I'm not quite clear about what you just spoke....was that a parable, or a very subtle joke?

Today on the blogs, we had a flare-up of one of the classic religious/political arguments of all time. Battling for my side (which for our purposes can be taken to be secular liberals, aka flaming-heart heathens) is Atrios, who as I've said is just about always right when he chooses to devote a few words to a topic. First, from the antagonist, Mark Kleiman at samefacts.org:

I'd love it if fervently religious folks decided to try to be "the soul and conscience of the Democratic Party," for example by insisting that the party stand foursquare against torture, or, as Mara Vanderslice suggests, that we need to be fervent rather than lukewarm in insisting on economic justice. And of course if you want to appeal to fervently religious folks, casting them in a role they'd like to occupy is a good way to do it.

This quote looks innocent at first glance, but it got Atrios' hackles up, and rightly so, IMHO:

I see no reason religious people are uniquely qualified to be against torture, or to convince those in the Democratic party to stand against it. It's, again, assuming that religious people have strong sense of morality that magically matches Kleiman's, and/or that they have a higher level of moral authority to persuade others.

I'd love it if religious people all over the country suddenly embraced my policy agenda and persuaded others to do so. But it's absurd and patronizing to assume they will, and it's insulting to both them and me to suggest that they'll arrive there through some deeper sense of morality.

This point goes to the heart of something that I've long believed. Just because someone believes in God in no way makes them inherently more moral (or soulful) than those who don't. Just to make it clear, let's just stipulate that the vast majority of the non-religious believe in some form of the Golden Rule/Inverse Golden Rule as their fundamental moral principle. The Golden Rule is more interventionist, the Inverse more libertarian, but both are basically designed around the reciprocal nature of existence, the idea that other people at heart are essentially like us in just about all moral and ethical qualities. We'll further stipulate that virtually no one decides on grand-scale hedonism as their fundamental moral code, even though a bunch of wacky religious types always seem to assume that this is the case. I'll note just to be insulting that Ken Lay, Jeffrey Skilling, Andy Fastow, and the rest of the Enron gang were all churchgoers, as are any number of indicted Congresscritters (cough, Tom DeLay, cough).

The heart and soul of the Democratic party need not be the "religious left", it should be the whole frickin' party. How in the heck can anyone claim that politics should be divorced from a moral basis, anyway? What Kleinman wants to say, and Atrios would almost certainly agree with, is that Democrats should couch their arguments in terms of a persuasive moral vision ("moral" can, but need not, equal "religious"). We don't believe in Social Security just because it's successful, but also because it is the right thing to do for the elderly. We care about the environment not because endangered species are pretty/fuzzy/cute, but because we want to leave the planet a better place than when we first stepped foot upon it. We believe that something should be done for all the forgotten victims of Hurricane Katrina because it's the glaringly obvious thing to do, and we're not criminally incompetent wastes of phosphorus who honestly care more about Trent Lott's vacation house than the million internal refugees we now have in the country. Speaking in terms of right and wrong is something I think Democrats should do more often, but this has nothing to do with religion. If Obama wants to credit his church for shaping his moral philosophy, that's fine, since his moral vision is a really appealing one. If someone comes to a similar set of views and doesn't believe in some form of quasi-spiritual bearded superbeing, though, how does that not count in the same way? Forgive me for expressing an opinion that is somewhat unpopular in our national discourse, but I honestly think that the religious feelings of a scary number of people are driven not by a sense of right and wrong, since that would require more thought and less rote repetition, but rather as a cheap and effortless way to feel morally superior to their fellows, even though they haven't put in the time and effort to really think about how their actions, great and small, fit into a larger moral framework. Still, for the majority who find a grounding for their moral beliefs in Biblical teachings, and then turn those beliefs for good, more power to them.

To close, I think I'll have to turn over the floor to kos, who nailed it today, in the context of the winning campaigns of Democratic Senators Jon Tester of Montana and James Webb of Virginia:

Democrats and liberals have been too willing in the past to make their electoral appeals based on the intellect -- offering a laundry list of 10-point plans and programs they will create and/or support. We're trying to appeal to the brain, while Republicans have learned to appeal to the heart.

So we bore and confuse voters, giving them little sense in what makes our candidates tick. They are busy. They have two jobs, kids to shuffle between soccer practice and camp, myriad problems to deal with. Political blog readers may be obsessed with politics, but it's mostly a hobby. Most people have other hobbies. Politics is background noise. They don't want to deal with the details or learn about the issues. That's why we have a representative democracy -- so we can elect people to worry about the details.

What voters want is a sense of what makes a candidate tick. When confronted with a decision, what values will the official draw upon to inform his or her decision.

And while many people -- thanks to the good branding work of the Religious Right -- think that "values" equals "religion", fact is that values can come from any number of places.
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And where do those values come from? If a candidate sincerely gets his or her values from religion, then that's fine. The Bible is a wonderfully liberal text. And when it's sincere it doesn't come across so grating, so imposing. Compare Obama's talking about religion to Bush's "favorite philosopher" b.s.

