According to a study done by the Harvard Medical School, it is estimated that 45,000 uninsured people die every year in the United States from preventable diseases. The Affordable Care Act will help reduce that number, but because the public option was taken off the table, one does not have to look very far down the road to see that Americans will still live under the tyranny of Insurance corporations. It is true they cannot deny coverage, but they certainly can make the premiums unreachable for any condition they do not wish to cover.
Obamacare is not the answer. It is a good thing that fewer people will die, but we need to get to work on the real solution to affordable health care which is single payer. The good news is the bill is already written. It is the “Conyers/Kucinich enhanced Medicare for All” bill. Time to take it off the table and get to work. Every American should receive basic health care. If nothing else, let’s start with saying every child deserves basic health care.
There is an old saying that those who hate sin over much come to hate their own humanity as well. The same warning applies to religion. We all have a duty to debunk superstition and challenge harmful religious beliefs and practices, but we should also remember that rationality is the flower of our humanity not the root.
Our emotional and intuitive roots pulse with life, and can only be expressed in an art some of us call “religion.” As myths remind us, the belief that we can untether the fire of reason from our animal bodies and live in its pure light is as sure path to madness as is the pitiful attempt to deny the truths that reason illumines.
For some of us, religion is the Ariadne’s thread we weave between our highest reason and our deepest animal passions. For some of us, religion is listening to the hymn of the cosmos and making our lives a reverent dance in response. For some of us, religion is the art of making our lives a gift to the world.
It is our duty to challenge religious superstition, but to say we should never be irrational is to say we should not have been born mammals.
We cannot renounce politics. Politics enters the equation as soon as a second person enters the room. That is why if there is a group in our culture that proclaims that they want no government, you can be sure that they consist primarily of white, heterosexual, Christian males. It is not government the group is renouncing, since any power hierarchy is a form of government, they are renouncing responsibility to share power equally with others.
Those of us who are white heterosexual Christian males have been born into enormous and unearned privileges simply by being born into a culture that is racist, homophobic, xenophobic and sexist. When we denounce politics but do not address the hierarchy of oppression, we can bully others merely by claiming the superior status granted to us in our culture’s pecking order.
Affirmative action, workers’ rights, and the protection of civil liberties of minority groups are essential to protect the weak from the strong. We can say we do not care about politics, but politics is how we share power. If we do not renounce our unfair privileges and build protections into our fabric of governance, then we exploit others merely by hiding in the structures of oppression we deny even exist.
There are two mistakes we can make with religious symbols. One is to believe in them literally. The other is to disbelieve in them literally.
I usually avoid debates between believers and non-believers, but this one is fun. Both speakers point out the weakness in their own side and the strengths of the other side. Perhaps if we let comedians teach in our seminaries and universities we could figure out how to get along.
Thanks to David Marks for the link.
http://www.upworthy.com/a-debate-between-an-atheist-and-a-christian-has-quite-a-surprising-result?g=2&c=la2
The GOP is once again using the the concept of religious freedom to assault civil rights. In the past they have claimed a right to deny civil rights to GLBT citizens under the premise that those who have a prejudice against homosexuality should not be forced to sell, rent, or otherwise do business with such persons. And now they are claiming that pro-life insurers and employers should be able to deny reproductive health care insurance to women.
It is a complicated issue to be sure. One the one hand, people should be able to honor their religious consciences. On the other hand, employees and customers should have certain rights, too.
For example, if a religion is racist and believes people of color aren’t fully human, should members of that religion who own businesses have a right to withhold insurance benefits from their black workers? No? Then by what principle does one withhold medical services from women that the Supreme Court has ruled to be a right?
If a religion believes only in divine healing, should members of that faith who own businesses have a right not to give medical insurance to its workers at all? No? Then by what principle does someone get to assert their believe that a soul entered a female employee’s body at conception and therefore she is not free to make her own choices.
I realize the issue is not clear and there are dangers either way we go. I see with 20/20 vision the danger that fundamentalist Christians might have their consciences violated. But fundamentalists also have their conscience violated by modernity and by the scientific method itself. I agree that we should bend over as far as possible to allow fundamentalists to live in the world of their religious imaginings. The problem for me is that the GOP doesn’t seem to realize that the rest of us have rights, too.
“A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. … A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.”<
I got my idea of happiness from Jerry my childhood dog. Every day, when we fed him the same crummy brown food, his tail would explode into joyful spasms of wagging. I took that to mean that he wasn’t comparing the present moment with anything else. So today, if I feel even mildly unhappy, I know it is time to enter more fully into the present moment, and to stop comparing it with imaginary alternatives. Even if I am shoveling my way out of a hole, the secret of happiness is to put myself fully into the digging.
unequivocal adjective
1. leaving no doubt; unambiguous
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has finally released its report on global warming. The report uses a word scientists are very reluctant to use -“unequivocal.”
“warming in the climate system is unequivocal and since 1950 many changes have been observed throughout the climate system that are unprecedented over decades to millennia.”
“Our assessment of the science finds that the atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amount of snow and ice has diminished, the global mean sea level has risen and the concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased,” – Qin Dahe, Co-Chair of IPCC Working Group I
No one should think the word “unequivocal” will be a clear enough word for climate change deniers, but it is clear enough to establish that all the serious scientific voices on the issue have reached a consensus. There will still be mavericks who disagree, but we cannot wait any longer to begin the drastic responses that might save nature as we know it.
And there will still be scientists for hire who will be trotted out for cable news and talk radio, but having a job as a scientist does not make all of one’s statements scientific. The word is in.
The report is included below along with another article on the subject:
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/09/27
Most of the political work I do is with Democrats, but I never forget that the answer to our deepest problems transcend the polarized options of electoral politics.
As Eugene V. Debs put it, “The Republican and Democratic parties, or, to be more exact, the Republican-Democratic party, represent the capitalist class in the class struggle. They are the political wings of the capitalist system and such differences as arise between them relate to spoils and not to principles.”
I disagree with Debs that the parties do not have important differences. But, his point, as I understand it, is that “liberal” and “conservative” are arcs of the same continuum. In this case, the parties do not fundamentally disagree on capitalism and empire. They disagree on how the spoils of capitalism and empire are to be divided.
“Liberal” and “conservative” are important distinctions, but if neither party addresses the true causes of our captivity to monied interests and to war, then our partisan elections are a struggle to decide who will captain a sinking ship.
The following video was made in 2010, but is a nice primer to the history of U.S. intervention in Iran. This history is essential because it helps understand what seems like crazy behavior coming from that region.
Believing any nation’s propaganda is like going to a western that begins with Native Americans as crazed savages and does not tell the earlier history of the atrocities they had endured. The U.S. war against democracy in Iran will always be left out of the official narrative of the United States, so it is important to leave our own national propaganda long enough to listen to what reality seems like from a wider perspective.
The film is just over 9 minutes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WVtpao0KSM&sns=em