Waiting for the Right Time

The Centers for Disease Control reported in August 2006 that fewer U.S. high school students are having sex, and the ones who do are less likely to have multiple partners, reports ABC news. In a 2005 survey, 46.8 percent of students said they engaged in sexual intercourse, which is down from 54.1 percent in 1991.

Figures for 2007 indicate that more students are waiting until marriage for sexual intercourse; the reasons seem to be split: some because of fear pregnancy or sexually transmitted infections, others because they intend to have a satisfying and successful marriage based on mutual respect.

God, Money, Education, and Love

Most people who are married, or who are going to be married one day, don't want to be divorced. But how can you improve your chances of having a successful marriage?

Researchers investigating marriage and divorce have stumbled upon a peculiar phenomenon. Couples who attend church together are more likely to stay together than couples who attend separately. Edna Brown, a former psychology research fellow in U-M’s Institute for Social Research now at the University of Tennessee, led a team as part of the Early Years of Marriage project, which has followed 373 couples since 1986.

Remarkably, though there’s a distinct difference between couples who do and do not attend church together, the study found no difference in divorce rates between those individuals who attend church regularly and those who never do. A couple’s marital stability, in short, seems to depend less on whether each individual worships in church or not, and more on whether they do so together as a couple.

What else contributes to remaining married? For women, the likelihood of staying hitched increases with education level. For men, income is decisive: the more they earn, the less likely they are to divorce.

Spinning a Coin?

It's always important to keep our eyes open for "spin" when we talk about history. People tell historical narratives with a spin, with a slant or bias designed to advance their agendas and promote their viewpoints. But sometimes it's not so obvious. Let's take an example from the seemingly innocent topic of the history of American coins.

If we consider the four most commonly used coins (quarter, dime, nickel, cent), and we look at whose picture shows up on them over the years, we might see a trend: in 1950 all four contained the portraits of men. In 1960 and 1970, all four carried the images of men. By 1980, we see the introduction of a new coin: the one dollar coin carrying the image of Susan B. Anthony. By the year 2000, we find a coin bearing the image of Sacajawea, who is not only a woman, but a Native American as well! This narrative shows progress - we've gone from all men, to including women and Indians.

The above paragraph is a narrative, carefully designed to make the "old days" look narrow-minded and bigoted, and present the current time segment as more progressive. The problem is, it's not true. But most readers don't know that, and don't detect the "spin" or bias woven into the narrative.

A more complete version of the story would tell you that only women were pictured on commonly used coins until 1909: Abraham Lincoln was the first male portrayed on a coin when the penny began carrying his image in that year. Not only did coins carry the images of women, but many of them were Native Americans.

Adding those missing facts makes the story look quite different. Now, most people don't really care a whole lot about whose picture is on a coin, but this example of how the story is told is a good example of why we need to be skeptical of anybody's version of history.

Opinion Makers

Regularly, celebrities voice their opinions on social and political issues. Movie stars, popular singers, and professional athletes tell us whom we should vote for, and what we should think about cultural questions. But who are these people? Why are they qualified to tell us what to think?

Well, let's look at some examples. Exactly how much education do these self-appointed "experts" have?

Barbara Streisand - no education after graduating from high school
Cher - finished 8th grade, never attended high school
Martin Sheen - flunked entrance exam for Dayton University
Jessica Lange - attended college for the first week of her freshman year, but failed to finish a semester
Alex Baldwin - dropped out of college
Julia Roberts - no education after graduating from high school
Sean Penn - no education after graduating from high school
Ed Asner - no education after graduating from high school
Mike Farrell - no education after graduating from high school
George Clooney - dropped out of college
Susan Sarandon - B.A. in drama

Those listed above have not only told Americans what to think about politics and politicians, but have even ventured to call their political opponents “stupid”!

Into the Mainstream

It's not unusual or surprising to read that a conservative politician said, "most Americans, too, are anti-gay marriage and anti-abortion." That's what we expect, although the wording could be revised: "in favor of normal marriage and pro-life."

But it is different when those words make it into the mainstream: they come from a national newspaper columnist, whose work appears in middle-of-the-road, and even some left-wing, newspaper.

He continues: "in times when football players are murdered in their homes, when Christmas shoppers are gunned down in Heartland shopping malls, more Americans might well be thinking: President John Adams was right when he said that "we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion ... our constitution was made for a moral and religious people."

