A Raisin in the Sun

I was raised in the Methodist Church - in a Northeast Methodist Church to be exact. My family went every Sunday and I was required to go to Sunday school even after my Confirmation. I did manage to learn a lot about Christianity - mostly through osmosis probably - and I respect the faith and the teachings (mostly). So you might ask why I do not practice.

In all honesty, I don't have a problem with the more mystical elements like the Virgin Birth, Christ's Resurrection, or the Old Testament teachings (well, there are some stories that I just don't get). My problem is with God. There, I said it. The fact is, that even if He does exist, I can't bring myself to worship Him.

There is a quote from Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun that I loved as soon as I read it and haven't been able to forget about since.

Beneatha: Mama, you don't understand. It's all a matter of ideas, and God is just one idea I don't accept. It's not important. I am not going out and be immoral or commit crimes because I don't believe in God. I don't even think about it. It's just that I get tired of Him getting credit for all the things the human race achieves through its own stubborn effort. There simply is no blasted God - there is only man and it is he who achieves miracles!

Beneatha gets slapped by Mama right after this, but that is beside the point. What bothers me is that God asks us to be humble but requires that we spend some significant portion of our lives worshiping Him. And on top of that, I don't even know what we are worshiping. Am I worshiping a God that allows 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus to be killed in 100 days; a God that allows millions of Jews to die under Hitler; a God that watches as famine, disease, and war (with child soldiers no less) wipe out the most vulnerable among us?

The crux of Christianity seems to be that we created sin, so therefore we are to blame for all of the world's evils. Yet the credit for all miracles go to Him. It has to be one way or the other. Either the human race is responsible for wars and miracles, or God is. I tend towards the former, but if it is the later, then I don't see why God is worth worshiping.

I Still Hate Him

Former VP Dick Cheney has been making press lately by saying that Obama's attempts to roll back some of his administration's worst abuses will make us less safe. This enrages me for a couple reasons.

First, he exaggerates the benefits of using torture and unlimited detentions while ignoring the costs. As we know, torture only creates the incentive for the victim to say what his interrogators want to hear. Sometimes this produces good intelligence, but sometimes not. In fact, it can lead the prisoner to overstate or lie about existing threats (which then further creates the false impression that the torture is working).

More importantly, it completely ignores the effect that our policies of torture have on recruitment of new terrorists. In fact, any security gains policies of torture can achieve are only short-term, while the costs are long term. This works for politicians like Bush and Cheney, who can claim short-term victory, and deny the long term affects that surface after they have left office.

But second, Cheney's statements and the Bush administration policies suggest that security is both attainable and our primary concern; holding to our values and protecting liberties is secondary. The idea that security, that protection from all terrorist attacks, is attainable is false. Once we admit that, that we can never achieve total security, than we must also decide not to sacrifice our values, for there is no payoff.

People like Dick Cheney will always be there, describing our deepest fears and fooling us into thinking that we can be safe. His solution will be through short term policies and sacrificing of our values and freedoms. We can defeat people like that by deciding that our values are more important, and accepting that by living free, we live with risk.

Holy Shit

Holy Shit. This article in the New York Review of Books is infuriating. The article describes a report by the International Committee of the Red Cross regarding the treatment of the 14 "high value detainees" that were until recently kept in secret detention sites outside the US. The description of their interrogations is appalling and very clearly torture. Through all of this, it seems that senior officials were aware of and sometimes directing the torture.

Bush has said that his administration did not torture. But the only way that statement is true is through the cruel and ugly logic of his torture memo, where torture is defined only as causing death, organ failure, or the loss of functioning of a body part. Rejecting that narrow definition of torture, we can accept that Bush did in fact torture prisoners.

Read the article for yourself. And get angry.

Book Report: Chasing the Flame (1)

I am not ready yet to give my thoughts on Samantha Powers' book Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World. I finished reading it a while ago, but I have not been able to organize all my thoughts on it yet. So while I do that, here is a post with some golden quotes from the book (the Kindle is amazing!).

Here is the quote of the book:

To nonexperts, humanitarian action and human rights sounded like synonyms or, at the very least, complements. But he knew that, in the real world, feeding people was often incompatible with speaking out. "How do we reconcile the need for humanitarian access and thus discretion, with the need, sometimes the obligation, for human rights?" he asked a gathering of diplomats from donor countries in Geneva, undoubtedly with the events of Zaire and Tanzania on his mind. "In the face of overwhelming human rights abuses, when do humanitarian agencies withdraw?"

