In this country, it seems that you can always get an argument going about "race" as long as it is guaranteed to be phony, but never when it is real. Almost every day brings news of full-dress media-oriented spats about Don Imus, Bob Grant, or the recent nonstory about how some golf show had managed to mention Tiger Woods and the word lynch in the same news cycle. The preceding week had involved some trivial but intense parsing of an exchange between Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama about Dr. Martin Luther King. But just let the real thing occur, with a full-blooded and full-throated bellow of old-fashioned authentic racism, and you can see the entire press refusing to cover it for fear of having to confront the real and unvarnished thing (and perhaps for reasons having to do with other "sensitivities" as well).

Gov. Mike Huckabee made the following unambiguously racist and demagogic appeal in Myrtle Beach, S.C., last week:

You don't like people from outside the state coming in and telling you what to do with your flag. In fact, if somebody came to Arkansas and told us what to do with our flag, we'd tell 'em what to do with the pole; that's what we'd do.

This is a straightforward racist appeal for the following reasons:

1) The South Carolina flag is a perfectly nice flag, featuring the palmetto plant, about which no "outsider" has ever offered any free advice.

2) The Confederate battle flag, to which Gov. Huckabee was alluding, was first flown over the South Carolina state capitol in 1962, as a deliberately belligerent riposte to the civil rights movement, and is not now, and never has been, the flag of that great state.

3) By a vote of both South Carolina houses in the year 2000, the Confederate battle flag ceased to be flown over the state capitol and now only waves (as quite possibly it should) over the memorial to fallen Confederate soldiers.

Thus, as well as crassly behaving exactly like someone "from outside the state coming in and telling you what to do with your flag," former Gov. Huckabee of Arkansas deliberately aligned himself with the rancorous minority who are still not reconciled to the idea that South Carolina may not officially consecrate racism and slavery and secession. "Your flag"? What an insult, not just to the descendants of slavery but to the many, many other loyalists and Unionists who fought and died to bring their state back into the Union. And what is the point of the "outside the state" slur? Wasn't this exactly what Gov. Orval Faubus of Arkansas used to say, as if to make it seem that all was hunky-dory in his own tight little dominion until them goddam "outside agitators" arrived? In the end, as Gov. Huckabee may or may not recall, the 101^st Airborne Division, most of them "outsiders" not from Arkansas, had to be sent by a Republican president to integrate the schools of Little Rock. That was a lot of trouble and expense that the big-mouth rednecks put us all to, but it was worth it. It's insufferable to hear this glib idiot make a mockery of it now in order to try to get the Klan vote in South Carolina.

One might add a couple of other points. The political flag of the Confederacy—the so-called "Stars and Bars"—is one thing. The battle flag of the Confederate army; the most militant symbolic form that secession and slavery ever took, is quite another. Under this fiery cross of St. Andrew, the state of Pennsylvania was invaded and free Americans were rounded up and re-enslaved. Under this same cross, it was announced that any Union officer commanding freed-slave soldiers, or any of his men, would be executed if captured. (In other words, war crimes were boasted of in advance.) The 13 stars of the same flag include stars for two states—Kentucky and Missouri—that never did secede, and they thus express a clear ambition to conquer free and independent states. And this is the symbol that Huckabee, seeking to ingratiate himself with the lowest element and lowest common denominator, calls "your flag." You might as well do a cross-burning and have done with it, and we all know how the networks would react if some ignorant kids did that.

But when real political racism rears its head, our easily upset media falls oddly silent. Can you guess why? Of course you can. Gov. Huckabee is the self-anointed candidate of the simple and traditional Christian folk who hate smart-ass, educated, big-city types, and if you dare to attack him for his vulgarity and stupidity and bigotry, he will accuse you of prejudice in return. What he hopes is that his neo-Confederate sickness will become subsumed into easy chatter about his recipes for fried squirrel and his other folksy populist themes. (By the way, you owe it to yourselves to watch the exciting revelations about his squirrel-grilling past; and do examine his family Christmas card while you're at it.) But this drivel, it turns out, is all a slick cover for racist incitement, and it ought not to be given a free pass.