Sex, Love, and Marriage

Although we think of the three words in the title of this posting as having some general relationship, it was much less so in certain other cultures.

In ancient pagan societies (Babylon, Egypt, Sumer, Akkad, etc.), marriage had very little to do with love. It was a very businesslike arrangement. Women were either sold into the marriage, or it was arranged for them by their fathers or other male relatives. For the female, the main benefits - if any - of marriage were that she had a man who was legally obligated to provide some of the necessities of life for her and the children, and that the marriage legitimized her status as a mother, and the husband provided some protection from both physical danger and social disgrace.

For the male, marriage ensured a well-managed household, and a woman who was essentially obligated to be his companion.

How different from our modern conception of marriage! We consider marriage to be a voluntary agreement to share a lifetime together: an agreement in which both parties respect and care about each other, a union in which a man and a woman want to provide good things to each other. When did this change happen?

It started long ago. The Hebrews seem to have been the first to clearly state and emphasize the concept of marital love. One of the the world's oldest love poems, stressing the union of two lives, is the product of the ancient Hebrew culture. It goes by various names: The Song of Solomon, the Song of Songs, the Canticle of Canticles. While the Babylonian husbands were apparently busy ignoring or beating their wives, the Hebrew men were bringing flowers to theirs.

But how did this idea of marriage as love spread to other cultures? As with many Hebrew ideas, the Christian faith spread this concept around the globe. So much of what is often considered to be Christian is actually Hebrew.

Before Christianity was introduced into Europe, the polytheistic natives there treated their women no better than their counterparts in the Ancient Near East, buying, selling, and beating them. Now, modern European culture is thoroughly influenced by the Hebrew notion that marriage is about serving one's spouse, not about controlling one's spouse; and, contrary to all stereotypes, the Christian faith celebrates sex as a beautiful and noble expression of love between husband and wife.

Was there ever a time or place in which people taught that sex was sinful? Christianity has never taught that sex between a properly married couple was sinful, if they were showing care, respect, and affection for one another. There have been some misguided individuals who thought that sex was sinful, but the Christian faith has always pointed to such an idea as an error. Sex outside of marriage (either premarital or extra-marital), on the other hand, has always been considered inappropriate, because of the often disastrous consequences for those involved.

Future Hope

Professor Moltmann lives in Germany. His childhood was spent in the era of atheism shortly before and during Hitler's reign. Only as a prisoner at the end of the war did he begin to study seriously about God. Since then, he has been a professor of theology at several universities.

He explains the change in terms of time: his early years of atheism and Nazism were focused on the past and the present, he says, but had no clear vision for the future. Yes, Hitler's plans for an empire gave a notion for the short-term future, but the questions which all humans ask were left unanswered: What happens after I die? What happens after the universe ends? Physicists from Newton to Einstein to Hawking tell us that the physical universe will indeed end.

Atheism, says Moltmann, may provide a basis for Hitler's plans of racial supremacy, but it does not provide a foundation for thinking rationally about the distant future. So Moltmann began to think about God.

Moltmann's vision of the next life is that God will “answer the cries of human victims for justice, without simply meting out vengeance on the perpetrators of injustice,” as Peter Steinfels summarizes in the New York Times (January 20, 2007). Moltmann's “eschatological vision would not involve the retributive justice of human courts, but” a creative form of justice “which can heal and restore the victims and transform the perpetrators.”

Moltmann's view of the end of this universe, and the beginning of the afterlife, “is not reward and punishment, but victory over all that is” evil; it will be “a great day of reconciliation.”

According to Moltmann, God is not primarily an angry judge, as he is sometimes depicted, but rather motivated by love for humans, and a desire to forgive them, and to fix the problems of the universe.

The History of Hospitals

Care-giving is rooted in a desire to enhance the well-being of our fellow man. Whether it is through our own need to be cared for or a loved one’s need, at some point in each of our lives we can benefit from this practice.

The art of care-giving began as a family effort and over time became institutionalized. In pre-Christian societies, the infirm were watched over by their family in their own home or they were expelled from the city. The first modern hospital, including a teaching and research department, was documented at the Academy of Gundishapur, and operated by the Persian Christian Church, around A.D. 300-600.

