Let’s talk about George W. Bush’s Department of Homeland Security.

DHS is not, shall we say, value for money. On paper, the idea behind the formation of the agency sounds (aside from the ominously totalitarian-sounding name — nobody but hokey authoritarian movie characters uses the words “the Homeland” in English) like it has some benefits. Why not pull law enforcement and disaster recovery together into one big superagency to coordinate efforts? No doubt this could have benefits: faster responses to looting during emergencies, coordination between law-enforcement resources, elimination of redundancies… what’s not to like?

In practice, however, DHS is a disaster. I cannot prove it, but I suspect that it is a disaster precisely because it was formulated under Bush. The same problems which are endemic within… well, pretty much every program under the Bush administration are in DHS as well.

First and foremost, a majority of the positions created by the new agency are filled by people whose qualifications consist in toto of loyalty to the Bush administration. These are frequently not people who should be in charge of disasters or law enforcement.

This shows in the buffoonery associated with DHS. Consider some of their efforts:

• Failing to help New Orleans — the money goes in, but it doesn’t come out. You may be sure it’s flowing into well-connected pockets, which was probably the intent, but the people who lost their homes (except for those who have given up and left) are living in toxic trailers. In fact, DHS-controlled agencies were involved in turning back refugees from the city during the worst of the disaster.
• Creating rules which deal with liquids on airplanes — we are now “protected” from liquid explosions by DHS requirements that no liquids and gels (other than those purchased at the airport) be allowed onto a plane. This despite the fact that liquid bombs just plain wouldn’t work.
• Foiling a plot to blow up the Sears Tower — of course, it later transpired that the plot had basically been fueled by the FBI agents who had infiltrated the group, and that the closest any of the group had come to planning was to have visited the Sears Tower years before. On a threat scale, these people were somewhat less worrisome than, say, the plan I heard about to smother the entire population of New York by breeding billions of kittens. (The similarly-foiled plot to blow up the J.F.K. Airport seems to have been equally worthless: no explosives, no money, no equipment, no actual plan, just an idea. Well, color me relieved!)
• Random non-mandatory searches of Indianapolis bus riders — hey, the buses are so much safer now. After all, no criminal or terrorist would ever hit on the devious plan of refusing a search and coming back the next day.

Those are just the high-profile items; DHS performs across the board with an incompetence which would be comedic if it were not dangerous. Dangerous because DHS performs a role which I have seen described as “sucking all the oxygen out of that space.” There is only one FEMA. It has been pulled into DHS and turned into another tool of the partisan bumblers we call the Republican Party these days, and now if you are unfortunate enough to live in an area hit by a disaster you get to be processed by these same people. Any attempt to create a disaster relief agency which isn’t part of DHS would be halted because, you see, there is already FEMA.

Along the same lines, there are no anti-terrorism agencies outside of DHS. If these Mack Sennet trainees fail to foil a plot — and sooner or later they’ll come up against a group which is not as incompetent as they are — there are no other groups to provide backup.

The fact of the matter is that DHS is a disaster, run (under Bush) by a fellow who apparently knowingly allowed large payments to go to terrorist groups for years. It combines services which could have run better without interference, such as FEMA, with services which are utterly irrelevant, like the color-coded terror alerts. (When the terror alert is yellow, the government advises us to continue business as usual. When the terror alert is orange, though, the government advises us to continue business as usual. Good to know! Certainly worth spending millions on!)

The rhetoric behind the DHS is a marvel of self-protection. No terrorist activity? Then obviously DHS is doing its job, and should be given more money. Terrorists attack? Then obviously the anti-terrorism forces (i.e. the DHS) need more funding.

This despite the fact that the DHS does a spectacularly bad job. Until the Republican Party lost its majority in Congress, DHS had no plans to protect chemical plants from terrorists, and made its first major contribution to securing nuclear power plants by publishing a list on the Internet of the most vulnerable ones. The Bush Administration was able to create the Republican pork-barrell wet dream which is the DHS because of the September 11 terrorist attack, in which we are told that the terrorists had no weapon greater than box-cutters. After five years, the DHS still can’t even find bombs, let alone box-cutters. The Republicans told us we were getting 24, but what we got was a cross between 1984 and the Keystone Kops.

