Deep Thought

The vaccination controversy has bubbled into the blogosphere via McCain and his comments supporting anti-vaccination parents recently. While the usual raft of ‘freethinkers’ and ‘skeptics’ were to be expected, there was also some serious negative attention paid by McArdle and Reynolds. With McArdle deliberately calling parents who refuse vaccinations ‘sociopaths’ amd Reynolds being marginally more kind, but still quite negative overall, I had to throw in my two cents.

Off the bat, I am not anti-vaccination, per se. The Airborne Philosophy Squad (Aristotlean) all have vaccinations against measles, mumps, polio, whooping cough, and other life-threatening diseases. But they do not need a vaccination vs. Hepatitis B, so they do not have one. The odds of chicken pox being lethal are vanishingly small, natural immunity from actually contracting chickenpox lasts much longer (thus reducing the odds of developing shingles later in life) so they don’t have that, either.

Does that make me a sociopath (per McArdle)? Am I ‘marginally educated’ (per Dr. George Milonas)? Am I stupid (per Reynolds)?

Of course, I do not agree with any of these assessments of my decision making. But I am also, perhaps, a bit more aware of what is actually going on with the many people like me that choose to avoid vaccines unless we decide they are truly needed. It’s a little something called risk assessment.

Parents do not have the time or access to carefully evaluate the scientific merits of various claims and counter-claims made by people with the medical establishment and their critics. As a matter of fact, parents that did that the time to do so wouldn’t have much time left to parent. Indeed, the details of medical research are so large and complicated that doctors cannot keep track of everything; why else would groups like the American Academy of Pediatrics feel the need to issue summaries for doctors to use as a sort of ‘cheat sheet’ of current medical knowledge?

Supporters of ‘vaccinate according to the AAP vaccine schedule or you are a Bad Parent’ are doing so because they conclude that doctors and medical claims from doctors are knowledge-based assessments – meaning a belief that the things told to us by research papers and medical professionals are only objective statements of fact. This is the largely-traditional view that medical research and doctors are objective sources of fact that are very cautious in their determination of fact.

Unfortunately, many people have serious problems viewing medical statements as objectively true. Thalidomide is often seen as an initial hammer-blow to the image of the doctor as being the most trustworthy of professions. After all, a widely-prescribed drug had truly horrific effects upon the most vulnerable people in society. As a result, the FDA’s ability to oversee drug safety was increased.

Of course, since then the widely-prescribed Vioxx was withdrawn for causing long-term heart damage; its successor, Prexige, was withdrawn from the market for causing liver damage. Both of these drugs were the subject of medical research, risk assessment, and testing trials before being approved by a number of governmental drug safety review groups around the world. Other drugs approved as ‘safe’ and later withdrawn include the combo called Fen-phen, cerivastatin, indoprofen, Raxar, Raplon, and a host of other drugs have all been approved for use within the last 20 years (usually much more recently), prescribed, and then withdrawn due to serious, often lethal, side effects. And, just to really ice the cake, as the vaccination/anti-vaccination debate was really getting into full swing in the late 1990’s the FDA (and others) approved RotaShield, a vaccine that was withdrawn because of its potentially serious side-effects.

I haven’t even discussed how Thiomerisol has been approved as safe, then withdrawn as potentially dangerous, and then re-approved as safe during the debate over how dangerous it may or may not be as an element of many vaccines.There is also the issue of whether transfats are good for you (as consumers were told for decades) or bad for you (as initial and current research state); what a healthy diet really consists of; whether beta carotene should be used as a supplement or not; indeed, the number of times medical professionals and groups (not to mention agencies like the FDA) have made claims to objective truth only to reverse themselves in the face of new evidence are legion.

As a result, no one should be surprised that the small but certainly non-zero chance that a drug prescribed by your doctor after many research papers and the FDA pronounce it safe has led a fair number of people to conclude that medical claims are not knowledge-based but are, instead, authority-based assessments – meaning claims that are evaluated by your trust of the people or groups making them. In short, the repeated failures of medical claims to represent objective truths force parents to evaluate all medical claims as subjective, not objective; this includes the claims of no link between vaccinations and autism.

Do some parents go overboard? Absolutely; of course, so do some medical professionals. But for the majority of parents  the decision to forgo as many vaccinations as they consider prudent is, indeed, a rational decision.

