C.I.T.O.K.A.T.E.

( My letter to the Illinois Leader. )
( Scott Thomas' personal reply. )

Mr. Thomas,
thank you for sending a personal reply. I understand your concerns, since I am the son of a pastor. Early in life I became a born-again Christian by choice and conviction, although you know I came to different convictions in my adult life. I acknowledge that you want society to be safe in our decisions and you have admirable good intentions, as I did at that time.
Thank you specifically for asking such important questions in your letter. I'm pleased to report that scientific instrumentation verifies that in an advanced fetus, possessing distinct tissues, organs, limbs and other features that an embryo lacks, the lights are on and somebody's home. Did you not know we have the ability to detect the onset of brain waves and even the ability of third-trimester fetuses to learn? You and I agree that a nine-inch trip down the birth canal is not what bestows personhood. Even though the answer to your question is more of a months-long window than a single universal instant, that window has an obvious beginning and end: how can there be thoughts in an organism without brain cells?
This is why one may as well call a human corpse or human sperm a person, as call a human embryo a person. If we are to take the path you advise, we would have to extend human rights to sperms and eggs. They are not from a different species. They are not dead. That makes them "human life," but life in the biological and not biographical sense. If conception is the onset of personhood, why is it that an embryo will just sit there and become nothing if it doesn't implant in the womb wall? They can be kept in a petri dish for a while, or frozen alive, as can sperm and eggs. The morning-after pill, RU-286, merely prevents implantation of this speck.
Your example of an infant is very helpful to my case. As a father, you would surely agree that your infant can not rightfully claim the full human right of freedom. Human parents grant independence gradually through the teenage years. So you are already used to the idea that human rights come in degrees with age. An organism that has not yet grown its first brain cell is not capable of choosing, feeling, thinking, loving, suffering, and desiring. Only people can do that.
This proves that the excerpt you cite from the bible is legendary embroidery. I can't recall from memory of my bible studies and bible college whether or not John the Baptist was even far enough along in pregnancy to have developed limbs to jump with. I understand, from personal experience, that when one's idiosyncratic and arbitrary choice of which holy book to place one's faith in is called into question, this is an instant thought-stopper for a person of faith. I wonder what you would do if you were confronted with a Muslim, a Jew, or a Hindu who would quote their own holy book back at you as a thought stopper and telling you they would pray for you? It's really enough to make me weep when I think about humans not employing the only interface they have-- reasoning with each other. I'm sorry for my choice of phrase "moral incompetence" which obviously has hurt your feelings. Nevertheless, ethics is a skill of observation and reasoning, like arithmetic. And like a mathematical illiterate who only uses a calculator, you exempt yourself from having to practice moral reasoning by getting it out of a book. I really can't describe it any other way.
-Matt

My non-humanist friends are reacting to the outcome of this election with the same stress, fear, disgust and alienation that I experience all year round. The sad thing is, when I have someone else to feel this way with, I'm actually less lonely than I do when they are calm and conciliatory toward our enemies.

It takes the carnival sideshow of politics to bring it out in them. I wonder how long it will last. Why do people get so much more worked up about the publicized struggles of power brokers in Washington, but will be conciliatory and passive with the attitudes of their loved ones and neighbors that make it possible? Do they think we suddenly started living in a state that was against gay Americans just yesterday when Proposal 2 passed? I gave my time and money to stop it because I knew we were living with our enemies all along. I knew because I spend a lot of time in the trenches, in the thick of memetic warfare. What 60% of Michigan told us in unison yesterday by voting yes on 2, individuals tell me personally. "Hearts and minds" is where it counts, but most would rather confront office-holders than confront their families, neighbors and co-workers.

The re-election of a conquering borderline-theocrat and the passing of Michigan's anti-gay constitutional amendment was a symptom. Faith and obedience toward authority is the disease. My non-religious, non-humanist friends treat church as a pastime of harmless personal enrichment. They coddle the childlike trust shown by their friends and relatives as long as it's about something distant and abstract like gods and goddesses, with the idea that it won't connect to create real-world pain. But that's what faith does. Childlike faith and obedience is a relinquishment of personal judgement, of personal responsibility, of self-respect, of personal gain. Faith is anti-human: "mis- anthropy." When this little private misanthropy called faith is lauded as a virtue by our entire culture, how could it not encourage misanthropy to manifest tangibly? I have seen it happen in anyone from Christian Supremacists to Pagan Ecofascists.

They are not as rare as we think. A woman who lives a few miles from me thinks that we should carpet-bomb a random city anywhere in the Middle East until every man, woman and baby is dead-- and she holds to that position staunchly, because in her words, ethnic cleansing is the way her god treated arabs in her Old Testament. We are surrounded in the churches of this nation with the precise moral equivalent of the woman I once saw on television who said, with cowlike eyes full of vapid peace and tepid joy, that her greatest wish is for her small children to die as suicide bombers for Allah. I have heard comparable things from your neighbors and your doctors and your mailmen. It is even on your radio and your television. But we look the other way, out of a misapplied concept of what religious toleration means. Yes, under our first amendment (a triumph of secularism) we should never restrict misanthropic attitudes through legislation. They have as much right to speak and broadcast as anyone. By all means, leave them alone. But those of us who are pro-human should stop praising misanthropic books such as the bible, the quran and the torah. We don't have to pretend it's really OK if you look somewhere in them, "down deep," scraping the bottom of the barrel to make excuses for these books and their gods, and encourage the use of them for some supposed "true" interpretation.

It's time to choose our friends, our business transactions, and our families based on whether or not they are anti-human misanthropes. At the very least, be so unambiguous and outspoken that those relationships will inevitably cool as a result. Otherwise, one is contributing to a climate that condones authoritarianism. Then one can't complain and react with surprise when supposedly Unquestionable Truths are carried straight into the voting booth.

Please visit Faithless.org.

Pardon me while I vent some steam about what I'm feeling right now. ( Read more... )