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WHAT I LIKE ABOUT PRAYER

For many Christians, prayer is a very profound, deeply spiritual experience. I can relate; it was for me, as well. If you listen to devotional music and sit there in the silence, concentrating on a Creator who loves you and the entire world deeply, then you can experience a very profound state of peace. Acquiring this sense of peace may take some practice for some, which would explain why, once it is attained, it is highly valued. The pressures of the day and the worries of tomorrow threaten to press in on you and interrupt your communion with God, oftentimes, but if they concentrate hard enough many Christians are able to find a way to focus on God in deep contemplation.

You might be surprised to know that there’s a lot about prayer that I don’t find anything wrong with. To understand why, try to take yourself away, for a moment, from the picture your pastor may have given you of atheism – any notion that atheism requires atheists to be connected entirely to the material and determined to be rational, without any hint of love or passion or emotion. In erasing this viewpoint from your picture of atheists, it may help you to remember that even though the pulpit minister may rail against the meaninglessness of a material existence that consists only of “atoms and molecules,” that same person often turns around and praises the works of God’s supposed creation – extolling the Niagara Falls, Orion’s Belt, Mt. Everest, the Grand Canyon, and so on.

THE PROBLEM WITH LOUIE GIGLIO, ET AL.

When I was a Christian there was a popular video by this guy named Louie Giglio in which this is done to the T. Giglio explains to his audience that we are in this massive universe, which is increasingly more stunning the more you zoom out and the more you zoom in. He then states, as the audience is reeling from awe, that this wonder and beauty has meaning because it is created by God. Now, many Christians claim their faith is strengthened by this picture. Mine was not, however. For me, it seemed as if there was this massive, huge, wonderful, overwhelming universe…and that Giglio was trying to stuff all of this into a narrow book, of about 1000 pages, whose character called “God” was one you had to follow with your entire being. An analogy that might help is that it felt like Giglio was trying to stick the entire massive cosmos into a “suitcase,” so to speak, that was so much smaller than the universe he described that there was no way it could fit.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azFFc20_Ub4[/youtube]

I began thinking: Why did the universe have to be attached to the Christian God to be wonderful? Pastors always told me it had to be, but when I actually sat down and started thinking about it, I realized that this wasn’t exactly true. There was no reason why the universe needed a God to be seen as valuable. Without God, the waterfalls worked just fine, the stars shone just as brightly, Mt. Everest was still there – and it was even more grand, because the world was REAL – this wasn’t a test, and it wasn’t something I had to force to make consistent with everything that was in a 1000 page, 2000 year old book. Other atheists have spoken to this realization, as well – leaving Christianity freed them to finally “breath” and appreciate the universe (including the people) around them more than they ever had before.

So, I say all that to tell you that reducing the world down to “atoms and molecules” doesn’t have to be depressing, although it can be if you want it to be (one great thing about atheism is that it frees you to be sad about life, and some people really enjoy seeing life from the bottom up – as Nate Ruess, the lead singer of Fun., once said in an interview, “I kind of like being depressed”). I mean, think about it – if there is no God, then the atoms and molecules ARE you and your consciousness. You’re part of the wonderful grandeur and beauty and complexity that you see around you. Not just observing it, but PART OF it. And the atoms and molecules are part of your emotions and your feelings – making your emotions just as real as every atom and molecule out there. You’re, in a very real sense, part of the world.

WHY DO PEOPLE PRAY?

Now, I’m going to stray away from what may be the popular atheist line and make a theory. I can’t prove this, but I strongly suspect (as have others who have looked into consciousness) that prayer is an attempt to remind ourselves that we are connected to all of existence. When people pray, they are often praying to God as the creator, a personal force that can get things done…at least, in the beginning of their prayer walk. As people become more “mature” in the faith of Christianity, you often hear them say that the main reason we pray is to develop a relationship with God as the creator of all things, including you – a being you are thoroughly connected to. You pray more for relationship than to get things from him; you stop trying to treat God like He is a vending machine because it becomes obvious to most Christians that He doesn’t work (that way).

But what if this desire is a desire to connect to all existence (as atheist Sam Harris tries to encourage in the video on the right, in front of a roomful of atheists, including Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett)?

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hdTJ9e6LhU[/youtube]

What if you pray to remind yourself that you are not an island in life, that you are profoundly connected to a process that brought your current frame of consciousness into being, and that every single part of you is part of the universe – not merely looking at it from the outside, but connected to it? That in spite of whatever people may say about your worth or value in belonging in the world..you belong because you’re here. Maybe in the hustle bustle of everyday life we can become so focused on the mundane that something in us gnaws at us to see the reality that we’re all profoundly connected, and maybe prayer is a way that people do that.

So that’s the part I don’t have a problem with. I like that people feel connected to their surroundings, that they feel a sense of peace and deep meaningfulness in being part of the entirety of existence.

WHAT’S YOUR PROBLEM WITH CHRISTIAN PRAYER, THEN?

The problem with Christian prayer, however, is that, in practice, it often limits rather than expands perspectives. One way it does this is by limiting your picture of humanity. Prayer to a deity that judges some as worthy of His love and others as unworthy can get you to think that YOU belong in the realm of existence, and that this belonging entitles you to certain blessings – while someone else doesn’t have the same sense of belonging. You, as a saved individual, might get blessed by God, while someone else, as an unsaved individual, may not be blessed in the same way. I’d prefer that prayer be something that doesn’t privilege a nonexistent God’s will above struggling people.

I also am trying to fight against prayer encouraging unrealistic solutions to problems. Many people depend on prayer rather than medicine for healing, and while this act may comfort the person doing the praying (and thus ease their suffering) doing so has resulted, famously, in several tragedies.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TO9AvzXvw4o[/youtube]

Also, prayer about career choices, voting decisions, and scientific advancements can replace rational, careful thinking about those choices with trust in what I see as a nonexistent God. Long story short, time spent praying to change a situation is time not spent doing something more rational that would be more effective.

Furthermore, I think that prayer limits your connection to the world around you – it puts your existence under the tyranny of a nonexistent being whose image is often controlled by those in charge of the church.

So, for these reasons, I don’t think Christian prayer is a good idea. But connecting to the world around you in a way that defies the divide between the rational and emotional can be a profound experience that approaches spirituality, and I have no quarrel with the peace such a connection can provide.

The current controversy over Planned Parenthood has me thinking about my own stance on abortion rights.  The truth is that I did not immediately become pro-choice after I became an atheist. The reason is that I have a strong respect for human life and dignity. It is at the center of my moral setup.