We shouldn’t be surprised at this, of course. The September 11 incidents were largely made possible through the actions of the Bush administration; even without going into conspiracy theories, it is not denied by anyone that under the protocols used by the Clinton administration, the hijacked planes would have been shot down before getting anywhere near the Pentagon or New York City. It was Rumsfeld who changed the protocols, thus introducing the possibility, and Cheney who kept NORAD from responding in the event, thus turning the possibility into a reality.

After a display of incompetence like that, nobody with a brain would expect the DHS to be anything but a fiasco. Even now, Republicans are actively wishing for more terrorist attacks! It is no longer an exaggeration to say that the Republican Party consists in large part of traitors to the nation.

Believe it or not, though, this post is not about DHS, or particularly about the Republican Party. This post is about religion.

I live in the United States, and therefore my post is primarily, though not exclusively, concerned with Christians, with a smattering of other groups thrown in.

Atheists are often dismissed as “angry,” as though angry people should not be taken seriously. Atheists, according to most religions, are nihilists, despairing of hope, and on the side of evil by default. Atheists, saith (for example) an overwhelming majority of the branches of Christianity, are automatons without real emotions.

This is clearly nonsense, as anyone who thinks about it for more than a few seconds will realize.

Consider: I volunteer at a local food pantry, run by a consortium of local churches and temples. It serves several hundred families in the area every month. The clients are the barely-making-it — people who are getting just a little less cash than they need to survive. We get elderly people on pensions, overworked parents, a few recently-homeless. Some of them come back often, some are able to better their situation and stop relying on the pantry.

The pantry is in dire straights right now. The U.S. economy is in the dumps if you’re poor right now (the rich, as usual, are doing fine). There are roughly twice as many people coming in each week to the pantry as there were five years ago, and ten times as many as there were a decade ago. We have had to introduce a number of restrictions on how much we give away and to whom. In order to give people as much as we did five years ago, we would need to spend about twice as much as we do.

In front of me right now, I have a financial record for a single (recent) year of the pantry. The amount spent on the food pantry was roughly the amount that one would need to make in order for two people to live in this area. In other words: each of the churches and temples could bring the pantry back up to the service level of five years ago if they were more dedicated to relieving hunger than to religious ceremony; all they would have to do is fire the pastor or priest.

The pantry isn’t the only charity in this area which has such a problem. There is a homeless shelter organization in this area. In order to avoid setting off any NIMBY protests, the organization has rotating shelters: each night of the week, a different group of locations is open, always within walking distance of the previous night’s location. Each night, the homeless are served a meal, and allowed to sleep indoors. This organization is also always in dire need of funds — and volunteers.

Do the local rabbis, pastors, priests and presbyters say to their congregations “the local charities need people to help, and we claim to encourage charity work, so I want everyone in this congregation to skip one service out of every four and use that time to volunteer”? How about “we’re canceling our social programs this year so that we can donate the money to relieve the poor”? If the virtues which they so often proclaim were foremost in their hearts and minds, these are the things they would do.

But they won’t. In fact, they are much more likely to threaten you with damnation if you abandon the church for practical charity work. This is hardly surprising. A little thought will tell you that, like Republicans hoping for more terrorism, churches want social problems to exist. If society solved its problems, whence churches? If the world were not seriously, noticeably imperfect, the whole notion of the fall of man — implicit in the Abrahamic faiths — would become very difficult to justify. Man’s reach had better continue to exceed man’s grasp, else people might wonder what a Heaven’s for.

The location of the food pantry, in common with most of the locations used for the nightly homeless shelters, is inside a church. One could argue that the churches in question deserve credit for allowing this.