And not merely racist incitement. So slack is our grasp of history and principle that we seem unable to think of the Confederacy as other than "offensive" to blacks. But there are two Republican candidates in this election—the absurd and sinister Ron Paul being the other—who choose this crucial moment in our time to exalt those who attempted to destroy the Union by force, and those who solicited the help of foreign powers in order to do so, and whose treason led to the violent deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans. Should their patriotism be questioned? I would say most definitely yes, and questioned repeatedly, at that, perhaps especially if they are seeking the nomination of the party of Lincoln.

In Washington, D.C., Gov. Huckabee has hired as smooth and silky a pair of big-city insiders as you could meet in a day's march: Ed Rollins and James Pinkerton. Elegant ornaments of many a past administration and many a well-heeled think tank (Pinkerton describes himself loftily as "a Burkean conservative and a Nixonian foreign-policy realist"), they know exactly what calculation lies behind their boss' smarmy appeals to the uneducated racists and losers and to the fools who believe that Adam and Eve were real (and recent) people. But do they endorse his street tactics as well? I, for one, would rather like to find out. Here's a genuine scandal about racism, and waddaya know? My great profession is absolutely determined to overlook it.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2182358/

Book Review: The Portable Atheist

(Author's Note: The following review was solicited and is written in accordance with this site's policy for such reviews.)

Summary: Not "essential" as its title claims, but a usefully broad sampling of atheist thought for the reader who wishes to be better versed in the voices of nonbelief.

The Portable Atheist, edited by Christopher Hitchens, is intended to serve as an introductory guide and perhaps an armamentarium for atheists. The book contains a wide variety of pieces, essays and poems - some original to this collection, most not - written by renowned freethinkers both modern and historical, all of them presenting the case for a godless cosmos in some fashion or another. Hitchens contributes a lengthy introduction, written with his usual brash flair, plus some brief remarks at the beginning of each chapter introducing us to the author featured therein. All in all, there are 47 different pieces, covering the history of dissenting thought from ancient writers like Lucretius, Spinoza and Hume to modern authors such as Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Of course, a writer of Hitchens' stature and contacts was able to secure the requisite permissions; his participation is very likely what made the book possible.

First, the good. One thing that made me especially happy was that, in addition to the prose, the book contained a fair number of freethought poems - some of which were written by authors whose atheist sympathies I had never known about. There's material in here to fill out at least a few more of my Poetry Sundays, and it's a wonderful and much-appreciated reminder that nonbelief can promote a flourishing art and culture, rather than just expressing itself in philosophical polemics.

In prose, there were many superb choices as well. To my mind, the standout pieces were:

• a firecracker of an essay by George Eliot (about which more later);
• a story of David Hume's last moments, written by a religious friend who hoped to see a deathbed conversion from the famous philosopher and went away disappointed;
• an autobiographical piece by the great John Stuart Mill explaining how his father raised him as a nonbeliever;
• a stinging, hilarious piece by Bertrand Russell satirizing the absurd beliefs of his day and of the past;
• an excerpt from Farewell to God, the book written by Charles Templeton, Billy Graham's one-time preaching partner, explaining how he became an agnostic;
• a lecture by Ian McEwan, "End of the World Blues", humorously and informatively lacerating the holders of apocalypse delusions through history;
• and a powerful essay by Salman Rushdie, taking the form of an open letter to the recently-born six billionth human being, stressing the necessity of independent, critical thought and the danger the human species faces from dogma.

All of these are well worth reading, and certainly have the potential to broaden any nonbeliever's mind and give rise to a solid, literate, well-grounded atheism.

Now, the bad. Although for the most part I have no objection to Hitchens' choices, there are a few things I think could have been improved upon.

First - and to my mind the single most glaring omission - there's nothing in this book by Robert Ingersoll! How could any compendium of atheist thought through the ages not include the nineteenth century's most famous and eloquent freethinker? Ingersoll was a prolific author and composed many pieces that would have been eminently suitable to include here, ranging in tone from cutting polemics to laugh-out-loud satirical discourses. He drew huge crowds everywhere he went, he was a friend of the famous and the powerful, and he was undoubtedly the driving force behind America's "golden age" of freethought. I can only imagine that he was overlooked somehow; I hope a future edition, if there is one, will remedy this deficit.