Upon doing research, however, my own views changed. After finding that fetuses do not seem to feel pain until about week 22, at the earliest, I lost all my qualms about abortions up to 20 weeks. I think they should be safe and freely available.

After that…there are extenuating circumstances. The idea of a fetus that can feel pain being aborted makes me uncomfortable, but rather than that fueling a desire to make laws against abortion, it drives me to work towards making abortions before 20 weeks more readily available, to make paid parental leave a law in this country, to ensure birth control pills are as available as possible, and so on. It should, in my mind, be as easy to terminate a pregnancy before 20 weeks as it is to order a free pizza, and there should be absolutely no stigma in doing so.

And, in addition, only 1.4% of abortions take place at 21 weeks or after. I imagine that those are likely severe circumstances – and even if they are not, I don’t think I, as a man, am really in a place to look down on a woman for deciding to terminate a pregnancy. The idea of being forced by the opposite sex to carry another human being inside me for months on end, without recourse…is profoundly upsetting. I can see myself as preferring to choose. Anything else seems a bit intrusive.

Carl Sagan, in a piece he co-wrote with Ann Druyan, presented these sentiments when, in 1990, he discussed the pro-life position in the following way:

“This conjures up the specter of predominantly male, predominantly affluent legislators telling poor women they must bear and raise alone children they cannot afford to bring up; forcing teenagers to bear children they are not emotionally prepared to deal with; saying to women who wish for a career that they must give up their dreams, stay home, and bring up babies; and, worst of all, condemning victims of rape and incest to carry and nurture the offspring of their assailants. Legislative prohibitions on abortion arous the suspicion that their real intent is to control the independence and sexuality of women…

“And yet, by consensus, all of us think it proper that there be prohibitions against, and penalties exacted for, murder.”

The discussion, from here, asks a challenging questions. When does life become “human”? Why choose the arbitrary moment when the sperm fertilizes the egg, as so many are apt to do? Is it because it’s in a woman, and becomes a way for us to inflict on women the view that they are here to bear and raise children, instead of be individuals in their own right who have equality with men?

Later, he addresses this discussion with this statement:

“Every human sperm and egg is, beyond the shadow of a doubt, alive. They are not human beings, of course. However, it could be argued that neither is a fertilized egg….

“A sperm and an unfertilized egg jointly comprise the full genetic blueprint for a human being. Under certain circumstances, after fertilization, they can develop into a baby. But most fertilized eggs are spontaneously miscarried. Development into a baby is by no means guaranteed. Neither a sperm and egg separately, nor a fertilized egg, is more than a potential baby or a potential adult. So if a sperm and egg are as human as the fertilized egg produced by their union, and if it is murder to destroy a fertilized egg – despite the fact that it’s only potentially a baby – why isn’t it murder to destroy a sperm or an egg?

“Hundreds of millions of sperm cells (top speed with tails lashing: five inches per hour) are produced in an average human ejaculation. A healthy young man can produce in a week or two enough spermatozoa to double the human population of the earth. So is masturbation mass murder? How about nocturnal emissions or just plain sex?”

The standard rebuttal to this is that a sperm is not a fertilized egg. True. But why is one automatically a human, and the other not? Because the sperm is alive…and could be a child.

Why don’t men feel guilty about the sperm they kill? Is it because that would be something that affects us?

Because think about it – if “pro-life” people were really concerned about the infants – why don’t they teach safe sex? Why don’t they encourage contraception? Why don’t they encourage maternity leave?

It’s hard for me to think of something more cruelly inconsistent than being against maternity leave and abortion at the same time. Maybe it’s not really about the child. Maybe it’s at least partly about controlling women with laws and guilt – especially when the scientific evidence seems to indicate that the fertilized egg, at least before 20 weeks, isn’t even conscious.

And according to Carl Sagan’s discussion, first trimester abortion wasn’t really a problem until the seventeenth century, except for the Assyrians. As he states:

“Different religions have different teachings. Among hunter-gatherers, there are usually no prhibitions against abortion, and it was common in ancient Greece and Rome. In contrast, the more severe Assyrians impaled women on stakes for attempting abortion. The Jewish Talmud teaches that the fetus is not a person and has no rights. The Old and New Testaments – rich in astonishingly detailed prohibition on dress, diet, and permissible words – contain not a word specifically prohibiting abortion. The only passage that’s remotely relevant (Exodus 21:22) decrees that if there’s a fight and a woman bystander should accidentally be injured and made to miscarry, the assailant must pay a fine.

“Neither St. Augustine nor St. Thomas Aquinas considered early-term abortion to be homicide (the latter on the grounds that the embryo doesn’t look human). This view was embraced by the Church in the Council of Vienne in 1312, and has never been repudiated. The Catholic Church’s first and long-standing collection of canon law…held that abortion was homicide only after the fetus was already “formed” – roughly, the end of the first trimester.”

Sagan goes on to state that until the nineteenth century, abortion in the United States during the first or second trimester was considered, at worst, a misdemeanor, because it was legal until “quickening” – but it was hard to get convictions, “because they depended entirely on the woman’s own testimony of whether she had felt quickening, and because of the jury’s distaste for prosecuting a woman for exercising her right to choose. In 1800 there was not, so far as is known, a single statute in the Unites States concerning abortion.”

So this is not a new concept. Later, there was an interest in raising the population, and in the twentieth century the decision as to when a baby could be aborted was left up to physicians, who had begun to say, mistakingly, that the fetus was conscious before it actually was. Because women could not really attend medical schools at the time…the opinion were biased. And so opinions changed.

But the traditional view is not that abortions are killing human beings. Upon deeper examination, the traditional view is that early abortions are of no consequence, and abortion, in general, is a decision best left up to the mother – with a few exceptions, like ancient Assyria.

I think Carl Sagan’s arguments are especially relevant now, due to the current Planned Parenthood discussion, and that it would definitely be helpful to get back to the way we used to think on this issue. The focus should be more on the woman’s right to choose. And if the concern is for the fetus – frankly, I’d be a lot more convinced that this is the case if the religious right were more passionate about maternity leave and contraception. Or, better yet, for the billions and trillions of sperm the Christian right has brutally murdered over the past few decades.

Just sayin’.

Thanks for reading.

During the Michael Brown incident in Ferguson, I was angry at how Brown was treated by cops.  However, the evening the prosecutor revealed that there was evidence that Michael Brown charged at officer Darren Wilson, I had doubts that he was standing, hands up, without threatening Wilson.  I was looking, at the time, for any contradictory stances on the matter, and went to the Facebook page of Greta Christina (a major atheist who is a social justice advocate), where I was blocked for bringing it up.