Will Wilkinson, whom we last touched on about his statements about prostitution, has tried to issue a rebuttal of my most recent post. Since Will has taken the time to respond to me, I will respond to his comments, as well. Let us start where he does.

“This post by one “Deep Thought” is a brilliant example [of being reductionist    about human love]:

This isn’t rocket science; men with easy access to prostitution or to promiscuous women have little incentive to marry. Suddenly there is nothing to offset their legal and financial obligations as a husband – so why take on the obligation? Women who are promiscuous face disease, pregnancy, and emotional trauma – all of them reduce their ability to be a valuable wife.

This probably helps explain what’s going on with prostitution bans, but is it supposed to be a moral reason to endorse them?”

OK, I appreciate his admission that my theory seems valid. After all, if I didn’t think it was valid, I’d have a different one! But his question reveals a lot about what I find wrong with his piece, as I will explain below.

Will goes on to make a semi-funny statement about what the value judgments involved in marriage are like on Planet Dim, then writes this;

“Maybe this tells us something about the great romance of being the mother of Deep Thought’s four children, but for my part, I share my life with Kerry because she is brilliant and exciting and we mesh in so many ways and I love her.”

What this has to do with anything is your guess. Since he seems to be implying that he loves his wife and I do not love mine, let us dismiss it as rather lame ad hominem. This theme continues;

“It gets even more obsessively biological. This is, sensibly enough I suppose, written by a Catholic guy with a theology degree who attends Latin mass and thinks “the Patriarchy, when controlled by Judeo-Christian morality, is a protector of and advocate for women.””

What does my degree, religion, or place of worship have to do with the validity of my theorem? Why, absolutely nothing! Will is not responding to my theory (which he started by admitting sounds valid) but in attempting to discredit me by painting me s a fringe figure. This is a classic ad hominem and tells me Will is reacting emotionally, not actually thinking. As Socrates might say “OK, I am a Catholic – so, what’s wrong with my theory?”

Will quotes me some more, with his own commentary;

““bans on prostitution exist not just to avoid the exploitation of sex workers; they are in place not just because the majority of world religions declare them immoral; they were passed not solely to fight the spread of disease; they were written with more than the goal of reducing the numbers of poor, fatherless children. No, they are there to protect the future.”

Again, I can see the explanatory power here. But to think that this has justificatory power is simply grotesque. This is to reduce individual human beings to tokens of a biological type, to reduce the purpose of an individual human life to a link in a biological chain there is no moral value in forging.”

OK, remember back when Will asked this question?

“This probably helps explain what’s going on with prostitution bans, but is it supposed to be a moral reason to endorse them?”

When he asked this question, he seems to have forgotten that I had written the rather long section he quotes here; I specifically state that this theoretical societal motive I propose is not a moral one! Further, I specifically mention that this motive does not exist alone! Will read this, quoted this, and seems to not understand what it means.

You see, my theory is that societies do not treat individuals as important – they treat the society in which they exist as important. The pro-natalist position of modern Japan is because of the terrifyingly low birth rates of that country. The pro-natalist policies of Nazi Germany were to swamp the world with ubermensch. They are similar social pressure with radically different motivations and very different moral implications.

Societies that want to survive think about the future, and almost always in a far-less-than-conscious manner. The Victorian prohibitions on adultery and prostitution were odd in that the general society discussed the reasoning behind them (a quick summary of which I had in my original piece and was quoted by Will).

Up until this point, I assumed Will simply misunderstood me. OK, the ad hominem attacks were slanting me toward the conclusion that on an emotional level he didn’t like me shooting down his theory. Then came this little tidbit in his concluding paragraph;

“Our duty is to treat one another as free and equal persons, as ends in themselves, which means we are duty-bound not to use people and their lives for purposes not their own. We treat people with the respect they deserve.”

I agree whole-heartedly. But Will was just arguing to allow prostitution to be legal. If there is any situation that treats a human being as a means rather than an end in themselves, is it not prostitution?

As far as I can tell from Will’s response to my article, he believes,

1.      My theory seems valid

2.      My theory has strong explanatory power

3.      I am Catholic

4.      People should be an end in themselves, not a means, unless they are prostitutes

On a personal note: Will, you didn’t bother to ask me or my wife, Deeper Thought, about our relationship before you formed an opinion. To satisfy your obvious curiosity – yes, we are very much in love. Indeed, I think the presence of 4 children underscores our devotion to one another. And, yes, there were value judgments made by both of us before I proposed and before she accepted. Just like with you and your ‘brilliant, exciting, compatible’ wife, Kerry.

