Why Do Some People Believe Everything That They Read?

Once upon a time, if you wanted to check the accuracy of something that you read or heard about, you would have to go to the library and search (manually) through the encyclopedia, or the microfiche of old newspapers, or even hunt down an expert in the field who could set you straight. It was hard work, but many of us did the work because we didn't want to get suckered by every idiotic statement that someone made in a bar, or (if you were a kid) in the schoolyard. But it seems like, now that we have almost unlimited access to information via the Internet, people refuse to utilize this virtually bottomless source of information and believe the first stupid meme that appears on Facebook. Research is easier than it ever was, although many, if not most, people, use this huge resource to find the first thing that backs up their preconceived notion. What's worse, is that even lazy people have a shortcut to check the accuracy of the crap they read. The best known fact-checking site is snopes.com, but there are others out there who will do the work for you if you are too busy posting cat videos. But even without resorting to a fact checking site it is so easy to do the research yourself that it makes no sense not to.

Ten Commandments

Does anyone really know what the 'Ten Commandments' are?

First of all, there are seven distinct traditions which divide the seven verses in Exodus differently regarding the numbering of the so-called ten commandments.

Almost all (6 of7) agree that the first is "You Shall Have No Other Gods Before Me", one makes it the second, counting the prologue "I am the Lord your God" as the first

Some (4 of 7) count "You Shall Not Have False Idols" as the second, two other combine this with the first and call it the first

The next few have 4 of 7 agreeing, while the other 3 are one step behind:

"You Shall Not Take the Name of the Lord in Vain" is third/second

"Remember the Sabbath Day to Keep it Holy" is the fourth/third

"Honor Thy Father and Mother" is the fifth/fourth

"Thou Shalt Not Kill" is the sixth/fifth, although one version counts it as the seventh commandment

"Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery" is the seventh/sixth, although since one source reverses this and the previous command, it is 3 for seventh and 4 for sixth

"Thou Shalt Not Steal" is eighth/seventh

"Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness (Lie?) Against Thy Neighbor" is ninth/eighth

"Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor's House" is 6 for the tenth (some combined with the following) and 1 for the ninth

"Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor's Wife" 5 of 7 combine it with the previous for tenth and two call it the ninth

"Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor's Stuff" - all call it the tenth combined with either one or two of the previous

(4 of 7 combine all 3 "covets" into #10, 3 combine 2 of them in various ways)

Even though there are actually thirteen commandments, if you count every one that at least one tradition considers a separate commandment, the bible, just before the listing, specifically calls them ten commandments (or words, sayings, or matters), but does not clearly delineate where one "saying" ends and another begins. Maybe whoever wrote it thought it would be obvious, or that it was unimportant. Here they are separated out and listed in order:

1. I am the Lord your God
2. You Shall Have No Other Gods Before Me
3. You Shall Not Have False Idols
4. You Shall Not Take the Name of the Lord in Vain
5. Remember the Sabbath Day to Keep it Holy
6. Honor Thy Father and Mother
7. Thou Shalt Not Kill
8. Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery
9. Thou Shalt Not Steal
10. Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness (Lie?) Against Thy Neighbor
11. Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor's House
12. Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor's Wife
13. Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor's Stuff

Periodically there are legal disputes about posting the Ten Commandments in courthouses and in government buildings. The rationale being that the commandments are all basic moral/ethical stuff and no one should have any problem with them, even if hey did originate in a religious book. There are some problems with that position. Some of them are hard core religious and not just "do unto others..." stuff.

The first three to five, depending on how you're counting, address who you should be worshipping, when you should do it, and how you should talk about the god who is the object of this worship. For anyone who worships a god different from the god of the bible, this is not something that they they would want to do and it certainly shouldn't be displayed in a government setting. If you think that the whole world, or at least the whole country, consists entirely of Christians and Jews (and depending on how you view Allah, Muslims), then you might have no problem with this. But that's not the reality - there's a large number of people who worship or honor different gods (or no gods at all) - in addition there's that pesky First Amendment.

The "covet" prohibitions are also problematic. Most people would agree in theory that these are things that you shouldn't do, but when you get down to it they are prohibitions against thought not actions. So once again, this comes down to strictly religious rules, not anything that could or should be encoded into secular law.

Honoring your parents (unless your parents are evil bastards), no stealing, lying, killing or cheating on your spouse...I'll give you those. The Five Commandments.

Disagreement is Dead

I'm pretty sure that I commented on this once upon a time, how no one talks to each other any more, how we engage in warring memes and refuse to have a real discussion about anything. People post a picture with a caption that reduces a complex situation to a misleading and overly simplistic one-liner, often in a confrontational manner. Then, when someone points out that the meme is wrong, or even that they simply disagree with it, then all discussion is shut down. And that's the best case. Many times the act of disagreeing is treated as an attack or something that one should just not have a right to do.

Maybe it's always been this way and the internet has just made the situation more obvious. After all the adage "Don't talk about religion or politics" has been with us for a long time.

False Equivalency

I've seen several things posted this past week, making a comparison between the shooting of unarmed black men by police officers and in one case, the shooting of police officers in the line of duty, sometimes at traffic stops and in another case, the shooting of a white waitress by three black criminals. The first evidentaly came from a police officer or the family of a police officer making the point that many officers are shot and killed in the line of duty and no one protests; there is little if any media coverage. The writer makes the rhetorical point that maybe cops' lives are viewed as less important than the lives of criminals, or as the writer calls them "low-life scumbags". The other article is a bit more racial in orientation. It refers to a killing of a white waitress by three black men. Similar examples circulated following the killing of Trayvon Martin. The article about the waitress mocked President Obama's comments that if he had a son he would have looked like Martin. The point was that we sensationalize the killing of blacks by whites and somehow the killing of whites by blacks is ignored.