And now some others to get you thinking:

Released from the cold war stalemate, the Security Council of the 1990s had been liberated to enforce international peace and security. But the back-to-back calamities had made it clear that, if civilians were not pawns in a larger ideological struggle, as they had been in the cold war, their welfare would command hardly any attention at all. Instead of using the Security Council to establish and enforce a new global order, the major powers sent lightly armed peacekeepers into harm’s way simply to monitor the carnage. The results were devastating in two regards. First, civilians were murdered en masse. And second, the UN peacekeepers took far more of the blame than the politicians who had handed them an assignment that was, Vieira de Mello liked to say, "mission impossible."

in the 1980s Western governments had spent millions aiding the Cambodian refugees as a way of destabilizing the Vietnam-installed regime in Phnom Penh. But in the Great Lakes area, a region of marginal strategic value, Western governments were not using aid as a tool for promoting their national interests. Rather, they were using aid as a substitute for meaningful foreign policy engagement of any kind. [Something Western governments do way too often.]

He urged UN officials to accept "that humanitarian crises are almost always political crises, that humanitarian action always has political consequences, both perceived and real." Since everybody else was playing politics with humanitarian aid, he wrote, "we can hardly afford to be apolitical."

In 1999 scholar Edward Luttwak published an influential article in Foreign Affairs entitled "Give War a Chance," in which he suggested that aid workers and peace-brokers were prolonging wars that would only end permanently if they were "allowed to run their natural course." "Policy elites," Luttwak wrote, "should actively resist the emotional impulse to intervene in other peoples’ wars—not because they are indifferent to human suffering but precisely because they care about it."

Vieira de Mello wrote a steaming letter to the editor slamming Luttwak’s "simplistic compilation of old arguments and wrong conclusions." He faulted Luttwak for his "uniform picture of war." Since few conflicts tidily confined themselves within national borders, Vieira de Mello argued, turning one’s back on violence would often result in wider, messier regional conflicts. In addition, since so many governments and rebel movements benefited from war, they had an incentive to prolong war on their own. They didn’t need any help from aid workers.

While he acknowledged that humanitarian action could sometimes have perverse consequences, he wrote that "to deny aid altogether is not only unhelpful, it is unthinkable." He noted that he generally valued critical commentary, but he found unhelpful such "oversimplified accounts far removed from the complexities of actual war and blanket statements that lead to quietism." [I have heard this same argument before, and de Mello's response is perfect.]

But he thought the flawed tendency of aid workers to give aid uncritically and indefinitely was a lesser danger than the tendency of rich countries to turn their backs on humanitarian crises altogether.

Only when Western powers stood together unequivocally, flexing their collective diplomatic and financial muscles, did Russia and China come around, as in the Persian Gulf War or in the belated decision to act militarily in Bosnia. But Vieira de Mello knew that occasions would arise when all the Western unity and diplomacy in the world would not change their views. In those circumstances, he was prepared to admit, exceptional emergencies might require a "coalition of the willing" to bypass the paralyzed Council. Ever so rarely, the urgency and legitimacy of the cause could excuse the illegality of the procedures. [Notice how this echoes the US justification for Iraq - without the legitimacy of the cause.]

He adopted a formulation common among those who supported NATO’s action but were nervous about its implications: The war was illegal (under the procedural rules of the UN Charter) but legitimate (according to the substantive ideals the UN was trying to advance).

he also did not understand why disarmament was a key item on the Security Council checklist while human rights were not. "A regime that can grossly violate the rights of its own people is ipso facto a threat to its neighbors and to regional and international peace and security," he insisted.

He knew that the organization he cherished was at once an actor in its own right and simply a building, no better or worse than the collective will of the countries that constituted it.

but he never imagined that U.S. planners would think so little about the peace [in Iraq]. Surely, he thought, they had watched as UN peacekeepers foundered in their "morning after" efforts to maintain order in the 1990s. Surely the Coalition would take precautions to stave off the kind of chaos that could be far deadlier than anything a regular army could unleash. Surely they would understand that establishing human security was a prerequisite to achieving other aims.