The expansion of the hospital system in Medieval Europe was driven in large part by Christianity. Before Christianity the Romans might care for each other as part of family-based obligations. The Greeks did the same. The First Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D. ordered the construction of a hospital in every cathedral town in the Roman Empire to care for the poor, sick, widows, and strangers. They were staffed by religious orders and volunteers and were funded by the same.

Although the first hospital in the United States was constructed much later in Philadelphia, Christianity was still the motivating force. Philadelphia grew into the fastest-populated city in the 13 colonies and became a melting pot for diseases because of its ports and constant stream of immigrants. With the increasing number of poor suffering from physical illnesses as well as the number of people from all classes suffering from mental illness, Philadelphia became the perfect place for the nation's first hospital.

The Pennsylvania Hospital was established in May 1751, the result of a collaborative effort of Benjamin Franklin and Dr. Thomas Bond, a hometown physician who studied medicine in England and France and became inspired by the thriving hospital system overseas. Franklin was emerging from his youthful flirtation with deism into a text-based spirituality; he authored and published a hymnbook of liturgies and prayers. Out of this mature world-view, he understood the necessity of helping the helpless with no expectation of repayment or reward; hence the desire to found a hospital.

The charter was granted to establish the Pennsylvania Hospital “to care for the sick, poor and the insane,” and the first patient was admitted in February of 1753. The hospital’s seal, the image of the Good Samaritan, was inscribed on the plaque outside as well as the phrase, “Take care of him and I will repay you.”

Although the hospital was created to benefit the community, it was not readily accepted, nor was any subsequent hospital that was built. In fact, most people found them unfamiliar and even frightening. People were used to caring for their sick relatives in their homes, and it wasn't until the “Spanish flu” epidemic in 1918 that people began to realize the appeal that mass care hospitals provided. Further promotion for the cause of hospitals came in 1921 when the editor for a Chicago magazine proposed that hospitals open their doors to the public for one day so the community could come inside and see them. After becoming more familiar with the medical advances employed by hospitals, people accepted them, and on May 12, 1921 America celebrated its first National Hospital Day.

The majority of hospitals serve only medical needs, and lack the philosophical guidance of a larger world-view. Since the late 20th century, more and more hospitals have been funded by the state, health insurances, health organizations, and charities rather than religious orders. Today nearly 6,000 hospitals are in operation with over five million staff members across the United States. According to Hospital Statistics, these hospitals admit almost 37 million patients each year, treat another 117 million in emergency departments, and see another 545 million for other outpatient needs. On any given day, 658,000 patients fill U.S. hospital beds.

Defining Virtue

We have seen that virtue is subject to changing definitions in history: among the Greeks, virtue was based on superiority, and often no attempt was made to disguise ruthless oppression, because precisely that was seen as virtuous - and so Thucydides reports the Athenian delegation speaking to islanders of Melos and threatening them with destruction if they fail to give in to Athenian demands, and so Alexander builds an empire by attacking, without provocation, neighboring countries, causing the deaths of thousands - such behavior was seen by more than a few as virtuous.

Some Romans likewise embraced harshness as virtue - Marcus Aurelius, whose calm Stoic aphorisms tempt one to picture him as a even-tempered sage, spent almost his entire career as emperor, not on a throne, but engaged in bloody and vicious battles, and penned orders for the executions of thousands of innocent men, women, and children, whose only crime was participating the new religion known as Christianity.

After Constantine's example of tolerance, by which he legalized Christianity, and declined to seek revenge by persecuting the pagans who had been persecuting the Christians, we see a shift in ideas of virtue - respect for human life becomes a central ingredient in the common European notion of virtue.

Yet hints of the old warlike virtue of competitive superiority remain: certainly in the half-Christian, half-pagan epics like Beowulf and the Nibelungenlied, but even in much more modern and post-modern examples: Nietzsche praises the virtue of a man who cruelly exploits any form of weakness in his fellow humans.

In our own time, Hillary Clinton has been praised for “her opportunism, her triangulation, her ethical corner-cutting, her shifting convictions, her secrecy, her ruthlessness.” These words, which would be perceived as insults according to the common notion of virtue, are conceived as praise by Maureen Dowd, a supporter of Hillary Clinton, who uttered them. In announcing what she considers to be Clinton's virtues, she describes what most people would call vices: “She is cold-eyed about wanting power and raising money and turning everything about her life into a commodity.”