Second: This book could have used more pieces by female authors. Out of forty-seven chapters, only four feature women: a cutting refutation of an evangelical author by George Eliot, a discourse on the philosophy of atheism by Emma Goldman, an essay on non-religious morality by Elizabeth Anderson, and a personal account of deconversion, original to this book, contributed by Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

All four are excellent choices - in particular, Eliot's razor-sharp dissection of the fallacies of a militant evangelical preacher would have made her right at home on Pharyngula or any of the other well-known blogs of today staffed by no-nonsense atheists, and in my mind was one of the highlights of the book. (The preacher's arguments themselves were almost identical to the ones we encounter all the time today from Christian apologists - it's sad to see how little has changed, but good to know that there have always been freethinkers ready to point up the flaws in orthodoxy.) And Hirsi Ali's account of her deconversion, though brief, was incredibly moving and was a perfect way to close out the book.

Still, there are many more female freethinkers who could have been featured here to offset this gross gender imbalance. How about historical authors such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton (like a selection from her "Woman's Bible"), Ernestine Rose, Margaret Sanger, or Madalyn Murray O'Hair? On the modern side, how about Susan Jacoby, Anne Laurie Gaylor, Taslima Nasrin, or Julia Sweeney?

Third: A few of the pieces here could have stood to be edited or removed altogether. The one that comes most prominently to mind is an excerpt from Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan. Admittedly, it does contain some suggestive arguments, but Hobbes strongly claimed to be a believer and we have no definite evidence to the contrary. The book could have stood to go without this one.

Also, by far the longest piece was an excerpt from Ibn Warraq's The Koran. The piece itself was fine, and it's a valuable thing that Hitchens prominently featured the writings of some ex-Muslims as well as nonbelievers coming from more Christian societies. However, much of this piece concentrated on critiquing the Old and New Testaments (to undercut the basis of Islamic belief), which made it seem somewhat out of place. It would have been better edited down to focus on the parts dealing with Islam, which many readers may be less familiar with.

In sum, this book was an imperfect but well-conceived and useful guide to the many voices of nonbelief throughout history. It's not essential reading for an atheist, if only because the arguments made by theists have changed little in hundreds of years, and so our replies haven't needed to change either. Any well-informed nonbeliever will already know how to deal with the religious fallacies challenged and criticized in this book. But it is a welcome introduction to some of history's most famous nonbelievers, including some who deserve to be better known. I look forward to seeing the few omissions in selection repaired in a revised edition (or maybe "The Portable Atheist, volume 2")?

[04-Jan-08 7:24:13 PM] Rational Response Squad says: the second blog about it has been posted, this one highlighting RDF a little more: http://atheismsucks.blogspot.com/2008/01/did-rational-response-squad-claim.html
FWIW: Many of our fans read that hate blog site, and they geerally trust our side of the story
so you've just told the whole world what you think to be untrue and would clearly hurt RDF if there were even the slightest chance that we were telling you the truth
amongst those that know us we're very trusted
i get the feeling you are a christian of some sort masquerading
I will likely file suit against you in the future.
as it's only gonna become a bigger story.
says: also posting of my message with you in a public forum was a federal crime
[12:22:33 AM] Reed Braden says: Really, you need to get over yourself. You used to ride Dawkins to fame and now that's gone. A Skype chat is not privileged information, nor is it secret unless a written pact between the two people chatting is made and logged, stating that it is private. Private message are made public all the time. Mark Foley and all those guys from To Catch a Predator can attest to that. I told you not to contact me and you created another account to do so after I blocked your other username. That's certainly more of a crime than posting information sent to me with no pact of privacy. This will also be posted, although I see no relevance or reason to do so: I think it will make my blog prettier.

"If this news gets out, Richard Dawkins will be nothing tomorrow."
- Brian Sapient

The major reason why different people can have vastly different interpretations of the bible is because they are too lazy to follow a sound, reasonable, objective method of interpretation and to get all the necessary background information. Different interpretations are not equally valid as the relativist claims, because we can approach the bible differently.

For example, if I want to prove that the bible is a source of fanatical evil, like a belligerent atheist, I would go about it as follows:

- completely ignore the fact that some literary styles are not meant to be taken literally

- completely ignore the cultural, socio-political and socio-economic dimensions of the time when the text was written; ignore the intended audience. These may may have a bearing on interpretation, depending on whether selected verses are examples of some timeless principle, rather than a statement of general principle, etc.