This took me aback, and it bothered me to see questions stonewalled instead of answered, because I saw importance in presenting a strong case.  Let me be blunt: I’m a black man with six younger black sisters, and I don’t want to get shot by law enforcement when I’m innocent or cited for a minor traffic incident. To ensure that this doesn’t happen, I have to have a convincing case.  In addition, I have a vested interest in encouraging dialogue among thinking people who can make the changes necessary for this better world to become a reality.  I have to be reasonable, I have to have strong evidence, and I think it’s also a good idea to have strong, rational answers to people who ask legitimate questions.  I also want to be seen as fair so that my voice is trusted.  I don’t always do this perfectly, but I try.  So when an ally shuts down a legitimate inquiry, I see that as hurting me — as saying that there is not a well-reasoned, evidenced position behind my stance.

That’s why, when it was suspected that Sandra Bland was murdered, I didn’t give my position on whether or not the suspicion was true right away.  Not because I didn’t care about Sandra Bland — just the opposite.  I do very much care about Sandra Bland.  I care about the fact that the cop, Brian Encina, escalated a minor traffic incident, and I think that what he did was not only wrong but characteristic of traffic stops in the area.  I am glad this incident is getting press for this reason.

I care about Sandra Bland, and that’s why I want to get her story right.  I don’t want us to have tunnel-vision and just say she was murdered when she wasn’t.  That will distract people from the rest of her story, which IS important and NEEDS to be heard.  It will have others saying that this movement is more about groupthink than the actual facts of racism in this country.  And I don’t want that to happen.  I don’t want our voices to be ignored in that way — I would like to have a strong, undeniable case concerning the racism that exists in this country so that honestly thinking people will be convinced.

So that’s what I did in this case.  If Sandra Bland was murdered, I wanted to build a strong case that would be undeniable to most observers.

So, first of all — the depression.  There was a bit of back-and-forth as to whether or not Sandra Bland was actually depressed.  I investigated this — if Sandra Bland was not depressed, and it said on one of her papers that she was…maybe there was a cover-up.  To me, this was one of the strongest arguments one could have as to foul play.

But then I discovered this video.  In it, Sandra Bland discusses her struggle with depression.  And she clearly states that the date of the video is March 1, 2015.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOF3hwNcEM0[/youtube]

Video evidence.  Right in front of my face. Not of a third party, but of Sandra Bland.  No CGI that I could see.

So I think that yes, she was depressed in the past year.  Deeply.  Enough to make a video about it. Enough to say,

But I gotta be honest with you guys: I am suffering from something that some of you all may be dealing with right now. It’s a little bit of depression, as well as PTSD. I’ve been really stressed out over these past couple of weeks….”

She goes on to encourage others who are going through what she is going through to be free to talk about it, and she talks about how God blocked those moments of depression — indicating she was trying to keep it repressed.

She was excited about a job, which is an extreme high.  Many people have argued that she wouldn’t have killed herself with those prospects.

But what they forget is that, besides the $5,000 bail, Sandra Bland’s charge of assaulting an officer is a third-degree felony here in the state of Texas, and carries with it a 2-year minimum (and a 10-year maximum).

For a traffic ticket.  The job was an extreme high — and instead, she was going to get two years in prison, minimum, and a third-degree felony on her record the rest of her life.

That is probably making you angry — but she didn’t have any recourse. She was stuck inside four walls, alone, for three days. With the PTSD and the depression.  And still angry at the officer.  And just…completely defeated.

The more I looked into the job argument, the more I saw that the offer of the job was a reason that she would kill herself, not that she would not.

There is also her voicemail, which is used to say she was fighting to live.  But all we have, really, is a voicemail — there doesn’t seem to be any indication anyone called her back, and her bail (it would have been $600 to get her out of jail on a $5,000 bail) remained unpaid.

So she felt isolated…which would have added to the depression as she was there, alone, in the cell.

Then, there is the infamous video by Anonymous Official on YouTube:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2pVJl6AmbI[/youtube]

But this video simply does not correlate with the facts.  Instead of going point-by-point, let me just show you the video that was recently released:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5NY0VF8F94[/youtube]

Sandra Bland is alive in this video, does not seem mistreated (by the attendants who did not have reason to think the video would be released), and is crying…it seems rational to think she may have committed suicide, especially since jailhouse suicides for offenses less serious than the one Bland was charged with are not at all uncommon.

I think it’s a case that makes me angry. Even the suspicion that she was lynched is deeply rooted in the history of Waller County in disturbing ways. That’s why, instead of dismissing those concerned as making much ado about nothing, I think it’s important to hear their pain and change law enforcement so that it’s clear they are here to help, not to harm.

I think it’s also important to teach policemen some manners and professionalism — especially since some of those they may be arresting struggle with depression and PTSD.  Escalating the situation is not good policing.

Let’s talk about this:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RT12F2Q3vPM[/youtube]

And the importance of better policing, and better laws about assaulting an officer, and more sensitivity to those struggling with mental illness.

Let’s talk about how the nature of the stop may have been motivated by Waller County’s racism and the racism throughout this country towards black individuals. Let’s use this opportunity to more closely examine racism among cops in traffic stops.  Let’s use this to continue the conversation of the facts uncovered in places like Ferguson.

Let’s focus on what we know happened as we remember Sandra Bland.  If we focus on theories that are clearly not true, we’ll lose credibility and distract focus from these important aspects of racism.  And that’s something I don’t want to do — I want to do what I can to convince those I need to with a strong case that ensures me and my family walk the streets and drive the streets without being violated, like Sandra Bland and others, by law enforcement.

Thanks for reading.

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I heard a call from a woman once on The Atheist Experience. She was in tears because she didn’t know what to do with all the guilt that she felt, now that she was an atheist. Christians who did something wrong could just go to God and repent, and feel clean. But she had to live with it, and she didn’t know what to do with it because she couldn’t repent to a God she didn’t believe in.

It was a truly heartbreaking call. You could tell from the woman’s voice that she felt deeply overwhelmed and trapped. Very alone.

What I hear from most atheists these days, frankly, isn’t much help. They tend to say that, unlike Christians, atheists have to own their mistakes, like permanent marks on their character, and they can never go away. A Christian can murder dozens of people in cold blood, repent, and feel, well, clean as Sunday morning. An atheist, however, who cuts off someone in traffic has little recourse for any guilt they may feel later.

