2centsworth.info

The Founding Fathers were all “god fearing Christians” but they understood the dangers of mixing religion with government. They were well read and remembered recent history… The religious “authorities” in Salem, Massachusetts had executed people for witchcraft; others had been executed merely for being Quakers in a colony dominated by Puritans. And tens of thousands had died in Europe in battles between Protestants and Catholics or in the Catholic Inquisitions. Secular scholars like Galileo had been threatened with being burned alive for publishing ideas that conflicted with church doctrine.

The Founding Fathers recognized what a lot of people now seem to have forgotten. That when people start injecting religion and faith into politics, terrible things happen.

One can count votes and make a decision on that basis. That’s Democracy. But if anyone, in the minority or the majority starts claiming divine authority then things can get very ugly indeed. How can one reasonably compare conflicting claims of divine authority? The answer is you cannot. Any attempt to argue a point of faith eventually degenerates to the childish equivalent of “my bible is bigger than your bible” (or koran, or talmud, etc.). Once you get to that point, violence is the usual result.

The Founding Fathers also knew that those claiming religious authority for themselves or their actions could be corrupt or even insane. In case one has the impression that things have changed since the 18th century, here are a few recent events:

• The Catholic Church has an ongoing world-wide scandal involving the molestation and abuse of thousands of children by dozens of church officials. Senior church officials were aware of these crimes and actively covered them up for decades. A Cardinal publicly called down the wrath of God on the newspaper and the reporters who were exposing the scandal in his Archdiocese. {Can you spell blasphemy?}
• The Reverend Jim Jones and Richard Koresh claimed divine authority for themselves and used it to justify their having sex with any of the women in their congregation. Most of their congregations died, either by “drinking the coolaid” or in a violent conflict with the US Government.
• Religious leaders from Jim Baker to Jimmy Swaggert have been exposed as philandering hypocrites or embezzlers.

Last year, a woman in Texas murdered her children. She claimed that God had told her to. She was arrested and charged with murder. But if you carry the current trend of mixing religion with the court system, there may come a day when she wouldn’t be arrested. Some religious leader may decide that she is a modern-day Abraham who made the ultimate sacrifice. Her home might become a place of pilgrimage.

We already have parts of the country where a pharmacist can refuse to fill a legal prescription because the drug in question violates his (or her) religious beliefs. Where does this sort of thing lead? There are religions that ban women from driving cars. Does that mean a woman will have to find a Meineke branch run by a manager of the correct denomination in order to get her muffler fixed? Do I need to make sure the supermarket is run by a Christian if I want to buy some pork chops?

I am rather surprised that more religious leaders do not see the risks for themselves and their followers. In the end, religious disputes are always decided by violence or the threat of violence unless there are secular authorities to intervene. And in the absence of a secular authority only one religion will be paramount. And then you get things like the Puritans hanging Quakers or Catholics persecuting Jews.

Secular authority is not incompatible with religion; it enables the free practice of religion. In its absence the only people free to practice their religion are the members of the most popular religion or the one that controls the police and the military.

Outside of the techie world, remarkably few people know the history of the Internet and the World Wide Web… Or even understand the distinction between them. I am certainly not an authority on either but I have “grown up” with both.

Back in the 70’s, the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) saw the potential value of networking computers together. They funded the development of a network architecture by a mixture of private companies (e.g. Bolt, Beranek, & Neuman) and various academic institutions. My understanding is that they specifically asked for an architecture that would resist the loss of various nodes due to battle damage. The result was a network (called ARPANET) that tied together computers at federally-funded academic institutions, military facilities, and government research labs. The networking protocol that was used is called TCP/IP. Ironically, no ARPANET or Internet node has every been destroyed in battle but the battle-resistant architecture has proven to be reasonably well suited to dealing with the loss of nodes due to routine equipment failure. [Hmm, maybe the resistance to battle damage requirement is a myth... According to the Resource Center for Internet History, ARPA developed the Internet for purely scientific purposes with no intent for military use.]

For the first couple of decades, ARPANET (later the Internet) was known to, and used by, a few thousand academic and military types. The primary use was for email and file transfers.

In the late 80’s, the government decided to open up the Internet for public and commercial use. It is largely forgotten now but this was quite controversial. The priviledged elite who had used the Internet up to that point objected to masses of unwashed newbies getting access to the network.