Perhaps Maureen Dowd and Hillary Clinton would be more comfortable with Octavian and Themistocles.

The KKK and the U.S. Senate

Could it be that a current member of the U.S. Senate has a history of being a member of the Ku Klux Klan? Could it be that he was not merely a member, but actually a leader in the KKK, given the title "Kleagle"? Could it be that he would use the "N-word", a hateful racial epithet, in front of a reporter, not once, but twice, in the same interview? And why wouldn't that reporter, eager to make news, report about this?

Because the senator, Robert Byrd, from West Virginia, has some powerful friends: He has been photographed, smiling, with his arm around people like Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, John Edwards, and other leaders in his political party.

To be sure, Senator Byrd claims that he ended his membership in the Klan. Maybe he did, but three years after he claims he stopped his membership, he was still writing letters to the leaders of the KKK, telling them that "The Klan is needed today as never before and I am anxious to see its rebirth here in West Virginia ... and in every state in the Union." Why would the newspapers and TV media not report to the general public about these facts? Because Senator Byrd is part of the Democratic party, and with friends like Gore, Kerry, Edwards, and the Clintons, no reporter will take him on.

In the senate, he opposed civil rights legislation to ensure equality in the armed forces, and he led a strong opposition and filibuster to the Civil Rights Act, which was aimed at ensuring voting rights for African-Americans, among other things.

David and ... ?

Archaeologists excavating the Philistine city of Gath have uncovered inscriptions with the name “Goliath” visible. The name, like the Philistines themselves, has its roots far away from the Semitic areas of the Ancient Near East; an Indo-European name, it came from an area probably near Greece.

The Philistines, known for their occupation of the Canaanite area, were actually new arrivals in the region, showing up there around 1200 B.C., when the other groups, such as Egyptians, Hebrews, Babylonians, and Canaanites, had been there for centuries already.

There is no way to prove that the Goliath in the inscriptions is the same Goliath who fought a battle with Israel's king David; the name may have been common at that time, and these inscriptions could refer to a different Goliath. The discoveries do, however, bring us one step closer to re-assembling the historical puzzle of the famous series of Philistine attacks on the Hebrews.

Would You Kill Someone Who Maybe Insulted Your Religion - But Didn't? Making the News, or Making it up?

How eager was Newsweek to print something that would make President Bush look bad? So eager that this popular news magazine, when it couldn't find anything damaging enough, resorted to fabricating stories. In 2005, Newsweek published a story about how interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay camp were torturing and humiliating the terrorists who were being housed there. The most graphic story centered around a prisoner who was forced to watch as a guard allegedly flushed a copy of the Qur'an down the toilet.

Obviously, the Qur'an (or Koran) is the sacred text of Islam, and the thought of it being abused this way would horrify any Muslim. This would indeed be a cruel act.

But it never happened. Within a week of publishing these stories, Newsweek was forced to admit that the story had been fabricated - that it simply was not true: a deliberate deception. What was the impact of Newsweek's lie?

In Islamic countries around the world, riots had already broken out, buildings and cars burned or otherwise destroyed, and at least seventeen people killed in the violence.

There are actually two stories here: the first story is about a group of reporters and editors who were willing to create a story and falsify facts when they needed them for political purposes. The second story is that even the unproven allegation of disregard for the Koran seems to be grounds to commit murder. People died because someone heard that something disrespectful had been done to the holy book of Islam.

What shall we say about the rioters, and their culture, which condones, and even celebrates, the wanton murder of innocent people, mayhem and destruction in response to the alleged and unproven destruction of a book? The question here is one of proportionate response. If a Koran had indeed been flushed, Muslims would have justifiably been offended. They may justifiably have considered the perpetrators boors, or barbarians, or hell-bound unbelievers. They may justifiably have issued denunciations accordingly. But to kill people thousands of miles away who had nothing to do with the act, and then fulminate with threats and murder against the entire Western world, all because of this alleged act, is disproportionate.

A few weeks prior to this incident, the government of Saudi Arabia had arrested forty Christians, and kept them jailed without bail, without any communication to the outside world, and without even explaining why they were arrested. The explanation finally given by the Saudi government was that these people had been guilty of discussing religious topics. Where was the proportionate response? Where were the thousands of people protesting about freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of thought and belief? Were there any riots or killings? No.