But religious values are no more superior than the values I learned from my abuelita (and most Latinos will get a good sense of what my value system looks like just by referencing the word "abuelita"). They are no more superior than the values Tester learned on the farm from his farmer father and grandfather. Or the values that Webb learned while proudly wearing his uniform. Or the values someone might learn by contemplating the great philosophers. Or whatever.

Values are important, and Democrats must be comfortable talking about them. Voters will respond to those better than any laundry list of issues.

That is the way to make sure people understand that the heart and soul of the Democratic party includes everyone, both people and politicians, religious and secular alike. V'imru, Amen.

'Cause one kid had it worse than that, 'Cause then there was this boy whose parents made him come directly home right after school

Without comment, we'll start tonight with one of the best image captions of all time:

A grilled cheese sandwich, top, with an image of what some see as the Virgin Mary sold for $28,000 on eBay. Jesus Christ is seen in an oyster shell, a frying pan and a pirogi.

Anyway, form the same fine newspaper, another story on the Academy, this time in relation to religious kooks Young Earth Creationists getting geosciences doctorates. From the article:

But Dr. Ross is hardly a conventional paleontologist. He is a “young earth creationist” — he believes that the Bible is a literally true account of the creation of the universe, and that the earth is at most 10,000 years old.

For him, Dr. Ross said, the methods and theories of paleontology are one “paradigm” for studying the past, and Scripture is another. In the paleontological paradigm, he said, the dates in his dissertation are entirely appropriate. The fact that as a young earth creationist he has a different view just means, he said, “that I am separating the different paradigms.”
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And, for some, his case raises thorny philosophical and practical questions. May a secular university deny otherwise qualified students a degree because of their religion? Can a student produce intellectually honest work that contradicts deeply held beliefs? Should it be obligatory (or forbidden) for universities to consider how students will use the degrees they earn?

I don't find these questions particularly difficult to answer: no, yes, absolutely not.

Look, a degree is conferred upon a student for completing a specified body of work. Even under that standard, there is a tremendous amount of subjectivity involved, and the last thing we need to do is to add to that a level of psychological study of the candidate's motivations and future plans. If you happen to be a complete whackjob but produce a worthy dissertation, then you have earned a doctorate. Many a physicist was a kook while still in school, and a great many more became so later, but they are all PhD physicists just the same.

In the end, science progresses onward even though many people fail to understand it, even some of those considered within the scientific community. The structure that has been established, though, works remarkably well, and it is dangerous to go tampering with it, especially with regards to religion. For all the happy talk about coexistence between science and religion, they are occasionally orthogonal and frequently contradictory (see, e.g., the argument from Free Will for one example), and science really does do best to avoid any mention of religion in its internal workings. Sure, science has a role in interacting with and sometimes confronting religion, like with matters of homosexuality being genetically determined or making sure that evolution is taught in schools, but these are external interactions between science and society. In other words, religion doesn't have much place during a qualifying exam or dissertation defense: these are scientific rites of passage independent of religion.

A telling quote from the article:

Online information about the DVD identifies Dr. Ross as “pursuing a Ph.D. in geosciences” at the University of Rhode Island. It is this use of a secular credential to support creationist views that worries many scientists.

Eugenie C. Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education, a private group on the front line of the battle for the teaching of evolution, said fundamentalists who capitalized on secular credentials “to miseducate the public” were doing a disservice.

Using a credential to miseducate the public is a completely reasonable thing to fear, but it results from those with an agenda taking advantage of people's ignorance, and is used by all sides in the debate. People somehow believe that if you've earned a doctorate in anything, it makes you an expert. I can talk about economics endlessly, but the closest I ever came to an Econ course was when I skimmed through one of my wife's textbooks. Still, if I, a PhD, start talking about free trade, there are people out there who will listen. I'll admit, academics often throw their credentialed weight around in support of liberal causes, and the world is often better for it. In a perfect world, however, audiences would learn to be more skeptical, and try to learn a little bit about an issue for themselves. With regard to global warming, there are numerous Climate Science PhDs who don't believe in its existence, and most of them have been interviewed as experts on FoxNews by now. Said group also makes up a ridiculously small percentage of the total community of climate scientists, the latter of whom clearly have a consensus view that global warming is a severe problem.

Lest I make it seem that Young Earth Creationists in the academy are just swell, I have to admit that I am stunned by the philosophical nonsense being spouted by Dr. Ross. These theories aren't interchangeable "paradigms" that can be switched in and out like CDs in a changer. They make assumptions about the very way in which the world works, with concrete and fundamentally contradictory implications for the planet and the universe. To be honest, most of the classic syntheses of religion and science are basically nonsense. A God who meddles in human affairs has a wacky sense of scale, given that we are just vastly insignificant in the grand scheme, and the level of suffering we go through is simply inexcusable if a higher being cared about us. A god who performed miracles in the past but not today, or miracles just for a select few perhaps, is one with a strange sense of favoritism. If God is mere clockmaker and tinkerer, then he really isn't a moral force, he's something of an engineer or computer programmer. As I mentioned before, it looks like he/she/they/God/Goddesses didn't even grant us free will at all, and we just fool ourselves into thinking we do. If Dr. Ross couldn't deal with these ideas, then he's not much of a scientific philosopher, but he is, and rightly so, a Doctor in the sciences.