On the other hand, the spaces being used are terribly inappropriate for the tasks. The food pantry has had to devise several very peculiar mechanisms for moving things around each week which would not be necessary if the space had been designed for the purpose. The homeless sleep in cold, dusty, drafty, noisy open spaces — no dignified poverty there. Respiratory diseases spread between the homeless like wildfire through a forest at the end of a drought. If the spaces had been designed for some privacy and warmth — if, indeed, they had been designed to help the poor, instead of as social areas for the well-off — this would not be the case.

Why is this okay? Why do people not rise up and say “this public building should have sleeping spaces for the poor”? Because the buildings are not homeless shelters and food pantries. They are churches and temples. That’s the only reason, and it isn’t really a very good one.

Religion, like the DHS, merges operations which are in fact independent (such as charity) with operations which are not actually necessary (such as social functions). As with the DHS, these operations often suffer in quality as a result.

But if there is no supernatural entity there to worship, as atheists would have it, churches are temples are needless, while there is an obvious and crying need for homeless shelters and food pantries. The mere existence of a church building is a monument to human misery, mocking the very virtues religions claim to champion. When you see a church, you see a statement: “here may be found a group which would rather participate in ceremony than relieve human suffering.” (This is, in fact, true regardless of whether or not you are a member of the church in question or not.)

And who works at these churches? Well, either the population in general has a much higher percentage of sexual deviants and financial frauds than has hitherto been suspected, or else church employees are disproportionately evil. As St. John’s Catholic Seminary in Los Angeles, 10% of all graduates have been accused of molestation. I hope I don’t need to rehash the recent scandals, but keep in mind that the Catholic church is not the only source of recent depravity, merely the most organized and publicized. (Predictably, among Protestant faiths it appears that the louder a religious leader denounces sexual sin, which usually correlates to how conservative the denomination is, the more likely it is that they are guilty of the sins they denounce.) If there is a supreme deity, he she or it has recruiting skills far below what one would expect from a being capable of creating a universe.

Religion is, furthermore, just as self-sustaining as the DHS. Is your life going well? It must be the benign influence of religion! Have you hit a rough patch? Obviously you aren’t pious enough. Donate more money, sing more hymns, study your scripture more studiously. Of course, as some discover, the church doesn’t offer any help these days if you tithe yourself into debt, and may even ask you to leave.

This extends to corrupt ministers and other initiates: does your pastor molest children? Then clearly he or she (who am I kidding? he) is not truly doing the work of god. No? then clearly he is. The hand of god can only be seen when something good happens, even though logically if god is all-powerful he she or it must be responsible for catastrophe as well as blessing.

Like the DHS, religion sucks all the air out of a space, that space being morality. There is no logical barrier to non-religious morality — just ask a philosopher. But here’s a test for you: what’s the first word that comes to mind when you hear (or, in this case, read) the word “virtuous”? For that matter, would you rather have a doctor who was also religious, or one who was an atheist?

In the event, religion seems to have very little to do with practical morality. Take, for example, doctors: a doctor who claims to be motivated by religion is no more likely to help the needy than one who is an atheist. The Catholic Church has enough money, and enough people willing to do its bidding, to put an end to hunger and homelessness around the world. But it does not do this. Instead, it hoards palaces and art treasures, and stands against birth control no matter how much human suffering derives therefrom.

So, to summarize: church buildings are ineffective at preventing human suffering. They are, in fact, noticeably worse than they would be if designed as secular structures. The people employed in them are often noticeably less moral than the population at large, and attendance inside has nothing to do with practical morality, yet religion maintains a stranglehold on the world’s concepts of morality and charity. This illusion is self-sustaining, as long as religion persists, and religious people deprecate atheists. Furthermore, since religions are mutually exclusive, a majority of existing religions are wrong even if atheists are wrong as well.

I think, all things considered, that atheists have a perfect right to be angry. In fact, it is a demonstration of their high moral natures that they become angry; anyone who failed to become angry under such circumstances must be a nihilist.