There is a cultural divide here: in North America, most citizens have been taught about peaceful and non-violent civil protest, so when someone called an “artist” chooses to insult the religious beliefs of millions by creating obscenities out of human urine and a Christian cross, or out of animal manure and a Bible, the reactions are not violent. Christians are offended and insulted, because this “artist” has deliberately worked to oppress their beliefs, but there is no violent reaction.

On the other side of the world, violence is seen as the logical response: we find cultures in which an innocent rape victim is stoned to death by the members of her village. Rioting and killing are seen as the appropriate way to respond to the idea that someone may disagree with one's religious beliefs.

John Macquarrie, R.I.P.

Philosophers around the world recently mourned the death of John Macquarrie, whose astute mind helped explain the difficult thoughts of geniuses like Martin Heidegger and Rudolph Bultmann to the rest of us. Spending most of his career at Oxford, he examined a broad spectrum of belief systems, from Roman Catholic to Baptist, from Quaker to Lutheran. He was known both for his fairness and for his profound understanding.

One of his central ideas was that, when a philosopher speaks about God, the words and sentences must always be understood as somewhat symbolic, and not entirely literal. In speaking about the central Being of the universe, human language is simply not capable of expressing such facts directly. Therefore, the most serious texts will always be not completely literal. Any text which is understood only on a literal level with either be not very profound, like the owner's manual for your DVD player, or will have important hidden truths available only to the reader who uses a more symbolic method of interpretation. Macquarrie's concept is this: to be literal is to be overly simplistic, and understanding the existence of the universe is not a simple task. Macquarrie hypothesized that God is Being - using the word "Being" to indicate pure existence - the thing which keeps the universe from disappearing.

Interestingly, the philosophers who influenced Macquarrie the most, and the ones whom he most influenced, were the ones with whom he had some disagreement. Heidegger, who did much to consolidate the concept of "Being," was opposed to much of what Macquarrie believed, yet Macquarrie appreciated Heidegger's analysis of this concept. In Europe after World War II, when so much had been devastated, it became clear to many people that they had to return to a serious analysis of God and His nature. Macquarrie's philosophy was one of several which led the way to hope and a peaceful modern Europe. He was born in 1919 and died in 2007.

The Compton Effect

Arthur Compton studied at the University of Wooster in Ohio, and was later professor of physics at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. He earned the Noble Prize in 1927 for discovering the "Compton Effect" which dictates the amount of change in an x-ray beam when it passes through matter.

Compton was intensively active in the Presbyterian Church. Explaining his work in physics, he said, "a supreme intelligence brought the universe into being and created man. It is incontrovertible that where there is a plan there is an intelligence - and orderly unfolding of the universe testifies to the truth of the most majestic statement ever uttered." He went on: "beyond the nature that science teaches is the Spirit of God that gives order and meaning and purpose to human life."

"Compton scattering" (or "the Compton effect") is the decrease in energy (increase in wavelength) of an X-ray or gamma ray photon, when it interacts with matter. Inverse Compton scattering also exists, where the photon gains energy (decreasing in wavelength) upon interaction with matter. The amount the wavelength increases by is called the Compton shift. Although nuclear compton scattering exists, Compton scattering usually refers to the interaction involving only the electrons of an atom. The Compton effect was observed by Compton in 1923; he earned the 1927 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery.

Compton scattering is of prime importance to radiobiology, as it happens to be the most probable interaction of high energy X rays with atomic nuclei in living beings and is applied in radiation therapy. In material physics, Compton scattering can be used to probe the wave function of the electrons in matter in the momentum representation. Compton Scatter is an important effect in Gamma spectroscopy which gives rise to the Compton edge, as it is possible for the gamma rays to scatter out of the detectors used. Compton suppression is used to detect stray scatter gamma rays to counteract this effect.

Inverse Compton scattering is important in astrophysics. In X-ray astronomy, the accretion disk surrounding a black hole is believed to produce a thermal spectrum. The lower energy photons produced from this spectrum are scattered to higher energies by relativistic electrons in the surrounding corona. This is believed to cause the power law component in the X-ray spectra (0.2-10 keV) of accreting black holes. The effect is also observed when photons from the Cosmic microwave background move through the hot gas surrounding a galaxy cluster. The CMB photons are scattered to higher energies by the electrons in this gas, resulting in the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect.