In 2000 he had embraced a new norm first put forth by an independent commission: the "responsibility to protect." The first responsibility to protect individuals from violence fell to those individuals’ government, but when that government proved unable (in a failing state) or unwilling (in a repressive state) to offer such protection, then the responsibility vested upward to the international community, which had a duty to mobilize the means to stop mass murder.

This last quote is amazing.

Book Report: Shia Revival

I finished reading The Shia Revival by Vali Nasr. The book mostly focuses on the conflict between Shia and Sunni faiths, with an emphasis on Shiaism, and includes a brief history of Islam (again, with a focus on Shiaism). The book is well written and so it was a quick read.

I learned two main things from this book. First, our understanding of the Middle East and their politics, as covered in the press, is highly skewed. Who we see as the villains and heroes depends on who likes us and who does not. In the past we have seen Iran as a villain and Saudi Arabia as a hero. In fact, as 9/11 taught us, it should be the other way around. We even judge Iran's democracy more harshly because of our relationship with them and yet don't judge Saudi Arabia's repressive government.

The author sees all developments in the Middle East through the lens of Shia and Sunni interactions (conflicts) and that other issues are often pawns in that interaction. An Iraq with closer ties to Iran can counter strength of Sunni governments, whose oppression and intolerance have a negative impact on the region (which is not at all how the US press sees it). Also, the Israel / Palestine issue is manipulated to garner popular support and strength in the region.

The book manages to provide a much more nuanced, and less negative, view of Shias and Iran specifically. Unfortunately, I do not think Americans are ready to accept that view.

The second thing I learned was of course how similar Islam and Christianity are when you contrast their histories. Both religions have had to respond to oppression against their faithful. Early Christians choose martyrdom (a really good analysis of the Gnostic Book of Judas suggests the author believed that martyrdom was against God's will - leading sheep to the slaughter) as a way to promote the faith. In the face of oppression, Shias have at times chosen martyrdom (as the celebration of Ashora remembers) at times modified their faith, and at times simply withstood the oppression.

Both faiths have had to deal with modernization as well, although it seems Islam has had the greater challenge since the modern world has seemed to leave Muslims behind. This debate largely revolves around traditionalism versus change. The faiths also face(d) conflicts over who should lead the faith and who should lead the government - and whether those two should be the same.

The issue that really struck me though was how the religions debate internally whether individual piety or social justice is more important - essentially whether the faith should be inward looking or outward looking. Around the 1950s, Shia clerics argued that the faith was too focused on piety and did not do enough to fight for changes to make people's lives better. Through these teachings, these Shias were arguing for revolution and social change - some argued in support of communism.

This book is a must read because it can both humanize Shias and help people to think about our role in the Middle East differently. We should be supporting states based not on their rhetoric towards us, but how their actions affect us and their own people. Also, by better understanding the power plays between Sunnis and Shias, we can better manage issues and conflicts in the region.

Economy, Interest Rates, and Cycles

As I have been thinking about the economic crisis, one thing keeps nagging at me. I have thought for a long time that interest rates were too low, and yet they kept getting lower. The constant lowering of interest rates during high growth seemed to have been an attempt to maintain growth and prevent a recession. And that decision was made on the assumption that we could actually prevent recessions.

This article in the Atlantic however suggests that the normal business cycle (boom and bust) still exists and maybe always will - that we have not conquered it. So maybe we should have raised interest rates during high growth instead of lowering them to maintain the high growth. By lowering them further while we were growing, we not only created a bubble, but removed one major mechanism we have for getting ourselves out of the recession. Interest rates cannot be lowered further, so the Fed is left with creative but risky mechanisms to get the economy going again.

There has been a lot of talk about lax regulation under Greenspan, and rightly so. But I think the Fed's policy on interest rates needs to be considered as well.

Gay Marriage: What Does the Bible Say?

Newsweek recently had an interesting article focusing on gay marriage. The article tried to engage with Christian arguments against gay marriage, instead of simply dismissing the Bible as an invaluable place to derive policy. Overall, the author made some good points, but oversimplified others. At the same time, I don't know how you can really engage in a discussion on textual teachings of the Bible and be thorough while also meeting space constraints of a Newsweek article.