This is the line many chest-beating atheists I come across seem to tell Christians to rub in a sense of superiority. And if I were pandering to them, I’d repeat it. But I’d like to be honest: That’s not what I do.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how I handle guilt, and I’ve found the most effective way I’ve found to do it is to accept what I’ve done, but realize that it does not mean I’m a bad person to my core. I’ve just done something out of ignorance, or done something that hurt somebody else. Maybe that needs to be remedied, somehow, to make the other person feel better. Maybe there is some empathy I feel for the other person’s pain. Maybe there is the discomfort I have from doing something that I shouldn’t have, and it having severe consequences.

I accept this. But I also know that it’s something I’ve done. It does not make me a bad, evil person. It is a fact of my life, not a mark on my entire character.

I came to this conclusion after seeing this reality in other people. I’d read up on the people who committed the worst crimes in history, as a Christian, and I kept being struck by the fact that these people were not all terrible people. The murderer-for-hire Richard Kuklinski who teared up when he talked about how much he hurt his family. The serial killer-rapist Ted Bundy who worked, for free, all-nighters on suicide hotlines. Even the mass murderer Adolph Hitler started out trying to be a painter.

To say these people hurt others horrifically is an understatement. We should be furious at the terrible things they did. We should be angry at the kind of people they were to do such evil things. No question. I cannot begin to imagine how much pain and hurt these people put others through; it boggles my imagination, and makes my blood boil.

Even so, as I looked at their lives, I was disconcerted by the fact that less and less remained black and white. I had a harder and harder time saying that people were just full-stop evil. Especially looking at their history and how they came to be who they were.

A song that haunts me was written by Sarah Mclachlan and is called “Adia”; it kinda spells out where I’m coming from. McLachlan’s best friend, Adia, had a boyfriend, and eventually the boyfriend dated and married Sarah, creating a rocky relationship for them. Sarah Mclachlan wrote the song out of her guilt.

The line that gets me is, “We are born innocent. Believe me, Adia – we are still innocent. We all falter, but does it matter.”

[youtube]https://youtu.be/Q5wW8N4pt3U[/youtube]

And it’s true, in a way. I’ve never seen a guilty infant. We belonged here. And then life happened, our psychology formed, and we developed the thinking we thought would give us the best chance to survive and thrive. Some of it hurt others. But it all came from that innocent origination that grew gradually into you. So at some level, you are still that person. You’re still innocent.

And yet, you sometimes hurt other people. And yet you have motives that aren’t always the best, or you are dishonest, or you do something you know is against your moral system.

But here’s the tough question: are those indications you are evil, or are those flaws in your actions?

I’m not saying that there’s nothing to fix. What you did had consequences, and like anything that you might break or impair, you may need to do something about it. And other people may have to react to what you did in ways that ensure you don’t hurt them or others.

Being empathetic for how you hurt people may be a good thing, and ultimately what they may want. But does this really mean that the positive ways you influence the world have to be impaired by crippling guilt?

I don’t think so.

I still feel guilty at times. But over time, I’ve noticed that what I tend to do is accept what I’ve done without feeling awkward about being in the world. I make peace with the fact that I’m still here. I also realize am where I am because of where I came from, partly – and that’s not just an excuse to dismiss the situation, but a diagnosis so that I can better plot out my future, as well as possibly change the environment so others don’t make mistakes and do the damage I did.

I make mistakes, some of them very consequential ones that hurt people. I do things that don’t always have pure motives behind them. And this introduces discomforts in myself, in relationships, and in various circumstances every once in a while.

I’ve found, however, that when I’m feeling guilty I have a harder time fixing what’s broken; the guilt cripples me. But when I admit the mistake and the damage it caused even as I accept my own existence, I have the ability to move forward and fix what needs to be fixed. We falter, we make mistakes, but there is still the possibility to learn from them and work to heal the damage with a sense of dignity and empathy, rather than be trapped in the guilt.

I guess that’s what I would say to the woman. That when she cuts someone off in traffic, she can think about the results of that, and realize it as a mistake (if it truly was) that she can learn from and apply to the future. It does not define her as a bad person. It is, rather, another step in learning to be in the world.

I think one way this is superior to much of the Christian way of viewing things is that Christianity often (though not always) encourages a “forgive and forget” kind of thinking, which often leaves the problem intact once the guilt is gone through repentance. As an atheist, I accept what happened, feel empathy for those I hurt, and take it as a lesson learned as I work to resolve the situation in real life; a guilt that is encouraged by a God I can’t see is not necessary. This solution, it seems to me, helps me come closer to actually solving problems.

Thanks for reading.

Do I have a purpose?

I enjoy seeing my life as a largely academic matter, to be poked and prodded and examined, turned over carefully and peered at. And yet, I feel things, but even as I feel them, deeply and truly and profoundly, I examine the feelings as something that is a natural part of me, an extension of who I am, like a rock might have ridges or a fish may have scales. Not as things that do or don’t “belong there.” But as the way I happen to settle in to my natural position in the universe.

Life sometimes feels exciting and enjoyable, and it also feels, at times, dreadful, and at other times pensive, at times full of pleasure, and at other times full of pain. And yet, throughout it all, threaded deeply within all these aspects, is the inflation and deflation of my lungs, the beating of my heart, the hum of electrons in my brain, the feel of life pervading the entirety of my sense of being.

This is the simplicity and complexity of life for me. As for “purpose” — I do not know if it is a coherent concept, but the descriptions I’ve heard of it seem to indicate it is something you were made for, or something you need to earn your right to exist. If that’s the case, I can’t relate. I was not made to mean anything or to somehow earn my full rights to existence. I get the sense that, somehow, at least here in Texas, I am supposed to find this profoundly depressing. I do not. It just is. Like breathing, like touch, like sight, like sound, like the rain pounding the roof or the sun tanning my skin or the calmly flowing by Trinity River on a quiet summer day.

Purpose, to me, is noise. Purpose is standing, looking over the Grand Canyon, and asking why it’s there. Not the question of how it came to be there – which is easy enough – but why it’s there. I prefer not to bother with such questions. I prefer to look across the canyon in the silence and just enjoy the beauty of our simultaneous existence.

I’m not saying it’s better to live this way. I’m not preaching a sermon to you or telling you how to live your story, unless that’s what you want this to be. I’m just telling you mine.

I do not always think this way, I admit. Sometimes I come down to the “real world” and wholly immerse myself in my daily affairs with some gusto and an illusion of what you might call “purpose.” But more often than that, I embrace a purposeless life, with the assurance that I’m here, a natural fixture of the universe, emotions and thoughts and all, and there need be no more meaning for this business of being here than there is behind Niagara Falls.

It’s all just part of the same thing, and I’m in it, and really, that’s all I know. But it’s enough to keep this atheist going with a profound sense of peace and unapologetic belonging.

Thanks for reading.