- deliberately avoid all verses that when taken literally are contrary or contradictory to my argument

- take a few phrases out of context and place them in a new context (my context of fanatical evil)
- do not quote my selected phrases on their own, paraphrase; do not reference them back to biblical context with hyperlinks
- mix my selected phrases with supposedly authoritative interpretations of those phrases by others -- only those interpretations that support my argument
- present a theology based on only some parts of the bible or a theology that assumes only part of what I present is true (e.g. God created hell, but he didn't send his son to prevent us from going to hell)

- mix my selected phrases with my bullshit -- I'm not here to genuinely, sincerely, humbly learn from others. I'm here to try to make others look bad. I'll ask insincere, loaded, rhetorical questions just to waste your time and irritate you -- the last thing I want is an honest answer. The benefit of the doubt is arrogated to me, the critic, not given to the document itself.

Here's an example that exhibits some of the deception methods above.

Something Paul said that I take issue with:Paul, you claim Jesus' teachings to be moral.

Until Jesus borrowed Hell from the Greeks' Hades, Yahweh was comfortable torturing people on this earth and then just letting them die. But Jesus, ever so masochistically, allegedly invented the concept of eternal, unquenchable, insufferable punishment for the mere "sin" of not believing in what no trustworthy evidence has ever shown.Explain to me the morality in this Nero-esque ultimatum of "Devote every ounce of your life to me, without question, even though I cannot provide any real evidence that I am who I say I am, or burn, not for a trillion trillion trillion years, but for an infinite amount of time."

That's one of the most horrible concepts anyone can conjure up: unimaginable pain for unimaginable time, and it came (allegedly) right out of the teachings of gentle Jesus, meek and mild.Too bad Herod didn't find the baby, else we may have been spared that lovely piece of theology.

Also, how is it moral for God to send himself to be tortured and killed for us when we didn't ask for him to, nor would any of us wanted him to if we were there. If he's judge and jury of our supposed souls, who is he trying to impress? It certainly doesn't seem moral at all to waste time on planning an elaborate snuff job and force all of your followers to genuflect to effigies of a bloody and mangled body when you, as God, could simply forgive all sins without that whole charade.

And don't even get me started on original sin! What an awful and immoral concept!

Let's talk about this bullshit. I'll give the author the benefit of the doubt and assume that he has actually read the bible. That may in fact be giving him far too much leniency, especially since he doesn't cite first-hand evidence (the bible) in support of his view.

-- Jesus borrowed Hell from the Greeks' Hades
What an unethical plagiariser! Is the the insinuation the author is trying to make?

But seriously, don't presume that copycatting has occurred just because a concept found in one culture is similar to another concept found in another culture. You're probably not genuinely interested in the truth, but just let it be known that the Old Testament was translated to Greek in the 3rd century BC. Rather than use the Hebrew word "Sheol" for "abode of the dead" or "underworld", the translators used the Greek word "Hades". Sheol was not like that of the Greeks' Hades, and it existed long before the conquest of the Near East by the Greeks -- it's found in the Old Testament in numerous places. When Jesus talks of Hades he is referring to a place where souls await judgement before going to Heaven or Hell (Luke 16:19-31, John 5:28-29, Acts 2:31, Rev 20:13). In the New Testament that which is called "eternal fire", "lake of fire", "unquenchable fire" or "eternal punishment" (e.g. Matt 25:41-46) is more like a part of the Greeks' Hades -- depending on whose version of Hades you use, although not the same. It too can be traced back to the Old Testament (Isaiah 66:24, Daniel 12:2), as well as Jewish apocryphal texts.

-- Yahweh was comfortable torturing people on this earth and then just letting them die
You're correct, we find that in Wanker 34: 11 [indignant sarcasm]. If you had elaborated on this I might have given a more substantial reply.

-- But Jesus, ever so masochistically, allegedly invented the concept of eternal, unquenchable, insufferable punishment for the mere "sin" of not believing in what no trustworthy evidence has ever shown
The (Hebrew) concept of Hell existing before God's incarnation in Jesus, but it is correct to say that God created Hell through Christ -- originally for Satan and his angels, not for man (Matt 25:41). I suppose what no trustworthy evidence has ever shown refers to Jesus Christ and/or God. You are making an epistemological argument here. God has made himself as clear as light (John 1:9), in his creation (Rom 1:20), in our consciences (Rom 2:13-15), in the person of Jesus Christ and his miracles, and elsewhere, but your ideology won't permit belief.