Paul or Saul?

You have to feel a little sorry for him - so many people hated him and tried to kill him during his life, and in the nearly two thousand years since he died, they've continued to accuse him of simply being nasty!

But, according to Harvard professor Harvey Cox, and Garry Wills, a professor at Northwestern University, “Paul was neither an anti-Semite nor a misogynist ... Paul frequently commends women leaders in the congregations and proclaims that in these new messianic congregations there should be 'neither male nor female, neither slave nor free.'” What about those claims that Paul was anti-woman? It's true that he commands that women should always wear headcoverings in certain meetings, but he also gave orders about what men should and should not wear: everybody needed to dress appropriately, both men and women.

Paul simply wanted to “tell Jews everywhere that the messianic era they had prayed for had dawned and that a certain rabbi from Nazareth, slain by the Romans as a threat to their empire and raised from the dead by God, was the long-anticipated Messiah ... the hour had now come ... to welcome the gentiles into the covenant.” Paul was an expert in this covenant, having worked in the San Hedrin (the Jewish high counsel) as an assistant to one of the San Hedrin's members; Paul knew the Jewish writings - the Tanakh and the Talmud - in great detail, being himself one of the most orthodox Jews.

This new religion would grow rapidly:“the time was ripe for just such a message. With the Roman pantheon in decay - dismissed by thoughtful people as mere superstition - and with Roman society rife with moral decay, Jewish monotheism and morality held a powerful attraction. Large numbers of gentiles were already attending synagogues but hesitated to undergo the circumcision and dietary restrictions required for conversion. At the same time, many Jews were looking for a more universal expression of their faith, in keeping with the emerging cosmopolitan culture. Paul's message attracted both. He taught that God had given his law to both Jews and gentiles, the former in the Torah, the latter by nature. All had fallen short, but now all were forgiven and called to constitute a single new and inclusive community.”

Although extremely well-educated in matters of spirituality, Paul was not ignorant of politics: “the Roman Empire was not just the background of Paul's life and work but shaped his every word and deed. The empire was shaky, and Paul discerned its inner rot. He saw his task as preparing infrastructure that would replace it when it collapsed. Thus he gave the congregations he organized a political, not a religious name: ecclesia, meaning an official assembly of citizens. When these upstarts insisted that there was someone higher than Caesar to whom they owed supreme loyalty, Roman officials saw that they threatened the symbolic capstone of the whole system. The empire executed Peter and Paul, and Jesus before them, because the imperial elites did not view their movement as a harmless, otherworldly cult but as a real and present danger.”

Muhammed on a Personal Basis

So who was this guy who started Islam? Exiled from his home tribe, he formed an army: “there were epic battles with the Quraysh and other tribes, and Muhammed was a fighter and tactician.” His military abilities, both to lead soldiers, and to use sword himself, became legendary. After the battle of Badr, he ordered the unarmed prisoners to be executed. He ordered several poetesses and poets in Medina to be killed, because they had expressed doubts about him. He organized the murders of several hundred men in the town of Banu Qurayza, suspecting them of disloyalty.

His family relationships were sometimes problematic: desiring “the wife of his adopted adult son,” he took “her to be his fifth wife.” He seemed to have a total of somewhere between eleven and thirteen wives, of who the youngest was engaged to him at age six, although she did marry him until she was nine years old.

(Quotes from Karen Armstrong at the University of London, and Laurie Goodstein of the New York Times.)

Steps to Fascism?

Psychologist and author R.J. Lifton has analyzed the mental adjustments which people make when forced to live in a totalitarian state - the way in which they attempt to make peace with the fact that they must do things which they find to be immoral: a soldier ordered to kill civilians, a teacher forced to present political propaganda to his class. The clearest examples are Stalin's Soviet Union, Mao's China, and Hitler's Nazi Party.

Lifton did a psychological study of the doctors who worked under Hitler's rule, and identified five steps by which they were seduced into silence, instead of protest:

First, there was coercive sterilization: Those who were to be sterilized included patients suffering from: mental deficiency, schizophrenia, manic depressive insanity, epilepsy, Huntington's chorea, hereditary blindness, hereditary deafness, grave bodily malformation, and hereditary alcoholism.