I’ve always thought as an atheist that many Christians don’t really believe the Christian story is true — or, at least, it isn’t very important to them whether it’s true.  For whatever reason, it’s such a beautiful story that they’d prefer to be true that its actual truth doesn’t matter.

I’ve been wondering, lately, if there are any tendencies or beliefs that I have that are like that.  And there is, possibly, one that I can think of at the top of my head.  As a secular humanist, I really believe this, even though I don’t have enough evidence that it’s completely true, and although many people (other atheists included) disagree with me.  It feels really good to believe it, it makes my life colorful and worth living, and so I hold on to it.

My irrational belief is that every corner of the world is beautiful somehow.  For about as long as I can remember, I’ve had this nearly unshakeable tendency to think that there’s an angle you can look at something from that makes it beautifully fascinating. This isn’t to say there are things I don’t think are harmful — I certainly do.  But I think that things are harmful with a kind of inner suspicion/conviction that it’s possible for even the most harmful parts of life to be seen as beautiful in someone else’s story.

It’s controversial to look at things that way — sometimes you feel as if you simultaneously agree and disagree with almost everyone at the same time.  And the difficult thing is that you have to choose which path of beauty you decide to walk on, and that requires rejecting others and choosing a set of blinders, to an extent.

But I somehow just know that, regardless, it’s gotta be a wonderful world.  Coldly beautiful, cruelly beautiful, and ugly from some angles (many of which I choose to fight from)…but somehow, I tend to think that even the ugliest bits hold the potential to be beautiful, from some vantage point, to somebody.

If I have an irrational faith in something these days, maybe that’s it. Because it might not be true.  Some things may be dark and ugly and have absolutely no shred of beauty to them, at all, period, zero.  Most people certainly seem to think so.

And yet…it’s like I have this overwhelming urge and tendency to see the world differently, to assume that even the darkest corners are beautiful in their way.  Honestly, maybe it’s because a truly ugly world would hurt too much to live in, or something.  Or maybe it’s because all the places I thought were only evil were complicated by a beauty someone saw in them if you saw it from a different perspective, and this beauty has surprised me even when it coexists with horror.  Probably it’s some combination of both these things.

In my fantasy-world, I tend to think that maybe, if we saw the beauty in each other’s perspectives, all the barriers would come down and we’d just live in a beautiful world somehow.  Weird, huh?  I know it’s irrational.  I know I have no reasonable right to think this.  And yet…I can’t shake this instinctual, calm resonance with some transcendent, peaceful beauty under the roughly cruel forces of existence…

Maybe I’m right.  Or maybe I’m wrong, and it’s just easier to live in a world I can love…

It’s like this scene, maybe.  Some people look at it and say, “it’s just a plastic bag.”

And others see so much beauty in it that it’s almost too much, sometimes, and it makes life more than worth living.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVuq7L9IEr8[/youtube]

I guess I’m in the latter group.  And sometimes I wonder if that’s a flaw, honestly.

But more often, I see it as giving me a reason to live and love, and figure that’s OK.  Can’t think of a reason indulging in the possibility/fantasy really hurts anyone, so much as it encourages understanding…

What do you think?

An Example of High vs. Low Probability

Yesterday, at 3pm, I was in Fort Worth.

Do you believe me?  Probably.

But how do you know that I was in Fort Worth?  I mean, I could have been in Houston.  Or Timbuktu. Or Norway (which, actually, I would prefer).

So you don’t know, the argument goes.  But there’s a high probability, you might say, that I’m telling the truth.  Being in Fort Worth is not at all unusual, and there is no reason to believe I’m not there, so you’re probably willing to just take my word for it.

That focus on probability is a good thing when I say something like:

Yesterday, at 5pm, I was on the first manned spacecraft that was headed to Mars.

As long as we’re talking about probabilities, you have a rationale for rejecting that claim.  Yes, it’s the same evidence as the first claim, but it has a lower probability of being true.  So when I say, “Why do you believe the first claim and not the second when they both have the same evidence?” You can say, “Well, there’s a lower probability that you were headed for Mars than that you were in Fort Worth, and I need more evidence for claims that have a lower probability rate.”

I guess I could challenge you on the exact numerical probability of my being on a spacecraft headed to Mars vs. the exact numerical probability of my being in Fort Worth and think that your inability to come up with an exact number was a sticking point.  But that’s not really necessary, is it? I don’t have to know exactly how probable each possibility is in order to say that, clearly, it’s more probable that I was in Fort Worth yesterday than that I was on the first manned spacecraft headed to Mars.

Gravy?

Now, let’s change the scenario.

How the Concept of Faith Introduces a Glitch

I say: Yesterday, at 3pm, I was in Fort Worth.

Do you believe me?  Probably.

But do you know that I was in Fort Worth?  For all you know, I could have been in Houston.  Or Timbuktu. Or Norway (which, actually, I would prefer).

So you don’t know, the argument goes.  Same as before up to this point.  But here, instead of discussing probability, I use the word “faith.” I say, “So you have faith that I was in Fort Worth.”

And with that slight of hand, I’ve thrown a monkey wrench into the entire conversation.  Because “faith” has become a word that is used to make all probabilities undifferentiated from each other and thus the same.  You can’t say something has low probability or high probability any more — all you have to describe probability, if you agree with my terminology, is the word “faith.”

So, when I say, “Yesterday, at 5pm, I was on the first manned spacecraft that was headed to Mars,” you are kinda stuck in trying to explain why you reject that claim. You had faith that I was in Fort Worth, I may challenge.  So why can’t you have faith that I was on the first manned spacecraft that was headed to Mars?

You might rebut that there is not enough evidence that I was headed to Mars, and I’ll simply answer that there was just as much evidence given for my being headed to Mars as there was for my being in Fort Worth — I told you the first, that was all the evidence you really had, and you believed me; and then I told you the second, that was all the evidence you really had, and you didn’t believe me.  Why was there enough evidence for you to have faith in the first proposition and not have faith in the second?  It’s all faith, I might go on. The person who believes me and the person who doesn’t believe me both have faith.  So if you don’t believe me in the second scenario when I’ve given the same evidence for each scenario, your choice must be based on preference instead of logic.

Once I say that your choice of faith is due to preference instead of logic, I can start psychoanalyzing you, saying that you don’t believe I was on the first manned spacecraft headed to Mars because you didn’t want me to be on the first manned spacecraft headed to Mars due to jealousy or something, and that could be all she wrote (kinda like Christians say that you don’t believe in God simply because you don’t want Him to exist). Especially if I ask you if you’d be jealous if I were headed to Mars and you weren’t, and you said, “Yes.”