Of course the real revolution was not the opening up of the Internet for public use. After all, the average person saw little use for email or electronic file transfers. The real revolution was the development of the World Wide Web by an obscure Englishman called Tim Berners-Lee. He was working for CERN which is a multi-national physics laboratory sponsored by the European Union (roughly corresponding to one of the US Governments national laboratories like Lawrence Livermore or Argonne).

His intent was simply to provide a means for sharing documents (physics papers, primarily) among the staff of CERN which numbered in the thousands and which was located at a number of different sites around Europe. All these sites were networked using the TCP/IP Internet and he built a computer architecture that layered on top of TCP/IP and allowed people to publish information on a server on one part of the Internet that could be viewed by someone else using a client browser at a remote location.

Berners-Lee apparently had no plans to “change the world” but he was a very competent programmer and designed an architecture that was scalable, robust, and very flexible. The same architecture he designed to serve the needs of a few thousand people in Western Europe in the late 1980’s is still being used… But now it is being used by millions of people across the planet. We now use it buy products, make travel arrangements, check the weather, read the news, publish our opinions, settle bets, and a million other day-to-day tasks.

In my opinion, no single individual can have had as great an impact on technology, business, and politics in as short a time as Tim Berners-Lee but hardly anyone knows his name.

I have heard a number of people (both in person and in TV “man-in-the-street” interviews) equate their being a veteran with their support for G.W. Bush. Since two of G.W.’s main opponents (John Kerry and John McCain) have been not only veterans but combat veterans, I find this very interesting.

G.W., after all, spent his Guard service in Texas while the two John’s risked their lives in Vietnam. While half a million US servicemen were fighting in Vietnam, the Guard spent thousands of US tax dollars training young G.W. how to fly a fighter jet. But not so he could participate in the ongoing war since the Air Guard was never sent to Vietnam. G.W. could have volunteered to serve in Vietnam but he chose not to. He stayed home to defend us against the long awaited invasion from Mexico. And hung out with local politicians, flunked his flight physical and basically turned his Guard service into a no-show job. Paystubs and dental records are the only proof he even existed during that period.

So where does this “I’m a veteran so I support Bush” stuff come from. Quite frankly, the antipathy of some veterans to McCain baffles me but their dislike of Kerry is somewhat easier to understand. I get the impression that it is Kerry’s antiwar activism upon his return from Vietnam that offends them. G.W. may have deliberately avoided service in Vietnam (heck, he avoided service here in the US of A) but he never challenged the justification for, or the conduct of, the war.

Back in the 60’s there was a popular bumper sticker that read “Challenge Authority”, I doubt that the veterans who support G.W. would be likely to have that slogan on their bumper. They’d probably prefer that the abuses at Abu Ghraib and the Halliburton scandal had been covered up. They don’t want to doubt the competence, wisdom, and motivations of our leaders. Such thoughts make them very uncomfortable. Unfortunately; as a result of their inability to challenge authority; it is now their children who are now being used as cannonfodder in a poorly planned and unnecessary war.

Over the last couple of years we have had some unfortunate examples of how people with demonstrated physical courage (e.g. John McCain, Colin Powell, and John Kerry) have failed when it was moral courage that was asked of them.

In all three cases, it would appear they have allowed their political ambitions to compromise their moral convictions.

In the case of McCain and Powell, one suspects that both secretly despise Bush and recognize his many failings yet they both publicly embrace him. Probably because they would otherwise forfeit the support of the Republican apparatus in any future political endeavors.

One gets the impression that the backroom Republican strategists have very cleverly played McCain versus Giuliani… “Rudy, you have to support GW now if you don’t want us to nominate John in 2008″ and vice reverse. And, sad to say, they have both fallen for it. Risking death, imprisonment, and torture in your 20’s doesn’t mean you will vote your convictions in your 50’s.

In the case of Kerry, he did flip-flop. I have no doubt that Kerry (along with many other members of Congress) doubted the wisdom of invading Iraq but he was reading the polls and planned to run for President so he voted in support of the invasion. Jumping out of a Swift boat in your twenties with an M-16 doesn’t mean you will vote your convictions when you are in your 50’s.

And as for Powell, one can only shake one’s head. Kerry never ranked higher than lieutenant. Powell was a General and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Powell must have known what a disaster the Iraq invasion was going to be. He must have had a pretty good idea of both the human and financial cost. And he must have been fairly sure that there were no WMD’s and no connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam. Since he does not appear to have any further political ambitions one is puzzled as to his motivations in supporting such a disasterous and incompetently planned debacle.