Second, killing of "impaired children" in hospitals.

Third, killing of "impaired" adults.

Fourth, killing of "impaired" inmates of concentration and extermination camps.

Fifth, mass killings.

Do we find eerie parallels to events in our own society? Consider: In the early to mid-1900s, forced sterilization was legal in sixteen states. Private individuals and prominent foundations supported the creation of the Eugenics Record Office to promote eugenics in American society. Eugenics is "the study of hereditary improvements of the human race by controlled selective breeding." Later, Jack Kervorkian assists over 100 people to kill themselves, Oregon institutes legalized physician-assisted suicide legislation. From 1998 to 2004, 208 persons with terminal illnesses have killed themselves. Eighty-seven percent cited the fear of losing autonomy as one of their concerns, and the death of Terry Schiavo in Florida is brought about through dehydration and starvation by discontinuing the administration of nutritional substances. Finally, New Jersey becomes the first state to legalize (and fund) human cloning experiments. The only reason for having these human cloned embryos is to terminate them in embryonic stem cell research experiments. Experience has shown that cloned animals are "impaired" and it is believed that cloned human beings would be just as impaired: "A review of all the world's cloned animals suggests that every one of them is genetically and physically defective. Ian Wilmut [lead scientist on the Dolly cloned sheep project] said, 'There is abundant evidence that cloning can and does go wrong and no justification for believing that this will not happen with humans.'" The Sunday Times of London reported that "gene defects emerge in all animal clones," indicating that anyone willing to make a human clone would be knowingly imposing a defect upon that human, and would be equally ready to exterminate that human for being defective.

Lifton comments: "The Nazis based their justification for direct medical killing on the simple concept of ‘life unworthy of life'. While the Nazis did not originate this concept, they carried it to its ultimate biological, racial, and ‘therapeutic’ extreme." Have these terrifying views, that human life has little value and can be terminated at will, crept into our culture?

Mephibosheth - Friend or Foe?

Odd and amazing events took place among the monarchs of the Ancient Near East; often, the events are clearly understood, but interpretations offer more than one possible reason for them.

When Saul was king of the Israelites, his son Jonathan was a friend of David. Now, David had been designated as the next king, taking away what might seem to be Jonathan's rightful inherited title. Jonathan didn't seem to mind too much, but his father Saul did, and tried unsuccessfully to assassinate David on several occasions. Both Saul and Jonathan were killed in battle, leaving the way open for David to ascend to the throne.

David now being king, he thinks kindly of his old friend Jonathan, and shows hospitality to Jonathan's only surviving heir, a son named Mephibosheth, who happened also to be physically disabled. David invites Mephibosheth to live near him in the capitol city and even dine with him at the king's table in the royal palace. What a nice guy David was, to show such kindness to the handicapped child of his dead friend!

Or is there another way to view these events?

Not only in the Ancient Near East, but in any government which functions by hereditary monarchy, rulers, and those who want to be rulers, must carefully watch networks of extended family members. With Saul and Jonathan dead, anyone who wanted to oppose David's rule, and perhaps start a revolution, might very well look to Mephibosheth as figure around whom to gather a political movement, being the heir to Saul's dynasty. As long as he lived, Mephibosheth represented a possible threat to David's political power, and even to David's life, inasmuch as any revolutionaries who would use Mephibosheth as a symbolic rallying point wouldn't hesitate to attempt an assassination. So David's kind invitation to Mephibosheth might simply have been a way for David to keep an eye on Mephibosheth, to prevent him from starting any political activities, and to see who might be in contact with him.

As a logical extension of this type of thinking, later on, when David's sons have reached adulthood, they also will become leaders of subversive political groups who attempt to assassinate David and grab power. Sons leading movements to assassinate their own fathers? Yes, again, this is a pattern found among hereditary monarchies.

Two thousand years later, in a typically dysfunctional royal family in England, these same dynamics will take place, as three sons of Henry II attempt to assassinate their father, and each other, supported at times by their mother; in return, Henry will consider assassinating his own sons, and have his wife placed in jail for a number of years.

The net effect of hereditary monarchy is to cause close family members to consider assassinating each other!

