with opinions, that lies are true, that we can believe whatever we want. And once they successfully elevate creationism, which, of course, is a myth - I mean, teaching creation out of the Book of Genesis is an absurdity. The writers of the Book of Genesis thought the earth was flat with rivers of above and below us. But what it does is destroy the possibility or sanctity of honest, dispassionate, intellectual and scientific inquiry. And when they do that, they have made a huge step towards creating a totalitarian state.

Democracy Now! 19.Feb.07
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"Tomorrow is zero hour"
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I'm still having trouble integrating the rational scientific world-view with my admittedly vestigial but still-functioning moral sensibilities.
Why exactly is fascism wrong? From a scientific p.o.v. I mean. I can see where it would be a problem for individual scientists, it's hard to imagine Einstein or Huxley campaigning for Dick Cheney or his chosen successor, but Joseph Mengele's a fine example of adaptation and mutual benefit to a fascist government by an amoral investigator of life's mysteries.
Also who can forget stunning Sidney Gottlieb, hero of applied behaviorist methodologies, right in there cheek by jowl with the big guns of the American Herrenvolk, making the world better for good people.
Asking science to weigh in on moral questions like totalitarianism v. democracy is like asking a biologist to make a moral distinction between two species competing for the same niche.
This makes it a task of religion, or some humanist analog of religion, to decide and resolve moral questions.
But Hedges says, correctly, that the Christian right is itself the wide fuse through which the black flower of theocratic fascism is being driven. And there doesn't seem to be much possibility of a united humanist anything to oppose it, let alone convincing moral dogma with an enforcement arm capable of withstanding that God-given nightmare of children-of-the-corn style hive-mindedness. Better maybe to tear it down and build something from what's left. Tear it all down, and hope enough gets through to carry the dream.
And that's where we go back to Genesis, and Hedges' all-too-common facile dismissal of what's there. The first thing rational minds trip on is the compare-and-contrast between our perceptual array now and theirs back then, along with their respectively inferior processing capabilities. Bunch of grubby sheep-herders living in tents and making up stories about what little of the world they can see from where they are, without instruments or anything but the most rudimentary records, versus our near-occult grasp of the stellar firmament, and the tiny building blocks of everything nearly under our control, and hundreds of years of detailed research and painstakingly recorded minutiae. Their world-view compounded of ignorance, superstition, wishful thinking, and a smattering of the undeniable, ours the constantly refining evidence from our constantly refining instruments. The parallel would be that both systems are investigating something infinite and eternal, and in that context they're far more equal than not. Plus the writers and credulous believers of Genesis insist it's coming from out of the infinite and eternal.
What I'm trying to say there is the simplicity of the people back then doesn't preclude them having access to dreamtime instruction, input from outside the system, which it is purported they do, though they mask it, dress it up as communication from the one and only deity before which all others must fall, and the inconsistencies of that deity make it look intellectually indefensible - so rational minds discount the entire message.
But it's only irrational, and therefore inferior, in some abstract discourse. On the ground, science tells us, nature favors what works and disregards what doesn't. Rationality's only a generally superior method, not always - just most of the time.
Maybe theocratic fascism works, just not for you. Or maybe humanist fascism, or ethnic fascism, or some new form that coalesces unaffiliated mindless around the need to live as a big functioning kick-ass thing.
Then what? It would help to have a few thousand years of religious dogma telling you you're the chosen people of the one true ruler of everything, but that would be the Jews, not fundamentalist Christians, unless it's a mistake and the message was actually intended for the Christians and was just intercepted by the Jews. But either way you can see how that would help with the problem of foundational premise. Because what's needed is assertion not explanation. Out there past logic and morality, out where it's nothing more or less than the will to be that keeps you here. That's the issue all around, isn't it? People feeling like somebody else wants them gone? Some of that's true.
It could be more a question of replacing one kind of theocracy with another. Get the Christian right-wing to build the theocratic super-state, then step in quietly and take it away from them. Hostile takeover on the q.t.
Maybe that's what we should do, instead of opposing everything and not having much to offer in return. Easier than tearing down the biggest security apparatus the world's ever seen. Much easier than getting an alternative moral system up and running in the little bit of time we have. Replace the Judeo-Christian moral shipwreck with one that defends more than its own desperately collapsing self. One that says nobility is more valuable than anything, even survival, that integrity is worth sacrificing everything for, that those who choose craven acts to ensure their own squalid lives, who choose to sacrifice integrity and nobility for mere survival will always bear the mark of that flaw, numberless as the stars though they may be.