Hopefully all that makes sense, because now I’m gonna apply it to the main point of this post.

How the Glitch is Exploited in Religious Apologetics

The truth is, you’re never really 100% sure about anything (yes, even this last sentence).

What we do is look at how the world seems to work and apply various probabilities to certain possibilities.  And when the probability seems high that something is true, then we’re more likely to go with the assumption that it is true when a bit of evidence is presented to us.

And this comes out in everyday speech.  There is always, it seems, a bit of skepticism when we discuss things.  Like the Fort Worth example — after I claim to be in Fort Worth, you’ll probably say, “Peter is in Fort Worth” as opposed to “Peter is probably in Fort Worth” because of the high degree of probability that the former is true.  But we both know that it’s possible I’m not actually there.

The same goes with, like, everything.  It’s how we talk and operate in the world.  We depend on the ability to assign different probabilities to possibilities in order to make everyday decisions and survive. A glitch of religion — a major reason that religious people can believe the fantastic things in the Bible — is that the ability to assign different probabilities to extraordinary things in the Bible is hijacked by the concept of “faith.”  For example, people think that the fact that there are thousands of copies of the Bible (although most were made after the Roman Empire became Christian and began churning them out) makes the resurrection true, because copies of Plato are less numerous and have a much greater temporal distance from the originals, and yet we believe that Socrates committed suicide.  We have faith in the latter, the statement goes, so we should have faith in the former.

Now, the problems with that argument go beyond what I’m about to say, but the biggest one is that it ignores the issue of probability.  We have little reason to doubt that Plato existed.  We have all the reason in the world to doubt that a resurrection of a godman happened after he was stone-cold dead three days in a tomb — a claim that seems much more improbable than the claim that yesterday at 5pm I was on a spaceship headed to Mars (we’ve never even come close to seeing a man raised from the dead after three days of stone cold death, ever, but, um…we’ve actually sent spacecrafts to Mars).

But you can’t make that argument if you replace “probability” in your vocabulary with “faith.”  The switch in vocabulary diminishes the ability to differentiate between likely events and unlikely events in your evaluation of evidence.

So…in future conversations with Christians on religion, a handy tip is to encourage a focus on “probability” as opposed to “faith.”  It doesn’t end the conversation, to be sure — but if my experience is any indication, it certainly may help you make more progress.

Thanks for reading.

Confirmation Bias:  Confidence in what we hope for and assurance of what we do not see.

Faith: Confidence in what we hope for and assurance of what we do not see. (According to Hebrews 11:1)

How Confirmation Bias Works in Sports

So, sometimes I play pickup basketball, and at times one player who is usually “meh” hits three three-pointers in a row. Others start saying that he’s “in the zone” and calls go out to “feed him the ball.”

It’s a lie, though. Turns out there’s no such thing as being “in the zone.”

And we’ve known this for a long time.  Since the 1980’s when a study was done on the shooting patterns of the 76ers.  In fact, after making three three-pointers in a row, it seemed as if players were more likely to miss rather than make shots, because the belief they were on a hot streak made them more careless.  This was rather difficult to believe, as Wired explains:

The 76ers were shocked by the evidence. Andrew Toney, the shooting guard, was particularly hard to convince: he was sure that he was a streaky shooter, and went through distinct “hot” and “cold” periods….But the statistics told a different story. During the regular season, Toney made 46 percent of all of his shots. After hitting three shots in a row – a sure sign that he was now “in the zone” – Toney’s field goal percentage dropped to 34 percent. When Toney thought he was “hot,” he was actually freezing cold. And when he thought he was cold, he was just getting warmed up: after missing three shots in a row, Toney made 52 percent of his shots, which was significantly higher than his normal average.

But maybe the 76ers were a statistical outlier. After all, according to a survey conducted by the scientists, 91 percent of serious NBA fans believed in “the hot hand”. They just knew that players were streaky. So Tversky and Gilovich decided to analyze another basketball team: the Boston Celtics. This time, they looked at free throw attempts, and not just field goals. Once again, they found absolutely no evidence of hot hands. Larry Bird was just like Andrew Tooney: After making several free throws in a row, his free throw percentage actually declined. Bird got complacent, and started missing shots he should have made.

So there is no evidence of being “in the zone” — and yet, coaches who get paid millions to coach the sport and are very intelligent still believe in the myth.  And the myth persists even when fewer shots are made after the supposed “streak.” This obviously has nothing to do with a lack of intelligence.  So why do they (and we) believe this?

And it’s not just basketball.  It also has to do with fourth downs.  Statistically speaking, it is better to convert a fourth down than to punt or try to make a field goal, as Scientific American reports:

Consider a study done a few years ago by an economist David Romer. Romer analyzed every fourth down that occurred in the first quarter of every NFL game from 1998 to 2000. After considering several variables Romer developed a mathematical model that gave the probability of successful converting fourth downs and kicking a field goal depending on position and circumstance. Then, he compared his model with what actually happened. He concluded that, “the behavior of National Football League teams on fourth downs departs systematically from the behavior that would maximize their chances of winning.” In other words, it is usually better to go for it on fourth down, and coaches do a really good job of not doing this.

Why, then, do we believe in basketball players being “in the zone”?  Why do even the most intelligent football coaches seem to insist on not converting fourth downs except in extreme situations?

Confirmation bias.  Basically, the way it works is that we pattern-seeking individuals try to find a pattern.  And once we find that pattern, we’ll have an intuition that there is a pattern that applies to our interpretation of every event.

We also have intuitions that are based on the impact of events.  So, we are probably more likely to notice the times we don’t have successful fourth down conversions than the times we do, due to the impact of the consequences — and that creates, in our minds, a pattern of not making fourth downs that results in fewer attempts at fourth down conversions.

I’m starting out with these examples because I want to make it clear that discussion on confirmation bias is not a commentary on someone’s lack of intelligence, and it’s not a flaw in a “stupid” person’s thinking.  We all do it.  We all have to fight it if we want to actually be right as opposed to merely feel right.

Why Faith = Confirmation Bias

But the concept of faith seems tailor-made to take away any defense against confirmation bias.  This seems clearest when looking at what is, arguably, the most popular Christian definition of faith in Hebrews 11:1 (NIV):

Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.

Although this verse has a wide variety of interpretations, depending on Christian denomination and stripe, the general gist is that faith is being confident in something in the absence of evidence that is true — and although many Christians will rebut that faith depends on some evidence, the fact seems to be that, even where you have evidence that it is true, faith is the use of belief to bridge any gaps in the evidence that might make conclusions that you hope for within Christendom questionable.