In the recent brouhaha over Gov Spitzer, there has been a discussion of whether prostitution should be legal or not. A fair number of people are saying “well, of course it should be legal!” But I think that their arguments are flawed because their premises are flawed.

Megan McArdle, for example, thinks that prostitution is illegal because of, well, an ‘ick factor’, I guess;

“Revulsion against sex work isn’t unique to female prostitutes. We’re also repulsed by men who sell themselves to women, even though there’s a general cultural assumption that a healthy man wants to have sex with nearly every female he sees. Something about sex work violates a deep belief–whether cultural or hard wired I don’t know–that sex should only be traded for affection.”

Will Wilkinson echoes Ross Douthat with the claim that the question boils down to this;

“[R]enting out your body to satisfy another person’s sexual needs is a form of self-inflicted violence serious enough to merit legal sanction …”

Kerry Howley at Reason magazine sorta’ mocks the whole idea with the quote;

“This whole tradition–the idea that women need be preserved in glass so as not to “ruin” themselves, lest they diminish their sexual value by “giving it away”–restricts the lived autonomy of women in ways I can’t even begin to articulate. None of the slut-shaming makes sense unless you assume women live to give themselves to men in their purest possible form.”

Now, I expect the usual suspects to miss this point entirely, but I tend to forget that libertarians also forget that social and cultural norms exist for a reason other than ‘oppress people’. All of their assumptions about why prostitution are illegal assume it is to oppress women, control women, or because of, well, heck – even they aren’t sure!

Here’s the deal, folks – prostitution is illegal for the same reason marriage is a heterosexual phenomena – its about families. Women face social and cultural pressure to maintain sex within the bonds of marriage for the same reason men face social and cultural pressure to remain faithful to their wives – families.

This isn’t rocket science; men with easy access to prostitution or to promiscuous woen have little incentive to marry. Suddenly there is nothing to offset their legal and financial obligations as a husband – so why take on the obligation? Women who are promiscuous face disease, pregnancy, and emotional trauma – all of them reduce their ability to be a valuable wife

[As an aside, I am sick to death of reading feminist blogs talking about how men must have certain attitudes and outlooks if they are to be ‘acceptable’ to women a post or two after they decry the standards men set for women]

Why is society so concerned about the family that up until recently prostitution and adultery were illegal everywhere in the West and divorce was so darned hard? Let me take another side trek.

In 1993 I read a book called The Children of Men. Powerful book with a powerful message. Of course, the movie loosely based upon that book changed the message. Not much of a surprise, really. You see, the book’s message is this; the future belongs to those who show up. If you don’t have kids, you have no stake in the future. If you have kids, you not only have a stake in the future, you can influence it in ways almost impossible to duplicate without kids.

Ancient cultures knew this, as did, say, the Victorians. They also understand that stable families are best for the men, women, and children involved in them. So cultural and social pressures that encourage marriage, childbirth and strong socialization of children while discouraging promiscuity, prostitution, and divorce are stronger and survive as cultures longer than do other societies.

In other words, bans on prostitution exist not just to avoid the exploitation of sex workers; they are in place not just because the majority of world religions declare them immoral; they were passed not solely to fight the spread of disease; they were written with more than the goal of reducing the numbers of poor, fatherless children. No, they are there to protect the future.

Hello, all. Comments are disabled while I get a handle on spam. And you will notice some real changes in the blog over the next few days as I refocus on the original goal of this blog. Stay tuned!

Hello, all; I installed a new comments control wizard and now the spam gets through and comments don’t! Blogodidact and dB0 have either been blocked or deleted and even I have had responses sent to the aether. Please bear with me, I am re-building the comments controls this week.

One of the ideas that has amazed me since long before I was religious was the strict interpretation of the separation of church and state in America. By the term ‘strict separation of church and state’ I mean the concept that religious ideas or ideas perceived as religious have no place in government. This is sometimes referred to as ‘freedom from religion rather than freedom of religion’. One of the more lucid (and I use that term very generously) arguments for this position is found here.

Now, I generally find Austin Cline, the About.com expert on atheism, to be a great resource. By that I mean I can count on him to both provide the argument and make it easy to refute all on one page. He doesn’t disappoint here. His argument boils down like this,

“What freedom from religion does mean, however, is the freedom from the rules and dogmas of other people’s religious beliefs so that we can be free to follow the demands of our own conscience, whether they take a religious form or not. Thus, we have both freedom of religion and freedom from religion because they are two sides of the same coin.”