I'll adress the second example first. The majority playing the persecution card is not an unknown phenomenon. The most common example in the United States is the frequency of Christians, the overwhelming cultural and numerical majority in this country, complaining that atheists, a tiny and marginalized minority if there ever was one, are "taking the country away from them". Other countries are not exempt - the huge Hindu majority in India is run by a political party that makes paranoia about Muslims their main policy. The United States is still majority white and its power elites are overwhelmingly white, notwithstanding a half black man in the White House. Yet many white people get enraged when there is news coverage of a white person killing a black person. Examples of black-on-white crime are trotted out as examples of the media conspiracy. But other than the recent focus on police officers and last year's Martin-Zimmerman case, can anyone think of an example where there was extensive media coverage, outside of local coverage, of a white person killing a black person? Can't do it? Me neither, because it's usually not news. The principal reason that Zimmerman's shooting of Martin became news was the highly unusual nature of the shooting. Zimmerman was a neighborhood watch guy, in contact with the police through the 911 operator, who shot an unartrmed teenager who was in his own neighborhood doing nothing but walking home. He was where he was supposed to be and there is good reason to believe that he would not have attracted Zimmerman's attention if he had been blonde, blue-eyed and wering a polo shirt instead of a hooded sweatshirt. Other anomalies can be found here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-cesca/blackonwhite-crime-and-th_b_1521775.html

The other issue is the number of police killed in the line of duty versus the number of police killings of unarmed civilians. There is a hint of "suck it up" in this equivalency. But it is a false equivalency. Police know that they will encounter criminals who will resist arrest and try to kill them. It is not a surprise that a criminal will act in a criminal fashion. As the son and brother of police officers, it saddens me whenever I hear of a police officer dying in the line of duty. But it's part of the job. And police kill criminals every day as well. To quote a few figures that I found while researching this issue - there have been between 700 and 800 killings of police officers nationwide since 2009, that's about 130-135 per year; this figure comes from several websites in support of the police (the FBI reports just 27 for 2013). On the other hand, the FBI reports that in 2013 alone there were 461 reported "justifiable homicides" by police. Some estimates put this figure as high as 1000 per year, since many jurisdictions do not report to the FBI. Taking even this low figure for the police on civilain and the high figure for civilain on police there are 3 1/2 times the number killings by police as there are of killings of police. And of those hundreds of police killings, how many made the national news? A handful? Hardly a media conspiracy.

What makes some of these killings newsworthy is when an armed police officer kills an unarmed man, often in situations that suggest racial profiling if not out and out racism. The Michael Brown case, while there was evidently serious provocation from Brown himself, was in the end another example of an officer killing a man who did not have the capacity for deadly force. Other cases are more egregious and do not have the questions that the Brown case did. We expect the police to act with restraint, to ascertain that there is no other alternative before shooting someone. We expect the police to be trained, to know how to handle unruly or dangerous people. We do not expect them to act like the criminals, the thugs, the scumbags that are gunningb their fellow officers down. We expect them to be professionals, not just, as the character Sam Vimes observers in Terry Pratchett's Night Watch, another gang.

A Religion of Peace? Part One

The first time that I heard the phrase "Islam is a religion of peace", George W. Bush was attempting to forestall a vigilante backlash against American Muslims while at the same time trying to paint our response to the 9-11 attacks as something other than a "crusade" against Islam and Muslims.

The typical American perception of Islam and of Muslims has never been particularly enlightened. The mainstream has never really accepted "the other" in our society, preferring to view the United States as a "Christian nation" while, at best, ignoring the presence of other religions as well as the non-religious. While the images of Muslims post-9/11 became worse, Arabs and other Muslims have long been referred to by derogatory names such as "towel-head",  "camel jockey" and "sand nigger" long before the 2001 attacks.

With some religions which have violent adherents, a case can be made at least for some, like Christianity and Buddhism, that the founders were peaceful men, and that it is only their followers who used violence to advance their cause. This is called the "No True Scotsman" fallacy. It refers back to a apocryphal story about someone accusing a Scotsman of some crime. The accuser is then told that it couldn't be, because Scotsmen don't do that sort of thing. The accuser responds that, yes, the perpetrator was a Scotsman whereby he is told that no true Scotsman would be guilty of such. We see this all the time when Christians do un-Christian things and other Christians rationalize it by stating that they aren't really Christians. Sure, it's a logical fallacy, but the fact that the founder of Christianity was peaceful makes it at least plausible.

The same cannot be said for Islam. Their founder, Muhammad, if he existed as described in the Koran, was manifestly a man who spread his new religion by the sword and his successors did the same. There are numerous sections of the Koran that advocate violence: killing of "unbelievers", killing of apostates, killing of conquered people who resist. There do appear to be sections that advocate living in peace with "the people of the book", i.e. Christians and Jews, but others that advocate their eradication. It appears that the Koran defines "peace" as "The Muslims are in charge and everyone else are second-class citizens (if that)". "Peace" is submission to Allah - "Islam" means submission.

There are certainly many Muslims who are not violent, do not support violence in the name of their religion and sincerely believe that Islam is a religion of peace. It seems to me that, similar to many Christians who cherry-pick their beliefs in order to deny the more unsavory parts of the bible, these "peaceful" Muslims mentally edit out the parts of the Koran that they disagree with or find morally repugnant. I do not believe that all Muslims are extremists,  or are potential terrorists, but the book upon which they supposedly based their lives is a book of violence.

I Feel the Rain

I feel the rain in my mind
slippery wet pavement
anchors my sight
Cloudy skies
will speak softly
and I quickly  know
what I didn't know before

Waiting

Waiting
for the other shoe to drop
and for the lightning bolt
to strike
twice