The important thing to notice is that the glorification of faith encourages individuals to interpret events in the context of what they hope will happen in the future, as opposed to what an unbiased examination of the facts would indicate will happen.  So, while everyone has this tendency of confirmation bias, in Christian conceptualizations of faith this thinking is actively encouraged, not incidental.

Have you ever talked to a person who has been a Christian for a long time and is confident that nothing can shake their faith — and also somewhat proud of the fact?  Such an individual, arguably, has had a lot of practice ignoring indications that his faith may be misplaced and highlighting indications that it is well-placed.  He’s “good at” perpetuating his own confirmation bias.

This dynamic explains why someone can see a parking space as proof of God’s existence and ignore rampant Ebola epidemics.  Everyone engages in confirmation bias, but Christians are strongly encouraged to embrace it, creating extreme cases of the phenomenon.

This realization is helpful for me, as I have, several times, been thoroughly confused by how others who seem otherwise intelligent (and, once, I myself) could possibly believe that a god-man born of virgin died on a cross for the sins of the entire world and was stone-cold dead for three days before rising from the dead.  It seems so fantastic to me now — but looking at faith as a function of confirmation bias has helped me make sense of the phenomenon.

The reason it is so hard to convince people that things like the resurrection are unlikely is that Christians are encouraged to find evidence that confirms what they hope to be true, and reject evidence that does not — for Christians who have the most faith and are often the most revered, opposing evidence simply does not register.  So that, over time, it seems to them that there is an overwhelming amount of evidence in favor of the resurrection of Christ, and little against it — to them, the evidence against it, due to the strong institutionalized encouragement of confirmation bias, hardly exists, because it doesn’t confirm what they are hoping for or assure them of a desired sense of reality.

In response, I’ve tried to be more careful about my own confirmation bias.  I try to keep an eye on what works and what is clearly effective, as opposed to merely confirming what I want to believe.  I try to engage people who believe in different things than I do in discourse to challenge my thinking.  I make a mental effort to be fair.  And I also try to focus more on being right and accurate than on winning arguments.

I still have blind spots. But the awareness that my Christian background is proof that confirmation bias can prompt me to believe very strange things is a strong incentive to try to find them and correct them.  I try now to actively reject faith/confirmation bias tendencies, to embrace doubt and investigate beliefs that contradict what I think in order to be less wrong.  I’m sure I have blind spots, but I’m working on it.

Thanks for reading.

You’ve probably run into this scenario before.

You’re sitting with one of your religious friends and they say, “I know God exists.  Because once I prayed for my grandmother’s cancer to go away, and it completely disappeared!  The doctors don’t know why — it’s a miracle!”

Or maybe it wasn’t their grandmother’s.  More likely, in your case it was their best friend’s cousin’s uncle’s pastor’s wife’s grandmother’s second husband, as told in a Sunday morning sermon on hope.

To start with the basics, one of the most obvious problems with this scenario is that it ignores all the other individuals who were prayed for who didn’t get healed from cancer.

[youtube]https://youtu.be/IZeWPScnolo[/youtube]

Second, if prayer cured cancer, every cancer ward should be stocked with a full-time pray-er. But there is no evidence that it does.  In fact, in at least one study, telling a hospital patient you are praying for them is more likely to make them worse than better, as the New York Times reported:

Prayers offered by strangers had no effect on the recovery of people who were undergoing heart surgery, a large and long-awaited study has found.

And patients who knew they were being prayed for had a higher rate of post-operative complications like abnormal heart rhythms, perhaps because of the expectations the prayers created, the researchers suggested.

Third, ascribing spontaneous cancer remission to prayer makes people whose parents died from cancer, despite prayer, insecure.  Did they pray hard enough?  Why did God decide it was time for their parents to die, and not someone else’s?  This can cause a lot of handwringing and angst that is completely unnecessary if there is a natural explanation.

The fourth and biggest objection I have — and other doctors may have — to the “God did it” argument is that it impedes research.  You don’t need to look for a natural explanation to a miracle.  In many cases I’ve found Christians hesitant to investigate miracles — many a time as a Christian I sat in a Bible Study as someone talked about a crippled person who was able to suddenly walk, or a blind man suddenly able to see. When I started asking if I could talk to these people and investigate the amazing miracles, I got accusatory looks.  Why was I asking these questions?  Couldn’t I just accept that sometimes miracles happen without having to investigate them?  Why would I ruin the Christian’s beautiful story?

(As an aside, I think most faith healings can be explained by psychological tricks and manipulation — but don’t take my word for it.  Sometime, when you have a free hour, feel free to watch the video below for convincing visual evidence.)

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuP5uOI7Xwc[/youtube]

When you say something is a miracle, you are often providing a reason to avoid looking for a natural explanation to the event.  And this is a problem, because a natural explanation — especially in the case of disappearing cancer — can help us change the event from a “miracle” that helps a supposedly favored few and leaves others insecure and hurt, to a natural phenomenon we can replicate and help millions of people.

Take, for example, this case:

It was the late 19th Century, and William Bradley Coley was struggling to save a patient with a large tumour in his neck. Five operations had failed to eradicate the cancer. Then the patient caught a nasty skin infection with a scorching fever. By the time he’d recovered, the tumour was gone. Testing the principle on a small number of other patients, Coley found that deliberately infecting them with bacteria, or treating them with toxins harvested from microbes, destroyed otherwise inoperable tumours.

Coley could have said, “It’s a miracle!  He was so sick — with a skin infection, to boot — and God saved him!”  But he didn’t.  He looked for a natural explanation…and in the process saved several lives and paved the way for additional research that would help many more.

Fast forward to June 2013, where a study examined the so-called “miracle” cases and found the following:

Could infection be the key to stimulating spontaneous remission more generally? Analyses of the recent evidence certainly make a compelling case for exploring the idea. Rashidi and Fisher’s study found that 90% of the patients recovering from leukaemia had suffered another illness such as pneumonia shortly before the cancer disappeared. Other papers have noted tumours vanishing after diphtheria, gonorrhoea, hepatitis, influenza, malaria, measles, smallpox and syphilis. What doesn’t kill you really can make you stronger in these strange circumstances.

So, again, studying spontaneous remission of cancer instead of saying “God did it” allows us to see trends, and looking for natural explanations of those trends can help people.

This is not just a “rational” atheistic argument trying to take away an emotionally understood story that binds someone to God.  It is sourced in a real empathy for other people that seeks to improve their lives, that doesn’t want people dying of cancer when the deaths can be prevented.  That recognizes how hurtful it can be to have to worship a God who shows favoritism to some and not others.  It’s not just rationalism — it also is an orientation connected to a deep well of caring and empathy.