Not a bad position, eh? Not really. Of course his examples are rather silly and narrow, but they do serve his purpose. So what is my issue with the idea of freedom from religion? Simply this – Mr. Cline and his fellows don’t really mean ‘religious dogma’ when they say religious dogma.

Within religion ‘dogma’ is a pretty specific term; it means “a formally stated and authoritatively settled doctrine of the faith; an immutable, objective defined truth which must be consented to by the will; that which a member of a religion must believe to be true” [definition from my Moral Theology textbook]. For example, as a Catholic, I must believe and hold true that Jesus Christ was truly God and truly human and that Mary the Mother of God was conceived free of the stain of original sin. If I do not truly believe these things to be objective facts, I am rejecting the dogma of the Catholic Church.

  But this sort of thing isn’t what Mr. Cline and others of his ilk are discussing; far from it. You see, no one is in the legislature introducing laws demanding that Americans believe the Immaculate Conception. Nor has anyone heard of pending legislation to impose Sharia law, or mandatory church attendance. And even if they did, the first amendment’s establishment clause or free exercise clause would be used to overturn it virtually immediately.

  Now what Mr. Cline and his fellow thinkers oppose is what almost everyone else would refer to as ‘issues in debate between social conservatives and social liberals’. In short, atheists of the stripe of Mr. Cline are usually referring to gay marriage, abortion, and pornography when they warn of ‘an erosion of the wall separating church and state’.

  I want to pause here and take a look at the elements of the first amendment that pertain to religion, the previously mentioned establishment clause and free exercise clause. The establishment clause is the name given to the statement “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”. This seems pretty clear-cut and the courts have pretty much seen it as clear-cut and apply it in three ways; first, there cannot be a ‘national religion’ and; second, one religion cannot be favored over another; third, a religious idea cannot be supported/promoted/etc. without an identifiable secular purpose. In strict interpretation the courts often play it safe by telling the government to simply not get involved in religion at all except to enforce the free exercise clause. In other words, my previous example of a law that requires Americans to believe the Immaculate Conception would violate this clause because it would make Catholicism and other religions that hold that dogma as, effectively, ‘official’. That’s also why the chaplains for Congress rotate between denominations; the armed forces have chaplains from virtually all faiths, etc. – to not favor one religion over another.

The free exercise clause comes from the constitutional statement “Congress shall make no law… prohibiting the free exercise [of religion]”. The free exercise clause has been interpreted by the courts in very different ways over the years. In the late 1800’s the Supreme Court of the US held that neutral laws that impacted religious practice but not religious belief were acceptable. But in the mid-1900’s the SCOTUS adopted the ‘strict scrutiny’ concept, a rule which meant that the state must prove both that the state had a compelling interest in creating the law and that the objectives of the law could not be achieved without impacting religious practices. Toward the end of the 1900’s the SCOTUS swung back towards its earlier stance and that is where it stands today – in flux.

In the end, the courts are a little fuzzy in what they mean by ‘free exercise of religion’ but pretty clear in what they mean by ‘no establishment of religion’. Perhaps the most critical concept in the American idea of the separation of church and state and the related jurisprudence is the third element of how the courts view the establishment clause – that religious ideas cannot be promoted or supported without identifiable secular purpose.

This is key to understanding where Mr. Cline and his fellows trip themselves up.

This is the clear, legal, acknowledgement by the courts (and, in other works, by the legislature) of something that should be obvious. To wit, just because religious people believe something does not make that belief, the target of that belief or enactment of that belief inherently religious or solely religious. There is an obvious example; murder. Prohibitions against murder and differentiation between just and unjust forms of killing in warfare are key elements of Judeo-Christian belief, and yet I am unaware of any proponent of strict separation of church and state that wants to allow murder just because some Christians see it as dogmatic.

This is where Mr. Cline’s examples of freedom from religion fail; while wearing a yarmulke is an expression of religious belief, wearing clothes in public is not solely a religious concept. Thus, while Christianity espouses the idea of modesty, prohibitions on public nudity are not ipso facto the establishment of a church, the preference of one denomination over another, the imposition of religious dogma on others, etc.