History or Propaganda?

In history class, we learn about ancient cultures, read their writings, and generally form some opinion of them. A straightforward process, right? Well, not always.

When we read what these people left behind, it is not always simply a record of their activities. For example, a guy named Pericles gave a famous funeral speech, and Thucydides recorded this speech for us in his book about the Peloponnesian War, written shortly before 395 B.C. In this funeral speech, a glowing description of the Athenian society is given. The Athenians of the era between 450 B.C. and 400 B.C. are, according to Pericles, noble, virtuous, democratic, fair, just, creative, artistic, intellectual, diplomatic, etc. Who wouldn't like Athens? But this speech was propaganda, given during a war, designed to promote a certain image for Athens. When we read how Athenians really described themselves, we see that their government based itself on practices like extortion, blackmail, bribery, intimidation, and ruthlessness toward any sign of weakness.

Or consider the Romans. We might read the speeches of Cicero, where he describes the virtues of the Republic, which is, in his speeches, the fairest and most just system of government ever devised. Cicero's praise for the Roman system is foreshadowed by similar phrases in the books of Polybius, and seem to be embodied in the books of Marcus Aurelius, who, living long after the fall of the Roman Republic, appeared to carry on the tradition of Stoic virtues in the Roman Empire. But again, this is propaganda: reading more carefully, we see that Polybius points out the corruption and flaws of the Republic and its politicians, and Marcus Aurelius acted in ways that directly contradict the peaceful and fair tone of his Stoic writings: he sat at his desk and calmly signed orders to have thousands of women and children executed, for no other reason than that they were Christians.

The lesson? Even when you're reading an ancient book, be aware that it might be shrewd propaganda. The ancient Greeks and Romans spent a lot of time and effort trying to advertise themselves. They wanted to make themselves look good.

Imagine, for a moment, that you lived a thousand years from now in the future. Looking backward as a history student, you might study the two most hateful and cruel governments of our era: the Nazi government which oppressed Germany, and the Soviet government which enslaved Russia. We know the unspeakable atrocities which these two systems committed and the millions of deaths which they inflicted on innocent civilians. Yet, if all you read was the propaganda which they wrote about themselves, you might walk away thinking that they were nice guys!

Junk Science?

Living in a world which, despite a strong post-modern leaning, is still largely modern, most of us have been educated to have a deep respect for the findings of science. But what, exactly, qualifies as “science”? Images of university researchers in which white lab coats, and computers churning out reams of statistics, come to mind. But beyond the physical appearances, there are also the phrases, which at least sound profound, about an "objective spirit of rational inquiry." And, to be sure, the great minds of people like Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, and Michael Faraday deserve our respect, in part because of their noble minds, and in part because their findings have stood the test of time.

Sadly, however, there is a far-less-than-honorable industry, known as “junk science,” which peddles propaganda disguised as intellectual effort.

How can you distinguish “junk science” from the real thing? There are a few clues: first, “junk science” will deal only with topics with immediate political or economic value, not with truth for truth's sake; second, it is funded by individuals or groups with a stake in the outcome; third, it proceeds with an agenda.

Consider a researcher trying to arrive at the most accurate possible value for the atomic weight of copper to fifty decimal places. This is not a social “hot button” topic; let us assume that the scientist doesn't have any preconceptions about the answer; it will be funded by those who desire only to have an accurate body of information for chemistry and physics. This is not “junk” science.

On the other hand, consider those who are paid by political parties and governments, not to find out “if” there is global warming, but rather accumulate evidence to persuade voters that there is global warming. Or those who are supported by governments and political parties, not to objectively and calmly compare Darwinism and Intelligent Design Theories, but rather to undermine and discredit those who question Darwinism. Likewise those who are paid, not to find out what causes some people to engage in homosexual behavior, but rather to support political policies about homosexual activities. None of these are intellectually respectable, and are in fact merely cleverly disguised propaganda. Whatever the word “science” might mean, these last three examples are not it.

One more example: medical research into the efficacy of various drugs is often funded by those who desire a certain outcome from the trials. Such experimentation, and the analysis of the resulting data, is often subject to financial, not scientific, pressures.

So, the next time a politician, a newspaper reporter, or an “expert” on TV or the Internet begins to tell you that there is “scientific” support for some view or opinion, beware!