And instead of a world in which a select few are seen as favored by God while millions die, with their relatives in angst as to why, perhaps we can come up with a better scenario:

But if – and that is a massive if – [researchers] succeed [in fully unlocking the process of spontaneous remission], the implications would be staggering. A rapid, relatively painless recovery from cancer is now considered a miracle. The dream is that it might just become the norm.

That’s a future I’d like to work for.  It has already seen some positive results, and it seems as if more could develop.

And one last note:  Spontaneous remission does not seem to be a miracle. 1 out of 100,000 cancer cases end in spontaneous remission, without treatment.  This year, in the United States alone, the American Cancer Society estimates that 1, 658, 370 NEW cases of cancer will be diagnosed.  What this means is that, statistically speaking, without any treatment whatsoever, 16 of those cases IN THE UNITED STATES ALONE will end in spontaneous remission.  This is normal.  It is rare, but normal.  And 77% of people in the United States are Christian, so about 12-13 of those people will be Christians. And when it happens to Christians, it spreads to other Christians who are looking desperately for proof of God’s existence — which is why these stories are often heard third or fourth hand, as opposed to first.  These stories spread like wildfire, and you are only about four degrees of separation away from just about ever other person in existence, so…yeah. It’s the farthest thing from a miracle that you’ve heard of one of these cases.

In closing, this last point brings to mind something Tim Minchin once said when discussing something that had not a 1 in 100,000 probability of happening, but 1 in 64 million:

A woman had given birth to naturally conceived identical quadruplet girls, which is very rare. And she said, “The doctors told me there was a one in 64 million chance that this could happen. It’s A MIRACLE!” But, of course, we know it’s not, because things that have a one in 64 million chance happen … ALL the TIME! To presume that your one in 64 million chance thing is a miracle, is to significantly underestimate the total number of things that THERE ARE. … Maths.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ET1-_PeExMs[/youtube]

I know it’s difficult to let go of miracles; they often hold powerful existential meaning for those who believe in them.  But here, not only does calling something a miracle not have a basis — it seems to possibly slow support for research and indicate there’s a God who works unfairly, giving individuals unnecessary angst.  So it may be a good idea to stop propogating such spontaneous cancer remissions as miracles.  Maybe instead of praying and thanking God, it would be a good idea to contribute your tithe — or at least a portion to it — to cancer research.

Thanks for reading.

In case you didn’t know, one of our candidates for President has a record.

He was cited for resisting arrest.  Before I tell you why, a little background.

Our story starts at the University of Chicago, in 1961.  Bernie Sanders, a young man of about 19, was pissed off.  The reason? The housing at the University of Chicago was segregated.  So Sanders helped organize a sit-in at the University President’s office till the housing ordinances were re-examined.  The sit-in lasted 15 days.

He did this for the Congress of Racial Equality chapter there, of which he eventually became President in his Junior year, at 20.  At that age, as President of the chapter he led a picket against a Howard Johnson restaurant location due to the chain’s race-based discrimination.

Later, when several black residents were being evicted from Chicago’s Hyde Park due to a restructuring of the neighborhood, an angry Bernie Sanders wrote the local paper:

To attempt to bring about a “stable interracial community” in Hyde Park without hitting, and hitting hard, the segregation and segregation mentality that exists throughout this city, is meaningless. Hyde Park will never solve its racial problems until these problems are solved throughout the city. Segregation (in the form of “benign quotas”), the promise to white people that Negroes will not be freely admitted into the neighborhood, cannot work on any long term basis.

Then, in 1963, 21 now, he took a bus from Chicago to Washington, DC to attend the March on Washington with Martin Luther King, Jr.

And then, in the summer of 1963, he committed his crime.

The Chicago Tribune reported the story months later, on January 14, 1964, on page 6 of section 1 (emphasis added):

The cases of 159 persons arrested in racial demonstrations last summer were disposed of yesterday before Judge Gordon B. Nash in Jury court.

Four persons were found guilty and fined $25 each. Twenty-two persons were found guilty but their fines were suspended. The remaining 133 defendants were discharged.

The 159 were arrested during demonstrations at four locations during which they protested alleged segregation in the city’s public schools.

The defendants sang in the hallway as they awaited trial in the fifth floor courtroom in the Criminal court building, but sheriff’s police put a halt to the singing.

The four found guilty and fined were William Devine, 32, of 1052 Sheridan rd.; John Harkins, 27, of 313 Hawthorne lane, Hoffman Estates; John Anderson, 18, of 6514 Ross av.; and Bernard Sanders, 21, of 5411 University av.

Devine was arrested Dec. 9 at the school board offices and charged with criminal trespass. Harkins was arrested Aug. 2 at 75th and Lowe and charged with resisting a police officer. Anderson was arrested Aug. 13 at 73d and Lowe and charged with battery, and Sanders was arrested Aug. 12 at 74th and Lowe and charged with resisting arrest.

Miss Willie Whiting, assistant state’s attorney, told the court that the four were in positions of leadership and engineered the demonstrations.

There has been talk, lately, of Bernie Sanders not caring about black rights. Nothing is further from the truth. In a speech in Dallas yesterday, pressed near to the front of a crowd of around 6000 people, I saw him, personally, speak powerfully and with strong conviction about injustices among minorities.

Bernie Sanders has a different approach to race. Some say, “Race doesn’t matter, so if minorities pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, they’ll get ahead.”

Sanders says, “Everyone should have the same opportunity, regardless of race, and if one color is not doing as well as another, that’s a sign that this is not happening.”

The basic point is that the color line shouldn’t matter, and that’s why it does.  That people should not be discriminated against by the color of their skin — we should all be one America, and the fact that we are not, that there are massive color-coded injustices, is a reason not to be complacent about racism in this country and pretend the real rifts do not exist, but to fight it aggressively with strategic policies, like free public community colleges, job programs, and a higher minimum wage. In other words, the opposite of this, the ideology he’s been fighting against for decades:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_8E3ENrKrQ[/youtube]

And it’s that fight — from a sit-in to Presidential candidacy — that has been Bernie’s focus for over 50 years.  He doesn’t just put on his “I’m for all people — regardless of race, gender, religion, or ethnicity” cap when he’s running for President.  He’s been doing it since the beginning, and his arrest record is proof.  And, recently, proof of this has come in the fact that he is the first presidential candidate to speak out on Sandra Bland’s own resistance of arrest.

So, long story short…yes, Bernie Sanders has a record on him for resisting arrest.

And that’s a major reason why, at the polls, I’m planning on putting down his name.