One of the clearest examples of this ‘if religious people support it, it’s a religious idea, thus laws about it are a violation of church and state’ nonsensical thinking is found here. I must admit, at first I was totally baffled by what Monica, the writer, was attempting to say. She freely acknowledges that many of the statistics she cites show that non-religious people support the ideas she believes are a violation of the separation of church and state. But then I realized; she honestly seems to propose the concept of ‘if religious people believe it, it has no place in politics even if non-religious people believe it, too’.  The example that I tried to walk her through, without success, is abortion. The opposition to abortion being legal in America is primarily led by Christians, this is true. This does not mean that opposition to abortion is either a universal Christian concept nor solely a Christian (or religious) concept.

In the first case, some Christian denominations support legal access to abortion in America. The Presbyterian Church (USA), Episcopal Church, United Methodist Church, and United Church of Christ, for example, are all ‘pro-choice denominations’. Considering that these three denominations alone represent the Christian creeds of about 15 million people I would say that it can be argued that opposition to abortion cannot be seen (legally) as a universal Christian dogma!

Further, opposition to abortion is not restricted to religious people. There are atheists and atheistic organizations that oppose abortion to varying degrees. And despite the denials of Monica, there are self-described Objectivists that oppose abortion on proclaimed purely rational grounds, too. This shows that opposition to abortion is also not a solely religious concept.

After looking at these facts (opposition to abortion is neither universally religious nor solely religious) and remembering the judicial tests for the establishment clause and the free exercise clause we can easily determine that laws restricting abortion are not an encroachment of religion into government anymore than laws concerning capital punishment or drinking age are a violation of the separation of church and state. The other topics raised by Monica and others of this school (stem-cell research, cloning, etc.) are likewise not inherently religious matters.

So if the difference between actual violations of the concept of church and state and these issues is so obviously determined, why do so many atheists make this mistake? Simple; they believe it is in their interests to do so.

Face it; in the marketplace of ideas, atheism is losing. Badly. Over the last 40 years atheism in America has looked like the Indians in the ALCS; they came out strong but fell apart pretty easily. The raw numbers of atheists and agnostics worldwide are falling; the population of atheists in particular is in freefall.  As I have pointed out in previous posts demographers show again and again two main changes over the next 100 years: overall human population will begin to decline and the percentage of devoutly religious people within that population will explode upward. These trends seem to be part of the Second Demographic Transition; over time, atheism is dying out as a non-viable ideology.

No ideological group likes to realize that they are failures. By attempting to declare ideas they oppose as a ‘violation of the separation of church and state’ atheists are attempting nothing less than to silence their opponents in an attempt to promote their own ideology to the exclusion of all else. The impetus for this attempt to muzzle opponents is, in my opinion, nothing more or less than fear. Not fear of violence from the religious, nor even truly fear of persecution. Rather, it is the fear of irrelevance in a world that has tried atheism and found it wanting.

There has been a little housekeeping at the Deep Thought Blog today, so please ignore any posts that appear and then vanish. There is a lot of turmoil in the Casa de Pensamientos Profundos - in addition to me not being employed, my father suffered a heart attack yesterday and had emergency surgery to insert a pacemaker last night. I ask you all to keep my father and my family in your prayers.

During the time that some are celebrating the 50^th anniversary of the publication of Atlas Shrugged, le me be so bold as to mention another novel that used the form to discuss politics. Where there were vague elements of science fiction in Atlas Shrugged, this novel was science fiction leaning toward space opera. The novel is Space Viking.

Yeah, I know. The title makes it sound like something from Mystery Science Theater. But this book by H. Beam Piper was his attempt to show that human nature and politics are the same in the modern world as they were in Pre-Columbian America and they will be the same in the distant future. Here is an example of dialog that I have quoted before,

“Every society rests on a barbarian base. The people who don’t understand civilization, and wouldn’t like it if they did. The hitchhikers. The people who create nothing, and who don’t appreciate what others have created for them, and who think civilization is something that just exists and that all they have to do is enjoy what they can understand of it– luxuries, a high standard of living and easy work for high pay… Responsibilities? Phooey! What do they have a government for?
“And now, the hitchhikers think they know more about the car than the people who designed it, so they’re going to seize control.”

Please – take the time. You won’t be disappointed.

I really don’t think much of the Nobel Peace Prize since Arafat won, but the Wall Street Journal really gets it right here.

An interesting piece from the Intergalactic Source of Truth.