Her first point, and what I have come to believe, is that most people who oppose gay marriage cannot do it using Biblical textual literalism, since almost no one actually follows all things taught in the Bible. Modern Christians regularly disregard teachings from the Old Testament, especially Leviticus, one of the few places male homosexuality is mentioned.

So if textual literalism is not driving Christians to oppose gay marriage, what is? The common response is support for a traditional family. It is this part of the argument where the author oversimplifies. She looks back to the Old Testament families (especially Abraham and Jacob) and suggests that since they had multiple wives, than the Bible cannot be the source of a focus on the one male - one female family unit. This argument does not make sense if we see that the teachings of Jesus often conflict with, and probably were meant to change, teachings in the Old Testament. The loving and peaceful Jesus was very different from what appears to be a vengeful Old Testament God. So if Jesus did preach about family units, than Jacob's multiple wives doesn't matter as much.

Unfortunately, I don't know as much about all of the teachings of Jesus, so I don't know what focus he put on families. But from what I understand, his (and Paul's) opposition to divorce is far stronger than opposition to gay relationships (the author rightly mentions this as well). So this begs the question - why does modern Christianity put far more focus on gay marriage than on actually dealing with the bigger problems facing what the Bible upholds as the traditional family unit? Through this lens, it seems like bigotry masking itself as righteousness.

If Christians really want to focus on strengthening families, then they need to focus on things that are actually affecting families. If high divorce rates and single family households are contrary to what the Bible upholds as the correct family unit, then Christians should deal with these issues, which are not related to homosexuality at all.

The bottom line is that opposition to gay marriage makes little sense even if you accept that the Bible can be a reasonable place to draw moral lessons. Almost no one can claim they are Biblical literalists and looking at the spirit of the text gives no clues to understand why opposing gay marriage should be a major focus of Christians hoping to protect families.

Book Report: The Bottom Billion

I read Paul Collier's The Bottom Billion a while ago, but never published this post. I did however publish a joint book report on this book and The End of Poverty over at the short-lived human rights blog. I have been reading (slowly) all of the popular books on development, and this was the one I started with.

To summarize quickly, Collier takes a very pro-growth position on how to improve the countries in the bottom billion - the worst performing countries. He uses statistical modeling to look at what factors affect growth, and he finds that being landlocked, resource rich (oil or diamonds for example), recent conflict or coups, and poor democracy - especially lack of an open press all have negative correlations with growth.

His solutions therefore are to promote democracy, export diversity, and international intervention during / following conflicts. I can agree with all of these, especially intervention. I firmly believe that more peacekeeping missions are both good for stability (obviously) but also a moral necessity to protect the victims of conflict. Sound democracy is hard to argue against also, since it can lead to pressure on the government to make good decisions. And countries with one major commodity can see their revenue misused and their exchange rates harmed (international aid can have the same impact).

I fear that I am oversimplifying, as well as leaving things out. I don't have the energy right now to really get into the details of his economic proposals. The point though is that he analysis made sense, but it seemed both too broad and quick, as well as somewhat cold in its tone. His arguments were all about economics, to the point that his main concern was to see positive growth that might get these countries out of their horrible situation over 20 years or so. What he didn't focus enough on was what to do right now to improve their situation. Their conditions are so horrible that we need equal focus to long term solutions and short-term fixes and I felt that his book was mostly focused on the long term.

The Only Cure for Steroids

I have been despondent about the ability of steroids testing to ever keep up with the cheaters. I believed that the cheaters would always have more resources than, and therefore be multiple steps ahead of, the testing agencies. I still think this is the case. But I recently came across a testing policy that would actually combat this and could be a real deterrent for steroids use. Here is the most important part of the proposal, via Freakonomics:

An independent laboratory stores urine and blood samples for all players, and tests these blood samples 10 years, 20 years, and 30 years later using the most up-to-date technology available.

He has other suggestions, but this is the best one. Cheaters know they can beat the system now, but they also must know testing will eventually catch up to their methods years from now. The next step would be to incorporate clauses in contracts that impose penalties years later if positive results come back years later.

This is the only method that would actually be effective. And the fact that we don't see it, and won't ever see it, shows me that baseball is not actually committed to ending steroid use. The unions would never allow it, and Major League Baseball will never push hard for it. What a shame.